Authors: Anna Powles and Jacqui True

This year New Zealand will become the 49th country to adopt a National Action Plan (NAP) on women, peace and security. This is fifteen years after the adoption of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1325 and eleven years after Kofi Annan’s call for member states to develop NAPs. New Zealand has a rich history of advancing women’s rights as the first country to give women the vote and is ranked thirteenth out of 136 countries in the World Economic Forum's 2014 Global Gender Gap Index. But the development of a women, peace and security NAP has waited until the achievement of a non-permanent seat on the UNSC. This timing could be fortuitous. During its two-year term in New York, New Zealand has a crucial opportunity to advance UNSCR 1325 issues at the international level.

New Zealand’s draft NAP was released in May 2015. It focuses on five areas: (1) ensuring women’s involvement in decision-making within conflict and post-conflict situations; (2) promoting New Zealand women as mediators and negotiators in international forums; (3) increasing the number of New Zealand women deployed in police and military roles in UN-mandated peacekeeping missions; (4) ensuring that gender analysis informs NZ’s peace support responses, and development assistance to conflict-affected countries; and (5) promoting efforts to combat sexual violence, intimate partner violence and violence against women in conflict affected countries where New Zealand has a development programme or post.

Author: Angela Woodward

The 30th anniversary of the bombing of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior on 10 July by French secret service agents in Auckland Harbour is a timely opportunity of the need to take stock of progress towards nuclear disarmament and to consider what more New Zealand can do to help achieve it.

The Greenpeace ship was targeted to prevent it travelling to Mururoa Atoll to take part in protest action against French nuclear testing in the Pacific. After a flurry of final tests in 1996 to beat the deadline imposed by the adoption of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), France ended its full-scale nuclear testing programme. While the Greenpeace protests were not the proximate cause of this halt, France’s destruction of the peace boat scored an own goal by focusing global attention, albeit fleetingly, on the anti-nuclear movement and the nuclear disarmament cause. 

Author Robert Ayson

Upon the arrival in 2012 of the Washington Declaration the National-led government denied that a full restoration of old alliance ties was on the cards. This was “not ANZUS in drag" said then Defence Minister Jonathan Coleman who had signed the new declaration with Leon Panetta. Strictly speaking of course this was eminently so. Unlike Australia, New Zealand is not a formal member of the US alliance system in Asia and nothing over the last few years has changed that fact.

But the flow of high-level American visitors to New Zealand's shores (if by plane, not ship) testifies to the accelerated closeness of what the New Zealand government described in its 2010 Defence White Paper as a "stalwart" partnership. The latest of these arrivals, Admiral Harry B. Harris, is not the first US Pacific Commander to come here from Hawaii in recent times. But his visit has come at an important juncture both for the region and for New Zealand policy.

Author: Rebecca McKeown

New Zealand’s 2014 Defence Assessment released in May refers to the possibility that in North Asia, Russia’s “influence and importance … could increase in the future”.  Closer to home, the Assessment offers a more muted overview of what it calls the “rising influence of non-traditional actors”, noting that “a greater range of countries are developing  relationships  with Pacific  states, including defence relationships in some cases”. No states are mentioned by name. In the Pacific context, it seems, New Zealand’s concern about Russian influence trails off.

But given Moscow’s increasingly isolated position in the world and the importance New Zealand governments place on close ties with Pacific states, it is perhaps worth considering whether our region might be one area Russia will increasingly look to for support. As it happens, Moscow has been stepping up efforts to win friends and acquire UN votes over the last few months, right under New Zealand’s nose.