"Girl power and gender mainstreaming. Looking for peace in new places through an EU lens"

This paper begins with a few reflections as to why most international peace-keeping missions have consistently failed since the miraculously peaceful fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, 1989/90. I briefly review the concept of gender mainstreaming, adopted by the EU in 1995, subsequent to EU women's participation in the 1995 UN Beijing Conference. Next I address presumed linkages between sustainable development and sustainable peace that have increasingly shaped both the UN and EU approaches to Third World countries over the last decade-not at all coincidentally, the very period during which women have assumed prominent positions at the international and supranational levels. I then examine the ways in which EU policy-makers have sought to concert gender, development and sustainable peace in accordance with 'Beijing plus 5" norms. Finally, I present a mini-case study of German efforts to operationalize these norms under a Red-Green government since 1998, driven by a critical mass of foreign ministers