I feel very fortunate. I do feel very well funded because just the title of being a Canada research chair is a good one. I do well. I get really good funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. I actually get a fair bit of research money from everywhere.
To be completely honest, what I feel we do have a need for is to be able to do more exploratory work. If we have a good hunch about something and need to do a pilot project, the results may be very different from what we anticipated. Being able to do exploratory work to understand these issues is really important.
We need more people involved. I have students who are studying these topics, but policy really needs to be informed by evidence and not by ideology or intuition, which is what I find. A lot of the assumptions and ideas about what women can do in these missions tend to be more intuitive or ideological than anything else—that women are good so they'd be able to do this. The more evidence we can present, the more research we can do. It's important, especially now, because there are peacekeeping missions in which there are significant numbers of women.
In some places, there are all-female peacekeeping units, such as the India example or the Bangladesh example. Again, I have mixed feelings about them. Sometimes I think it's a grand gesture in style to show how well women in this country are doing, whereas India, for example, still has huge problems with sexual violence. It's the lowest-rated country for gender equality in the G20. I do think it ends up being a bit of a public relations exercise, but we have opportunities for grounded research that would enable us to understand the contributions that these groups make, that women make, as peacekeepers. Are they different? Are they really different such that we can actually say women make different contributions?
I would welcome funding to do that work. I do think we have enough, but some funding for smaller exploratory projects would also be very helpful.