Gender, UN Peacebuilding, and the Politics of Space

Abstract

The United Nations is an organization founded at least in part on hope: hope for a postwar future offering security, human rights, justice, “social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” This book documents some of the ways in which the UN engages with peacebuilding as a practice of hope, under the auspices of the UN Peacebuilding Commission that was created in 2005. Hope was part of the Commission’s foundational mandate: the hope that the Commission, as a principal actor in the UN peacebuilding apparatus, would “integrate a gender perspective into all of its work”; and the hope that the Commission would “consult with civil society, non-governmental organizations, including women’s organizations, and the private sector engaged in peacebuilding activities, as appropriate.” This book engages with the work that gender is doing conceptually to organize the way that peacebuilding is defined, enacted, and resourced, as well as exploring the ways in which women, gender, and civil society are constructed in UN peacebuilding discourse. Laying bare the logics of gender and space that organize the discourse, the author argues that these constructions work independently and together to constitute the terrain of UN peacebuilding discourse in three ways: to create “conditions of impossibility” in the implementation of peacebuilding activities that take gender seriously as a power dynamic; to heavily circumscribe women’s meaningful participation in peacebuilding; and to produce hierarchies that paradoxically undermine the contemporary emphasis on “bottom-up” governance of peacebuilding activities.