Narrating the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Abstract

This history of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, and its articulation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda that grew from its adoption, are as familiar to anyone working on the agenda as the alphabet, the rules of grammar and syntax, or the spelling of their own name. This book encounters WPS as a policy agenda that emerges in and through the stories that are told about it, focusing on the world of WPS work at the United Nations Headquarters in New York (noting, of course, that many other equally rich and important stories could be told about the agenda in other contexts). Part of how the WPS agenda is formed as (and simultaneously forming) a knowable reality is through the narration of its beginnings, its ongoing unfolding, and its plural futures. These stories account for the inception of the agenda, outline its priorities, and delimit its possibilities, through the arrangement of discourse into narrative formations that communicate and constitute the agenda’s triumphs and disasters. This is a book about the stories of the WPS agenda and the worlds they contain.