Women and the UN Security Council

Abstract

The UN Security Council has presented a complex and challenging site for women and feminists. It is the organ of the UN with the narrowest and most militaristic function. Further, it is the organ of the UN that is most exclusionary in its composition and decision-making, composed of only five permanent member states and ten non-permanent member states. There are three key axes along which we might consider the topic and scholarship on women and the UN Security Council: the first is women within the UN Security Council, including the involvement of women in negotiating its mandate and its ongoing decision-making and activities; the second is the impact of the Security Council on women, for example through its peacekeeping and sanctions activities; and the third is the Security Council’s thematic agenda on Women, Peace and Security (WPS), adopted in 2000 as part of the Council’s broader post–Cold War turn to “human security.” As this entry will make clear, there is a significant disparity between the volume of scholarship dedicated to each of these three axes. Scholarship addressed to women within the Security Council is scant. Scholarship on the impact of Security Council activities on women is more developed and has a longer trajectory since the early-mid 1990s. Scholarship addressed to the WPS agenda is voluminous and emerges from across multiple disciplines and draws on diverse theoretical and methodological approaches. WPS scholarship emerged soon after the adoption of the initial resolution and has continued to gather pace ever since. It is therefore appealing to collapse any discussion of the UN Security Council (UNSC) and women into the UNSC’s thematic agenda on Women, Peace and Security, but to do so would overlook both essential historical context that preceded the Council’s adoption of WPS in 2000, as well as the many ways in which women intersect and cross-cut with other attributes, powers, and activities of the UNSC. Consequently, while this entry does dedicate much discussion to scholarship of the WPS agenda, this scholarship is contextualized within broader international legal scholarship on women, feminism, and gender at the UN Security Council.