Women, Peace and Security as deterrence? NATO and Russia's war against Ukraine

Abstract

Abstract NATO's security turn following Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine opened new prospects for adopting the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda from external operations to all tasks of the alliance. Drawing on feminist institutionalism and feminist pragmatist approach to security, this article interrogates NATO's WPS localization in deterrence and territorial defence. I demonstrate that NATO has in the past decade been unable to operationalize WPS in deterrence and defence. I identify following obstacles to NATO's post-2014 WPS considerations: first, implementing WPS pragmatically as an external, depoliticized and low-priority military agenda pushed primarily by femocrats; second, taking WPS to the strategic level while omitting practical localization in deterrence and defence; and third, approaching WPS partnership with Ukraine as a unidirectional transfer of NATO's WPS knowledge to Ukraine rather than a mutual learning. I argue that these institutional factors made NATO's WPS implementation only reactive and ultimately ill-prepared for such gendered security crisis as the one caused by Russia's full-out war against Ukraine in 2022. The article makes the case for rethinking feminist conceptualization of deterrence through the convergence of WPS and resilience agendas. This concerns going beyond military deterrence and centring social and political practices which are linked to societal resilience.