Peace Agenda Research Articles

The boundaries of peace: a feminist analysis of international mediation processes

ABSTRACT The assumption that peace mediation is gender-neutral reproduces and reinforces the already gendered aftermath(s) of war. Peace mediation is a multilayered conflict resolution mechanism that ranges from grassroots peacebuilding to high-level diplomacy. As a ‘language of peace’, international law has become foundational in high-level peace mediation processes and institutions. International legal feminist and queer theory are critical of international law for its gendered and heteronormative frameworks that reinforce the binaries of war/peace, masculine/feminine or heterosexual/homosexual. Global governance gender law reforms, such as the Women, Peace and Security agenda, are part of the institutional frameworks that guide peace mediation processes. High-level peace mediators are also members of an ‘epistemic community’ regulated by international and regional organisations. The article analyses how masculine and heteronormative international legal institutions and experts shape peace mediation’s already gendered processes and outcomes. The article concludes that contemporary peace mediation approaches must be rethought and that alternatives to the traditional peace table must be imagined.

Gender Justice in EU Crisis Management Missions

This paper examines competing understanding of gender justice between CSDP civil and military staff and representatives of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). Using the three GLOBUS concepts of justice as an analytical framework the paper shows that there is a sharp contrast between CSDP staff discourse on gender justice and the implementation the Women Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and discourse from CSOs. It finds that approaches to gender justice in CSDP missions have been largely dominated by a justice as impartiality approach, located in the language of universal human rights but when we look at the actual the implementation of the WPS agenda in the field (or lack thereof), an approach rooted in the state-centric model of justice as non-domination emerges. In contrast, CSOs tend to advocate for the inclusion of a more context specific approach, one that takes account of intersectionality and complexity, more aligned with justice as mutual recognition. This disconnect in understandings of gender justice is problematic because in order for missions to be successful, or to have any transformative power, there is a need for a level of engagement between mission staff and CSOs. This is in order to take a context specific approach to gender justice in CDPD missions and to avoid the curtailing of certain women’s voices. The paper uses qualitative data from interviews with civilian and personnel from within military field missions and representatives of a variety of CSOs from both the global North and South.

Shifting Conceptions of Gender Justice in EU Policy on Women Peace and Security

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security was a landmark resolution passed in 2000 that, for the first time, recognised the differing impact of conflict on women and girls and called for greater participation of women in conflict resolution and peacebuilding. This Resolution has now been followed by a further 8 Resolutions, which, together, make up the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. This paper examines United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security through the lens of the three GLOBUS conceptions of justice: justice as non-domination, justice as impartiality and justice as mutual recognition. The paper argues that in the process and adoption of the 2018 EU Strategic approach to UNSCR 1325, the EU has demonstrated a shift towards an approach to gender justice that is more closely assigned to justice as mutual recognition than in its previous approach to Women, Peace and Security, found in the 2008 Comprehensive Approach to UNSCR 1325 and 1820. Using empirical data from meeting notes and qualitative interviews, this paper demonstrates how the EEAS engaged in a surprisingly inclusive process within the consultations that led to the adoption of the new 2018 Strategic Approach, which enjoyed extensive inclusion of a diversity of civil society voices in the process. As a result, the document shows a shift towards a greater focus on (1) diversity, (2) civil society inclusion and (3) a gendered analysis. From the perspective of gender justice, this shows a shift from an approach previously aligned with justice as impartiality in the text of the 2008 document, but in actuality, through a lack of implementation, an approach more akin to non-domination, towards an approach to gender justice that can be more firmly associated with justice as mutual recognition.

Caught between art and science: the Women, Peace and Security agenda in United Nations mediation narratives

This article was selected as the runner-up for the 2018 Enloe Award. The committee commented: “This article provides a solid and nuanced account of UN mediation processes around the WPS agenda, drawing on Annick Wibben’s narrative approach to document how the notion that mediation is a science rather than an art leaves little room for complexity. It is a very well-researched piece with a clear, polished, and coherent argument.” “The article’s meticulous engagement with a bureaucratic procedure reminds the reader of its life-and-death consequences, all the while providing a sophisticated and solid gender analysis. It is also important for revealing the complexities – how masculine–feminine assumptions and expectations work, or that one method is not necessarily better than another for gender inclusiveness. The author’s conclusion is a generative one: it recognizes the need to explore the question in other settings and points to a future research agenda.” ABSTRACT The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has not yet had a large or lasting impact on United Nations (UN)-brokered peace processes. I argue that we can understand the challenges to incorporating the WPS agenda by examining the changes that UN mediation has undergone in the post-Cold War era. UN mediation has moved from being seen as a diplomatic art to being seen as a professionalized science. Narratives about mediation as an “art” or as a “science” have distinct implications for how the UN has incorporated the WPS agenda in mediation. To examine these narratives, I adopt Wibben’s feminist narrative approach. I analyze texts including UN guidance documents on mediation, notes from participant observation of training sessions on mediation and gender, and 37 interviews with UN mediation personnel. I find that the narrative of mediation as a science constructs a linear process with little room for complexity. In doing so, it depoliticizes gender relations and constrains the participation of women. The narrative of mediation as an art privileges experience, consent, and trusting relationships. Including women and gender issues appears risky because it endangers consent. Meanwhile, building trust may rely upon excluding certain groups of people. These findings contribute to our understanding of how institutional contexts affect the implementation of the WPS agenda.

The Australian Foreign Policy White Paper, gender and conflict prevention: ties that don’t bind

ABSTRACTAfter a 14-year gap, Australia’s 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper advanced a ‘comprehensive framework to advance Australia’s security and prosperity in a contested and competitive world’ (Australian Government 2017a, “2017 Foreign Policy White Paper.” https://www.fpwhitepaper.gov.au/., v). Focused on regional stability, partnerships and global cooperation, it identifies ‘risks and opportunities’ in an altered external environment. In this article, we argue that the neglect of gender and conflict prevention in the White Paper has implications for its stated aspirations with regard to peace and security. This is striking considering the attention that gender—particularly in the context of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda—has received in other policy areas and documents. Building on feminist security scholarship, conflict prevention approaches, and bringing in civil society voices, we argue that the White Paper contains a gendered, masculinist logic, separating domestic and international issues and paying insufficient attention to the structural and systemic causes of conflict. This article pursues a gender analysis in order to illuminate the gaps present in the White Paper and its limited vision of security and makes the case that conflict prevention from a gender perspective is key to sustainable peace, security and national interests.

Peace Journalism Strategy for Creating a Public Value Sphere

ABSTRACTThis article describes a peace journalism model for conflict resolution based on collaboration within a public forum established by using alternative media. In other words, peace journalists have initiated a new type of public sphere that helps to overcome the inadequacies of the liberal peace agenda. The article proposes that reconciliation is enhanced by shifting the emphasis to collaborative engagement in order to create shared values and common principles. The unique contribution of this study is expanding Galtung’s peace journalism approach to conflict resolution to include using communication media to create a public sphere that establishes shared values. Thus, the article presents a viable dialogic and dialectic model for conflict resolution in Cyprus with its peace journalism response to criticisms regarding the role of the Cypriot press. Consequently, the developed model establishes an example for the regions in the world where ethnic conflicts are experienced.

Countering Conflict Related Sexual and Gender-Based Violence through Reparations

Across the world, women and girls continue to experience a variety of gendered harms rooted in sex and gender-based discrimination. For the vast majority of women and girls who have experienced conflict related sexual violence (CRSV), justice remains elusive. The need for States to adopt a victim-centred approach in responding to CRSV was recognised by the UN Security Council with the adoption of Resolution 2467 (2019) under its Women, Peace and Security agenda. This means that States must ensure that survivors can access gender sensitive reparations. Transformative reparations are key to breaking the cycle of violence by preventing CRSV in the first place.

Messy feminist knowledge politics: a double reading of post-conflict gender mainstreaming in Liberia

ABSTRACTThe debate around the production and circulation of feminist knowledge has been rekindled since the emergence of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. While much attention focuses on the diffusion of WPS norms, less is paid to the sociocultural context within which feminist ideas circulate through WPS gender-mainstreaming (GM) interventions, its broader implications, and what happens beyond. I propose a double reading of GM as a site of feminist knowledge production and circulation: I combine anthropological and feminist governmentality insights to analyze GM as a form of (disciplinary) governing with insights from post/decolonial scholars that call for an engagement with the “exteriority” of interventions, with what lies outside our grid of intelligibility of the narrow political terrain of GM. Through a case study of the post-conflict GM intervention in Liberia, I illustrate how this double reading reveals the ways in which GM works as a gendered form of governing to prescribe dualistic social roles and (re)produce social differentiation mechanisms linked to “civilization.” An engagement with the exteriority of the GM intervention reveals critiques and alternative forms of feminist knowledge production and circulation that emphasize non-dualistic and non-judgmental attitudes and propose invited partnership and dialogue.

The UN in conflict resolution: the case of East Timor

The involvement of the United Nations in East Timor can be divided into four periods, including the anti-colonial period (1955-1974), the reaction period (1975-1982), the attenuation period (1983-1998) and the commitment period (from 1999). It is about this last period that this paper will focus by analysing the decisive steps of the UN, as a multilateral organization with a security mandate, in resolving the Timorese conflict and peacebuilding in that territory. This analysis will be guided by the proposals of the document An Agenda for Peace presented in 1992 by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, and the expectations he created in the field of peace operations. We are particularly interested in looking at the design of post-conflict peacebuilding missions and assessing the extent to which the (expected) capital gains from these operations compared to conventional peacekeeping missions would come to fruition or not. Thus, it is important to examine how the main missions were carried out, with special focus on the different actors, as well as to make a critical balance with some historical distance. In this context, it seems to us that the case of East Timor will be a good example to understand the need for a new approach to peacebuilding, as advocated in this Report, but which at a distance of more than 25 years becomes even more evident. The perception of peace as a continuous process that involves a whole sustainability network, and that depends above all on fostering and developing competences for peace (involving multiple and distinct actors facing constant coordination and negotiation challenges), therefore allows demanding greater commitment on the part of the Security Council, but also on that of the General Assembly in carrying out this difficult task in the context of the new world (dis) order.

South Africa Gender Based Violence and the Global Gendered Viewpoint Approach Mechanisms in Building a Peaceful World

This study looks at the prevalence of gender violence in South Africa particularly, and argues to support a gendered perspective as an approach with the inclusion of women in an effort to address or resolve violence against women. The UNSCR-1325 reaffirmed the significance of gender integration at all levels of peace and security agenda, the purpose underlined in the declaration shows a slow affirmation among international organisations. The effect of gender based brutality is a significant human rights infringement with real social and formative effects for overcoming viciousness. On an individual level, sexual based violence can lead to mental injury, and can have both psychological social and physical ramifications for survivors. Therefore, the argument set forward in support of a gendered viewpoint to deal with violence and peace-building originated from a classified arrangement of political characters, from a collection of controls, with various political sentimentalities and distinctive prescribed techniques for conflicts intervention. Furthermore, the global gendered perspective intervention is also assessed as a strategy by exploring various approaches to deal with global gender-based conflict. The approaches are considered instrumentalist in their various approaches, as they consider women to be instrumental in accomplishing a maintainable peace, but dismissing the issue of how peace can improve the situation of violence against women, and not taking into consideration the issues of gender based violence. This tremendously fails to discourse and address structural disparities and power crescendos or dynamics that underpinned gender discrimination. Findings in this study shows that, there is a need for gendered perspective to address violence and build peace in various civil societies, while taking into account the socio-economic effect of gender violence. Peace and Security plan is goal-oriented and transformative in its discourse. Therefore, it requires women's contribution to fight gender violence at all levels.

Contextualization of the Local

The critical literature on peacebuilding has mainly addressed the local and its agency in the post-conflict phase while the nexus between context occurring prior to the implementation of the liberal peace agenda and subsequent hybridization of the local and the international has largely been overlooked. Accordingly, this text discusses the idea that success of any peacebuilding project is also dependent on political, economic or social circumstances present in a country or region before international intervention. Hence, the article analyses the context in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (sfry) before the conflicts in the 1990s as a decisive factor to understanding successful implementation of the liberal peace in the region.

Strengthening Prevention of Conflict-related Sexual Violence and Trafficking in Human Beings: Saving the Potential of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda with the Human Rights-Based Approach

Strengthening Prevention of Conflict-related Sexual Violence and Trafficking in Human Beings: Saving the Potential of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda with the Human Rights-Based Approach

Broadening ‘business’, widening ‘peace’: a new research agenda on business and peace-building

ABSTRACTWhat role does business play in peace-building and conflict reduction? This special issue tackles this complex question, exploring varied business efforts to bring peace through six rigorous qualitative cases in Myanmar, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Somaliland, Brazil, Guatemala and El Salvador. Three main findings cut across this issue. First, local context is paramount to success; there is no one universal formula that a regulator, business or peace practitioner aiming to advance a business agenda for peace can employ for operational success. Second, rather than compartmentalising ‘peace’ into projects that often carry ‘win-lose’ consequences for local communities, business-peace projects must first understand who they are empowering so that they do not unwittingly make the conflict worse. Third, investment and access are deeply intertwined in fragile and conflict-affected areas, and business-peace projects that simply try to improve business access typically exacerbate inequalities favouring elite actors. We close with a discussion on how to take the business and peace-building agenda forward with scholarship and policy, stressing that business-peace projects must be assessed at the societal and not project level if their impact is to be truly beneficial for a political economy of peaceful development.

La construcción de paz e interiorización del posconflicto en Colombia: tres décadas de garantía

El presente artículo de investigación propone un esquema de asociatividad en los territorios para la construcción de paz e interiorización del posconflicto en Colombia, durante los próximos tres períodos presidenciales; partiendo del enfoque de Justicia prospectiva con precisiones conceptuales de paz, reconciliación y asociatividad, para la recuperación de los tejidos comunitarios, promoción de agendas de paz desde los territorios, consolidación de redes de política pública y expectativas relacionadas con la futura reconciliación. El enfoque metodológico es cualitativo y se analiza la producción académica en temas de paz, los proyectos de investigación e intervención de los territorios del conflicto y la consolidación de asociatividad territorial para el fortalecimiento institucional y desarrollo regional, desde dos perspectivas : i) actores del territorio, ii) región y ordenamiento territorial.

Norm negotiation in the Australian Government’s implementation of UNSCR 1325

ABSTRACTThe Australian National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security (NAP) offers an apt example of norm negotiation in implementing United Nation Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325). Launched in 2012, the NAP is nearing completion due June 2019. The purpose of this article is to understand how far and in what ways the NAP has thus far supported the achievement of the transformative ambitions of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda to bring about greater gender equality for conflict-affected women. I argue that whilst this transformative agenda failed to diffuse vertically throughout the Australian NAP, this has simultaneously encouraged horizontal diffusion. That is, the sophisticated discourse on gender equality presented in the narrative part of the NAP did not translate into a robust framework for action (vertical diffusion). This failure has, however, allowed the WPS agenda to be negotiated within individual implementing agencies (horizontal diffusion). Through the juxtaposition of policy analysis with semi-structured interviews with NAP implementers, this article demonstrates that the lack of precision around the implementation strategy has—paradoxically—resulted in significant policy development on UNSCR 1325. Simultaneously, it has led to untargeted implementation, ultimately constraining the possibilities for meaningful impact on the ground.

Dialogue Partnership for Prevention: The International Dialogue in context of the 2030 Agenda, Sustaining Peace and Conflict Prevention Agendas

In 2015, the adoption of the 2030 Agenda reaffirmed the key importance of peace as one of the key pillars the agenda is built on. The inclusion of a ‘peace’ goal and related peacebuilding and state...

Women, Peace and Security in the SADC Region

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is a key part of the international, continental and regional programme for attaining sustainable and durable peace. Conflict and post-conflict situations have a different impact on women, men, boys and girls. During conflicts, women and children are more vulnerable to sexual violence and exploitation, displacement, a change to household relations and poverty. There have been concerted efforts to identify and address the impact of conflict on women and children and to provide for more responsive, representative and inclusive peace and security structures and processes. SADC countries have made great strides in enacting gender sensitive legislations, representation of women in cabinet, parliament, local government, and security sector institutions. Women have not adequately been represented in mediation and peace-building efforts and most peace agreements lack gender sensitivity. Peace agreements do not include reference to specific needs or interests of women.

Corrigendum: A Century of International Relations Feminism: From World War I Women's Peace Pragmatism to the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Corrigendum: A Century of International Relations Feminism: From World War I Women's Peace Pragmatism to the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

LA JUSTICIA PROSPECTIVA: UN RETO CONCEPTUAL Y METODOLÓGICO PARA LA JUSTICIA TRANSICIONAL EN COLOMBIA

El análisis que enmarca el presente artículo de investigación, es la justicia prospectiva como reto conceptual y metodológico para la justicia transicional en Colombia; la metodología es cualitativa, centrada en fuentes documentales de producción académica en temas de paz, proyectos de investigación e intervención de los territorios del conflicto. El abordaje teórico se rige por justicia prospectiva, paz, reconciliación y justicia transicional. La propuesta es un esquema de justicia prospectiva, basado en premisas de recuperación y consolidación de los tejidos comunitarios, promoción de agendas de paz y expectativas asociadas con la futura reconciliación.

Indonesian Female Peacekeepers in The United Nations Peacekeeping Mission

<p align="justify">As peacekeeping has evolved to encompass a broader humanitarian approach, women personels have become increasingly part of the peacekeeping family. The UN has called for more deployment of female peacekeepers to enhance the overall “holistic” approach to current UN peacekeeping operations. There is clearly more work to be done to integrate more female peacekeepers into UN missions. More skilled and trained female peacekeepers can only be an asset to future peacekeeping operations. In October 2000, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. The resolution was hailed as a landmark resolution in that for the first time, the Security Council recognised the contribution women make during and post-conflict. Since the adoption of Resolution 1325, attention to gender perspectives within the international peace agenda has ¬firmly been placed within the broader peace and security framework. This article explains the development of Indonesian female peacekeepers contribution in the period of 2009-20016 and argues why Indonesia needs to support and to consider deploying more female peacekeepers in UN peacekeeping operations.</p>