Women, Peace And Security Agenda Research Articles

Disarming the Women, Peace and Security agenda: the case for centring the United Nations General Assembly

Abstract After over two decades of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda at the UN Security Council, involving the adoption of 10 thematic resolutions, there is now increasing momentum towards the de-centring of the Council from feminist engagement and from broader institutional activity on WPS. Against this backdrop, this article lays out arguments for centring the WPS agenda instead in the UN General Assembly. Given its broader membership and mandate, its role in international law-making, and critically, its leadership on disarmament, the article argues that the General Assembly offers more propitious opportunities for the institutionalization of a feminist peace agenda.

Sweden, NATO and the gendered silencing of feminist foreign policy

Abstract Sweden was the first state to adopt a Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) in 2014, drawing on its state feminist tradition and support for the United Nations' Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Yet following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and Sweden's move to seek NATO membership—abandoning its policy of non-alignment—a gendered silence on FFP pervaded. Significantly, this therefore predated the official abandonment of FFP following the election of a new government in October 2022. NATO membership was viewed as incompatible with FFP. Yet, NATO has long sought to project itself as a gender-just actor, including through engagement with the WPS agenda culminating in its inclusion in the 2022 Strategic Concept. Further, Sweden—as a NATO partner—had been a stalwart of the alliance's work on WPS. This article contributes to understanding the role of gendered silences in shaping strategic narratives, in this case concerning Sweden's NATO membership bid. It provides insight for policy-makers and diplomats on the impact gendered silence can have on the wider efficacy of FFP and WPS, even during processes such as NATO enlargement which might otherwise be viewed as ‘gender neutral’, particularly when imbued with urgency.

Reconceptualizing Advocacy through the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Embodiment, Relationality, and Power

Abstract This article critically examines the embodied and relational politics of networked advocacy in the case of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda in the United Kingdom. Moving beyond liberal framings that position WPS advocacy as an attempt to overcome gender exclusion from peace and security policymaking, this article is concerned instead with the gendered, racialized, and classed logics and hierarchies (re)produced through the practice of WPS advocacy. Toward this end, this article conceptualizes advocacy as an embodied, relational practice where WPS meanings are shaped, power is negotiated, and individuals are interpolated into subject positions. This conceptual claim is substantiated through an initial, exploratory analysis of interviews conducted with UK NGO professionals and government officials. Examining the figures of the “critical friends” and the “shouty NGOs,” I demonstrate how modes of advocating for WPS are ascribed and inscribed to certain bodies, which, in turn, reproduce power relations that affect the possibilities of the agenda. By reconceptualizing advocacy, the article contributes not only to WPS scholarship on civil society and advocacy but to wider debates within international political sociology around embodiment, relationality, and power. Additionally, it contributes empirically by highlighting how NGOs advocate for the WPS agenda.

Forum-Shifting and Human Rights: Prospects for Queering the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

ABSTRACT: The adoption of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda by the UN Security Council constituted a forum-shift by women’s rights advocates away from the human rights system. As queer critique of the WPS agenda gathers pace, this article reflects on the antecedents of the queer exclusions of the WPS agenda in international human rights law. The article thereby reveals the consequences in other international law regimes of human rights law’s queer exclusions. The article concludes with some tentative proposals to utilise the pluralism of international human rights law to expand queer possibilities for both human rights and WPS.

The UN - African Union Partnership on the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Frameworks, Policies and Strategies

A strong partnership between the United Nations (UN) and the African Union (AU) is essential to achieve strategic convergence, coherence and effective solutions to Africa’s complex peace and security challenges. This article analyzes the key challenges in the UN - AU partnership for peacekeeping, including the UN - AU frameworks, policies and strategies in implementing the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda to establish equal, full and constructive participation of women in the peacekeeping process. The authors identify key challenges in the UN - AU partnership for peacekeeping and assess the effectiveness of the mechanisms and tools of this partnership in the field of maintaining peace and security. The implementation of the WPS agenda in Africa in 2003-2022 is discussed in detail. The empirical basis for the research was drawn from the UN peacekeeping website database, official AU documents, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions, and AU and UN statistics on the gender composition of key UN peacekeeping missions during the period under review. This study employs quantitative methods of assessment and comparative analysis of UN and the AU statistics on women’s participation in African peacekeeping from 2003 to 2022. It focuses on the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) as a case study. The article concludes that there is a direct link between the deteriorating security situation in Africa, the effective implementation of the WPS agenda, and the level of strategic partnership between the UN and the AU.

The nexus between COVID-19 and gender, peace, and security: opportunities and risks for gender planning responses

ABSTRACT This article presents a textual analysis of areas of convergence and divergence between the United Nations (UN) Framework for the Immediate Socio-Economic Response to COVID-19 and the six National Action Plans (NAPs) on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) of the Arab States region. The article contributes to debates on the centering or sidelining of gender analysis and planning in crisis response to the nexus between COVID-19 and gender, peace, and security. Gender and gender planning inform the textual analysis, which shows that there are significant areas of overlap between the UN COVID-19 Framework and the NAPs. Divergences, such as the greater emphasis on economic recovery in the UN COVID-19 Framework, expose the gaps in engagement with the socio-economic and subsistence harms in the WPS agenda. Given the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, and the expectation of future novel outbreaks, the article provides evidence that rather than sidelining gender in times of crisis, existing tools such as NAPs should be centered in planning responses.

ALIGNING PARTICIPATION AND PROTECTION IN THE WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY AGENDA

AbstractThis article presents the first feminist doctrinal textual analysis of cross-pillar synergies within thematic resolutions of the United Nations Security Council. Specifically, it examines the pillars relating to ‘participation’ and ‘protection’ under the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. In attempts to balance agency with victimhood, normative advancement of both pillars has until recently evolved along parallel tracks, with little acknowledgment of how protection relates to women's participation. This article identifies synergies, gaps and productive tensions as the WPS agenda begins to engage with the inter-relationship between the pillars. It outlines critical implications and considerations for any future moves towards cross-pillar congruence.

The (Dis-)Appearance of Race in the United Kingdom’s Institutionalization and Implementation of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Abstract In contrast to earlier, more celebratory accounts, more recent scholarship on the United Nations Security Council's Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda reveals the racial–colonial logics deeply woven into the very fabric of the agenda that contribute to reproducing hierarchies, inequalities, and exclusions. Building on this body of literature, this article investigates in more detail how race shapes the United Kingdom's engagement with and institutionalization of the WPS agenda, reinforcing particular domestic identities. Drawing from a rich body of new empirical material, including documentary sources and interview data, the analysis excavates four interlinked racial–colonial practices: (1) the erasure of Britain's imperial and colonial history; (2) the production of new geographies of empire; (3) the construction of cultural inferiority of the “other”; and (4) nation branding efforts that construct the UK as the repository of leadership and expertise. I argue that the UK serves as an illustrative case that yields significant empirical and theoretical insights regarding how race is central to the institutionalization and implementation of the WPS agenda by national governments in the Global North and how, in turn, the WPS agenda enables those governments to identify as morally and culturally superior, thereby justifying racialized hierarchies in international relations.

Challenging civil society perceptions of NATO: Engaging the Women, Peace and Security agenda

Engagement with the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda by military actors has caused concern among some of its civil society advocates. For example, NATO has adopted the WPS agenda as an increasingly visible part of its self-narrative. Yet what had distinguished NATO’s engagement with WPS from many other actors is that it came without civil society involvement. The establishment of a Civil Society Advisory Panel (CSAP) on WPS in 2014 is therefore highly significant for both NATO and the WPS agenda. Despite this, the efficacy of such consultation is not clear-cut nor its potential to mitigate militarised understandings of WPS and support transformative engagement with the agenda, particularly given the wariness of some civil society to engage with NATO. Drawing on interviews with civil society, this article interrogates their perceptions of NATO in order to understand the potential of such engagements to support transformative understandings of WPS and more broadly the efficacy of civil society engagement with military institutions. In so doing, it examines how such consultation adds to our understanding of NATO as an institution of international hegemonic masculinity.

“Critical feminist justpeace”: a grounded theory approach to Women, Peace and Security

ABSTRACT More than 20 years after the landmark achievement of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, feminist scholars and activists are debating the conditions in which peacebuilders should employ the agenda and those in which they should pursue alternatives. This article argues that the conflict and peacebuilding in Manipur, a state in Northeast India, is ripe for creative thinking beyond WPS. India refuses to acknowledge legally this intractable, low-intensity armed conflict, barring international and humanitarian actors from entry. Moreover, the WPS agenda has failed to reach from New Delhi into the marginalized Northeast region, where plentiful forms of direct and structural violence persist. Thus, rather than rallying around the WPS agenda for this case, feminist scholars and activists should find other ways to support longstanding women’s peacebuilding initiatives. Using Ackerly’s critical feminist methodology, I synthesize inductive insights from women’s peacebuilding praxis and apply them to Lederach’s contextual and relational approach to conflict transformation, revising it to incorporate the gendered concerns of women building peace across ethnic and religious differences. The result is a grounded normative theory called “critical feminist justpeace,” an alternative to the WPS approach.

Beyond instrumentalisation: gender and agency in the prevention of extreme violence in Kenya

ABSTRACT Since the adoption of UNSCR 2242, which calls for the integration of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) and the Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) agendas, feminist scholars and activists have cautioned that such a move instrumentalises and securitises the WPS agenda and its objectives of gender equality and women’s empowerment. Based on over 80 interviews with civil society actors involved in P/CVE in Kenya – specifically, Mombasa, Isiolo and Nairobi – this article argues that both the calls for empowerment and the critiques of instrumentalization similarly draw on racialised constructions of women’s agency, or lack thereof, in the global south. Further, the instrumentalised/empowered binary is premised on a liberal feminist conceptualisation of agency only as resistance, which does not accurately capture the complex ways in which WPS actors and feminist peace activists negotiate with and work to transform security agendas. While recognising the harms caused by state and donor-led P/CVE approaches, this article centres the perspectives and experiences of men and women who work in daily violence prevention within and beyond the frame of P/CVE to theorise the agentive capacities that emerge from securitised spaces.

Unpacking the making of National Action Plans: governmentality, security, and race in the Dutch implementation of UNSCR 1325

ABSTRACT In 2000, the United Nations Security Council decided on Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS). More than 80 countries around the world have adopted National Action Plans (NAPs) to implement the resolution. The existing literature on NAPs in the Global North is critical of how states use the WPS agenda for traditional security goals and hardly include civil society in their policies. The Dutch NAP has not been studied yet, although it is built on a strong relationship between the state and civil society organizations, the latter being partners and signatories of the NAP. Based on interviews with signatories of the third Dutch NAP, this contribution unpacks and analyzes NAP making as governmentality. I argue that the plan’s governing structure has led to more comprehensive understandings of security and gender in the NAP, yet it is still made for specific racialized “Others” and prioritizes national security interests. The NAP is primarily a funding instrument and is exclusively available to signatory organizations. This has created competition for funding and influence between different civil society groups, rewarding large development and peace organizations, and thus white Global North knowledge, marginalizing women’s rights and diaspora organizations, and excluding local actors.

Women, Peace and Security across scales: exclusions and opportunities in Iraq's WPS engagements

Abstract While space, positionality, hierarchy and location have been central undercurrents to understanding women's participation and uptake of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, there has been little conceptual clarity about how these dynamics play out in post-conflict settings, nor on the impact that this has on women's civil society networks in these locations. In turn, this silence depoliticizes, decontextualizes and flattens the complex and diverse uses of the WPS agenda in post-conflict settings, as well as the diverse civil society arrangements underpinning this activity. This article makes the issue of space and its political nature central (captured through the use of the ‘politics of scale’), with reference to Iraq as a context for unpacking these dynamics. I explore how Iraqi women participate across different scalar contexts linked to the WPS agenda, and navigate exclusions and opportunities within and across them. Drawing on interviews, speeches and policy material from Iraqi women's organizations and their international partners, I argue that grasping how hierarchies related to scale, identity, resourcing and positionality are reproduced in local and national contexts is vital to understanding the uptake and rewriting of the WPS agenda in post-conflict settings. Further, I explore how Iraqi women's organizations are responding to openings and attempting to challenge the spatial arrangements within and across the different scales they work and participate in.

Women, Peace and Security governance in the Asia–Pacific: a multi-scalar field of discourse and practice

Abstract The UN's Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is now over 20 years old, yet much of the Asia–Pacific has been slow to engage in formalized WPS work at national and regional scales. This article examines the relatively recent development of official WPS national action plans by Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Timor-Leste, alongside mounting collective efforts towards WPS governance by regional organizations like ASEAN. We demonstrate the existence of an emerging multi-scalar field of WPS discourse and practice in the Asia–Pacific, which is still in its formative stages and carries the potential for both convergence and contestation as actors work to navigate diverse approaches to WPS governance along various ‘tracks’. This article also points to the limitations of a rigidly formalized elite-driven WPS agenda that neglects well-established communities of practice in the Asia–Pacific. Ultimately, more attention needs to be paid to the complex dynamics that shape the ongoing postcolonial encounters between the broader WPS agenda and the localized historical and discursive contexts of regional WPS governance.

Rebuilding peace in exile: bringing together the Women, Peace and Security Agenda and the International Refugee Protection Regime in Turkey

ABSTRACT Refugee women are generally depicted as vulnerable and dependent subjects and excluded from peacebuilding efforts. This article is a response to the need for balancing the protection needs of refugee women and their participation in decision-making processes. It brings two different but complementary frameworks, namely the International Refugee Protection Regime (IRPR) and the United Nations Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda, into conversation through a gender analysis. The article shows that bringing these two frameworks together can overcome each other’s limitations regarding refugee women’s agency. Through analysing legal and policy frameworks together with the existing literature on refugee women and the WPS Agenda, this article focuses on Turkey as a case study. This article argues that implementing the IRPR and the WPS Agenda together in a national action plan in Turkey would strengthen refugee women’s protection and promote their agency as actors of peacebuilding in exile.

Introduction: WPS 20 Years On: Where Are the Women Now?

ABSTRACTTo commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Resolution 1325, this introduction discusses the state of the field in the women peace and security (WPS) agenda and outlines the challenges to implementation. It begins by introducing the current gaps we see in WPS practice, many of which are driven by insufficient data and lack of funding. The section that follows provides a brief discussion of the global diffusion of the WPS agenda. We highlight the important contribution the Global South has made in implementing the agenda in the absence of great power leadership and the stultified progress of the Global North. We argue that the WPS agenda remains hampered by poor national implementation, a lack of support for civil society initiatives and a failure to recognize the importance of its application in context. The final section introduces the articles in this issue, showing how they advance an emerging human security agenda: integrating WPS into UN-led security initiatives like R2P, and the challenges of the implementation of the WPS agenda in varied local and national contexts. We conclude by arguing that to meet future challenges, the WPS agenda must be broadened to include areas outside traditional conceptions of security and embrace the full remit of evolving security threats; in particular, structural barriers that prevent the empowerment of women across the board.

The UN and women's marginalization in peace negotiations

Abstract Although UN Security Council Resolution 1325 calls for increased participation of women in all stages of a peace process, the number of women who participate in formal peace negotiations is still very limited. In order to augment their number, UN Women and other international organizations have published a series of policy reports in which they argue that women's participation increases the success of peace negotiations and leads to more inclusive peace agreements. However, based on an analysis of relevant policy reports and interviews with women and men involved in peace negotiations, I argue that the policy reports do not lead to women's empowerment. Instead, they contribute to women's marginalization in peace negotiations, because they entrap women between conflicting expectations. The type of behaviour that international advocates of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda expect of women when they participate in peace negotiations limits the women's room for manoeuvre—at best. At worst, this type of behaviour prevents women from participating in the negotiations, because it is dismissed by domestic (male) negotiators. But if women who participate in peace negotiations violate the behavioural script proposed by the policy reports, they are considered as not acting in line with the WPS agenda. Hence, no matter how women behave when they sit at the negotiation table, they either lose the support of international or national gatekeepers.

The impact of UN Security Council resolution 2242 in Australia, the UK and Sweden

ABSTRACT The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is anchored in ten United Nations Security Council resolutions addressing gender equality and women’s rights in peace and security governance. The codification of the WPS agenda in the adopted resolutions establishes standards of practice to be adopted by UN member states and entities to prioritise women’s role as agents in peace and security settings and respond to women’s specific security needs. This research explores the influence of UN Security Council resolution 2242, adopted by the Council in 2015, particularly the provisions related to counter-terrorism and preventing and countering violent extremism (CT and P/CVE). Drawing on analysis of policy documents and interview data from the United Kingdom, Australia, and Sweden, the article argues that resolution 2242 is driving a degree of engagement, if not alignment, between WPS and CT and P/CVE. Further, the important differences between the operationalisation of the norms embedded in the resolution in the case study countries suggest that it would be fruitful for WPS analysts to engage in further research about how norm diffusion interacts with policy development.

NATO's strategic narratives: Angelina Jolie and the alliance's celebrity and visual turn

AbstractAngelina Jolie's high-profile visit to NATO in 2018 signals a move to brand the alliance's strategic narrative within the language of celebrity through engagement with popular culture. The partnership represents a significant change in the alliance's approach to global security. It also builds on a shift in NATO's self-narrative through the advocacy of gender justice related to the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Rather than fading into the background, NATO appears to be pursuing the limelight for the purpose of ‘awareness raising’ as a tool to implement the WPS agenda. Drawing upon feminist scholarship on the WPS agenda, NATO, and research on celebrity humanitarianism and politics, we provide a critical study of this change in NATO's strategic narrative, through the analysis of visual and textual material related to Jolie's visit to NATO. Our focus is on the significance of this partnership and its contribution to legitimising the alliance's self-defined ‘military leadership’ in the area of conflict-related sexual violence. While Jolie's visit to NATO opened the alliance to public scrutiny it also symbolised a form of militarism, surrounded by orchestrated visual representations. As such, it only marginally disrupted the militarist logic present in NATO's wider WPS engagement.

BRICS countries and the construction of conflict in the Women, Peace and Security Open Debates

Abstract The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is a diverse field of practice comprised of numerous actors, activities and artefacts. Conventional accounts of WPS development and implementation tend to reproduce a narrative that positions states located in the global North as ‘providers’ of WPS, and those in the South as ‘recipients’. This assumption in turn prescribes, and proscribes, forms of WPS engagement and has a constitutive effect on the agenda itself, as shown by post- and de-colonial analyses of the WPS agenda. This article seeks to explore the WPS practices of a group of states that in many ways challenge these North/South and provider/recipient binaries by explicitly positioning themselves as operating beyond and across them: the BRICS countries, comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. In this article, we explore how constructions of conflict within the WPS practices of BRICS states relate to the acknowledgement of, and commitment to, the agenda more broadly. We ultimately argue that the BRICS' commitment to the WPS agenda is driven more by identity-making geopolitical considerations, including geostrategic interests, than a politics of peace.