What does gender equality mean for peace, justice, and security? At the turn of the 21st century, feminist advocates persuaded the United Nations Security Council to adopt a resolution that drew attention to this question at the highest levels of international policy deliberations.
Today the Women, Peace and Security agenda is a complex field, relevant to every conceivable dimension of war and peace. This groundbreaking book engages vexed and vexing questions about the future of the agenda, from the legacies of coloniality to the prospects of international law, and from the implications of the global arms trade to the impact of climate change. It balances analysis of emerging trends with specially commissioned reflections from those at the forefront of policy and practice.
The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, associated with the United Nations Security Council resolutions of a similar name, is widely recognized as the most significant and wide-reaching global framework for advancing gender equality in military affairs, conflict resolution and security governance. The first of these resolutions, UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, bound the international community to ensure, among other provisions, greater participation of women in decision making in national, regional and international institutions; their further
Key messages Women, Peace and Security policy to date has not sufficiently incorporated the lessons of intersectionality. Gender-just peace processes require the Women, Peace and Security agenda and peacebuilding to complicate gender in policymaking. Intersectionality, as derived from Black feminist theory, goes beyond including those marginalised by ‘difference’. Incorporating intersectionality prevents a single-axis approach, which is greatly needed in responses to conflict-affected communities. Introduction I find I am constantly being
Key messages The article examines to what extent Women, Peace and Security practices in Myanmar contribute to feminist peace. Feminist peace is theorised as political conditions that allow women’s experiences and priorities to inform peacebuilding. Findings show that Women, Peace and Security support is least likely to benefit the women most affected by war. This is compounded by illiberal government efforts to exclude critical voices. Introduction ‘I think a lot of international [Women, Peace and Security] support has not modelled feminist
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has challenged the accepted international order and resulted in the first-ever deployment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Response Force under the remit of collective defence. It has also raised questions about the future relevance of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda encapsulated in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 and the follow-up resolutions. Primarily, if the WPS agenda is not invoked now given the highly gendered nature of the war, including the use of conflict-related sexual and
the architecture of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, Resolution 2242 takes into consideration the changing global security context, and attempts to revise and augment the priorities of the WPS agenda enshrined in the previous resolutions in light of the major shifts that have occurred in peace and security governance since 2000, when the first WPS resolution was adopted (United Nations Security Council Resolution [UNSCR] 1325). One of the new areas of concern represented in Resolution 2242 is the possibility of alignment with counter
Technology UK Ltd were accused of frequenting the brothels where women were imprisoned and sexually enslaved (Schulz and Yeung, 2008 , p 5). Although a former DynCorp employee acted as a whistleblower and revealed the abuses, the accused contractors enjoyed immunity as they served a UN mission; they were sent back to their countries of origin, where they were not prosecuted (Sperling, 2015 , p 171). The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda does not include any provisions related to the escalating threat that private contractors hired to provide military and security
among the priorities of the government. The belief that victory can be achieved through the barrel of the gun results in the largest amounts of government spending going into defence. On the other hand, CSOs working on women, peace and security utilized the NAP for advocacy and to implement projects on peace, countering gender-based violence, justice, education and humanitarian aid for women and girls. Personally, if I were to evaluate the progress of the state of South Sudan in the implementation of the NAP, I would say that it is a disappointment. If
From NAPping to sNAPping How does it feel to snap at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, at a meeting taking stock of the progress of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) National Action Planning (NAP)? This auto-ethnographic reflection (Martini and Jauhola 2014 ) on the affective sites of WPS NAPping is a result of a dialogue and writing process between two feminist international relations scholars who share a career trajectory of having been aid intervention project managers, gender experts and advocates for UNSCR 1325 during the two decades of its
The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is rooted in international law – notably international humanitarian law, human rights and international criminal law. UNSCR 1325 specifically calls upon states to respect fully the obligations within these laws, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Subsequent WPS resolutions emphasize the need for commitment to women’s human rights and implementation of human rights law, without again referencing CEDAW until Resolution 2467 in April 2019 (UNSCR 2467, para. 18
