Stories of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Author(s):  
Laura J. Shepherd

After introducing the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, this chapter offers a brief discussion of the political significance of stories and storytelling, drawing on narrative theory. This is followed by a brief elaboration of the ethics and politics of working with narrative. The inevitable partiality of narrative accounts and the decision to focus on the UN in New York are just two of the ethical tensions that run through the project presented here, and the chapter explores these tensions not in an effort to resolve them but rather to acknowledge the work that they do in prompting thinking around the issues that arise in the course of this analysis. The final section explains the book’s argument and outlines the development of this argument over the course of the chapters that follow.

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Wallis

This article considers what treating individual international interveners engaged in peacebuilding work as referent objects can tell us about emplaced security. This is important because individual interveners are diverse, embodied agents who can impact the agency, peace and security of conflict-affected populations. It argues that applying an ontological security lens can provide a partial explanation for why interveners develop narratives and perform practices, including why they sometimes identify and behave in counterproductive, and even damaging, ways. The final section considers why an analytical focus on place is valuable, noting that place-based experiences and place-identities are formative of ontological security. It argues that treating interveners as a referent object provides opportunities to rethink the tendency to focus on home as the key site of emplacement in the ontological security literature. Building on this, it argues that examining the emplaced security of interveners invites us to examine the political nature and consequences of interveners’ physical and ontological security-seeking narratives and practices, including their creation of the material and ideational structures of intervention spaces and places.


2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 73-81
Author(s):  
Karen Donfried

Wolf-Dieter Eberwein and Karl Kaiser, Germany’s New Foreign Policy: Decision-Making in an Independent World (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001)Adrian Hyde-Price, Germany & European Order: Enlarging NATO and the EU (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)Matthias Kaelberer, Money and Power in Europe: The Political Economy of European Monetary Cooperation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001)


2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Brothers

The rise of neo-Nazism in the capital of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was not inspired by a desire to recreate Hitler's Reich, but by youthful rebellion against the political and social culture of the GDR's Communist regime. This is detailed in Fuehrer-Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Naxi by Ingo Hasselbach with Tom Reiss (Random House, New York, 1996). This movement, however, eventually worked towards returning Germany to its former 'glory' under the Third Reich under the guidance of 'professional' Nazis.


Our world of increasing and varied conflicts is confusing and threatening to citizens of all countries, as they try to understand its causes and consequences. However, how and why war occurs, and peace is sustained, cannot be understood without realizing that those who make war and peace must negotiate a complex world political map of sovereign spaces, borders, networks of communication, access to nested geographic scales, and patterns of resource distribution. This book takes advantage of a diversity of geographic perspectives as it analyzes the political processes of war and their spatial expression. Contributors to the volume examine particular manifestations of war in light of nationalism, religion, gender identities, state ideology, border formation, genocide, spatial rhetoric, terrorism, and a variety of resource conflicts. The final section on the geography of peace covers peace movements, diplomacy, the expansion of NATO, and the geography of post-war reconstruction. Case studies of numerous conflicts include Israel and Palestine, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzogovina, West Africa, and the attacks of September 11, 2001.


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