scholarly journals Women, Peace, and Security

Author(s):  
Sara E. Davies ◽  
Jacqui True

The Women, Peace, and Security agenda (WPS) stands at a juncture with significant potential to prevent conflicts, protect human rights, and promote recovery from conflict but inadequate progress and institutional resistance to meeting the commitments enshrined in UNSCR 1325. The chapter builds on feminist constructivist theories of normative change to put forward a pragmatist understanding of “women, peace, and security” as a “work in progress,” wherein advocates and scholars work together with activist states to advance principles of equal and lasting peace. We argue that WPS theory and practice in conflict, post-conflict, and peaceful situations is a dynamic, normative agenda, and iterative reform process committed to realizing a critical gender perspective on peace and security. Drawing on scholars, practitioners, and advocates’ experiences from the Global North and South working on the WPS thematic agenda and on women’s diverse practical experiences of promoting peace and inclusion, we defend a gender-sensitive and gender-inclusive perspective on peace and security.

Author(s):  
Melanie Hoewer

What explains the disconnect between two images of the Irish state: the champion for gender human rights in matters of foreign affairs, and laggard on these rights internally? Is there a disconnect, or are these two sides of the same coin? Hailed internationally for its progressive promotion of the women, peace and security framework, policymaking at the national level reinforces multidimensional experiences of inequality for those most powerless in Irish society. A more nuanced, intersectional understanding of human rights and equality is central to understanding this ambivalent approach of the Irish state. This chapter explores the roots of Ireland’s position on gender rights and assesses Ireland’s role as champion for gendered human rights in the international sphere. Reviewing existing contrasts and contradictions, it provides a discussion of reasons and possible remedies for addressing these, and an explanation of what this may indicate about the Irish polity and its global self-perception.


Author(s):  
Charlotte Bunch

This article discusses women and gender, and first identifies the differences between the concepts. It moves on to a critical examination of the norms and their institutional manifestations, along with selected UN system efforts to promote women's rights in development, peace and security, human rights, and health. The article also provides a balanced evaluation of how much things have changed for girls and women over the last sixty years.


Author(s):  
Iryna Klymchuk ◽  
◽  
Olena Shtraikher ◽  

The study examines the peculiarities of the implementation of gender policy in the field of security and defense by the example of the UN and NATO. To achieve this goal, we considered the legal regulation of gender equality in the field of security and defense of the UN and NATO; analyzed the work of institutional mechanisms for the implementation of gender policy in the field of security and defense by the example of the UN and NATO; characterized the peculiarities of cooperation between Ukraine, the UN and NATO in ensuring gender equality in the field of security and defense. The legal regulation of gender equality at the UN and NATO levels was considered, in particular a number of resolutions (UN Security Council Resolutions on Women, Peace and Security No. 1325, No. 1820, No. 1888, No. 1889, No. 1960, No. 2106, No. 2122, No. 2422, No. 2467, No. 2493), which recognizes the importance of involving women and gender mainstreaming in peace negotiations, humanitarian planning, peacekeeping, post-conflict peacebuilding, governance, and equal participation of women at all levels of conflict prevention or protection from sexual violence. Also the authors analyzed the work of institutional mechanisms responsible for the implementation of gender policy of the UN and NATO, in particular, their expertise and scope of activities. It was clarified that the following persons responsible for the implementation of UN Security Council Resolutions in NATO: Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Women, Peace and Security; NATO Gender Office; Gender Adviser at the International Military Staff; a number of advisory committees and working groups led by NATO Strategic Command; Civil Society Advisory Council on Women, Peace and Security. At the same time, the UN has seven expert institutions and regional independent human rights experts to combat discrimination and gender-based violence against women and girls: UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women; UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women; UN Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls; Committee of Experts on the Follow-up Mechanism to the Belem-Par Convention; Expert Group on Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence; Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Africa of the African Commission on Human Rights; Human Rights Rapporteur. In addition, a number of sub-organizations and programs have been established at the UN level to achieve gender equality in all spheres of life, such as the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the HeForShe IMPACT 10x10x10 movement and the UN-Women. Aspects of Ukraine's cooperation with the UN and NATO in ensuring gender equality in the field of security and defense are highlighted separately. The importance and effectiveness of cooperation between Ukraine and the Alliance during the war in Eastern Ukraine have been established. The support by the UN of Ukraine in fulfilling the obligations within the international regulatory framework on the introduction of gender equality and women’s rights was also analyzed.


Author(s):  
Gema Fernández Rodríguez de Liévana ◽  
Christine Chinkin

The chapter discusses the tension that exists between three separate UN agendas, those relating to CEDAW and WPS; the fight against trafficking in human beings; and the Security Council’s broader agenda for the maintenance of international peace and security. It considers in particular how the securitisation of WPS and human trafficking by the Security Council has diluted and fragmented the discourse of women’s human rights. It argues that as a form of gender-based violence, human trafficking is subject to the human rights regime that has evolved to combat such violence and that human rights mechanisms should be engaged to hold States responsible for their failure to exercise due diligence to prevent, protect against and prosecute those responsible – in the widest sense – for human trafficking. The incidence of human trafficking (as a form of gender-based violence) in armed conflict means that it comes naturally under the auspices of the WPS agenda. The Security Council’s silence in this regard constitutes of itself a form of violence that weakens the potential of the WPS agenda to bring structural transformation in post-conflict contexts. In agreement with the Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children and cognisant of some of the downsides, we argue that ‘in order to ensure more efficient anti-trafficking responses, a human rights-based approach … should be mainstreamed into all pillars of the women and peace and security agenda’. In turn this would provide a new direction for the WPS agenda.


2021 ◽  
pp. 119-186
Author(s):  
Ilan Kapoor ◽  
Zahi Zalloua

This chapter pursues further the stakes of a universal politics in a variety of case studies that serve as key global sites of resistance and antagonism, spanning the West and the East, or the global North and South. It considers the ways the diverse phenomena of climate change, refugee crises, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, political Islam, Bolivia under Morales, the European Union, and Covid-19 open up emancipatory spaces when they manage to short-circuit the democratic liberal script, exhorting us to see to what extent the script works against (most of) us. To that end, the revolutionary potential of these events lies in their capacity to shake our postpolitical myopia by inciting us to read politically and dialectically—to read with an eye for capital and political economy, race and gender, and the libidinal economy that subtends their global circulation.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Hewitt

This article examines the relationship between the Women, Peace and Security (wps) agenda and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). R2P remains ‘gender-blind’, inadequately addressing gender issues encompassed within the wps agenda. Currently, women are limited by gendered structural inequalities and marginalisation in conflict, where the wps agenda has failed to be incorporated in R2P and broader conflict mechanisms. I argue that the wps agenda and R2P are mutually beneficial and complementary in their protection mandates to enable lasting peace. I identify three common intersecting commitments of these two normative frameworks to provide a more holistic, gender-sensitive approach to conflict. These are prevention and early warning systems, protection and gender-sensitive peacekeeping, and women’s participation in peace processes. I conclude that identifying common areas of engagement could potentially effect positive changes for women and men on the ground in conflict prevention and protection, and post-conflict reconstruction.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-363
Author(s):  
Mercedes Masters ◽  
Salvador Santino F Regilme

Abstract In the post-9/11 context, citizenship in the global North has been reoriented towards the concept of public security. Much of this lay in political rhetoric definitions of who is a threat to the security of a nation state, with a particular emphasis on the ‘threatening Other’. The ‘war on terror’ motivated governments to revoke the citizenship of such persons. In February 2019, the British teenager Shamima Begum was branded as such, and swiftly had her citizenship stripped, which the UK authorities justified as a necessary precaution to protect the nation’s safety. This article asks the core question: how does Britain embed notions of hierarchical human rights, particularly in Begum’s case? The article upholds two key arguments. First, the revocation of citizenship suggests hierarchical notions of humanity, whereby the state’s obligations to its constituents differ depending on each individual’s socially constructed racial and gender identities. Second, the legitimization of exceptionalist security politics suggests the deployment of differentiated conceptions of the state’s obligations to its citizens. The case of the revocation of Begum’s citizenship illustrates how persistent colonialist and stratified conceptions of citizenship enable the demotion of a citizen to a bare human or homo sacer.


Author(s):  
Cecilia Jacob

Abstract This article assesses recent UN reforms to enhance the organization’s capacity to prevent violent conflict. These reforms target crucial inefficiencies within the UN that have hampered effective preventive and protection practices in violent conflict and atrocities. The article argues that state actors have viewed the reform process as a site of norm contestation, and negotiations have created an avenue for compromises on the centrality of human rights and political backstopping of UN missions in volatile field contexts that are vital to better prevention and protection outcomes. Contestation by state actors is significant in steering the outcomes of institutional reform as states advance their normative agendas, and seek to integrate these preferences into new institutional structures that are open to negotiation through the reform process. A broad assessment of these reforms confirms the move toward a more pragmatic vision of peace and security in the UN to accommodate global power shifts.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Syaiful Anam

This paper examines the transformation within the practice and concept ofcontemporary peacebuilding. Peacebuilding, practically and conceptually, hasbeen dominated by the liberal peace paradigm. In this case, theinstitutionalising of its core ideas such as democratisation, human rights, therule of law, and liberal market system to the post-conflict states and to a socalled ‘fragile/failed states’ aiming at bringing peace and security has failed to create a comprehensive and sustainable peace on the ground as exemplified in Nicaragua, Haiti, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and other post-war states. Scholars focused on the issue of peacebuilding have engaged to a new approach that challenge the domination of the liberal paradigm through the accommodation and appreciation upon the ‘local’ and thus create spaces for the interaction between the liberal and the ‘local’ within forms of ‘hybrid peace’ or ‘hybrid peacebuilding’


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