Narratives of Failure

This chapter interrogates the challenges and obstacles that are a frequent theme in the WPS stories I have collected. Specifically, it examines the ways in which failure, limitations, and challenges are narrated in the WPS agenda and juxtaposes these “failure narratives” with the “success stories” presented in the previous chapter. The first section, which sketches out the fabula of these tales of failure, shows how the telling of these stories produces a collective subject jointly responsible for the limitations perceived in the agenda as it stands. This construction reinforces the authority of the UN as well as its culpability as a WPS actor in the stories of these shortcomings, relevant to the logics of (dis)location that situate the agenda at/in the Security Council, and simultaneously disperses it spatially, locating it “in country” or “on the ground.” The resolution to the acknowledged shortcomings is often presented as more frequent, more granular monitoring (in addition to further resources and stronger political will), which reinforces the construction of the agenda itself as a quantifiable knowledge object.

Narratives of Tensions and Pressures

The WPS agenda is usually described in terms of four “pillars” of activity: the participation of women in peace and security governance; the prevention of violence and conflict; the protection of women’s rights and bodies; and gender-sensitive relief and recovery programming. Over time, however, the emphasis given to each of these pillars has varied, and different actors have supported different initiatives under each pillar, with different political effects. The story of tension evident in the data collected or co-produced is primarily articulated in this chapter in terms of imbalance across the various pillars (which in itself is interesting, as it presupposes the virtue or desirability of balance). Further, tensions and pressure points are politically and strategically deployed as rationales for (limited) engagement across the agenda as a whole by certain actors.

Silences, Secrets, and Sensibilities

This chapter explores representations of silence, and perceived absences, in the WPS stories analyzed here. Specific silences and absences have a formative effect on the political affordances generated by the WPS agenda; the “common sense” of WPS is that these dimensions should be left unspoken lest they provide cynics and skeptics with critical ammunition to undermine the agenda. Examining these silences and absences as constitutive of the WPS agenda, and therefore as implicated in both its failures and its successes, reinforces the plurality and polyvalences of WPS as it emerges as a knowable policy agenda through its narration. The suppressed frustrations and the barely detectable influences and influencers are as much part of the formation of the WPS agenda as the indicators, audits, and action plans. This chapter surfaces some of these silences and secrets and describes the sensibilities that emerge through the storytelling.

Narratives of Success

This chapter examines the “success stories” of the WPS agenda, interrogating how the agenda emerges as a triumph of transnational advocacy, a step forward in the seemingly endless search for strategies to mitigate against gendered inequalities and discrimination, and the prompt for—or ally of—related policy initiatives such as the UK’s Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative or the “feminist foreign policy” commitments of Sweden and Canada. Multiple articulations of success feature in the narrative of the agenda; for the purpose of identifying the fabula, I have organized these into two primary dimensions. First, the narration of the WPS agenda frequently cites the agenda itself as a success. The second dimension of the success story is the narration of moderate successes in implementation of the WPS agenda. These are the moments of change and, by implication, improvement to organizational structure or individual experience that the agenda has brought about. Over time, the ways in which these victories are presented, particularly in the Secretary-General’s reports but also in the contributions to and statements at Security Council Open Debates and even in interview data, rely more and more on quantitative data. Further, in terms of subject specificity, these successes are related increasingly to the prevention of sexual violence and women’s participation in peace processes, while other dimensions of the agenda are less well attended.

Stories of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

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.

Tools to Think with

People learn from stories, from the ways in which stories are told. In the context of this investigation, which explores the narration of the WPS agenda at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York, the stories that are told about the agenda—the events that are made prominent, the actors, the timelines, and the points of contestation—are constitutive of WPS as a knowable policy agenda in world politics. Moreover, the specific ways in which the WPS agenda is narrated function to hold open the meaning of the agenda, to resist—in fact, to render impossible—the closure of the agenda around a single and stable meaning, thus shaping and informing the futures of the agenda. This chapter develops the theoretical and conceptual framework that sustains such a claim.

Ownership and Origin Stories

One of the most prominent motifs in the narration of the WPS agenda is a repeated, and repeatedly coherent, story of the history of “the agenda,” which tells of the advocacy surrounding the adoption of UNSCR 1325 in 2000 and anchors the agenda firmly in the passage of this resolution by the UN Security Council. The narration of this “origin story” is of critical importance in shaping what the agenda could and would become in the following twenty years. The “ownership” of the agenda by the women’s civil society organizations that lobbied for the adoption of the foundational resolution is a touchstone of political activism around the agenda and has had an impact on its development over the past two decades. These ownership claims, deriving from the origin stories, thus have important constitutive effects on the future of the agenda and on the legitimacy and credibility of various WPS subjects.

Resisting Narrative Closure

This chapter offers a brief conclusion to the arguments developed throughout this book. It revisits the questions driving the investigation presented here, recapping the logics identified and reflecting on the implications of these logics for the imaginable future(s) of the WPS agenda. It also revisits the contribution that the book hopes to make, both to research on global governance and to research on the WPS agenda. The chapter situates the WPS agenda as a form of international policymaking and international policy practice constituted in and through the stories that are told about it and argues that in order to apprehend WPS as a knowable policy agenda, due analytical attention should be paid to the ways in which it is narrated. Through analysis of narrative and discourse, it is possible to identify the logics that organize and (re)produce meaning in particular configurations and that therefore structure the horizons of possibility around WPS as a policy agenda. The plural logics identified resist efforts to close down or narrow the meaning of WPS as a policy agenda in global politics, and so effective political engagement—the realization of agenda—depends on sitting with, and finding productive potential in, multiplicity, polysemy, and ambivalence.