Human Trafficking, Human Rights and Women, Peace and Security: The Sound of Silence

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.

Women, Peace and Security: A Critical Cartography

This introductory chapter offers a mapping of the field of research to which we – the authors of the chapter and the editors of the volume – hope that the volume itself will contribute. Using the motif of ‘new directions’, we chart historical and contemporary scholarship on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), tracing avenues of enquiry, streams of argument, and architectures of practice across geographical, temporal, and institutional scales. In the course of our mapping, we identify overlapping waves of WPS scholarship, beginning with those who came to study WPS primarily through peace activism and women’s movements (including those who engaged directly with the politics and processes that produced UNSCR 1325), through the emergence of ‘WPS’ as a discrete object of analysis, and to the current state of art represented by the contributions to this volume. In doing so we show how WPS has gone from peace activism at the margins to a more significant landmark in the peace and security environment than perhaps anyone had envisaged. This cataloguing constitutes the first substantive section of the chapter. In the second section of the chapter, we map the contours of the contemporary field of study, proposing three new horizons of WPS scholarship: new themes; new actors; and new methods of encounter. In the final section, we conclude our cartography with a discussion of the ways in which the more recent contributions to WPS scholarship and practice are producing interesting new contestations, tensions, and constellations of power, and re-situate the new politics of WPS in relation to the geographical, temporal and institutional scales which will shape its future trajectories.

Holding Feminist Space

In the decades since the Security Council adopted its first resolution on Women, Peace and Security this thematic policy area has both expanded and deepened. Although there are key institutional and geo-political continuities to be traced here, the contours of the space into which WPS policy now emerges has also shifted profoundly. Emerging out of a conversation between two former NGO policy advocates this article explores some of these continuities and changes. With a combined experience spanning 15 years of the WPS Agenda at the UN’s Headquarters in New York, Louise Allen (NGO Working Group Executive Director 2014-2018) and Sam Cook (WILPF, PeaceWomen Project Director, 2005-2010) reflect on and weave together a range of concerns: the significance and ethical challenges of the Council’s behind-the-scenes politics; the shifting role of NGOs in relation to WPS policy development; the impact of advances in communication technology; and perhaps most cogently for ongoing political efforts, the challenges and rewards of working in feminist coalition and toward a shared feminist future.

Best Practice Diplomacy and Feminist Killjoys in the Strategic State: Exploring the Affective Politics of Women, Peace and Security

“And then I sNAPped”. How does it feel to snap at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, at a meeting taking stock of the progress of the UNSCR1325 National Action Plan? This paper is a response to the affective sites of Women, Peace and Security politics and the ways in which academic/activist knowledge has become (un)used by the strategic state. We identify moments of feminist killjoyism, which we call sNAPping, in the context of the wider transition from state feminism to the need to engage with the neoliberal governmentalities of the strategic state”. Our contribution is an auto-ethnographic reflection by two researcher-activists who participated in the multi-stage government-led process of drafting and launching the third Finnish UNSCR1325 National Action Plan and were also the authors of three key advocacy texts. We have used our experiences in such encounters as ethnographic research material to interrogate and analyse the feminist affects of sNAPping.

South Sudanese Women on the Move: An Account of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

This chapter offers a personal reflection of Rita M. Lopidia’s journey into activism on matters related to Women, Peace and Security (WPS) in South Sudan. In this chapter, Rita discusses her first-hand experience of feminist advocacy in relation to WPS in South Sudan and transnationally. Rita is the co-founder of EVE organisation, which under Rita’s leadership has played a critical role in monitoring the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 in South Sudan. This chapter focuses on the work involved in monitoring the implementation of UNSCR 1325, and the opportunities and obstacles activists face. Rita describes her personal experience of advocacy in the region and at the UN Security Council level. To conclude, Rita explains the local context and the future of the women’s movement in South Sudan, with reference to the intersections between WPS with UNSCR 2250 on Youth, Peace and Security. Rita’s tireless advocacy and work addressing gendered violence, justice, peace and security is an awe-inspiring example of the connectedness between the normative gains of WPS and the on the ground realities of ensuring women’s voices are heard at the negotiating table.

The Price of Peace? Frictional Encounters on Gender, Security and the ‘Economic Peace Paradigm’

Since the early 2000s, the United Nations Security Council’s Women Peace and Security framework has been a key focus of gender advocacy for women’s organisations confronting outbreaks of conflict in the Pacific Islands region, and for those who demand involvement in processes of conflict transition. But in these contexts, arguments about the rights of women to be recognised as bearers of specific burdens in times of instability, we well as active contributors to the consolidation of peace and durable post-conflict governance also come into friction with vernacular notions of security and localised sentiments about the foundations for the safe ordering of community. In this chapter, I reflect on recent academic development of the concept of vernacular security and the insights this work might offer when examining the enabling and constraining nature of these frictions. In particular I examine the impact of programs emphasising women’s economic participation as a key element of post-conflict restoration in Solomon Islands and Bougainville. These programs yoke liberal models of individualised, rights bearing citizenship and empowerment with advocacy aiming to encourage women’s entrepreneurship and business acumen. They constitute an important element of post-conflict external aid delivery programs in both countries. Yet my own research conducted with women who have participated in these programs, as well as those seeking to improve their economic participation independently, point to the problems of assuming that women’s economic participation easily correlates to higher levels of gendered security and empowerment in these post conflict contexts. To develop this argument I reflect on the idea that women may labour, but for negligible gain, a concept first expressed by Solomon Islands scholar Alice Aruhe’eta Pollard in the early 2000s. Building further on this idea, I argue that vernacular perspectives on gender and economic order are particularly helpful for exposing the fragile and complex relationship between gendered “labour” and “gains” in gendered security in these sites.

The Privatization of War: A New Challenge for the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Private military and security companies (PMSCs) have rapidly increased in size and rate of deployment since the 1991 Gulf War, notably during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars of 2001 and 2003 respectively. This growth of PMSCs in the last two decades has not been accompanied by an effective legal regulatory framework, and 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 services in conflict settings pose to international peace and security and human rights. This chapter argues that UN institutions, scholars, advocates, and practitioners should incorporate the privatization of war as a new challenge within the WPS agenda, intending to plant a seed in touching upon different ways in which the privatization of war should be addressed in order to prevent gendered human rights violations in conflict scenarios.

Between Protection and Participation: Affect, Countering Violent Extremism and the Possibility for Agency

In 2015, United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2242 set out the need for a gendered approach to Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) and counter terrorism. Scholars have critiqued the incorporation of gender into existing CVE programmes and on multiple grounds: CVE has instrumentalised the Women Peace and Security (WPS) agenda towards state-centric goals; it has essentialised the Muslim women (and men) it encounters; and it has framed women in need of Protection from risky men, creating tension with the space for female Participation, advocated within WPS. Violent extremism and radicalisation have so far, therefore, proved problematic frameworks for interpreting conflict-related violence and gender, given the critiques focus on the ways in which policy seeks to deny women’s agency. While acknowledging these critiques, this chapter argues for the ambiguities in Muslim women’s role in gendered CVE, which yet contains the possibility for women to exercise agency. As the soft side of counter-terrorism, gendered CVE entails partnering communities to build resilience. CVE programmes aimed at women’s participation rely on - and indeed reproduce – women’s affective relationships within a distinctly localized terrain. This chapter acknowledges this ambivalence, so far neglected in the literature, to explore how these relationships offer a new direction for the women peace and security agenda in CVE. Through a series of interviews with women in the field of CVE, the chapter explores how affective relationships underpinning the UK counter-radicalisation strategy Prevent can enable British Muslim women’s transformation of CVE; their leadership; and their participation. Women are able to both impact and progress gendered CVE, which is constituted in female agency within communities, as much as within policy, either at the UN or national level. The chapter problematises the straightforward reading of CVE as necessarily exploitative and reductive, instead revealing the ways in which women’s own community relations can produce agency and resistance, and a new path for the WPS agenda in CVE.

Difficult Encounters with the WPS Agenda in South Asia: Re-scripting Globalized Norms and Policy Frameworks for a Feminist Peace

The chapter draws upon scholarship and gender expertise, primarily from South Asia, on the everyday resistance and resilience of local women negotiating multiple militarised patriarchies in the conflict continuum, to critically assess the limits and scope of leveraging the WPS agenda to build a transformative peace. It teases out the plural and contextual meanings of militarisation, peace and justice, emphasising the intersecting structures of disadvantage and discrimination which shape women’s experiences of insecurity. Confronting ‘post conflict’ transitions that likely deliver a violent peace or internal domination, the chapter questions the presumed apolitical engagement of women with peace and calls for attention to their resistance to the crisis of solutions delivered by the hegemonic neo liberal peace and development template. The chapter makes a case for bringing in the concept of ‘resistance’ into the WPS agenda, as it is integral to the collective mobilization of the region’s peace groups as well as women’s alliances with social movements for socio-economic justice and cultural rights. Finally, it outlines how the region’s gender equality and peace advocates have expanded openings for WPS practices in other institutional contexts such as CEDAW.

Global Racial Hierarchies and the Limits of Localization via National Action Plans

This chapter uses an intersectional feminist analysis to consider how most WPS work continues to be done to or about countries in the Global South through the lens of National Action Plans (NAPs). We consider who WPS is about and who it is for on the international stage. A central part of this investigation is interrogating whether certain NAPs are truly able to localize the international project of WPS or whether because of global racial hierarchies, they actually simply reinforce the status quo. We also consider why funders in the Global North continue to look abroad to address issues of gendered insecurity and conflict despite the challenges within their own boarders. Finally, we look at which images are used to present the women the NAP is meant to be about keeping secure. As part of the second generation of work reflecting on the WPS architecture, this chapter is a reflection on how whiteness and white privilege are refracted in the knowledge of and in the implementation practices of the WPS agenda. Overall, this critique of the practices of the WPS agenda contributes to feminist studies on securitization and the cooptation within WPS that serves to perpetuate a ‘white savior’ narrative around peace and security.