Since the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, the woman‐in‐conflict has emerged as a central figure in the discourse of the UNSC Women, Peace and Security policy community. She is an ever‐present referent in discussions, the person in whose name critique is launched or action demanded. This figure is a representation of the needs and interests of the uncountable, faceless and nameless women affected by and living through war; a representation that takes place through imbuing her with particular meaning or characteristics. These meanings shape how the figure is understood in Women, Peace and Security discourse, which, in turn, constructs the horizons of possibility for both current and future policy and its implementation. This article explores how this figure is produced as a subject through layers of representation and is deeply embedded in the practices and relationships of power in the policy community. It suggests that accounting for these will offer an opportunity for feminist advocates to engage in this institutional space in more considered and effective ways.

Feminist interventions in international politics are, more often than not, understood (and visible) as interventions in relation to policy documents. These policies—in this case the United Nations Security Council's resolutions on Women, Peace and Security—often feature as the end point of feminist advocacy efforts or as the starting point for feminist analysis and critique. In this article the author responds to the provocations throughout Marysia Zalewski's work to think (and tell) the spaces of international politics differently, in this case by working with the concept of feminist failure as it is produced in feminist policy critique. Inspired by Zalewski's Feminist International Relations: exquisite corpse, the article explores the material and imaginary spaces in which both policies and critique are produced. It picks up and reflects upon a narrative refrain recognizable in feminist critiques on Women, Peace and Security policy—that we must not make war safe for women—as a way to reflect on the inevitability of failure and the ostensible boundaries between theory and practice. The author takes permission from Zalewski's creative interventions and her recognition of the value of the ‘detritus of the everyday’—here a walk from New York's Grand Central Station to the UN Headquarters, musings on the flash of a particular shade of blue, and the contents of a footnoted acknowledgement, begin to trace an international political space that is produced through embodied and quotidian practice.

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Killing vectors are generators of symmetries in a spacetime. This article defines certain generalizations of Killing vectors, called affine symmetry tensors, or simply affine tensors. While the affine vectors of the Minkowski spacetime are well known, and partial results for valence n = 2 have been discussed, affine tensors of valence n > 2 have never been exhibited. In this article, we discuss a computational algorithm to compute affine tensors in Minkowski spacetime, and discuss the results for affine tensors of valence 2 ≤ n ≤ 7. After comparison with analogous results concerning Killing tensors, we make several conjectures about the spaces of affine tensors in Minkowski spacetime. KEYWORDS: Affine Symmetry Tensors; Affine Vectors; Killing Tensors; Killing Vectors; Minkowski Spacetime; Dimension; Maple CAS; Lie Derivative; Generalized Killing Tensor

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.