The futures past of the Women, Peace and Security agenda

Abstract

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has developed at the United Nations over the course of the past 15 years, and there have been critical engagements with it for nearly as long. In this article, we first take stock of the operationalization of the WPS agenda, reviewing its implementation across a number of sectors. In the second section, we expose the tensions that have marked the WPS agenda from the start. With others, we argue that there has been a narrowing of the agenda's original scope, reducing it to the traditional politics of security rather than reimagining what security means. We highlight this reduction primarily through an analysis of the tension between the ‘participation’ and ‘protection’ pillars of the agenda. Further, we argue that the WPS agenda faces a current challenge in terms of the actors entrusted with it. Although in some ways involving civil society, the consolidations and implementation of WPS principles at the national and international levels have become increasingly state‐centric. Third, we imagine some possible futures of the agenda, from a trajectory characterized by increasing marginalization or even irrelevance, to new avenues like the emergent, albeit tentative, ‘Men, Peace and Security’ agenda. We close with an argument for a revival of the WPS agenda beyond a fixation on states, beyond a narrow heteronormative or essentialist focus on the ‘Women’ of the WPS resolutions, and moving towards the radical reimagining of security as peace that inspired the original architects of these important resolutions.

End Impunity! Reducing Conflict-Related Sexual Violence to a Problem of Law

“…The emphasis of the Security Council on conflict‐related sexual violence similarly reduces the wider participatory purposes of the WPS agenda to a question of women's victimization that is primarily to be solved through criminal law (see also Lemaitre and Sandvik ). The holistic approach of the other resolutions—addressing structural and participatory inequality—may in the long term have greater impact on women's lives and risks of being subjected to conflict‐related sexual violence than do criminal prosecution (see also Kirby and Shepherd ).…”

“…The resolution is widely endorsed as an achievement brought forth “not only [by] member states, but, just as important, [by] networks of nongovernmental organizations” (Tryggestad : 539). The Women, Peace and Security‐agenda (WPS) that Resolution 1325 set out for the UN and its member states is founded on five pillars: protection, prevention, participation, relief, and recovery (Kirby and Shepherd ). Later, the UN Security Council has adopted seven additional resolutions under this agenda.…”

“…Later, the UN Security Council has adopted seven additional resolutions under this agenda. However, as Kirby and Shepherd (: 379–80) underline, in “the WPS policy architecture … there has been a narrowing of the agenda around the issue of prevention of, and protection from, violence” (see also Engle ; Kirby ). It is pertinent to add that it is not violence as such that is the primary concern in the WPS agenda of the UN Security Council, but conflict‐related sexual violence, illustrated by the simple fact that a majority of the subsequent WPS‐resolutions are dedicated in full to addressing this issue .…”

Transforming CSDP? Feminist Triangles and Gender Regimes

“…The WPS agenda has provided an advocacy tool for feminist activists, with civil society actors having a key role in holding the UN and national governments to account for their implementation of the WPS agenda (Kirby and Shepherd, , p. 379). In relation to the EU, the locus for consistent engagement with civil society is focused on the Informal Task Force for the implementation of UNSCR 1325, established in 2009 (Council of the EU, ).…”

Beyond liberal vs liberating: women’s economic empowerment in the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security agenda

“…A significant proportion of work that adopts a more critical perspective tends to focus on the way in which the language of the WPS agenda reduces women to the status of victims or essentialises them as naturally peace-loving (e.g. Charlesworth 2008;Otto 2010;Kirby and Shepherd 2016). Several critical scholars argue that the WPS agenda helps legitimise military interventions that reinforce a neoliberal, neo-colonial global order, which ultimately does little for women's security (e.g.…”