'You will go far but no further': Applying a gendered lens to the women peace and security agenda in post-conflict Liberia

Abstract

This thesis explores how the UN Women Peace and Security (WPS) policy, formalised in UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and expanded in an additional eight resolutions, is developed and implemented at the global, national and local levels of political action. In particular, the thesis builds on the scholarly literature that demonstrates how the language of the resolutions and in particular feminist concepts of gender, can inhibit the transformative aspirations of the feminist project embodied in the production of the WPS policy. These aspirations centre on the notable achievement of placing gender on the international security agenda and the disruption of the male norm in international security discourse.Recognising that various strands of feminism inform the text of the WPS policy Within the post-conflict landscape, while traditional gender norms can be unsettled, change is constrained by a number of factors. In particular, the translation of global policy into local practice is impacted by the liberal peacebuilding project and donor-country agendas, which are layered on top of local notions of gender, creating a complex web of competing and contradictory perspectives and outcomes.The gender stool analysis undertaken reveals that a gender-as-difference perspective is predominant at the global, national and local levels, supported by a gender-as-equality perspective, closely aligning to the strands of feminism that Pratt identifies in the production of UNSCR 1325 (2013: 773-774). Interestingly, the analysis reveals that while a gender-as-difference perspective is predominant at all three levels, the implications of focusing primarily on a difference perspective engenders diverse implementation outcomes depending on which level (global, national or local) is invoking that perspective.3