Narrating the Women, Peace and Security Agenda
Narrating the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Author: Laura J. Shepherd

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-02-26

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0197557260

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The "narrative turn" has recently influenced theories, methods, and research design within the field of international relations. Its goal is, in part, to show how stories about international events and issues emerge and develop, and how these stories influence the uptake and limitations of global policy "solutions" around the world. Through the lens of narrative, this book examines the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, adopted by the United Nations Security Council twenty years ago. The agenda seeks to increase the participation of women in conflict prevention efforts and to protect the rights of women during conflict and peacebuilding. Those involved in the creation of the WPS agenda, including its strategies, guidelines, and protocols, tend to assume that implementation is the most critical element of it. But what can the stories about the agenda's emergence tell us about its limits and possibilities? Laura J. Shepherd examines WPS as a policy agenda that has been realized in and through the stories that have been told about it, focusing on the world of WPS work at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. She argues that to understand the implementation of the agenda we need to also understand the narration of the agenda's beginnings, its ongoing unfolding, and its plural futures. These stories outline the agenda's priorities and delimit its possibilities--as well as communicate and constitute its triumphs and disasters. As the book shows, much energy and resources are expended in efforts to reduce or resolve the agenda to a singular, essential "thing"--with singular, essential meaning. There is no "true" WPS agenda that practitioners, activists, and policymakers can apprehend and use as their guide; there is only a messy and contested space for political interventions of different kinds. Shepherd shows that the narratives of the WPS agenda incorporate plural logics but that this plurality cannot--should not--be used as an alibi for limited engagement or strategic inaction. Those seeking to realize the WPS agenda might need to live with the irreconcilable, the irresolvable, and the ambiguous.

Narrating the Women, Peace and Security Agenda
Narrating the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Author: Laura J. Shepherd

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0197557244

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"This history of UNSCR 1325, and its articulation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda that grew from its adoption, are as familiar to anyone working on the agenda as the alphabet, the rules of grammar and syntax, or the spelling of their own name. In this book, I encounter Women, Peace and Security as a policy agenda that emerges in and through the stories that are told about it, focussing on the world of WPS work at the United Nations Headquarters in New York (noting, of course, that many other equally rich and important stories could be told about the agenda in other contexts). Part of how the WPS agenda is formed as (and simultaneously forming) a knowable reality, is through the narration of its beginnings, its ongoing unfolding, and its plural futures. These stories account for the inception of the agenda, outline its priorities and delimit its possibilities, through the arrangement of discourse into narrative formations that communicate and constitute the agenda's triumphs and disasters. This is a book about the stories of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, and the worlds they contain"--

Gender, UN Peacebuilding, and the Politics of Space
Gender, UN Peacebuilding, and the Politics of Space

Author: Laura J. Shepherd

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-08-02

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0190699434

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The United Nations Peacebuilding Commission (UNPBC) was established in December 2005 to develop outlines of best practice in post-conflict reconstruction, and to secure the political and material resources necessary to assist states in transition from conflict to peacetime. Currently, the organization is involved in reconstruction and peacebuilding activities in six countries. Yet, a 2010 review by permanent representatives to the United Nations found that the hopes of the UN peacebuilding architecture "despite committed and dedicated efforts...ha[d] yet to be realized." Two of these hopes relate to gender and power, specifically that peacebuilding efforts integrate a "gender perspective" and that the Commission consult with civil society, NGOs, and women's organizations. This book is the first to offer an extensive and dedicated analysis of the activities of the UN Peacebuilding Commission with regard to both gender politics, broadly conceived, and the gendered dynamics of civil society participation in peacebuilding activities. Laura J. Shepherd draws upon original fieldwork that she conducted at the UN to argue that the gendered and spatial politics of peacebuilding not only feminizes civil society organizations, but also perpetuates hierarchies that privilege the international over the domestic realms. The book argues that the dominant representations of women, gender, and civil society in UN peacebuilding discourse produce spatial hierarchies that paradoxically undermine the contemporary emphasis on "bottom-up" governance of peacebuilding activities.

The Women, Peace and Security Agenda
The Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Author: Laura J. Shepherd

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-26

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 100046248X

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The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is comprised of the policies, protocols and practices enacted by a wide range of actors inspired by, or under the auspices, of the UN Security Council resolutions adopted under the title of ‘women and peace and security’. Since the adoption of the first resolution in 2000, resolution 1325, there have been nine others, each of which elaborates or extends aspects of the original resolution. This book provides a forward-looking collection of scholarship on the WPS agenda in two halves. The first half of the book presents a series of essays that each provide a glimpse of the rich and insightful research on WPS being undertaken in and about different contexts, to demonstrate the importance of centring the "local" as a site of knowledge production in the WPS agenda. The essays presented in the second half of the book also engage questions of knowledge production, documenting the exploratory methods in use in WPS scholarship, and highlighting those topics engaged at the hinterlands of what is a broad field – topics that gesture at the future of research in this area. The chapters in this book were originally published as special issues of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

Governing the Feminist Peace
Governing the Feminist Peace

Author: Paul C. Kirby

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2024-04-02

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0231555857

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The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda is celebrated as a landmark global framework for achieving gender equality in peace and security governance. Its power is visible in two decades of United Nations resolutions, national action plans, regional initiatives, and countless activist, academic, and philanthropic projects. Yet despite this vitality, it is haunted by failure, as a lack of political will and stubborn patriarchal resistance frustrate its promise. This book offers a groundbreaking critical account of the WPS agenda, exploring its evolution in relation to the wider politics of global governance and feminism. Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd argue that WPS is not a settled, cohesive policy but a field in flux, defined and disrupted by a growing number of national, supranational, subnational, and transnational agents who in turn act on an expanding catalogue of threats, from climate change to homophobia, challenging traditional boundaries of peace and security. Kirby and Shepherd reconceptualize WPS as a “policy ecosystem,” tracing interaction and contestation around the agenda across levels from the UN Security Council to military alliances to feminist activists. They combine analysis of a vast dataset of policy documents with key informant interviews and close readings of diplomacy, statecraft, the politics of indigeneity, counterinsurgency, antimilitarism, human rights, and the arms trade across the first twenty years of WPS. Far-reaching and incisive, Governing the Feminist Peace poses a provocative question: What if we abandoned the idea of the WPS agenda as a unified political project altogether?

Feminist Solutions for Ending War
Feminist Solutions for Ending War

Author: Nicole Wegner

Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)

Published: 2021-11-20

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780745342863

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Will war ever end? Women across the world are proving that they can oppose patriarchal capitalist violence

Narrating War and Peace in Africa
Narrating War and Peace in Africa

Author: Solimar Otero

Publisher: University Rochester Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1580463304

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Narrating War and Peace in Africa interrogates conventional representations of Africa and African culture -- mainly in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -- with an emphasis on portrayals of conflict and peace. While Africa has experienced political and social turbulence throughout its history, more recent conflicts seem to reinforce the myth of barbarism across the continent: in Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique, Chad, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Sudan. The essays in this volume address reductive and stereotypical assumptions of postcolonial violence as "tribal" in nature, and offer instead various perspectives -- across disciplinary boundaries -- that foster a less fetishized, more contextualized understanding of African war, peace, and memory. Through their geographical, historical, and cultural scope and diversity, the chapters in Narrating War and Peace in Africa aim to challenge negative stereotypes that abound in relation to Africa in general and to its wars and conflicts in particular, encouraging a shift to more balanced and nuanced representations of the continent and its political and social climates. Contributors: Ann Albuyeh, Zermarie Deacon, Alicia C. Decker, Aména Moïnfar, Kayode Omoniyi Ogunfolabi, Sabrina Parent, Susan Rasmussen, Michael Sharp, Cheryl Sterling, Hetty ter Haar, Melissa Tully, Pamela Wadende, Metasebia Woldemariam, Jonathan Zilberg. Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Hetty ter Haar is an independent researcher in England.

Handbook on Gender and Violence
Handbook on Gender and Violence

Author: Laura J. Shepherd

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 1788114698

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Containing contributions from leading experts in the field, this Handbook explores the many ways gender and violence interact across different contexts and offers a range of disciplinary perspectives. This comprehensive volume connects micro-level interpersonal violence to macro-level structural forms of violence across three discrete but interrelated sections: concepts, representations, and contexts.

Civil Society, Care Labour, and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda
Civil Society, Care Labour, and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Author: Caitlin Hamilton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-31

Total Pages: 78

ISBN-13: 1000394492

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This book proposes that work on the Women, Peace and Security agenda undertaken by civil society actors can be interpreted as a form of care labour that nourishes and sustains the agenda – without which the agenda could not, in fact, succeed. The care labour of civil society is thus a condition of the Women, Peace and Security agenda’s success. United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 is the foundation of a diverse and pluralising policy framework known as the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Over the 20 years since the adoption of the foundational resolution, despite sustained resistance from some quarters and a general lack of adequate resourcing and political will, the agenda has continued to see many successes, and to achieve elements of political transformation large and small. This book explores how the supporting constituency of the agenda has ‘made 1325 work’. Based on new interviews with representatives of diverse civil society organisations working on WPS, the book offers a novel intervention into WPS scholarship, which has thus far paid relatively little attention to the labours of civil society actors working on WPS, particularly on an individual level. The authors consider the motivations, pressures and frustrations experienced by WPS civil society actors, as well as the goals and challenges. This book is based on original research and will be of interest to scholars, policymakers and practitioners working on WPS specifically, and those working in Political Science, International Relations, Development Studies, and on the global governance of peace and security. It will also be relevant for students in WPS-focused programs and of peace and security studies more broadly.

Responsibility to Protect and Women, Peace and Security
Responsibility to Protect and Women, Peace and Security

Author: Sara E. Davies

Publisher: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers

Published: 2013-08-08

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9004257691

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In Responsibility to Protect and Women, Peace and Security: Aligning the Protection Agendas, editors Sara E. Davies, Zim Nwokora, Eli Stamnes and Sarah Teitt address the intersections of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle and the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Contributions from policy-makers and academics consider both the merits and the utility of aligning the protection agendas of R2P and WPS. A number of actionable recommendations are made concerning a unification of the agendas to best support the global empowerment of women and the prevention of mass atrocities.