In this sharp exploration of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, Governing the Feminist Peace asks not just what WPS has achieved, but how it operates and who it serves. This is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how global feminist goals are pursued, co-opted, or transformed within the complex machinery of international governance.
Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd*
In late April 2019, Nadia Murad addressed the United Nations Security Council during its annual open debate on sexual violence in conflict. Murad had gained an international profile as a courageous and articulate survivor of atrocities carried out by Da’esh – the so-called Islamic State – against the Yazidi ethno-religious community in northern Iraq. In her short speech, Murad urged the council to end its reliance on slogans and finally prosecute sexual violence and other grave crimes. Accompanying Murad was her lawyer, Amal Clooney, who challenged the Council to rise to its “Nuremberg moment, its chance to stand on the right side of history” by triggering an International Criminal Court or hybrid court process. The meeting culminated in a new resolution, the ninth in the series of Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) resolutions, consolidating the status of ‘the agenda’ as the most extensive of all the Security Council’s thematic commitments.
Murad’s six-minute speech was but one instance in a still-unfolding mosaic of events and relations, institutions and movements, talk and text, united by reference to conflict-related sexual violence. Similar constellations of actors may be found throughout the WPS agenda, working across boundaries of domestic and international, formal and informal, state and society, military and civil, lay and expert, public and private. Sexual violence is but one – and the most controversial – in a docket of gender issues, encompassing equal rights, the benefits of women’s substantive participation in promoting peace, the contribution of a ‘gender perspective’ to military planning, the urgent need for global disarmament, recognition of gender diversity, changes to humanitarian practice, inclusivity in refugee, disaster and climate change management, and more besides. As well as the national governments that are invariably the target of appeals for resources and action, the WPS circuit runs on an expansive cast of women’s groups, humanitarian agencies, freelance consultants, celebrity activists, academics, private philanthropic foundations, lawyers, investigative journalists, religious authorities, intergovernmental agencies, international courts, treaty bodies, think tanks, and military alliances.
Governing the Feminist Peace is our attempt to come to terms with this dizzying array of issues and agents. WPS is (still) celebrated as a success for feminists in that a coalition of civil society actors managed to get the Security Council to not just acknowledge the gendered quality of war and peace but to pledge – and on some accounts to legislate – for concerted global action towards feminist goals, from demilitarisation to indigenous peace-making. In formal policy terms it is embraced not only by the Security Council but by over a hundred countries, dozens of regional bodies, and, increasingly, a range of sub-national actors. An accompanying cottage industry has sprung up to track the pace of adoption. For all this energy, WPS is also frequently, almost reflexively, announced as partial, faltering, betrayed, coopted, and securitised. In our terms, a wellspring of vitality and a vortex of failure. These aspects of WPS are not mere opposites, with advocates celebrating vitality and cynics documenting failure. The relation is more intricate, with failure as often a spur to greater implementation efforts as a reason to abandon the agenda, and with vitality in the sense of official adoption to some extent dependent on the failure of the more radical versions of the agenda.
We began with dissatisfaction at the dominant perspective on WPS, familiar to all readers with a background in International Relations (IR): norms. Many, if not most, WPS scholars understand the agenda as a norm, series of norm, or super-norm. But we argue, first, that basically none of the norms of WPS – with the partial and very arguable exception of the prohibition on sexual violence – are effective constraints on behaviour; second, that the norm perspective has a tendency to Eurocentrism and simplistic models of diffusion in which rules are formulated by white feminists and then gradually diffused with resistance to the global south, sometimes with ‘localisation’ variants that have to be accommodated with the ‘pure’ original; and third, that labelling everything a process of norm contestation has a way of displacing politics as such. Norms come to mean both too little – in that they are aspirations, campaigns, and in-development rather than strictly operative – and too much – in that every action taken in the name of WPS can be labelled a kind of norm framing, contestation and so on. Instead we speak of a policy ecosystem and of ourselves as policy ecologists. By that we mean the field of activities, actors, and artifacts interacting in the name of ‘Women, Peace, and Security.’ The criterion for inclusion in the ecosystem is performative: WPS agents are those agents that say they are doing WPS. In our conception, an ecosystem always involves this referential quality, an acting in the name of. Our claim is that this new perspective is better able to capture the “relational multiplicity” of WPS.
Concretely we do that at several levels. We begin with the ‘policy canopy’ of 237 policy documents, from which we draw out a content analysis of formal WPS: what issues are included, by which actors, when, and how. So we end up with figures like these: a diffusion map of WPS policy; and a ribbon graph of which ‘new issues’ were taken up in WPS policy between 2000 and 2020, corrected for the growth in documents over time. We take that as a starting point for ‘reading against the grain’ – through testimony, interviews, close interpretation of some plans, and our own participant observation.
Against the much-rehearsed story of WPS starting with resolution 1325, we recover several counter-histories. One example is Namibia, not usually foregrounded in WPS origin stories. In May 2000, it was the location for the ‘Windhoek seminar’ on women in UN peacekeeping. The seminar was hosted by Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, then Namibia’s minister for women’s affairs and child welfare, who had previously been rapporteur general at the Beijing World Conference on Women. The coalition established in Windhoek seeded language that would flourish a few months later in resolution 1325 (the most recognised birth moment of WPS), with effects far beyond UN operations. This transformation had always been the larger objective for some of the participants and drew on a politics quite different from that of the imperious global north feminism usually indicated by WPS critics.
In 2000, Namibia was simultaneously an elected member of the Security Council, president of the UN General Assembly, and chair of the Beijing+5 summit, which began almost as soon as the ink on the Windhoek Declaration was dry. Namibia was due to take presidency of the council for the month of October, and with other supportive governments of the time – including Bangladesh, Canada, Jamaica, and Mali – worked to translate the spirit of Windhoek into a resolution. Several of the driving participants were veterans of the liberation movement, and Nandi-Ndaitwah (subsequently foreign minister and vice-president of Namibia, now President) has been credited with the first suggestion of a resolution, mirroring Namibia’s innovation of children and armed conflict the year before. The United Kingdom and the United States, later to take up “penholder” roles on WPS and sexual violence, respectively, as permanent members of the Council, did not obstruct the campaign, but neither were they its originators. In reading national WPS against the grain, we get to ask, for example, what it would look like if Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah was treated as as essential to WPS as Hillary Clinton.
That example is particular to the orthodoxy of WPS, one of several moments in the book that upset commonplaces: the weakness of the WPS norm structure, the early west African WPS complex, the regional policy from the early years making links with development and women’s empowerment, the Security Council resolutions that never made it out of draft (and to our knowledge, never before discussed), the ebb-and-flow of issues in northern WPS. But ours is not an inner story only. In concentric circles we work outwards to foreground profound and abiding feminist tensions as they play out in the United Nations, in national plans, in the clash between military alliances like NATO and feminist groups like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and in the integration of WPS themes in parallel policy ecosystems like the arms trade regime. In each new site we find the politics of WPS entangled with the wider contentions of global feminism(s): in the figuring of victim and peacebuilder, the fight over sex/gender, the promise and peril of institutionalisation, the legacies of empire and cross-currents of race, and the imagination of a post-patriarchal peace.
Although the book deals with much WPS arcana, our hope is that our analysis has resonance beyond the WPS community not only in the specific issue areas we mention but also among those who seek to understand how complex governance agendas develop, sprawling and tentacular, over time, taking on different – sometimes unrecognisable – forms in different contexts. The WPS ecosystem, as we have come to understand it, has vibrant pockets of intense activity and, simultaneously, areas where WPS is withering or mutating in hitherto unforeseen ways. The return of Trump signals most obviously one such pesticide: a full-spectrum assault on feminism, humanitarianism and the spectre of ‘gender’. Whether he will galvanise new coalitions of defence or force the feminist peace underground is yet to be seen. Our wager is what is true of WPS may hold for other complex governance agendas; efforts to assert singularity in any case are fundamentally political, functioning to foreclose not only dissent and contestation but also opportunities for growth. As we conclude in the book: “Forcing the coherence of the agenda is itself a form of violence, an erasure or dismissal of those not counted by that which is captured in any partial vision or presumed faithful representation of the agenda. Every entity, connection, surface and contribution within the ecosystem is a fragment of peace potential because the adaptation of the system to the part (and vice versa) is inevitably non-linear, unpredictable, and replete with possibility.” At this particular point in world history, with the rolling back of women’s rights on multiple fronts, the glimpses of possibility offered by feminist peace often seem to exist on a different plane – but perhaps are more precious than ever.
*Laura is Professor of International Relations in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, and served as President of the International Studies Association from 2023-2024. She is a former Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2018-2022), and has been a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security in London, UK, since 2016. She is a member of The Disorder of Things authorial collective.
Paul is Reader in International Politics and a Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. He was until this year a Co-Director of the GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub, a multinational, interdisciplinary research consortium investigating the politics of gender justice and inclusive peace.
**This article has been published in the Disorder of Things. See the original link here.