There is an increasing amount of literature on various aspects of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. While appreciating this scholarship, this volume highlights some of the omissions and concerns to make a quality addition to the ongoing discourse on the intersection of gender with peace and security with a focus on 1325. It aims at a reality-check of the impressive to-dos list as the seventeen years since the Resolution passed provide an occasion to pause and ponder over the gap between the aspirations and the reality, the ideal and the practice, the promises and the action, the euphoria and the despair. The volume compiles carefully selected essays woven around Resolution 1325 to tease out the intricacies within both the Resolution and its implementation. Through a cocktail of well-known and some lesser-known case studies, the volume addresses complicated realities with the intention of impacting policy-making and the academic fields of gender, peace, and security. The volume emphasizes the significance of transforming formal peace making processes, and making them gender inclusive and gender sensitive by critically examining some omissions in the challenges that the Resolution implementation confronts. The major question the volume seeks to address is this: where are women positioned in the formal peace-making seventeen years after the adoption of Resolution 1325?

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?

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.

Wars kill and destroy lives of women, girls, men and boys. There are particular gendered dimensions to violence that have a disproportionate and different impact on women and men. Gender-based violence (GBV)1 , such as sexual violence and domestic violence tend to increase during and after war. At the same time, postconflict peace- and state building can be an opportunity to change discriminatory gender roles and advance women’s rights and gender equality. This brief gives an overview of the women, peace and security agenda, how it is positioned within the Swedish development cooperation, and where the entry points are for Sida.

This interdisciplinary book explores how the policy goal of gender equality operates in arguably the most masculinist area of politics: peace and security. Gender equality was set on the international peace and security agenda with the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 and the inception of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Celebrated internationally as an outcome of feminist advocacy efforts, the WPS agenda has over time become a site of contestation. Security institutions have questioned the placement of the gender equality objective within the peace and security sector, whereas feminist advocates have expressed their concerns about the capacity of security institutions to support gender equality in meaningful ways. Drawing on insights of nearly seventy UN, government, international and local civil society experts, the book offers a systematic take on key gender equality debates within the WPS agenda in the case studies of UN Security Council, ASEAN and Pacific Islands Forum, and Governments of the Philippines and Australia. By looking back at the dilemmas of gender equality policymaking and their paradoxical effects in conflict and post-conflict situations, the book also looks forward to the third decade of the WPS agenda and the long-term impact of the agenda on the political struggle for gender equality in peace and security.

The United Nations Security Council, in 2000, unanimously passed a resolution calling for women’s increased participation in conflict prevention and peacebuilding, as well as their protection during conflict. This marked the first time that the UN Security Council explicitly addressed gender issues in ‘conflict’ and ‘post-conflict’ situations. But what difference has this international agenda on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ made to women’s lives on the ground and to the governance of international peace and security? This volume provides a critical evaluation of the mainstreaming of gender issues in matters of international peace and security resulting from the passage of Resolution 1325 in 2000. It considers how this agenda actually plays out in different contexts, and with what implications for women’s activism and for peace and security. The picture that emerges is not uniform, obliging us to reconsider the links between gender, conflict, different visions of peace and, consequently, different projects of peacebuilding. Consequently, the book poses new questions for transnational feminist scholars and activists. This book was based on a special issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

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.

Gender, Race, and Sudan’s Exile Politics examines the gendered and racialized discourses and practices of the Sudanese opposition in exile through the opposition movements of the 1990s and early 2000s, and discusses the history through which these discourses evolved. The military coup that brought the National Islamic Front (NIF)—now National Congress Party (NCP)— to power in 1989 not only forced most political parties, trade unions, and activists in Sudan into either exile politics or underground activism; it also urged many of Sudan’s political forces and activists to rethink the meaning of belonging and of the “Old” Sudan. In the mid-1990s, this involved a rethinking of the relationship between religion and politics, acknowledging Sudan’s diversity, acknowledging the need to restructure Sudan’s economy and politics to ensure equal access and participation for the historically marginalized, and committing to self-determination for the people of South Sudan. The concept of the New Sudan broadly captured this rethinking. This book interrogates the relationship between women’s organizations and activisms in exile on one hand, and nationalist, transformative, and other political movements and processes on the other. It further discuses transnational coalition building across difference, including racial difference, between women’s organization seeking to transform gender relations in Sudan and South Sudan.

The SADC Protocol on Gender and Development is the only sub-regional instrument in the world that brings together global and continental commitments to gender equality in one instrument used to enhance accountability. The Southern African Gender Protocol Alliance is a network of country and regional NGOs that campaigned for the Protocol, its updating, implementation and tracking. Originally aligned to the Millennium Development Goals that expired in 2015, SADC Gender Ministers updated the Protocol and aligned it to the Sustainable development Goals (SDGs), Beijing Plus Twenty and the Africa Agenda 2063 in 2016. In July 2017, the Ministers adopted a Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Framework (MERF) that will be the basis of future reporting. Now in its ninth edition, the 2017 Barometer is the first assessment of the Post-2015 SADC Gender Protocol. Moving with the times, the Alliance has expanded the two key main yardsticks in the Barometer: the SADC Gender and Development Index (SGDI) and the Citizen Score Card (CSC). The Barometer incorporates many MERF and SDG indicators, as well as its own unique measures of voice, choice and control. The Barometer also introduces the Gender Responsive Assessment of Constitutions and Laws conducted by Alliance experts and networks around the region. A wealth of data, insights and analysis awaits all readers of the Barometer, that will also be made available online and in multi-media formats. The “SADC we want” is one in which citizens engage; step it up for gender equality, and make sure we achieve Planet 50/50 by 2030!

This book investigates to what extent UNSCR 1325/WPS agenda has functioned in practice, to advance women’s equality and empowerment in the peacekeeping context and beyond. The book examines whether widespread implementation of UNSCR 1325 and the broader WPS agenda via gender mainstreaming in UN operations has translated into increased gender equality in peacekeeping operations, the broader UN institutional context and, by extension, the host countries in which missions are situated, via norm dissemination. The book investigates this via a review of the implementation of UNSCR1325 in the operations chosen as research sites over three snapshot years. The book undertakes a comparative analysis that scrutinizes if, how and under what conditions gender mainstreaming has succeeded as a strategy to advance gender equality by analyzing the factors/conditions that have led to successful gender mainstreaming across the operational context, and those that have impeded this outcome. The book concludes that, despite rhetorical commitments to women’s equality in peacekeeping since the passage of UNSCR 1325, progress on the ground has remained minimal, and that the operational environment continues to be discriminatory against women. Both quantitatively and qualitatively, women do not participate as equal partners in peacekeeping and continue to have less access to resources and decision-making power, overall. The book interrogates that by exploring the spaces available within law, policy and practice of the UN to pursue the human rights agenda of gender equality and considers whether UNSCR 1325 has enlarged those spaces. It also points to the irony of internal UN structures failing to adequately adapt to their own gender mainstreaming mandates, while those same structures have delivered some gender equality mandates successes externally, at local levels. This book will be of interest to students of peacekeeping, gender studies, and International Relations.