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.

This interdisciplinary book brings together innovative chapters that address the entire spectrum of the African peacebuilding landscape and showcases findings from original studies on peacebuilding. With a range of perspectives, the chapters cover the full gamut of peacebuilding (i.e. the continuum between conflict prevention and post-war reconstruction) and address both micro and macro peacebuilding issues in the five regions of Africa. Moving beyond the tendency to focus on a single case study or few case studies in peacebuilding scholarship, the chapters examine critical peacebuilding issues at the local, state, regional, extra-regional, and continental levels in Africa. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of African politics, peace and security studies, regional organizations, development studies, state-building, and more broadly to international relations, public policy, diplomacy, international organizations, and the wider social sciences.

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.

In 1999, after 24-years of violent military occupation by Indonesian forces, the small country of Timor-Leste became host to one of the largest UN peace operations. The operation rested on a liberal paradigm of statehood, including nascent ideas on gender in peacebuilding processes. This book provides a critical feminist examination of the form and function of a gendered peace in Timor-Leste. Drawing on policy documents and field research in Timor-Leste with national organisations, international agencies and UN staff, the book examines gender policy with a feminist lens, exploring and developing a more complex account of ‘gender’ and ‘women’ in peace operations. It argues that gendered ideologies and power delimit the possibilities of building a gender-just peace, and contributes deep insight into how gendered logics inform peacebuilding processes, and specifically how these play out through the implementation of policy that explicitly seeks to reorder gender relations at sites in which peace operations deploy. By utilising a single case study, the book provides space to examine both international and national discourses, and contextualises its analysis of Women, Peace and Security within local histories and contexts. This book will be of interested to scholars and students of gender studies, global governance, International Relations, and security studies.

In an era which many now recognise as ‘post-secular’, the role that religions play in shaping gender identities and relationships has been awarded a renewed status in the study of societies and social change. In both the Global South and the Global North, in the 21st century, religiosity is of continuing significance, not only in people’s private lives and in the family, but also in the public sphere and with respect to political and legal systems. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Gender and Society is an outstanding reference source to these key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject area. Comprising over 40 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into 3 parts: Critical debates for religions, gender and society: theories, concepts and methodologies Issues and themes in religions, gender and society Contexts and locations Within these sections, central issues, debates and problems are examined, including activism, gender analysis, intersectionality and feminism, oppression and liberation, equality, bodies and embodiment, space and place, leadership and authority, diaspora and migration, marriage and the family, generation and aging, health and reproduction, education, violence and conflict, ecology and climate change and the role of social media. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Gender and Society is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and gender studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as cultural studies, area studies, politics, sociology, anthropology and history.

Anti-radicalization efforts are a significant part of the War on Terror and influence many parts of our lives. This book examines five countries to demonstrate how the design, implementation, and evaluation of preventing and countering violent extremism programs rely on limited ideas of religion, security, and gender. The programs implicitly and explicitly depend on stereotypes about men and women, and in turn, these biases negatively influence the success of these programs and the rights of citizens. Ultimately, the book proposes an alternative way of implementing anti-radicalization efforts that are rooted in a feminist peace--one that is transformative, inclusive, and sustainable.

EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. What is feminist peace? How can we advocate for peace from patriarchy? What do women, globally, advocate for when they use the term 'peace'? This edited collection brings together conversations across borders and boundaries to explore plural, intersectional and interdisciplinary concepts of feminist peace. The book includes contributions from a geographically diverse range of scholars, judges, practitioners and activists, and the chapters cut across themes of movement building and resistance and explore the limits of institutionalised peacebuilding. The chapters deal with a range of issues, such as environmental degradation, militarization, online violence and arms spending. Offering a resource to advance theoretical development and to advocate for policy change, this book transcends traditional approaches to the study of peace and security and embraces diverse voices and perspectives which are absent in both academic and policy spaces.

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.

This volume provides one of the first comprehensive feminist readings of international statebuilding, with a specific focus on the case of Kosovo. Rather than simply showing how the state in Kosovo is being built by and through women and feminist encounters, this volume is interested to problematise women and feminist subjectivities vis-à-vis the state and statebuilding. The book challenges three main arguments related to the processes and subjects of statebuilding in Kosovo. First, the academic literature on Kosovo has a tendency to take the international intervention of 1999 as the originary point of statebuilding processes in Kosovo. Second, and relatedly, given Kosovo's unprecedented exposure to Western intervention and statebuilding, the majority of works start from the presumption that liberal interventionism in Kosovo (and elsewhere) is normatively more progressive than the previous system, and that the liberal interventionism and statebuilding are naturally gender progressive and gender-equal. The third argument has to do with the existing legal architecture on gender and women’s rights in contemporary Kosovo. The aim of the volume is to, on the one hand, problematise the evidence against the backdrop of everyday manifestations and/or performances of statebuilding and on the other hand interrogate the co-constitutive gender aspect. In terms of methodology, the volume brings together contributions that rely on traditional and multi-sited ethnography, and narrative research rooted in projects and initiatives in Kosovo. This allows the contributors to unearth new and silenced actors, entry points, subjects and subjectivities in processes of and related to statebuilding in Kosovo; feminist frictions and challenges to statebuilding in Kosovo; as well as encounters of heteronormative statebuilding. This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, Balkan politics, feminisms, and international relations, in general.

In the past, it was assumed that men, as good citizens, would serve in the armed forces in wartime. In the present, however, liberal democratic states increasingly rely on small, all-volunteer militaries deployed in distant wars of choice. While few people now serve in the armed forces, our cultural myths and narratives of warfare continue to reproduce a strong connection between military service, citizenship, and normative masculinity. In Support the Troops, Katharine M. Millar provides an empirical overview of "support the troops" discourses in the US and UK during the early years of the global war on terror (2001-2010). As Millar argues, seemingly stable understandings of the relationship between military service, citizenship, and gender norms are being unsettled by changes in warfare. The effect is a sense of uneasiness about the meaning of what it means to be a "good" citizen, "good" person, and, crucially, a "good" man in a context where neither war nor military service easily align with existing cultural myths about wartime obligations and collective sacrifice. Instead we participate in the performance of supporting the troops, even when we oppose war--an act that appears not only patriotic and moral, but also apolitical. Failing to support the troops, either through active opposition or a lack of overt supportive actions, is perceived as not only offensive and inappropriately political, but disloyal and dangerous. Millar asserts that military support acts as a new form of military service, which serves to limit anti-war dissent, plays a crucial role in naturalizing the violence of the transnational liberal order, and recasts war as an internal issue of solidarity and loyalty. Rigorous and politically challenging, Millar provides the first work to systematically examine "support the troops" as a distinct social phenomenon and offers a novel reading of this discourse through a gendered lens that places it in historical and transnational context.