Feminist Peacemaking (original) (raw)
Related papers
Women, Peace and Security: Resolution 1325
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2004
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 is an eighteen-point resolution that develops an agenda for women, peace and security. It calls for the prosecution of crimes against women, increased protection of women and girls during war, the appointment of more women to UN peacekeeping operations and field missions and an increase in women's participation in decision-making processes at the regional, national and international level.
Women, peace and security: Resolution 1325 on its tenth anniversary
2010
The inclusion of the gender dimension in the international agenda for peace and security has been a long process which now has a history of over four decades. The United Nations, the European Union and other international bodies have gradually been introducing different laws, resolutions and directives which form an extensive regulatory framework in relation to women, conflict and peacebuilding.
Considered the single greatest achievement in ‘engendering’ global security policy, UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (SCR 1325) is celebrated as a triumph of women’s peace movements and transnational feminist organizing. My central claim is that SCR 1325 has both over performed and under delivered. The remarkable achievements it catalysed in establishing new international standards have not been fully appreciated, explored, or understood, while its successful utilisation by women rights and peace activists in the context of 'informal peace building' has not fundamentally challenged the workings of the Security Council itself, as feminists had hoped. This has resulted in an overestimation of SCR 1325’s symbolic and practical importance, and an underestimation of the broader institutional and geopolitical factors that shaped SCR 1325’s genesis and continue to drive Security Council decision-making in relation to women and gender issues. I suggest that SCR 1325’s perceived failures have less to do with its oft-criticized textual content than with the institutions, actors, strategies, and processes that have been most central to its implementation. Historically, the geopolitics of UN decision-making on gender issues demonstrate an extreme form of bureaucratic pathology that has circumscribed opportunities for bringing gender issues onto the UN’s peace and security agenda. I introduce the concept of ‘relegation’ to explain why decision-making on women has been extrinsic to the UN mechanisms and entities that have the greatest potential for autonomous action. SCR 1325’s implementation failures also reflect the absence of a collaborative feminist epistemic community of research and praxis in the nascent field of feminist security studies. This has further limited the UN’s ability to internalise, institutionalise, and implement actions that advance, rather than undermine feminist peace building agendas.
The UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 establishes the roles of women in the conflict solving process and here there will be an examination into what steps have been taken to put UNSCR 1325 in progress during this past decade. It is essential to emphasise that this action is generally considered a ‘landmark, legal and political framework’ as this was the first time that the Security Council addressed the disproportionate and extraordinary impact of armed conflict on women. The eighteen articles of UNSCR 1325 aim to transform the roles of women and recognize the crucial contribution they could make in conflict prevention, peacekeeping, peace and security. In particular, UNSCR 1325 encourages greater participation of women at the decision making level, for example in peace negotiations (Arts. 1&2) and in peace operations as soldiers or police (Art. 4). As highlighted in the preamble, another important aim of UNSCR 1325 is to protect women and girls from gender based violence (Art. 10). It also calls for the respect of the particular needs of women and girls in refugee camps (Art. 12). The decision taken by the Security Council in 2000 to adopt UNSCR 1325 suggests the importance of this issue, as a major characteristic of the Security Council is ‘selectivity...especially of the P5, in deciding which issues to address or not address.
International Feminist Journal of Politics 13, no. 4 (2011): 557–575. doi:10.1080/14616742.2011.611662.
Social movement scholars credit feminist transnational advocacy networks with putting violence against women on the United Nations (UN) security agenda, as evidenced by Resolution 1325 and numerous other UN Security Council statements on gender, peace and security. Such accounts neglect the significance of superpower politics for shaping the aims of women's bureaucracies and non-governmental organizations in the UN system. This article highlights how the fall of the Soviet Union transformed the delineation of ‘women's issues’ at the UN and calls attention to the extent that the new focus upon ‘violence against women’ has been shaped by post-Cold War US global policing practices. Resolution 1325's call for gender mainstreaming of peacekeeping operations reflects the tension between feminist advocates’ increased influence in security discourse and continuing reports of peacekeeper perpetrated sexual violence, abuse and exploitation.