THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF WOMEN, PEACE, AND SECURITY
To see a World in a Grain of Sand. And a Heaven in a Wild Flower. Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand. And Eternity in an hour
—WILLIAM BLAKE, AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE , CA. 1803 . . . when you get there, there isn’t any there there.
— GERTRUDE STEIN, ON OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, 1934
The Women, Peace and Security agenda is . . .
Adopted in 2000 by the United Nations Security Council, resolution 1325 is the foundation of . . .
With its title derived from the thematic agenda item of ‘women and peace and security’ at the UN Security Council, the Women, Peace and Security agenda comprises . . . R
How do we introduce the subject matter of a book when our purpose is to show the illusion of that subject’s singularity and coherence? To show the impossibility of capturing within a single term the enormity of that subject, the multiplicity of its subjects—in the sense of both its concerns
and the protagonists pursuing them—and the ways in which even the most basic description of our field implicates us in subject-making, generating narratives of gendered agency and identity? Gertrude Stein remarked wistfully, regarding the possibility of returning to her native Oakland, California, and her longing for a sense of recognition, of homecoming: “there isn’t any there there.” We feel much the same about the ephemeral qualities of the subject in which we have invested much of our combined and separate careers. This is not to say that there is a lack of energy, a lack of effort, a lack of embodied and lived experience invested in feminist peace projects—quite the opposite. As we show in this opening chapter, the complex constellations of objects and subjects and relations between them that make up the field of policy and governance called “WPS” are notable for their vitality, and are proliferating wildly, with the diffusion and diversity of the agenda often held up as evidence of both its success and its shortcoming.
The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda is typically introduced as an ambitious and coherent gender equality architecture conceived at the United Nations Security Council and with an exact birth date: October 31, 2000 (see chapter 4). This was the “ first time the Security Council devoted an entire session to debating women’s experience in conflict and post-conflict situations . . . [and] it is the only Security Council resolution that has an anniversary celebrated by a growing constituency of practitioners and advocates.”1 The agenda exists to “ensure that gender is mainstreamed throughout all conflict prevention and peacebuilding activities, and reaffirms women’s rights to be involved in decision-making and to access and take on leadership positions.”2 It is the global governmental expression of the “simple, yet revolutionary idea . . . that peace is only sustainable if women are fully included, and that peace is inextricably linked with equality between women and men.”3 The agenda is so celebrated as a rarity because it was driven from below: “a pragmatic attempt on the part of women’s rights activists to address the significant violence and inequality that characterizes conflict, particularly women’s experience of it.”4 Over more than two decades, WPS has been almost universally understood as a reconfiguration of prior logics of peace and security, involving a novel form of governing practice, and resulting in a more just global order: in short, the feminism of war and peace.
But the above paragraph represents a conventional—and, we will argue, limited—account of the agenda. In this book we offer an alternative historiography of WPS as a heterogenous collection of policy documents, political discourses, institutional guidelines, varieties of professional practice and expertise, dedicated aid programs, and not least (though these are often left out) activist and community mobilizations. This sprawling entity is indeed a gender equality project of great scope, but its exact terms are contested and diverse. This simple insight leads to a different vantage point on feminist governance. Practically every sympathetic scholarly account to date presumes the existence, somewhere, if only in principle, of a coherent WPS agenda that could—if the conditions were right—be made to succeed, to live, to transform the reigning forms of patriarchal war and peace. And yet the agenda is everywhere observed to be partial, stalling, inadequate, incremental, neglected—failing to thrive. Taking our cue from the persistence of promise and complaint, in this book we follow the trails of vitality and failure to explore the shifting manifestations of WPS.
Under scrutiny, the singular Women, Peace, and Security agenda turns out to be a chimera. WPS is multiple, available in radical and conservative variants, an expansive list of demands that lends itself to selective adoption, pliable but also laden with history. As the agenda has developed— growing in scope and depth and energy—it has diverged and converged anew. The pluralism of the agenda is much noted, often explained as a break between Western and local expectations or as a welcome branching into new themes in ways that don’t necessarily disturb the coherence of WPS as a project.5 We take a different perspective, however, and conceptualize the plurality of WPS in terms of ecology, rather than the replication of a singular organism. The complexity and dynamics of contestation ensure uneven growth, with some aspects of the agenda benefiting from significant resources and investment while other areas are comparatively silenced or starved. Parallel and competing initiatives produce truths of the agenda that are impossible to reconcile, as in the clash between the antimilitarist vision of the agenda and the desire to realize its promise by increasing the number of women in armed and defense forces. The making, unmaking, and remaking of WPS commitments and principles over time in turn mean that “the WPS perspective” on a given
issue is always in the process of becoming. Though the imagery of chimera is mythological, our point is historical and sociological: grounded in the conditions that initiated the agenda, the contingencies of how it was taken up and applied, and the relations between the agencies that today collectively constitute it. The chimera is many-faced, a collision of bodies, imaginary and threatening, in later scientific terms a hybrid or fusion of botanical specimens. Though there are precursor species, there is no essential form. The idea that the WPS agenda exists, simply waiting to be implemented, is likewise an illusion. There is no there there.6
We develop the concept of a policy ecosystem to reveal the relational multiplicity behind the slick superficiality invoked by “the WPS agenda.” The ecosystem is an analytical model prompted by our dissatisfaction with norm theory as the predominant framework in global gender governance research, and in the discipline of International Relations (IR) more broadly (as explained at length in chapter 2). The norm perspective emphasizes the establishment of robust standards of conduct, their diffusion by socialization and emulation, alternatively their failure or hybridization in the “local,” and more recently their contestation by rival actors. From the vantage point of policy ecology, the sum of WPS interactions is more fruitful, less stable, and only ambiguously related to international “rules” that are everywhere flouted. The ecosystem presumes dynamic interaction and a diversity of practices along a continuum of efficacy, with norms incorporated as one, but by no means the only or even predominant, vector of meaning.
The ecosystem comprises both a circuit—a network of agents, individual and collective, who interact with each other to produce the range of texts and effects associated with WPS—and a field—the less distinct atmosphere of WPS, its discourses and topics, the flow of debates and desires for change, taken up by the circuit but exceeding it.7 In our study, we will have cause to specify both the identity and motive of participants in the circuit and to consider the emergent qualities of the field. There is also a pleasant echo in our insistence that each arrangement or artifact within the agenda must be apprehended as relationally constituted, connected, and, importantly, always produced within these broader conditions of possibility, and our own collaborative engagement in this inquiry, which simultaneously produces a “we-subject”/writer within a broader ecosystem of intellectual endeavor. We reflect on this below, where we present
an overview of the bricolage method, with which we try to fix, for a moment, the ecosystem to be studied.
To provide a foundation for our investigation, in the rest of this chapter we summarize the layers of our approach, beginning with an explanation of the motifs of vitality and failure we use to illuminate aspects of the WPS ecosystem that we analyze. We go on to situate debates about “the agenda” in a wider field of feminist entanglements. Though the agenda can sometimes appear as narrowly technical, even depoliticized, with its daily language of implementation measures and donor funding, it is laced with many of the same tensions that animate gender politics at large, from the relationship between feminism and nationalism to the discourse of rights and representation and the terms on which sexual and gender identity are recognized and negotiated. Part of our motivation is to bring questions of feminist peace back into conversation about, and with, WPS. We then engage with theories of governance to draw on ideas about the “rules, structures and institutions that guide, regulate and control social life” in the field of the WPS agenda, to situate the policy documents within their circumstances and relations of production by examining the arrangements and agents that enact WPS.8 In the analysis presented in the following chapters, we address the policies, protocols, and guidelines that codify WPS, which are both produced by/through governance arrangements and actions, and which condition the possibilities of those same arrangements and actions. The book moves across these layers, taking in politics and critique, practice and policymaking, arrangements and artifacts. This chapter therefore concludes with a brief discussion of how we make sense of the layers and an outline of the structure of the book.
Let us, then, try again to provide an introduction . . .
VITALITY AND FAILURE
Over the last two decades, feminist activists and at least partly sympathetic policymakers have nurtured a system of peace and security governance anchored in, but extending far beyond, a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions adopted under the title of “women and peace
and security.” The basic history has become rote. The first of these resolutions was adopted in 2000 (S/RES/1325); its identifying number, “1325,” has become an icon as much as a policy object, a touchstone for feminist engagements from formal peace negotiations and political settlements to the protection and assurance of women’s rights during war. Subsequent resolutions expand on the substance of resolution 1325 in various (and variously satisfactory) ways, and together the sequence of resolutions adopted under this title is the supreme architecture of what has crystalized as the Women, Peace, and Security agenda (commonly abbreviated to “the WPS agenda” or simply “WPS”). In addition to the resolutions, and the international governmental organization under the auspices of which they are adopted, there is an abundance of related policy guidelines, protocols, and plans interpreting the provisions of the agenda, along with a mass of advocacy coalitions and networks, government programs and representatives, think tanks and research centers, experts, diplomats, community groups, and practitioner organizations. The agenda has become part of the repertoire of international peace and security, its claims repeated by officials otherwise distant from the traditions of feminist thought.
The magnitude and complexity of the agenda is a testament to its success, and the energies devoted to the feminist peace. The success itself poses a question: How did “one revolutionary idea [become] the official policy of the highest body tasked with the maintenance of international peace and security?”9 How has a seemingly antimilitarist feminist project made such progress in traditionalist institutions of state, in councils for security and ministries of war? Students of the agenda have offered a number of answers: That WPS is but one face in a changing culture of security prompted by the collapse of bipolar Cold War antagonisms. That diligent activism by transnational networks and concerned publics has opened a channel, albeit a tentative one, to mitigate and redress the violence that remains endemic to global politics. Or that the agenda was never, or is no longer, properly feminist and antimilitarist at all, but has instead been co- opted and instrumentalized to serve the war system it once promised to transform. Each of these explanations has some purchase, and in their different ways all draw attention to the vitality of WPS, a locus for marshalling energies. Most obviously this is so for the energies of women’s groups, civil society organizations, activists and advocates
who continue to make the case for WPS as a vector of progress or a means of survival. Despite a pervasive sense of disenchantment with the bureaucratization and dilution of the more radical elements of the agenda, feminists from around the world continue to mobilize in the name of WPS, to make demands on its terms, and to reinforce the contract through accountability mechanisms and legal guarantees. Others are moved in more mundane ways. Bureaucracies have been spurred to conduct scoping studies, revise protocols, set quotas, commission experts, and form working groups. Parliamentarians have debated, advocated, and challenged governments of various stripes to live up to the rhetoric of gender equality increasingly expressed in WPS terms of art. Academics have defined their vocation in relation to the agenda, an investment that often brings them into dialogue and dispute with others on the WPS scene.10 Even for those most critical of the securitization or colonial resonances of the agenda, the naivety of WPS advocacy lends energy to hegemonic forces, who are able to manipulate that resource for other ends.
The liveliness of WPS is expressed most immediately in the profusion of policy documents, offices and initiatives, and political opportunities flowing from resolution 1325. As we document in chapter 3, there are now several hundred high-level policy directives devoted to the agenda issued by a panorama of actors. The pace has at times been almost frenetic, with Security Council resolutions passed mere months apart (see chapter 4). Yet the energies of the agenda are not intrinsically beneficent, as the more celebratory accounts of feminist progress might imply. The field shimmers with potential, both power and danger, to adopt the diagnosis of Dianne Otto.11 The potentiality of WPS is everywhere invested with feeling: hope for expanded equality and security; national pride conveyed in government plans and ministerial speeches; bitter frustration at Security Council intransigence; rage in the face of atrocity; excitement at new alliances and mobilizations. The vitality of activism is integral to the memory work of transnational feminist networks, in which the landmarks of the agenda often feature prominently (see figure 1.1).
The labor of generating and sustaining WPS policy is emotional as well as intellectual.12 This terminology is fraught, of course. “Emotion” is too easily read as belittling women’s groups and “women’s issues”; in more philosophical terms, the juxtaposition of emotional and intellectual labor enshrines a distinction between feeling and thought that has a long and
FIGURE 1.1 “Our Story as Women Peacebuilders, 2000–2020,” a visual narrative produced by seventy peacebuilders from thirty-eight different countries.
Source: International Civil Society Action Network, ICAN Annual Report 2019 (Washington, DC: ICAN, 2019), https://icanpeacework .org /wp-content /uploads/2020/07/ICANAnnual Report 2019final-1.pdf.
troubled history.13 Following critical scholarship on the politics of emotion, we therefore highlight the force of affect in our explorations of vitality: the “flow of resonances”; the intensities of “mood, intuition, temperament, attachment, disposition, and even memory” as animating the WPS field.14 “Affect” connotes a range of investments and responses not
reducible to psychological interiority or somatic reflex. In the simplest terms, affect is a feature of the social world. Politics is always affectual, but the relations between feeling, knowing, and acting are more pronounced, more explicitly recognized and reasoned about, in feminist thought. Moreover, feminist entanglements with governance institutions require affective skill; Anna Elomäki and colleagues describe this as “affective virtuosity,” which “entails not only the competence to analyse and negotiate the conflicting emotions in the room but also within oneself,” arguing that this virtuosity is needed in particular as “feminist knowledge producers negotiate their relationship with neoliberal governance.”15
Feminist investments are also powered by what Clare Hemmings has called “affective dissonance”: the gap between a sense of self and social conditions that politicize, generating new ways of thinking and acting in relation to others.16 Dissonance produces movement, an energy of becoming that also unsettles: “it is this question of affect—misery, rage, passion, pleasure—that gives feminism its life.”17
WPS is, then, full of life: vibrant, thriving through successful propagation. And yet failure, even the threat of death, stalks the feminist peace. The WPS origin story may be of “a revolutionary outcome,” but it is “yet to trigger revolutionary change.”18 In its most common expression, there is the failure to properly implement the agenda; practically every study of it identifies major and persistent underachievement. The most comprehensive and significant single evaluation to date was the 2015 high-level review commissioned by the UN secretary-general, which diplomatically concluded that “obstacles and challenges still persist and prevent the full implementation of the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda.”19 Though scholarly analysis of the agenda (sometimes) identifies (moderate) successes, the central shared research puzzle has been how best to account for the shortcomings of the agenda, with a predominant focus on the gap between political rhetoric and national action.
The culprit is typically “lack of political will,” a complaint heard with increasing regularity as more states adopt the agenda. This is a kind of failure contained within the agenda’s success. In similar terms, advocates and practitioners speak of the fatigue induced by the passage of ever more thematic resolutions in the United Nations Security Council, adding little to what came before and, in some cases, undermining it. Fatigue lasted at least until the stream of resolutions ran dry (see chapter 4). Then there is the neglect of some part of the agenda, the abandonment of promises to prevent conflict in favor of simply making war safe for women.20 A near universal refrain is the lack of understanding of, or resistance to, the “true” WPS principles that ought to be prioritized and thus operationalized. The “norms” at the heart of WPS are at once a marker of achievement—brought into being by demands placed on the Security Council—and a yardstick of failure—because the standards are observed principally in the breach (as we discuss in chapter 2). There is an underlying, and often implicit, assumption that if the tensions could be ironed out, then the agenda could be effectively implemented; if the agenda could be properly resourced,
with the investment of high-level leadership, and actors could agree on fundamental or original principles, then the implementation gap would be eliminated, and feminist peace realized. The slow progress in meeting targets for even the most uncontested forms of participation, the chronic underfunding of the agenda, and the often unrecognized and unvalued labor of advocacy exhausts and exasperates activists. Lack, fatigue, neglect, exhaustion, betrayal.
A second charge of failure comes from another direction: not the failure of states to implement WPS, but the failure of the agenda itself as a feminist project. Though the agenda is about women, this does not by necessity make it feminist, nor does it resolve the vexed question of what is entailed in a feminist politics today. For many critics, “WPS” articulates a problematic figure, a collective feminine subject assumed to share an identity and interest. The “woman” being added to “peace” and “security” is a victim, usually of sexual violence, who is at the same time invested with powers of reconciliation and peacemaking ultimately derived from a maternal archetype.21 This image of the woman—in need of saving but also offering a kind of salvation—damns the agenda to reproduce a binary model of gender (men as always already perpetrators, women as victims), and to facilitate racial hierarchies in gifting the role of benevolent hero to the liberal states of the Global North.22 In the theater of WPS, individual women are expected to perform accordingly, to appear in front of a Security Council represented overwhelmingly (and often only) by male ambassadors, to recount their trauma and plead for assistance.23 The logic of WPS as a policy frame stands in stark contrast to the trajectory of feminist theory away from essentialism and against treatments of “gender” in isolation from its imbrication with the political categories of race, nation, class, sexuality, citizenship, and (dis)ability.24 The critique is not only one of scholarship. Contemporary feminist movements frequently reject undifferentiated conceptions of womanhood, instead acknowledging the diversity of women’s experiences and sometime privileges, committing to intersectional feminism, and/or queering conventional masculine/ feminine distinctions. In short, the category woman is not a solidaristic identity to be assumed, but a construct to be critiqued and replaced, a task at odds with the prevailing gender scripts of the WPS agenda.
We have ourselves participated in both these discourses of failure, separately and together, proposing ways to do WPS better or pointing out
the reductivism of the interventions designed in its name.25 But there is also a third sense in which WPS is failed, this time by academic feminism itself. For practitioners and activists invested in WPS, the interest taken by scholars—as either a topic of expertise or an object of critique—is too often detached from the urgent use to which resolution 1325 is put by women activists during and after conflict. Whether national plans match the resolutions in all particulars, and whether some actors promote essentialist ideas of femininity, is on this account less important than the maneuvers, tactics, and compromises that create new realities. Academic feminism, which becomes closely linked to the positions of semiprofessional and professional women of privilege who are often the graduates of feminist university courses in the Global North, faces its own “implementation gap,” unable to forge solidarities with women’s groups that articulate their struggles in different terms, and which adapt the tools at hand—including resolution 1325—under conditions not of their choosing. The negativity, abstraction, and insularity of academic feminism is then seen as failing feminist politics as such.
In a different context, Judith Jack Halberstam has pursued failure as a political art, a way to circumvent the disciplining force of academic tradition and slip the expectations of success and “toxic positivity.”26 Failure is a neglected utopian resource, a tactic of renegade feminists and pop cultural guerrillas. For WPS advocates, influence instead requires a pragmatic accommodation with reigning standards of seriousness and maturity.27 Transposed to the circuit of advocacy and governance, failure is less of an aesthetic and more of a craft, both a motivating lack and a powerful rhetorical resource. Activists react to— are energized by —the failures of state response, the dissonance between promise and reality.28 In this sense the endless deferral of full implementation is inextricably conjoined with the vitality of WPS. Frustration and resentment are part of the lived biography of the agenda, for those who have moved away from advocacy as much as for those who have persevered. In a different register, failure has its uses precisely as a rhetorical device in making feminist demands. In some sense, resolution 1325 is less remarkable for the change it effected than the discourse it enabled: the narrative of the failure of states (and others) to do what was required of them, a lack that cohered as failure because of all that the resolution and its successors demanded and implied. Failure has a temporal quality, marked in anniversary years
and missed opportunities, recognition deferred and progress undone, incremental reform against the urgency of systematic change.
Failure, then, becomes the chronic generative condition of WPS. Rather than treating failure as a technical question—where acts of government are compared to grand promises, or policies scrutinized for their mechanisms of delivery and evaluation—we keep it in mind as an affective boundary: a sense of foreboding and disappointment pervading the WPS field. Against some critics, who regard WPS as a substitute for a real feminism that lies elsewhere, we look to follow the detour of failure, to map the dead ends and false starts.29 Instead of asking after the practical barriers to implementation of the agenda, we interrogate the various practices enacted under the auspices of WPS. When viewed outside of the expectations of success— of “reproductive maturity”30 —what is it that WPS labor does? How might thinking otherwise about the varieties of the feminist peace change how we view international policy and governance?
FEMINIST ENTANGLEMENTS
As we have sketched it, the vitality of the Women, Peace, and Security field subsists on feminist energies of various kinds. We refer to WPS as a feminist peace project in part to decenter the UN Security Council from our accounts and also to draw attention to its pre- and parallel histories, through which it is linked to a longer trajectory of peace activism and initiatives proximate to and far from the United Nations Headquarters in New York.31 The immediate causes of WPS, emerging out of mobilizations in the 1990s, deserve dedicated comment (see chapter 4). These in turn have a complex genealogy, easily glossed in potted chronologies. For the discipline of International Relations, with its origin story of an interwar feud over world government, the prototype of WPS was present at the foundation as the 1915 International Congress of Women and its appeal to the warring parties.32 Helena Swanwick, in what must count among the first feminist readings of modern warfare, argued then that “in militarist states, women must always, to a greater or lesser degree, be deprived of liberty, security, scope and initiative,” seeing in the control of arms and international organizations a possible solution to the torment.33
This book offers a groundbreaking critical account of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, tracing its evolution amid the contentious politics of global governance and feminism.
“This magnificent collaboration exceeds all expectations. Engaging with the Women, Peace, and Security agenda as a dynamic plurality, Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd map the complexities, tensions, and contestations of its vast ecosystem of policies and ‘messy realities.’ Their method produces compelling insights into what conditions (and failures) might empower feminist vitality (postcolonial, antiracist, indigenous, and queer) to foster feminist peace.”
—DIANNE OTTO, PROFESSORIAL FELLOW, MELBOURNE LAW SCHOOL
“Reflecting the impressive repertoire of their feminist scholarship, Shepherd and Kirby present critical insights into the WPS policy ecosystem. Their ‘breaking’ of WPS in this book infuses new energy into efforts to imagine and realize feminist peace.”
—SOUMITA BASU, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, SOUTH ASIAN UNIVERSITY
“In Governing the Feminist Peace, two of the world’s leading scholars on Women, Peace, and Security make a compelling case for pursuing feminist peace by forgetting WPS. They pair skillful, careful, detailed research on WPS’s multiplicities with field-changing theoretical analysis. The result is a must-read text for students, scholars, and practitioners alike.”
—LAURA SJOBERG, AUTHOR OF WOMEN AS WARTIME RAPISTS: BEYOND SENSATION AND STEREOTYPING
“Kirby and Shepherd push us, their lucky readers, to the edges of our seats. Reading this book sharpens our wakefulness, keeps us restless in our curiosities. Kirby and Shepherd show us how the myriad and shifting resistances to the Women, Peace, and Security agenda actually have fueled the vitality of diverse WPS campaigners and their understandings. Learning how to become what they call ‘policy ecologists’ will better equip us to grasp the fluid, messy realities of international political life.”
—CYNTHIA ENLOE, AUTHOR OF TWELVE FEMINIST LESSONS OF WAR
PAUL KIRBY is senior lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London and a codirector of the UKRI GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub.
LAURA J. SHEPHERD is professor of international relations at the University of Sydney and a visiting senior fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security.
COLUMBIA STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL ORDER AND POLITICS
Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee
Cover image: Poster created by Barbara Klunder for the Toronto International Women’s Day 1979. Used with permission of the artist.