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This chapter discusses gender, peace, and the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programs for former Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) combatants and Women Associated with the Armed Forces (WAAF) in South Sudan, based on field research in Juba and Wau in South Sudan in 2013. The chapter examines the distinct impact of DDR on women former combatants and on (WAAF), in a militarized ‘post’-conflict setting where gender inequality prevails, and in light of the government of South Sudan’s and the international community’s endorsement of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. A key finding is that in post-CPA South Sudan, DDR compounded social exclusion for most women ex-combatants and WAAF. The chapter calls for a rethinking of understandings of peace as mere cessation of hostilities, and as gathering of arms from former combatants. It also calls for restoring the voices of former combatants of both sexes, and of citizens in local communities directly affected by conflict, into policy and scholarly discourses on Security Sector Reform (SSR), and post-conflict reconstruction.

Examining post-national defense peacekeeping practices verifies that Sweden has a gender aware post-national defense. This success was attributed to a systematic approach to gender and UN SCR 1325 training, appointed gender advisors and a committed leadership. Surprisingly, these achievements were reached without increasing female troop numbers. Probing this further reveals that gender has been translated to women. In the context of the Swedish ISAF it means the local Afghani women, i.e. gender equals the “other“ women. Gender is made into a problem-solving tool, reducing its transformative potential. The analysis suggests that it diverts from the “real” problem of legitimacy for peacekeeping missions. Their quest to win the “hearts and minds” of the people are more concerned with the view of sexuality embedded in militaries than with women. Thus it is crucial to discuss masculinity as well as sexuality in order to reach the objectives of post-national militaries when they are stationed abroad. To inform of codes of conduct is clearly not sufficient.

The chapter explores the emerging EU security and defense governance (ESDP) and asked how gender has been conceptualized and organized in the development and institutionalization of its military activities. The ESDP is a new post-national institution with a shared commitment by member states to take on tasks to ‘save distant others’ in the name of human rights. To be a full-fledged cosmopolitan military requires that the organization also incorporate those ideals in its own organization, through gender equality and mainstreaming. The ESDP is dominated by men throughout, mainly due to the influence of the member states’ militaries. The analysis verifies the unwillingness to achieve gender parity in military organizations. Gender mainstreaming, if taken to mean education about gender effects and how it can improve operational effectiveness, was more successful. Gender has been re-interpreted through the work with UN SCRs, to be viewed in an instrumental way as something providing added value and increasing operational effectiveness.

This chapter concludes the book by highlighting the findings in relation to the following themes: the way that UN SCR 1325 has impacted peacekeeping and other post-national defense practices, how women have been conceptualized as peacekeepers by outlining the relationship between military institutions and sexuality, relating the findings on the relationship between militarism and the gender order, and discussing the role of cosmopolitan values in the post-national defense. Finally, the conclusion suggests that to deal with the unresolved ambivalence on the use of violence in peacekeeping operations it may be useful for feminists to engage with post-national defense practices and turn to feminist ethics of war and peacekeeping. Feminists would not remain “innocent” as the “beautiful souls”, as pacifists or anti-militarists, but have agency and the possibility to propose alternatives

Chapter 1 provides an ethnography and analysis of women’s peacebuilding initiatives in Palestine, tracking the ways in which the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and the liberal Women, Peace and Security agenda was interpreted and implemented there. After the Oslo Accords, foreign donors but also some scholarly analysts have displayed a peculiar fascination with peacebuilding initiatives between Palestinian and Israelis. Such joint peace initiatives often are legitimized in the international community with reference to the UNSCR 1325, but they have become few and lack social support and impact in Palestine. Countering liberal approaches to peace, politics, and the public sphere, including Habermas’s notion of ideal speech, this chapter argues that joint Palestinian and Israeli women’s peacebuilding in fact constitutes an attempt to discipline rather than to strengthen women’s political activism in Palestine.

This introductory chapter offers a mapping of the field of research to which we – the authors of the chapter and the editors of the volume – hope that the volume itself will contribute. Using the motif of ‘new directions’, we chart historical and contemporary scholarship on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), tracing avenues of enquiry, streams of argument, and architectures of practice across geographical, temporal, and institutional scales. In the course of our mapping, we identify overlapping waves of WPS scholarship, beginning with those who came to study WPS primarily through peace activism and women’s movements (including those who engaged directly with the politics and processes that produced UNSCR 1325), through the emergence of ‘WPS’ as a discrete object of analysis, and to the current state of art represented by the contributions to this volume. In doing so we show how WPS has gone from peace activism at the margins to a more significant landmark in the peace and security environment than perhaps anyone had envisaged. This cataloguing constitutes the first substantive section of the chapter. In the second section of the chapter, we map the contours of the contemporary field of study, proposing three new horizons of WPS scholarship: new themes; new actors; and new methods of encounter. In the final section, we conclude our cartography with a discussion of the ways in which the more recent contributions to WPS scholarship and practice are producing interesting new contestations, tensions, and constellations of power, and re-situate the new politics of WPS in relation to the geographical, temporal and institutional scales which will shape its future trajectories.

The chapter draws upon scholarship and gender expertise, primarily from South Asia, on the everyday resistance and resilience of local women negotiating multiple militarised patriarchies in the conflict continuum, to critically assess the limits and scope of leveraging the WPS agenda to build a transformative peace. It teases out the plural and contextual meanings of militarisation, peace and justice, emphasising the intersecting structures of disadvantage and discrimination which shape women’s experiences of insecurity. Confronting ‘post conflict’ transitions that likely deliver a violent peace or internal domination, the chapter questions the presumed apolitical engagement of women with peace and calls for attention to their resistance to the crisis of solutions delivered by the hegemonic neo liberal peace and development template. The chapter makes a case for bringing in the concept of ‘resistance’ into the WPS agenda, as it is integral to the collective mobilization of the region’s peace groups as well as women’s alliances with social movements for socio-economic justice and cultural rights. Finally, it outlines how the region’s gender equality and peace advocates have expanded openings for WPS practices in other institutional contexts such as CEDAW.

“And then I sNAPped”. How does it feel to snap at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, at a meeting taking stock of the progress of the UNSCR1325 National Action Plan? This paper is a response to the affective sites of Women, Peace and Security politics and the ways in which academic/activist knowledge has become (un)used by the strategic state. We identify moments of feminist killjoyism, which we call sNAPping, in the context of the wider transition from state feminism to the need to engage with the neoliberal governmentalities of the strategic state”. Our contribution is an auto-ethnographic reflection by two researcher-activists who participated in the multi-stage government-led process of drafting and launching the third Finnish UNSCR1325 National Action Plan and were also the authors of three key advocacy texts. We have used our experiences in such encounters as ethnographic research material to interrogate and analyse the feminist affects of sNAPping.

This chapter focusses on United Nations Security Council 1325 passed in 2000. It analyses the resolution in detail; highlights the beginnings of changed attitudes to tactical rape and sexual violence in conflict and implications for accepting these as issues within the mandate of the Security Council. It reviews steps leading to the resolution and providing the basis for future work. The National Action Plans required of states are considered finding their limitations and significance. This is done within acknowledgement that states form the Security Council and some states are among the perpetrators of these crimes. Limitations of resolutions are highlighted.

Through a tracing of key international documents, one can better understand how gender equality emerged as a specific set of politics and how “gender equals women” was a key development in this process. This chapter focuses on two narratives about gender that remain in tension with one another. One is radical and critical of the world order, while the other treats gender as a “technocratic” shortcut—treating women as a means to an end. Through a careful reading of the Geneva Conventions, reports on the World Conferences on Women, the Vienna Declaration, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Declaration on Violence Against Women, and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325), a dual and dueling set of global narratives emerges. These narratives are reproduced in a neoliberal world order that prefers and promotes liberal feminist women’s rights and inclusion that adds women without challenging or radically destabilizing gender or the gendered institutions that exclude women in the first place.

This chapter discusses the role of women in forging paths into post-liberal peace formations. The adoption of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 could be said to have marked the incorporation of key tenets of gender rights discourse in the global liberal peace agenda. The resolution is based on liberal principles of representation and participation of women in all levels of peacebuilding and on democratisation in setting up new institutions and norms of gender equality in the post-conflict processes; it also recognises the specific protection needs of women and girls in conflict situations as well as the underutilised contribution women make to conflict prevention, peacebuilding, conflict resolution, and peacekeeping. Ultimately, the chapter asks whether gender discourse can uphold the promise of peace formation by holding peacebuilders accountable to just, democratic, and equal societies.

This chapter provides an introduction to the new global phenomenon of Women’s Mediator Networks, focusing on the legal basis for their creation and locating them within broader foreign policy objectives. Seeking to address the apparent invisibility of women in the field of mediation, several new Networks have been created with the aim of increasing the representation of women in high-level mediation and the visibility of women mediators at all levels. These Networks have been created as Foreign Policy tools, pursuant to commitments made in National Action Plans on UNSCR 1325. Given the relative infancy of the Networks and the absence of much scholarly scrutiny of their creation, the chapter provides an overview of the creation, aims and objectives of the Networks, and identifies some conceptual and practical challenges that the Networks must navigate if they are to be successful in increasing the representation of women in the peace mediation field.

After introducing the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, this chapter offers a brief discussion of the political significance of stories and storytelling, drawing on narrative theory. This is followed by a brief elaboration of the ethics and politics of working with narrative. The inevitable partiality of narrative accounts and the decision to focus on the UN in New York are just two of the ethical tensions that run through the project presented here, and the chapter explores these tensions not in an effort to resolve them but rather to acknowledge the work that they do in prompting thinking around the issues that arise in the course of this analysis. The final section explains the book’s argument and outlines the development of this argument over the course of the chapters that follow.

One of the most prominent motifs in the narration of the WPS agenda is a repeated, and repeatedly coherent, story of the history of “the agenda,” which tells of the advocacy surrounding the adoption of UNSCR 1325 in 2000 and anchors the agenda firmly in the passage of this resolution by the UN Security Council. The narration of this “origin story” is of critical importance in shaping what the agenda could and would become in the following twenty years. The “ownership” of the agenda by the women’s civil society organizations that lobbied for the adoption of the foundational resolution is a touchstone of political activism around the agenda and has had an impact on its development over the past two decades. These ownership claims, deriving from the origin stories, thus have important constitutive effects on the future of the agenda and on the legitimacy and credibility of various WPS subjects.

The chapter provides an introduction for the book. It demonstrates that the United Nations, through the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, has been at the forefront of promoting gender equality in peacekeeping operations. It highlights the main theme of the book: that there have been successes and challenges with regard to gender equality in and through missions. Challenges stem from gender power imbalances that perpetuate discrimination, a protection norm, and sexual exploitation, abuse, harassment, and violence. It also highlights our approach, which uses existing scholarship on feminist theory related to gender and international relations but takes a positivist approach. The chapter concludes by summarizing the subsequent chapters.

This chapter lays the historical foundations for the book by providing an account of gender reforms in peacekeeping operations. It explains how implementing gender reforms became a part of international peacekeeping mandates. Specifically, it goes into depth about the evolution of gender mandates before and after the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, including the UN's two most recent evaluations of peacekeeping from 2015. The last part of the chapter highlights the success of current gender reforms, including those related to participation, protection, and gender mainstreaming. In particular, it notes increases in women’s participation in peacekeeping; shows that peacekeeping missions lead to a higher probability of gender reforms domestically; and highlights decreases in the incidents of sexual exploitation, abuse, harassment, and violence in peacekeeping missions, as well as the ability of peacekeeping missions to address conflict-related sexual violence. The chapter concludes with a discussion on gender mainstreaming.