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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 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.

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.

Chapter 1 discusses the book within the wider scholarly literature, situating it within three intersecting bodies of literature. Firstly, the literature on women, peace and security (especially that on UN Security Council Resolution 1325) has advanced the considerations and status of women generally in terms of global peace and security. Second, feminist security studies considers women more specifically in relation to the construction and practices of security. Third, terrorism studies which has increasingly considered women's roles and agency in terrorist groups, yet has not yet adequately considered if or how women's roles have impacted on counterterrorism practices. These three fields try to locate women in relation to security, considering agency, power relations and structures, and interrogate gender binaries in the field. Second, they try to bring to light women who perpetrate or support violence in militant and terrorist groups and their agency (which has direct implications for counterterrorism practices).

Somali women's participation in peace-building and conflict resolution in Somalia has been very limited, and they have been marginalized in all aspects of decision-making and governance. However, their political participation is closely linked to peace-building and state-building in Somalia, hence the need to study the various factors which promote or inhibit women's involvement in mainstream peace and reconciliation in Somalia. This chapter summarizes broader research conducted in Galkayo (South and North) and Kismayo, and a focus group discussion conducted in Garowe. The study addressed four research objectives: (1) levels of women's participation in peace-building; (2) factors constraining women's participation; (3) policies, frameworks, rules, and regulations encouraging women's participation; and (4) UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and an agenda to catalyse action and bring about positive change.

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.