Governing the feminist peace : vitality and failure of the women, peace and security agenda

Author / Creator

Kirby, Paul (Research fellow), author

Available as

Online

Physical

Summary

"In 2000, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1325, acknowledging the impact of war on women and resolving to increase the participation of women and incorporate gender perspecti...

"In 2000, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1325, acknowledging the impact of war on women and resolving to increase the participation of women and incorporate gender perspectives in all United Nations peace and security efforts. This landmark initiative-commonly referred to as the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Resolution-was hailed by feminist activists as a watershed moment that could serve as the cornerstone of a robust policy infrastructure that uplifted women around the world. Twenty years and hundreds of declarations, action plans, and protocols later, the WPS agenda is more complex and confounding than ever, contested by a proliferating cast of governments, activists, humanitarians, lawyers, militaries, celebrities, and scholars. In this book, Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd offer a new reading of the WPS agenda as an unruly field of governance, full of vitality but marked everywhere by failure, where the technical provisions of policy collide with some of the most profound questions about contemporary feminism, the purpose of peace movements, and the shape of international order itself. The authors argue that the WPS field is often in flux, defined and disrupted by a growing number of national, supranational, subnational and transnational entities. These conflicting stakeholders, in turn, operate across multiple levels of global governance and address an expanding menu of "issue areas" that themselves challenge traditional boundaries of peace and security, hindering the implementation of the stated WPS policy goals. The first full-length scholarly examination of the complexity of the WPS agenda as an object of study in its own right, Governing the Feminist Peace permanently reorients our understanding of international policy-setting away from a notion of change cascading out from the texts of the UN and toward the idea of multiple actors within a variegated field shaping and implementing policy on a global level"--

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