Encountering the Women, Peace and Security Agenda
The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda was inaugurated at the UN Security Council with the adoption of Resolution 1325 in 2000, as a result of sustained advocacy by women regarding the need to ensure a gender perspective on all matters of international peace and security. In tandem with the agenda itself, an extensive body of scholarship has developed on the topic. This collection presents a selection of contributions to WPS research.
The first article is a conversation between Carol Cohn, Helen Kinsella, and Sheri Gibbings that offers insights into the fraught but fiercely committed modes of feminist engagement that that made Resolution 1325 possible. The second article discusses three more WPS resolutions adopted by the Council under the title of “women and peace and security,” observing that these separate resolutions had begun to cohere into the framework now known as “the WPS agenda.” The third article focuses on the process of bureaucratization that accompanied the formation of the agenda and its impact on women’s peace activism.
Feminist scholars have paid careful attention to expressions of women’s agency, advancing peace and conflict prevention across a range of settings, as presented in the next four articles. From the Occupied Palestinian Territories to Japan, from Serbia to Nigeria, women are leveraging the principles of the agenda and working toward peace in their communities, with governments, and engaging international organisations.
The collection closes with three sets of conversations with female peace leaders. These women, hailing from Chile, Iraq, and the Philippines, doing peace and anti-violence work in national and regional contexts, are among the ‘superheroines’ of the agenda. The scholars with whom these women are in dialogue bring to their conversations their own commitment to the agenda and its enactment for the betterment of society and women’s lives.
Edited by
Laura J. Shepherd