Gender, Governance and International Security

The United Nations Security Council, in 2000, unanimously passed a resolution calling for women?s increased participation in conflict prevention and peacebuilding, as well as their protection during conflict. This marked the first time that the UN Security Council explicitly addressed gender issues in ?conflict? and ?post-conflict? situations. But what difference has this international agenda on ?Women, Peace and Security? made to women?s lives on the ground and to the governance of international peace and security?

This volume provides a critical evaluation of the mainstreaming of gender issues in matters of international peace and security resulting from the passage of Resolution 1325 in 2000. It considers how this agenda actually plays out in different contexts, and with what implications for women?s activism and for peace and security.

The picture that emerges is not uniform, obliging us to reconsider the links between gender, conflict, different visions of peace and, consequently, different projects of peacebuilding. Consequently, the book poses new questions for transnational feminist scholars and activists.

This book was based on a special issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

1. Introduction: Critically Examining UNSCR 1325 on Women, Peace and Security 2. Sex, Security and Superhero(in)es: From 1325 to 1820 and Beyond 3. No Angry Women at the United Nations: Political Dreams and the Cultural Politics of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 4. UNSCR 1325 and Women’s Peace Activism in the Occupied Palestinian Territory 5. Resolution 1325 and Post-Cold War Feminist Politics 6. ‘Women, Peace and Security’: Addressing Accountability for Wartime Sexual Violence 7. Configurations of Post-Conflict: Impacts of Representations of Conflict and Post-Conflict upon the (Political) Translations of Gender Security within UNSCR 1325 8. Feminist Knowledge and Emerging Governmentality in UN Peacekeeping 9. Leveraging Change: Women’s Organizations and the Implementation of UNSCR 1325 in the Balkans

Nicola Pratt is Reader of the International Politics of the Middle East at the University of Warwick, U.K. She researches and writes about gender, civil society and security in the Middle East. She is also joint leader of the ‘Reconceptualising Gender’ research network between Warwick and Birzeit University (Palestine).

Sophie Richter-Devroe is lecturer in Gender and Middle East Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, Exeter University, U.K. She is the author of several prize-winning articles on Palestinian women’s activism against Israeli occupation. More recently her research focuses on Palestinian refugees and the Naqab Bedouins.