Caitlin Ryan

National Action Plans as an obstacle to meaningful local ownership of UNSCR 1325 in Liberia and Sierra Leone

National Action Plans (NAPs) have been hailed as the preferential mode of implementing United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 at a national level. In recent years, member states, especially post-conflict member states, have been heeding the calls of the United Nations to develop their own National Action Plans. However, there has been limited assessment of whether or not National Action Plans are beneficial to women in post-conflict states. Using evidence from field research in Liberia and Sierra Leone, this article argues that, despite the intent to increase national ownership of 1325 in post-conflict states, National Action Plans are ineffective at creating meaningful local ownership because they are driven by a bureaucratic approach to peacebuilding. Furthermore, implementation of National Action Plans in post-conflict states is hampered by a variety of factors, such as lack of capacity and lack of political will. Finally, we conclude that National Action Plans also do a disservice to the hard work and dedication of local women’s organisations.

Resilience, resistance, infrapolitics and enmeshment

A great deal has been written in the International Relations literature about the role of resilience in our social world. One of the central debates in the scholarship concerns the relationship between resilience and resistance, which several scholars consider to be one of mutual exclusivity. For many theorists, an individual or a society can either be resilient or resistant, but not both. In this article, we argue that this understanding of the resilience–resistance connection suffers from three interrelated problems: it treats resilience and resistance as binary concepts rather than processes; it presents a simplistic conception of resilient subjects as apolitical subjects; and it eschews the ‘transformability’ aspect of resilience. In a bid to resolve these issues, the article advocates for the usefulness of a relational approach to the processes of resilience and resistance, and suggests an approach that understands resilience and resistance as engaged in mutual assistance rather than mutual exclusion. The case of the Palestinian national liberation movement illustrates our set of arguments.

Large-scale land deals in Sierra Leone at the intersection of gender and lineage

Abstract There is wide engagement with large-scale land deals in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly from the perspectives of development and international political economy. Recently, scholars have increasingly pointed to a gendered lacuna in this literature. Engagement with gender tends to focus on potential differential impacts for men and women, and it also flags the need for more detailed empirical research of specific land deals. This paper draws from ethnographic data collected in Northern Sierra Leone to support the claim that the impacts of land deals are highly gendered, but it also argues that lineage in a land-owning family and patronage intersect with these gendered impacts. This data supports my claim that analysis of land deals should start from an understanding of the context-dependent, complex arrays of power and marginality. Such a starting point allows for a wider and ‘messier’ range of impacts and experiences to emerge.

UNSC Resolution 1325 national action plans in Liberia and Sierra Leone: An analysis of gendered power relations in hybrid peacebuilding

ABSTRACT This paper considers how the use of ‘hybridity’ in the peacebuilding literature overlooks the gendered dimensions of hybrid interactions. It does so by examining the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1325 national action plans (NAPs) for Liberia and Sierra Leone. By asking the gendered questions of ‘who participates?’ and ‘how do they participate?’ it draws from Mac Ginty’s conception of hybridity and traces the compliance and incentivizing power in hybridized peace, as well as the ability of local actors to resist and provide alternatives. However, Mac Ginty’s model is found to be inadequate because of its inattention to the gendered nature of power. It is found that with a gendered approach to hybridity, it is easier to trace the processes of hybridization of NAPs in post-conflict states where their implementation is limited. In asking the questions of ‘who’ and ‘how’, three conclusions about the gendered nature of hybrid peacebuilding are drawn: international intervention relies upon the ‘feminization’ of local actors; issues framed within the realm of the ‘masculine’ are more likely to get attention; and the Resolution 1325 agenda in post-conflict states can be subverted by framing it as a ‘soft’ issue.

Oporto! Oporto! Reflections on the motorcycle as methodological tool, and on having lunch with “the men”

This piece uses two vignettes from fieldwork in northern Sierra Leone. The first explains what happens when I, a white person (oporto), turns up in a village on a motorcycle instead of the 4 × 4 in which most other white people arrive. The second explores my discomfort with being invited to eat lunch with “the men” while the women who cooked the food waited until the men have eaten. The piece engages with how the view I have of myself and the view others have of me produces expectations tied up with a complex web of power relations colored by race and gender.

The subjected non-subject: security, subjectification and resistance in the occupied Palestinian territories

The aim of this article is to examine how Palestinian women living under Israeli occupation experience and resist subjectification through security practices. Such an examination is inspired by Foucault, who claims that power functions upon corporeal bodies to create subjects. Interesting to the case of Palestinian women in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is the way in which they are de facto subjects in that their bodies are subject to Israeli power, without being subjects of Israel. This article is based on recent field research in the West Bank. It thus relies upon narratives from individual Palestinian women of how they experience being subject to Israeli power and how, in turn, they enact resistance to that power.