Nicole George

'Just Like Your Mother?': The Politics of Feminism and Maternity in the Pacific Islands

The varied extents to which maternal images are invoked by women activists in the Pacific Islands and the way in which theses varied articulations of motherhood are shaped by broader, contextual political considerations are discussed. Motherhood plays a very vital role in Pacific cultures and has been found to be very meaningful.

Promoting women, peace and security in the Pacific Islands: hot conflict/slow violence

How has the Women, Peace and Security agenda been advanced in the Pacific Islands? While some observers argue that this region suffers from a contagion of unrest, violence and state weakness, these estimates commonly ignore the vital work women have performed in the region as promoters of peace and security. Even when such activity places them in direct personal danger, women across the region have spearheaded efforts to bridge communal boundaries and challenge the increasing normalisation of violence, gendered and otherwise, that accompanies threatened or actual incidents of conflict. As this article demonstrates, these efforts have had profound impacts on the ground in conflict-affected Pacific Island countries. They have also received increased recognition at the level of institutional politics, with member states of the Pacific Islands Forum recently accepting a Regional Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. This has been hailed as a significant achievement for the regions women peacebuilders. But much of this plan is focused on womens contributions to peacebuilding at the pointy end of a crisis. This overlooks the extent to which the ‘slow violence’ of environmental degradation, masculinised politics and militarism also compound gendered insecurity in the region. Attention to these issues offers a contradictory picture of the gains made in promoting the Women, Peace and Security agenda in the Pacific Islands. While this advocacy framework has provided important opportunities for the regions women peacebuilders, it may also have discouraged broader reflection on the prevailing structural conditions at work across the region which function in an attenuated fashion to undermine womens security and the achievement of a gendered regional peace.

Light, heat and shadows: women’s reflections on peacebuilding in post-conflict Bougainville

Abstract In this paper, I examine women’s reflections on their experiences as peacebuilders during Bougainville’s long years of conflict and the later period of conflict transition. I discuss the varying ways in which women, in this predominantly matrilineal society, recounted their contributions to conflict resolution as part of broader efforts to build peace. My interlocutors told stories of the distinctiveness of women’s peace leadership, interwoven with references to global policy frameworks such as United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. This appears, at first glance, to evidence a positive story of global and local influences coming together to produce positive peacebuilding outcomes charged by ‘light and heat’, as theorised by Annika Björkdahl and Kristine Höglund. I show this story to also be one of shadows, however, arguing that deeper scrutiny of these perspectives on women’s peace leadership suggest they also mask difficult and more complex local realities.

Policing “conjugal order”: gender, hybridity and vernacular security in Fiji

ABSTRACT This article develops a feminist critique of debate on hybrid forms of governance in global politics by demonstrating the gendered implications (and limitations) of hybridized approaches to security provision. The conceptual approach that frames my enquiry puts arguments advancing the benefits of multilayered and hybridized security into dialogue with ethnographic enquiry on “vernacular” security and feminist study of “conjugal order.” I contend that this conceptual approach is particularly productive for examining the gendered policing outcomes that can be produced in environments where vernacular influences – customary and religious – inflect prevailing idioms of security and order. To further defend this claim, I apply this conceptual approach to a case study of gender and policing in Fiji. Although there has been a strong state rhetoric of progressive reform on gender policy in this context, efforts to reform policing have been hamstrung by longstanding customary and religious discourses that emphasize the defense of conjugal norms as foundational to the achievement of order and safety. I show how this scenario has encouraged a practical policing of gender and sexuality that is restrictive for women generally and may expose particular groups of women to direct forms of insecurity and violence.

Community resilience and crisis management: policy lessons from the ground

Community resilience is a central concept within crisis management policymaking, but it has escaped critical analysis. This article responds to this problem by examining a community-led response to a large natural disaster (the Queensland floods of 2010–11). The findings emerge from the application of a novel ethnographic method, uniquely informed by an insider’s view of the disaster, which generated narratives from ‘the ground’. These narratives highlight a darker side to community resilience, which is largely unacknowledged, but needs to be understood so that we can critically appraise the concept more effectively in the future.

Women, Peace and Security: Exploring the implementation and integration of UNSCR 1325

This special issue brings together articles that examine how the localisation and implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda occurs in policy and practice. In this introduction, we examine the increasing importance of the Women, Peace and Security policy framework in global politics and the inevitable tensions that surround calls for greater local-level institutional implementation. Drawing on findings from the United Nations 2015 Global Study on Implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, we consider the evolving nature of Women, Peace and Security policy and advocacy. We look at what is required to develop policy provisions on this agenda which are considered locally meaningful and ‘useful’ in distinct policy contexts.

Sexual violence and hybrid peacebuilding: how does silence speak?

Abstract This paper reflects on the gendered impacts of hybrid peacebuilding processes in Timor-Leste and Bougainville. We consider the interplaying local and global influences that shape how womens stories of conflict-related sexual violence are received, and consider the silences that often shroud these experiences. In contradiction to the global push to expose sexual violence as part of peacebuilding efforts, we offer a more ethnographically focused examination of womens silences. Our analysis challenges mainstream accounts of the way silence ‘speaks’ to the shame of conflict-related sexual violence and has relevance to broader debates about hybrid approaches to conflict resolution.

The difference that gender makes to international peace and security

Over the last twenty years understanding the effects of gender inequality on inter-national peace and security has led to much study and data collection. This feminist-informed scholarship has deepened collective understanding of the preconditions for lasting peace and security. However, the impact of efforts to reduce gender inequality on sustaining peace and security has received less feminist scholarly attention. The argu-ment that gender equality is not an optional extra but essential for the maintenance of international peace and security still needs to be made.

Beyond 'Cultural Constraint': Gender, Security and Participation in the Pacific Islands

In this chapter the author address to a few questions as he considers how the WPS and R2P agendas can be collaboratively invoked to constructively address one of the most fundamental sources of womens insecurity in the Pacific Islands: their exposure to extreme gender violence. Further, he develops these claims more fully and considers what may be gained by approaching gender violence in the region as a mass atrocity. He asks if it might be relevant to consider gendered violence both in its most extreme and its more mundane, everyday incarnation, as a threatening mass atrocity. He argues for the development of new conceptual approaches to the question of gendered insecurity in the region which foreground the importance of womens economic and political participation. In the concluding section, the author speculates on how responses might bring the relationship between gender, participation and security under new national and international scrutiny. Keywords:gender violence; Gendered Insecurity; Pacific Islands; womens political participation; womens economic participation

The virtues of strangers: policing gender violence in Pacific Island countries

ABSTRACT This article considers the gap between reformist policy and practice in the policing of gender violence in Pacific Island Countries (PICs) with a key focus on Solomon Islands, Fiji and Kiribati. In doing so, we critically engage with two pervasive arguments in policing scholarship: (1) arguments regarding the value of hybridity and regulatory pluralism in PICs; and (2) the dominant critique of ‘policing by strangers’. We outline and acknowledge the compelling logics of these arguments, but we contend that they are called into question when (re)evaluated through a gender lens. Drawing on in-country fieldwork observations, relevant reports from government and non-government sources, and secondary literature, we begin to map out the empirical evidence that demonstrates the fragility of such positions in the case of policing gender violence. We go on to explore the complexity of institutional reform processes in PIC police forces by providing an overview of the intersection between informal operating cultures and police reform agendas – particularly as they relate to the policing of gender violence. We argue that Georg Simmel’s (1950) idea of the stranger, illustrating the contradictory experience of what it means to engage with someone who is spatially close but socially distant, offers a framework for exploring policing reform in the context of gender violence. Approaching gender violence through the lens of the ‘stranger’ potentially supports the development of a context-specific professional ethic that is able to effectively navigate conflicting forms of authority that currently undermine policing in PICs to provide better outcomes for women.