Soumita Basu

Gender as national interest at the UN Security Council

The United Nations Security Council has often been identified as a key actor responsible for the uneven trajectory of the international Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. It is, however, the Council members—who also seek to advance their national interest at this intergovernmental forum—that are pivotal in the Councils deliberations and shape its policies. Yet, little attention has been paid to this aspect of deliberative politics at the Council in feminist scholarship on WPS. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature. It notes that gender has increasingly become part of foreign policy interests of UN member states, as evidenced by practices such as invocation of ‘womens rights’ and ‘gender equality’ in broader international security policy discourse. The article demonstrates that this national interest in gender has featured in WPS-related developments at the Security Council. Using specific illustrations, it examines three sets of member states: the permanent and non-permanent members as well as non-members invited to take part in Council meetings. The main argument of this article relates to highlighting member states’ interests underpinning their diplomatic activities around WPS issues in the Security Council, with the aim to present a fuller understanding of political engagements with UNSCR 1325, the first WPS resolution, in its institutional home.

The Global South writes 1325 (too)

The passage and subsequent implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 at the international level tend to be associated with efforts of governments, non-governmental organizations and international organizations that are based primarily in the Global North. While such skewed dynamics of global governance are not unique to women, peace and security (WPS) issues, widely shared assumptions about the Global North being the conceptual, material and (not least) institutional home of the resolutions appear to inform debates on UNSCR 1325 in ways that limit its potential. In response, this article seeks to bring attention to the Global South’s contributions to the evolution of the international WPS agenda. The agency of actors – governmental and non-governmental – in the Global South is identified in both implementation and ‘non-implementation’ of the WPS resolutions. The actors are seen to actively contribute to ‘writing’ UNSCR 1325, the follow-up resolutions, and indeed the broader discourse on women, peace and security.

South Asian Peacekeeping: Regional Possibilities

Abstract South Asia contributes the largest contingent of peacekeepers to the United Nations, and yet remains a fragile region in terms of peace within its own borders. This article argues that, although the implications of South Asia’s engagement in global peacekeeping operations has been the subject of academic study, not enough attention has been paid to how South Asian expertise in peacekeeping can be harnessed as a resource for regional cooperation.

Gender in International Relations: Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Conflict

Gender and conflict is a growing area of study. The authors show how an empirical and theoretical focus on gender and its multifaceted meanings yields entirely different explanations of conflict than traditionally understood. They highlight especially the ways in which attention to women and men, femininities and masculinities, gender norms, and gender relations challenges given categories in International Relations such as levels of analysis, and reconceptualizes security along a “continuum of violence”

Prevention in pieces: representing conflict in the Women, Peace and Security agenda

ABSTRACT The Women, Peace and Security agenda is often operationalized across three priority areas: the participation of women in peace and security governance; the protection of women’s rights and bodies (specifically, but not limited to, conflict-related sexual violence); and the prevention of conflict. In this short paper, we explore violence prevention in more detail, and argue that it is of critical importance to define conflict as well as prevention. We draw on the illustrative examples of Australia, the UK and India to explain how this definitional work happens within the machinery of the state and the networks of civil society. Understanding how conflict is theorized by different actors in different locations not only gives insight into the tendency towards militarization in the WPS agenda but also can be interpreted as a manifestation of contestation over ownership of the WPS agenda and its location between the state and civil society.