WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY BEYOND RESOLUTIONS

Considered the single greatest achievement in ‘engendering’ global security policy, UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (SCR 1325) is celebrated as a triumph of women’s peace movements and transnational feminist organizing. My central claim is that SCR 1325 has both over performed and under delivered. The remarkable achievements it catalysed in establishing new international standards have not been fully appreciated, explored, or understood, while its successful utilisation by women rights and peace activists in the context of 'informal peace building' has not fundamentally challenged the workings of the Security Council itself, as feminists had hoped. This has resulted in an overestimation of SCR 1325’s symbolic and practical importance, and an underestimation of the broader institutional and geopolitical factors that shaped SCR 1325’s genesis and continue to drive Security Council decision-making in relation to women and gender issues. I suggest that SCR 1325’s perceived failures have less to do with its oft-criticized textual content than with the institutions, actors, strategies, and processes that have been most central to its implementation. Historically, the geopolitics of UN decision-making on gender issues demonstrate an extreme form of bureaucratic pathology that has circumscribed opportunities for bringing gender issues onto the UN’s peace and security agenda. I introduce the concept of ‘relegation’ to explain why decision-making on women has been extrinsic to the UN mechanisms and entities that have the greatest potential for autonomous action. SCR 1325’s implementation failures also reflect the absence of a collaborative feminist epistemic community of research and praxis in the nascent field of feminist security studies. This has further limited the UN’s ability to internalise, institutionalise, and implement actions that advance, rather than undermine feminist peace building agendas.

Policy Brief, Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre (NOREF), 2013

The implementation of the women, peace and security resolutions of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) faces ongoing challenges. National action plans (NAPs) are being developed as a means to address the implementation gap, with 40 such NAPs developed by UN member states to date. NAPs aim to enable states’ commitments under the various UNSC resolutions to become the actions they take in both domestic and foreign policy. Stand-alone NAPs offer significant opportunity to advance national implementation of the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda. They also present risks, however, most notably in terms of how strategic provisions of the various WPS resolutions are translated into actions in an action plan. Successful implementation of the WPS agenda is thus not just contingent on the adoption of a NAP, but the proper implementation of that NAP. This policy brief provides an overview of the key opportunities and constraints presented by NAPs and the action planning process itself, and concludes with a range of recommenda- tions for enhancing the development and implementation of NAPs for the overall fulfilment of the WPS agenda.

In 2015, the UN held a High Level Review and undertook a Global Study on the implementation to United Nations Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (2000): 'Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace'. This article explores three key issues raised in the global study, which are designed as a significant course correction to the UN's peace and conflict work.

Societies Without Borders, 2009

is research analyzes the 11 national action plans that were adopted between June 2005 and October 2008 as a response to the United Nations Security Council's Resolution 1325. Resolution 1325, one of the most important UN resolutions within the fi eld of peace and security, was adopted unanimously on 31 October 2000. e resolution highlights the consequences of violent confl ict on women and girls and the important role of women in peacebuilding and post-confl ict processes. In 2002 and again in 2004, UN member states were invited to prepare national action plans in order to take strong steps towards the implementation of UNSCR 1325. is study examines the similarities and diff erences in the plans and compares the points identifi ed in the plans to the relevant points in UNSCR 1325.

2015

An analysis based on three UN missions: MINUSTAH (Haiti), MONUSCO (Democratic Republic of the Congo) and UNIFIL (Lebanon). Fifteen years after Resolution 1325 was adopted in 2000, to what extent has it been integrated into peacekeeping operations? What approach has been developed for the military component? What achievements and pending challenges have been found in the implementation of this Resolution in the area of military and police tasks? Moreover, what role does the approach on women, peace and security have in the peacekeeping review process?

The ACMC has posted this document here to assist researchers to access relevant materials. ACMC claims no authorship of this publication. "The Global Study on the implementation of resolution 1325 is an important part of the United Nations global agenda for change to better serve the world’s most vulnerable people. As noted by the HighLevel Independent Panel on United Nations Peace Operations and the Advisory Group of Experts for the 2015 Review of the United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture, changes in conflict may be outpacing the ability of United Nations peace operations to respond effectively. Any reforms must include gender equality and women’s leadership as central ingredients. The Global Study offers new evidence, ideas and good practices that can help generate new commitments and implement old ones. Let us not squander the potential dividends of gender equality for peace and development. Empowering women to end and prevent conflicts is essential and urgent." - Ban Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary-General.

The Contribution of UN Women to Increasing Women's Leadership and Participation in Peace and Security, 2013

2010

The inclusion of the gender dimension in the international agenda for peace and security has been a long process which now has a history of over four decades. The United Nations, the European Union and other international bodies have gradually been introducing different laws, resolutions and directives which form an extensive regulatory framework in relation to women, conflict and peacebuilding.

International Affairs, 2016

In October 2015, diplomats, policy-makers, activists and observers gathered in New York to mark 15 years since the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, generally accepted as the founding document of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda (although women's activism for peace predates UNSCR 1325 by many decades). Its passage was described on that occasion as 'one of the most inspired decisions' of the Council, a commitment to women's participation which remains 'at the top' of the UN agenda, and as integral to 'faithfully advancing international peace and security' itself. 1 Having stressed the necessity and vitality of WPS, the Council then unanimously passed Resolution 2242, the eighth in a series of WPS resolutions. 2 The case for the novelty of UNSCR 1325 as both a Security Council resolution and a wide-ranging policy artefact has been made well, and often. 3 Indeed, UNSCR 1325 has strikingly few critics-or, at least, few who would openly dispute its headline ambition: to achieve global gender equality. Certainly, the WPS agenda is expansive and ambitious; it seeks both the radical reconfiguration of the gendered power dynamics that characterize our world and a properly global commitment to sustainable and positive peace. As the contributions to this special issue of International Affairs show, the advances and limits of the WPS agenda are traceable

Rethinking National Action Plans on Women, Peace and Security, Sahla Aroussi (ed.)

The United Nations (UN) has proposed multiple strategies for addressing deficits in the implementation of its women, peace and security (WPS) resolutions. National Action Plans (NAPs) have gained huge traction and popularity, yet there has been little critical assessment of how they have advanced the WPS agenda overall. This paper assesses a number of key trends: first, the purchase that NAPs have attempted to gain at macro-structural levels within the UN’s political arena; second, the procedural modalities that have come to determine how the WPS resolutions are translated into NAPs at meso-levels across Member States; and third, the kinds of substantive focus found at micro-levels within adopted NAPs. The peripheral activities on WPS by related UN and civil society entities are also explored. It emerges that, while many practical gains have been made, NAPs-WPS remain insecure in their political positioning and are not yet fully realising their potential to deliver on women’s rights.

United Nations adopted the UN Resolution 1325 in the year 2000. It was, for the first time, UN’s acknowledgement to women’s situation during armed conflict and violent areas along with their crucial role in conflict resolutions, which now was on the agenda of the Security Council. It was a key step in addressing women right’s and gender equality in the United Nations agenda for peace and security. Moreover, the Resolution 1325 wasn’t the only document adopted by the UN, there were many other resolutions passed to address women’s security during conflict and acute violence. Also, United Nations established a dedicated organ, the UN Women aiming to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment establishing a platform for advocating issues of violence towards women, prevention of violence against women in pre-conflict, conflict and post-conflict zones.

Since its inception in the 1940s, the United Nations (UN) has been a prolific norm entrepreneur on women's rights, gender equality and gender mainstreaming through its Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). Nevertheless, October 2000 constituted a revolution: the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), one of the last bastions of masculine power in the UN, produced the first resolution -Resolution 1325of its women, peace and security (WPS) agenda. The resolution contains a set of norms that seeks to address women's concerns in post-conflict settings by highlighting the need to increase female participation in security governance and post-conflict processes, prevent sexual and gender-based violence, and protect women from conflict and post-conflict violence. The agenda is now formed by eight resolutions and has to date been adopted by 67 countries through national action plans, as well as by different organs, programmes and funds of the UN such as the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission. The conceptual apparatus of the agenda regulates the norms it seeks to promote, as well as the actors and institutions in charge of their promotion. Understanding how this conceptual apparatus is deployed and interpreted, how and under which circumstances it is resisted or reinforced, and what the implications of its reiteration and/or resistance might be, is therefore essential in order to grasp the impact that international norms on gender, peace and security have on the daily lives of ordinary citizens.

International Affairs, 2016

Copenhagen, and from Nairobi to Beijing, transforming its geographical basis and political presence as it developed. 8 It was at Beijing in 1995 that the immediate antecedents of Resolution 1325 were codified. Appealing for the 'maintenance of international peace and security', activists posited that peace itself 'is inextricably 8 Martha Alter Chen, 'Engendering world conferences: the international women's movement and the United Nations',

The UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 establishes the roles of women in the conflict solving process and here there will be an examination into what steps have been taken to put UNSCR 1325 in progress during this past decade. It is essential to emphasise that this action is generally considered a ‘landmark, legal and political framework’ as this was the first time that the Security Council addressed the disproportionate and extraordinary impact of armed conflict on women. The eighteen articles of UNSCR 1325 aim to transform the roles of women and recognize the crucial contribution they could make in conflict prevention, peacekeeping, peace and security. In particular, UNSCR 1325 encourages greater participation of women at the decision making level, for example in peace negotiations (Arts. 1&2) and in peace operations as soldiers or police (Art. 4). As highlighted in the preamble, another important aim of UNSCR 1325 is to protect women and girls from gender based violence (Art. 10). It also calls for the respect of the particular needs of women and girls in refugee camps (Art. 12). The decision taken by the Security Council in 2000 to adopt UNSCR 1325 suggests the importance of this issue, as a major characteristic of the Security Council is ‘selectivity...especially of the P5, in deciding which issues to address or not address.

Michigan journal of gender & law, 2021

The year 2020 marks the twentieth anniversary of the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution (“UNSCR”) 1325, the most important moment in the United Nations’ efforts to achieve world peace through gender equality. Over the past several decades, the international community has strengthened its focus on gender, including the relationship between gender and international peace and security. National governments and the United Nations have taken historic steps to elevate the role of women in governance and peacebuilding. The passage of UNSCR 1325 in 2000 foreshadowed what many hoped would be a transformational shift in international law and politics. However, the promise of gender equality has gone largely unrealized, despite the uncontroverted connection between treatment of women and the peacefulness of a nation. This Article argues for the first time that to achieve international peace and security through gender equality, the United Nations Security Council should tran...