This paper challenges the UN Security Council's approach to women, peace and security through a detailed analysis of participation initiatives in the eight resolutions on women, peace and security, alongside study of the recent shift to include countering terrorism and violent extremism provisions in resolution 2242. Through review of a range of feminist approaches that remain 'outside' the strategies leading institutional gender perspectives I scrutinise the shifts across the resolutions on women, peace and security. In particular, this article analyses how Security Council resolution 2242, produced after the High-Level Report studying the fifteen years after resolution 1325, includes important developments in the articulation of participation. However, the risk of progressing work on women, peace and security within global structures without attention to the diversity of women's needs, lives and experiences drawn from a feminist commitment to anti-militarism and postcolonial listening is likely to produce a series of regressive outcomes that perpetuate victim feminisms and which fail to dislodge the intersection of gender with colonial and racial power structures within global institutions.
Violence is a key factor in the production, maintenance and legitimisation of domination and subordination. People often experience multiple forms of violence that are interrelated, coconstitutive and mutually reinforcing, and that exist at state, institutional and individual levels. This is especially true in relation to violence against women (VAW). Everyday forms of violence and violence as a daily reality are observed in various contexts but occur via diverse methods, perpetrators and agendas. VAW is understood as a salient outcome of systemic gender inequality across the globe, and is an intentionally broad term. It encompasses any physical, sexual, psychological, emotional, financial or social harm caused to a woman by individuals (known or unknown to the woman), groups, institutions or states, based primarily or in part on the fact that she is a woman. Alongside the individual occurrence of violence, and potential state interventions to challenge or address it, the state also acts as a facilitator or perpetrator of gendered violence. Throughout this special issue, the term 'VAW' is used to acknowledge the specific, gendered nature of harm women encounter, often in private or domestic arrangements, while acknowledging that VAW, and domestic violence, is linked to other systems of inequality based on sexuality, race and class. While we conceptually favour 'VAW', the terms 'gendered violence' and 'gender-based violence' are also used by the contributors to this volume. While recognising that any attempt at a definition of these terms will be complex and contested, and that they cannot be universally applied without modification or qualification to all women-as revealed by the experience of black, minority ethnic, lesbian and refugee women-this special issue of Feminist Review focuses on the gendered nature of VAW (Thiara and Gill, 2010; Donovan and Hester, 2014).
This paper provides a critical analysis of the United Nations (UN) Security Council's 'naming and shaming' provision in operative paragraph 3 of Security Council resolution 1960 (2010), arguing this is a counterproductive development in the contemporary collective security approach to women, peace and security. Resolution 1960, the fifth Security Council resolution on women, peace and security, significantly extends the Council's approach to challenging sexual violence in armed conflict through the development of global indicators and accountability mechanisms. This article offers an explanation of the terminology and context of resolution 1960 with a particular focus on operative paragraph 3. The article then shifts to review the value of the operative paragraph 3 naming and shaming provision. I argue against feminist activism that seeks to develop accountability mechanisms for non-state actors in isolation from strategies to prevent violence and suggest the need to promote, instead, strategies that increase women's participation in the delivery of justice mechanisms locally and globally. Additionally, the effectiveness of any list produced in the context of such naming and shaming will be undermined by the combination of a potential conflict of interests for humanitarian workers and the potential for mislabelling non-state actors, particularly members of armed groups, as responsible for sexual violence in armed conflict without paying appropriate attention to established due process and the rule of law. As such, the Security Council's current shift towards global indicators and accountability mechanisms will be unable to end sexual violence and gender-based human rights abuses by non-state actors in situations on the Council's agenda. I conclude that the impact of resolution 1960 operative paragraph 3 will be minimal: promoting neither women's rights nor peace nor security and with the potential to reduce incentives for armed groups to be active participants in the creation of peace.
The world of international relations and law is constantly changing. There is a risk of the systematic undermining of international organisations and law over the next years. Feminist approaches to international law will need to adapt accordingly, to ensure that they continue to challenge inequalities, and serve as an important and critical voice in international law. This article seeks to tell the story of feminist perspectives on international law from the early 1990s till today through a discussion between three generations of feminist international legal scholars: Hilary Charlesworth, who, with her colleagues, contributed to the area in the immediate post-Cold War years, Gina Heathcote, who over the past decade has published extensively on feminist perspectives on the use of force and collective security, and Emily Jones, an early career scholar working on feminist approaches to international law. The conversation, which began as a Skype discussion, considers both the ways in which feminist approaches to international law have changed over the past two decades, as well as the ways in which they have been shaped by global politics, before turning to consider the future for feminist approaches to international law. The impact of feminist approaches to international law has been considerable. However, it seems that feminist approaches still lack legitimacy and credibility in many mainstream circles, remaining on the disciplinary periphery. Charlesworth, Heathcote and Jones discuss potential ways in which to manage some of these tensions, noting both the importance of 'speaking to ourselves' (Charlesworth 2011) as a creative and nurturing space, as well as the need to be seen as a more credible voice in the mainstream. They note the need, too, for further feminist work beyond the realms of sexual violence and women's representation. While the great amount of work in this area is, indeed, foundational, having achieved many important legal and political outcomes, feminist approaches should now develop beyond these areas. Doing so will not only propel this area of scholarship in new and exciting directions, but it might help feminist scholarship gain further traction by avoiding categorisation only under the umbrella of "women's issues" and thus ready dismissal as just another specialist area of international law in the era of fragmentation. Conversation The Beginning: Entering the Academy What was it like to enter academia as a feminist international legal scholar at the time that you did?
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