Sex, Security and Superhero(in)es: From 1325 to 1820 and Beyond

Abstract

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 was adopted in October 2000 with a view to ensuring that all aspects of conflict management, post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding be undertaken with a sensitivity towards gender as an axis of exclusion. In this paper, I do not dwell on the successes and shortcomings of UNSCR 1325 for long, instead using a discussion of the Resolution as a platform for analysis of subsequent Resolutions, including UNSCRs 1820 (2008), 1882 (2009), 1888 (2009) and 1889 (2009). This last relates specifically to the participation of women in peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction and is the most recent pronouncement of the Security Council on the issue of ‘women and peace and security’. Through this analysis, I draw attention to the expectations of and pressures on (some) women in the arena of peace and security, which can only be alleviated through discursive and material change in attitudes towards equality and empowerment. I argue that the Council is beginning to recognize – and simultaneously to constitute – (some/most) women as agential subjects and suggest that the fragmented and mutable representations of women in Council resolutions offer a unique opportunity for critical engagement with what ‘women’ might be, do or want in the field of gender and security.

Keywords:

• 1325
• peacebuilding
• participation
• gender
• security

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the comments of the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this Special Issue. Their input and constructive engagement with my analysis and argument were both valuable and encouraging.

Notes

I am grateful to the reviewer who noted that there is a distinctive difference between claiming the Resolution as groundbreaking and the Resolution being groundbreaking. As this introductory section is meant only to provide a descriptive account of the analysis that follows, I engage more fully with this debate in the second substantive section of the article.

At the time of writing, 24 states have implemented national action plans (PeaceWomen n.d.).

It is of course also interesting to ask why the Council writes (about) women in the ways that it does. ‘[I]s it because women are good at peace; or because women have equal rights to participate in peace operations?’ (Charlesworth 2008: 351). This discussion is, however, beyond the scope of this paper, as I seek to explore the possibilities that are created or foreclosed by how the Council writes.

The origins of this phrase are unclear. The first printed citation of it was apparently in 1946 in a Texan newspaper, when the athlete commented, upon receiving an award, ‘said “They say behind every great man there's a woman. While I'm not a great man, there's a great woman behind me”’ (The Phrase Finder, n.d.).

I have been unable to trace its author or production company.

Richardson (1996: 289) makes this distinction in his discussion of policy-making and planning theory, drawing on the Foucauldian concept of a power/knowledge nexus to suggest that while the dualism is ‘convenient’, it perpetuates the obfuscation of practices of power in the policy-making process, thus ‘enhanc[ing] the possibility of imposition of normative values, confusion and manipulation’.  While I do not entirely agree with Richardson's attribution of intentionality, it is nonetheless refreshing to see discourse-theoretical analysis being taken seriously in debates about policy and planning.

This is a prosaic echo of Ani DiFranco's (1995) lyric cited at the outset: ‘I have had something to prove as long as I know there's something that needs improvement.’

Of course, in a wider academic and practitioner literature, these contestations have been actively explored and expanded upon for many decades (see, for example, Moser and Clark 2001; El Jack 2003; Afshar and Eade 2004; Giles and Hyndman 2004; Mazurana et al. 2005; Sweetman 2005).

Another reading of this discursive move is in keeping with feminist literature on the constitution of the subject of ‘civilian’, which elucidates the frequency with which gendered assumptions ‘stow away’ (Carpenter 2006: 31) within the norm of civilian immunity (see also Sjoberg 2006), rendering civilians effectively feminised.