Beyond liberal vs liberating: women’s economic empowerment in the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security agenda

ABSTRACT

This article is about women’s economic empowerment within the United Nations (UN) Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Based on analysis of the core agenda-setting documents, it traces where two different versions of women’s economic empowerment, “liberal” (including women in the formal economy) and “liberating” (women collectively mobilizing to challenge the status quo), appear in the WPS agenda. It argues that the two exist in uneasy tension in the UN’s aspirations for women’s economic security post-war, but that when it comes to actual activities and achievements, the liberal version dominates over the liberating version. The article argues that it is important not to overstate the divide between the two approaches, and that the seeds of a liberating approach can be found within the liberal. It is initiatives to facilitate women’s economic empowerment that contain opportunities for collective action to transform the structures of the economy that WPS advocates should advocate. This would strengthen the WPS agenda and its ability to contribute to security as feminists envisage it, as encompassing freedom from want as well as freedom from fear.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• peace
• security
• economic empowerment
• United Nations

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Amanda Cahill-Ripley, Kelly Gerard, Anne Marie Goetz, Lucy Mckernan, and the three anonymous reviewers and the editors at IFJP for their feedback at different stages of this work. I would also like to thank Elizabeth Prugl and Jacqui True for the chance to present earlier versions, and Carol Cohn for ongoing conversations. All these interactions strengthened the work; the remaining weaknesses are mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Claire Duncanson is a senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research addresses multiple issues in global politics from a feminist perspective. Her recent publications include Gender and Peacebuilding (Polity, 2016) and the Palgrave International Handbook on Gender and the Military (with Rachel Woodward) (Palgrave, 2017).

Notes

1 Early feminist conceptions also included ecological security, which is equally as important, but regrettably beyond the scope of this article.

2 See two recent collections in the journal Politics and Gender edited by Elias 2015 and Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2017.

3 The feminist literature on empowerment and its co-optation is extensive. See, for example, Arat (2015); Batliwala (2007); Bexell (2012); Calkin (2015); Calvès (2009); Chant and Sweetman (2012); Chant (2016); Cornwall and Rivas (2015); Elias (2013); Gregoratti (2018); Parpart, Rai, and Staudt (2003); Prügl (2015); Roberts (2015); Roberts and Soederberg (2012).

4 There are other feminist critiques of empowerment, such as the way that it can reinforce myths of women’s inherent powerlessness and victimhood; or the way that the tools favored by some international organizations to promote empowerment of the poor, such as community-based projects, reflect a “romantic” vision of local and community-based power wherein internal power relations, conflict, and social inequalities are deemphasized or ignored. Whilst important, they are beyond the scope of this article.

5 This mirrors the findings of the NGO Working Group on WPS, which monitors the work of the Security Council and analyses resolutions, reports, and presidential statements for the inclusion of information on WPS. In 2015, for example, more than 80 percent of all references focused on violations of women’s rights, including SGBV, and in 2016, it was 85 percent, a point made by many academics too (see e.g., Aroussi 2011; Meger 2016).

6 Before this, the word “economic” is either not mentioned – UNSCR 1325 (2000) and UNSCR 1820 (2009) – or mentioned in the context of socio-economic services for victims of sexual violence 1888 (2009)

7 Available at: http://www.un.org/en/peacebuilding/pbso/pdf/women_economic_empowerement_draft_declaration.pdf

8 The temporary employment for women results from the UN’s commitment to a range-of-parity principle in all post-conflict temporary employment programs so that neither sex receives more than 60 percent of employment person-days generated.

9 See http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2015/10/yemeni-women-call-for-their-inclusion-in-peace-efforts.