Women, Peace and Security in a changing climate

ABSTRACT

In this article, we argue that the effort to get the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda implemented in a series of bureaucratic institutions has pulled the agenda quite far from its original motivating intent. Indeed, going down the bureaucratic implementation rabbit hole has made it almost impossible for advocates to stay in touch with the foundational WPS question: how do you get to gender-just sustainable peace? As we approach the twentieth anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, we argue that WPS advocates need to return to that question, but in doing so, must also acknowledge the changed context. One striking change is that climate breakdown is both more acute and more apparent than in 2000, and any attempt to build gender-just sustainable peace will face serious climate-induced challenges. However, the climate crisis creates not only challenges for the WPS agenda, but also opportunities. The sustainability of peace and of the planet are inextricably linked, and we argue that the realization of the WPS agenda requires transformations to social, political, and, most importantly, economic structures that are precisely the same as the transformations needed to ward off greater climate catastrophe.

KEYWORDS:

• Women, Peace and Security
• UNSCR 1325
• feminist political economy
• climate
• peacebuilding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The nine successor UNSCRs are 1820 (2008), 1888 (2009), 1889 (2009), 1960 (2010), 2106 (2013), 2122 (2013), 2242 (2015), 2467 (2019), and 2493 (2019).

2 This slippage between motivating goals, formulation of a policy agenda, the architecture developed to achieve it, implementation, and the desired impacts is not a story that is unique to WPS, of course. For example, note the way in which feminist aspirations were restricted by the formulation of the Millennium Development Goals in ways that have hampered socio-economic justice for women (Cornwall and Rivas 2015). Efforts to work with and within institutions always involve the need to translate goals into a language that can be understood and deemed actionable by colleagues – hence the large scholarship on the potential risks and pitfalls of “insider” feminist strategies (Eisenstein 1996; Hawkesworth 2006; Caglar, Prügl, and Zwingel 2013; Eyben and Turquet 2013). Some of this scholarship claims that despite the risks, small reforms can sometimes lead to more radical transformation (see, for example, Cockburn 1989; Eyben and Turquet 2013).

3 The arguments in this section are largely based on, and laid out in more detail in, Cohn (2014) and Cohn (2017).

4 This is something that Kandiyoti (2007) illustrates so well in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq.

5 Of course, it is important to note that not everyone’s lives will be equally affected – that there will be differential impacts both between countries and within countries. Worldwide, it is the people who have the fewest economic, political, and social resources, as well as those whose livelihoods are tied to specific landscapes and those who live in especially vulnerable areas such as coastal or arid zones, who will be among the most impacted (see, for example, UNFCCC 2018).

6 The US military, for example, is the single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world (see Crawford 2019).

7 For more on the inextricability of the climate crisis and the WPS agenda, as well as reflections on the ways in which some of the same troubling patterns that we have seen in WPS discourse are already emerging in the policy discourse on women and the climate crisis, see Cohn (2020).

8 It is also absolutely not a call for women to be valued as naturally superior stewards of the world’s resources; just as WPS advocates have long been wary of the equation of women with peace, we are advocating for attention to climate breakdown while absolutely resisting any equation of women with nature (see, for example, Arora-Jonsson 2011; Resurrección 2013; Leach 2015; Kronsell 2019).

9 Here we draw from and seek to contribute to ideas in Nelson (2012), Wichterich (2012), Benería, Berik, and Floro (2015), Leach (2015), Raworth (2017), and Bauhardt and Harcourt (2018), as well as the Kari-Oca Declarations. See also Cohn and Duncanson (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carol Cohn

Carol Cohn is the founding Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security & Human Rights. She works across scholarly, policy, and activist communities to create the multidimensional, feminist gendered analyses that are imperative to finding sustainable and just solutions – not only to wars, but to the structural inequalities and environmental crises that underlie them. Her scholarship has addressed topics such as the gender dimensions of nuclear and national security discourse, gender mainstreaming in international security institutions, gender integration issues in the US military, and the strengths and limitations of the international Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and she has published a textbook on Women and Wars (Polity Press). Her current focus is on bringing feminist political economic analysis into both the Sustaining Peace and the WPS agendas through a collaborative international knowledge-building project to create a “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace” (https://genderandsecurity.org/feminist-roadmap-sustainable-peace). Recent work in that project, co-authored with Claire Duncanson, includes a report, “What Kind of Growth? Economies that Work for Women in Post-War Settings,” and “Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Postwar States” in the Review of International Political Economy. In honor of the US presidential election, she has published “‘Cocked and Loaded’: Trump and the Gendered Discourse of National Security,” in Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton (Cambridge University Press).

Claire Duncanson

Claire Duncanson is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on issues relating to gender, peace, and security, and teaches on these subjects to undergraduate and postgraduate students. Her current work aims to bring a feminist analysis to the political economy of building peace, and she works with Carol Cohn on the “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace” project. Recent publications include Gender and Peacebuilding (Polity Press), “Beyond Liberal vs Liberating: Women’s Economic Empowerment in the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security Agenda” in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, and (co-authored with Carol Cohn) “Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Post-War States” in the Review of International Political Economy. She is also an active member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and has co-authored with fellow WILPF member Vanessa Farr on the Women, Peace and Security agenda in Afghanistan for Sara Davies and Jacqui True’s Oxford Handbook on Women, Peace, and Security.