Neither the Global North nor the Global South: locating the post-Soviet space in/out of the Women, Peace and Security agenda

ABSTRACT

Despite 20 years of theorization on the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, a critical review of the WPS literature points to a large, curious, and ignored epistemic gap regarding the post-Soviet space. In this exploratory article, I want to problematize this absence. While the gap can be partly attributed to the Anglophone hegemony in this literature, I suggest an alternative explanation: metageography and the “in-betweenness” of the post-Soviet region as an ambiguous space corresponding to neither the Global North nor the Global South. Drawing on insights from post-socialist feminist theories about the former “Second World,” I argue that the post-Soviet space has been erased from the WPS literature because – as elsewhere in the social sciences – the end of the Cold War rearranged the East/West geopolitical imaginaries into a Global North/Global South divide. Consequently, this epistemic gap creates an incomplete picture of the WPS agenda as a whole. I urge and challenge WPS scholars to pay attention to this region by developing the outline of a more holistic research agenda beyond the Global North/Global South binary.

KEYWORDS:

• Women, Peace and Security agenda
• National Action Plans
• post-Soviet space
• metageography
• epistemic gap

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Claire Turenne-Sjolander, Stephen Brown, Stephen Baranyi, Alexandra Wishart, Laurence Deschamps-Laporte, and Priscyll Anctil-Avoine for valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article, and Míla O’Sullivan, Kateřina Krulišová, and Zorana Antonijević for fruitful discussions on the WPS agenda in Prague and Belgrade. I also thank the editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their kind and constructive reviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In October 2000, the United Nations (UN) Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325), which, for the first time, recognized the unique impacts of war on women. UNSCR 1325 urged UN member states, among others, to increase the participation and representation of women in all aspects of decision making concerning international security, from participation (such as in peacekeeping, security careers, and peace negotiations), to protection (such as from conflict-related sexual violence), and prevention. Nine other resolutions followed and now constitute what has become known internationally as the WPS agenda.

2 NAPs are one of the main ways for member states to implement the WPS agenda. As of 2023, 105 UN member states have adopted a NAP. Though an analysis of each NAP in the region is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth mentioning that currently ten countries in the post-Soviet region have published a NAP: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan (PeaceWomen 2022b).

3 For a more extensive discussion of colonial patterns within academic publications and the geopolitics of knowledge, see Trubina et al. (2020).

4 Between the time of writing (spring 2021) and the publication of this article, two articles were published featuring one or more countries in the post-Soviet space as case studies (Dudko and Langenhuizen 2022; Myrttinen 2022). In addition, an article on the WPS agenda in Central Europe with a similar argument to mine (the region as an “in-between”) was published recently (O’Sullivan and Krulišová 2023).

5 With the combination of WPS keywords, WoS returns 264 results. When adding the second set of keywords (regional and national) to the first, the number of results drops to ten. However, GS shows a larger pool of publications. I made a manual selection to eliminate duplication and irrelevant results.

6 In addition to academic publications, I found two short articles published in Security and Human Rights, a professional journal devoted to the activities of the OSCE (Benigni 2016; Lukatela 2016). Though both are relevant, I chose to omit them from my sample to prioritize academic publishing.

7 This distinction is important because it means less visibility, thus less citation and influence in Western academic spaces.

8 For example, they challenge the neoliberal idea of economic employment as being the ultimate emancipatory factor for women. On the “double burden,” see Grabowska (2012).

9 For a rich history of Global South and socialist feminist coalitions during the Cold War, see also Bonfiglioli (2016) and Ghodsee (2019).

10 On the ambiguous whiteness of Eastern European women, see Lewicki (2023) and Nachescu (2018).

11 De facto states are disputed states where there is (varying) internal, but not external, sovereignty, which means that they are not recognized by the international community. The fall of the Soviet Union generated several ethnic, territorial, and separatist conflicts that are still not resolved today (often problematically referred to as “frozen”), most notably Transnistria (Moldova), Abkhazia and South Ossetia (Georgia), and Nagorno-Karabakh (Armenia–Azerbaijan).

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (Government of Ontario).

Notes on contributors

Bénédicte Santoire

Bénédicte Santoire is a PhD candidate and Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She researches and teaches in the areas of feminist international relations theories and feminist security studies. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda in the post-Soviet space, more specifically in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia.