A Sign of "Weakness"? Disrupting Gender Certainties in the Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325

Citation:

Otto, Dianne. 2006. “A Sign of ‘Weakness’? Disrupting Gender Certainties in the Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325.” Michigan Journal of Gender & Law 13 (1): 113–75.

Author: Dianne Otto

Abstract:

One of the greatest challenges is harnessing the energy and activism that many women exhibit in informal [peace building] activities and translating that into their participation and influence in formal activities. On the other hand, the feminist agenda for peace requires disrupting those same gender identities because they discursively legitimate militarism and women's inequality. A week later, Resolution 1325 urged as its starting point the need for states to ensure the increased representation of women in formal decision-making processes related to the prevention, management, and resolution of armed conflict. With respect to strategy, I suggest that the sites for feminist peace advocacy opened up by the Resolution, located partly within formal systems of decision-making, could be more fully utilized as gender-disruptive locations. With such minimal assistance from the Resolution, has the Resolution provided the "watershed  political framework" that the UNIFEM experts predicted? Have the emancipatory goals, which have animated women's international peace activism for nearly a century, been furthered by the achievement of small increases in women's formal participation? In relation to the goal of addressing the patterns of inequality and injustice that create global insecurities, the experience of Timor-Leste and Afghanistan indicate that women's contributions have been thwarted by the imperial and military terms by which international peace and security has always been understood.

Topics: Gender, UN Security Council Resolutions on WPS, UNSCR 1325

Year: 2006