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The ‘woman-in-con?ict"

at the UN Security Council: a subject of practice

SAM COOK

International Aairs

ƒ ?5", UK and

Madame President, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good morning,

I am here for my friends and colleagues, Samira al Nuaimi and Umaima al Jebara, who were recently killed defending women's rights in Iraq; Razan Zaitouneh who was abducted for documenting human rights violations in Syria; and all activists who risk their lives daily to make women, peace and security not just a resolution, but a reality. - Statement by Ms Suaad Allami, UN Security Council open debate on 'Women, Peace It was with these words that Suaad Allami began her address to the Security on the occasion of that body's now-familiar marking of the anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) ? and the inauguration of Women, Peace and Security as a thematic item on its agenda. Just as the holding of an open debate has become a ritualized form through which to mark this occasion, statements such as Ms Allami's have also become part of the regular practice of the Security Council policy community. A those now held earlier in the calendar year to consider the specic sub-theme of 'sexual violence in conict', and three women took up this position in the open debate held recently to mark the resolution's th anniversary. Beyond the ritualized incantations of greeting with which Allami begins, her words are striking for bringing something unusual into the austere space of the Security Council - names. These are not names of states in which wars are fought, or names of the government o cials or bureaucrats who are required by form and relationships of power to be thanked and acknowledged. These are names of women who have died and been tortured and abducted in war for their activism in seeking, as Allami puts it, to 'make women, peace and security not just a resolution,

The open debate is a form of debate in the Security Council that allows for the participation, through the

Council's rules of procedure, of UN member states outside the Council membership, as well as UN entity

and civil society representatives.

UNSC, S/Res/?

, S/PV. . INTA92_2_FullIssue.indb 35325/02/2016 15:21:32

Sam Cook

International A?airs

92: 2, 2016

Copyright ©

2016 The Author(s). International A?airs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International A?airs.

but a reality". In that naming, the statement that follows becomes a tribute, and Samira al Nuaimi, Umaima al Jebara and Razan Zaitouneh become a present reminder to the audience that it is in the lives of real, individual, embodied and very particular women that the (now eight) Women, Peace and Security (WPS) resolutions matter, and do so in ways that go beyond simply being resolved to act. There is also embedded in Allami"s words the subtle reminder of how feminist activism, advocacy and scholarship—including those that resulted in the adoption of UNSCR —have sought to shift and complicate the way in which women and their roles in relation to conict are understood within international security discourse. One of the often-cited claims of feminists working for Resolution was that women play multiple, and often concurrent, roles in conict situations that go well beyond that of the passive victim requiring protection. Each of the names spoken by Suaad Allami is that of a woman whose life is not dened solely by victimhood; whose life, indeed, complicates any simple dichotomy between victimhood and its imagined opposite, agency. The act of saying names into the Security Council space in that moment then seems to negotiate a way through the dichotomy and produce a very particular, material and complex sense of the gure I refer to here as the ‘woman-in-conict". This naming carries with it the lived experiences, needs and interests of women whose lives are a€ected by conict. It is these, feminists have argued, that should form the basis of knowl edge upon which policy and programmes are built.

It is, of course, not possible

to determine—or meet—the needs and interests of the uncountable, faceless and nameless women a€ected by and living through war. Rather, the inevitable representation of these women takes place through imbuing the gure of the woman-in-conict with particular meaning or characteristics. These meanings shape how the gure is understood in WPS discourse, which, in turn, constructs the horizons of possibility for both current and future policy and its implemen tation. This article explores how this gure is produced as a subject in the civil society statements delivered over time at the Security Council"s thematic WPS open debates. The moment of naming with which this article began could be seen as one that, in opening space for particular experiences and complex identities, represents the successful shifting of the dominant security discourse. There is, however, a general sense that the WPS discourse that has emerged over time has not lived up to the transformative promise of UNSCR and has, in some ways, undermined the

This position is expressed in a vast literature that seeks to capture the myriad roles and experiences of women

in conict. For a sample of such work, see C. Moser and F. Clark, eds,

Victims, perpetrators or actors? Gender,

armed con?ict and political violence experience to International Relations theory and practice, see Chandra Talpade Mohanty,

Feminism without

borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity INTA92_2_FullIssue.indb 35425/02/2016 15:21:32 The ‘woman-in-con?ict" at the UN Security Council

International A?airs

92: 2, 2016

Copyright ©

2016 The Author(s). International A?airs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International A?airs.

feminist intent behind its adoption.

Concern has been expressed that the concept

of gender has been entirely depoliticized and the holistic approach of UNSCR reduced such that women continue to be portrayed primarily as victims. Many argue that the increasingly limited focus on sexual violence in conict, seen country-specic work, is detrimental to the long-term feminist peace and security agenda. It is further argued that comprehensive and nuanced understandings of sexual violence and its connections with political participation and with milita rism have been lost in policy that simply reinforces the image of women as victims in need of the paternalistic protection of international security actors. To the extent that claims for women"s full and equal participation in peace and security decision-making have been met, this has primarily been through increasing the number of women in national militaries—a ‘success" antithetical to the goals of most WPS activists. The perceived failure to produce and sustain international policy that is properly ‘feminist" (and thus presumably more likely to successfully address feminist concerns) is one that has been tackled by a number of scholars.

It is a problem

not unique to feminist activism but faced in other arenas by those seeking to introduce progressive or emancipatory agendas to the work of institutions. For many, the explanation is that as concepts such as ‘gender" have been mainstreamed, feminist goals have been ‘co-opted" by other agendas as ‘gender is turned into a technocratic tool and stripped of its critical content".

Similar arguments are made

in other arenas—for example, in relation to the introduction of the concept of ‘social capital" to the work of the World Bank. Some claim that these failures are attributable to blockages such as the hegemonic forms or ‘sedimented meanings" that exist in institutions or to particular actors within those institutions having the power to ‘dictate the terms of the debate".

Others allege that those who are

meant to be ‘working on the inside" for the feminist project have abandoned the struggle. While for the most part I agree with these various critiques in terms of

See e.g. Dianne Otto, ‘The exile of inclusion: reections on gender issues in international law over the last

security: discourse as practice Otto, ‘The exile of inclusion"; Shepherd, Gender, violence and security.

See Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd, ‘Reintroducing women, peace and security", International Aairs : ,

, pp. -

above.

See e.g. Otto, ‘The exile of inclusion".

See e.g. Anthony Bebbington, Michael Woolcock, Scott E. Guggenheim and Elizabeth A. Olson, eds, The search

for empowerment: social capital as idea and practice at the World Bank Depoliticizing development: the World Bank and social capital voices and human security: to endure, to engage or to critique?",

Security Dialogue

Audrey Reeves, ‘Feminist knowledge and emerging governmentality in UN peacekeeping", International Femi-

nist J ournal of Politics you can have [gender]? Conicting discourses on gender at Beijing",

Feminist Review

, vol.

, , pp. -

McRobbie suggests that gender mainstreaming ‘can be thought of as a non-conictual accommodating kind

of programme or schema which follows a path which has some equalizing potential, but which in essence

can be absorbed and taken on board by the structures and institutions of capitalism": Angela McRobbie,

The aftermath of feminism: gender, culture and social change Ryerson, ‘Critical voices and human security", p. . INTA92_2_FullIssue.indb 35525/02/2016 15:21:32

Sam Cook

International A?airs

92: 2, 2016

Copyright ©

2016 The Author(s). International A?airs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International A?airs.

their analysis of overall outcomes, I argue that it is necessary to nd other modes of analysis to think through the problem. This article presents a way in which we might begin to account otherwise for the disjuncture between the outcomes and understandings envisioned by feminist policy interventions—such as that resulting years ago in the adoption of

UNSCR

—and the way in which these are then manifested in institutional policy discourse. I explore the ways in which the understandings of the gure of the woman-in-conict are produced through the quotidian practices of the WPS policy community engaged at the Security Council. Doing so will, it is hoped, o€er WPS advocates a better sense of how feminist understandings come to be excluded, shifted or incorporated in the production and reproduction of dominant discourses in institutions like the Security Council, and in the process also indicate possible opportunities for resistance and challenge.

Discourse: linguistic and other practices

The impetus for the approach taken here begins with the contention that inter- ventions made to shift policy, for example on international peace and security (which is how many see the WPS agenda), are made in and through language - it being, after all, the very ‘stu€" of policy.

Of course, this starting point rests in

some way on the assumption or belief that if we get the words right, if meaning is xed ‘appropriately" or in some ‘right" way, this will shift material conditions in the spaces in which policy is implemented. If we assume for a moment that the aim is to ‘get the words right" or ensure a particular feminist understanding of those words, what can we learn about how to do that if we think of these inter- ventions more explicitly as attempts at making meaning? Thinking of contestations over meaning in this way guides our attention towards identifying where linguistic interventions are ‘vulnerable" to the sorts of failures under consideration, to how they are in fact built on inherently unstable ground. The very openness and contingency that allow language to be a space of contention also leave it vulnerable to future contestation. Although systems of meaning may become more or less hegemonic, they cannot be xed and are always vulnerable to that which was excluded in their making.

Even if hegemonic

meanings are established in the face of already existing discourse, those meanings have to be actively and continually reproduced.

Certainly many feminist critics

are vigilantly engaged in critiques of shifts in meaning.

Nevertheless,

how that

Giandomenico Majone, Evidence, argument, and persuasion in the policy process (New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, ), p. .

Systems of meaning are, by their nature, essentially open and contingent. For Gramsci, ‘nothing is anchored

to xed and certain meanings; all social and semantic r elations are contestable, hence mutable": see Jean

Comaro€ and L. John Comaro€,

Of revelation and revolution: Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South

Africa

pp. -.

Good examples of this approach are Otto, ‘The exile of inclusion"; Shepherd, Gender, violence and security;

Laura J. Shepherd, ‘Sex, security and superhero(in)es: from

International Feminist

Journal of Politics

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International A?airs

92: 2, 2016

Copyright ©

2016 The Author(s). International A?airs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International A?airs.

meaning is created and reproduced needs to be part of the analysis. Failure to do so may result in the misidentication of barriers to producing or sustaining the meanings intended by any particular intervention. Some take the position that failures to sustain feminist ideas within policy discourse can be attributed to the ways in which particular concepts in those policies are constructed or understood. Shepherd, for example, argues that the particular conceptions of ‘(international) security" and ‘gender (violence)" within UNSCR condemn that policy to failure in practice.

There is an implicit sense here that

the problem is a lack of appropriate or su ciently ‘feminist" conceptualization on the part of those engaging in policy work; that what is needed is to provide them with ‘the possibility of alternative concepts with which to proceed".

It is far

from clear, though, that the disconnect between feminist conceptualizations and those emerging in policy and policy discourse can be attributed to a theoretical or conceptual decit on the part of those engaged in policy-making. What seems more likely is that even those fully equipped with the ‘appropriate" meanings may still face signicant challenges in getting those meanings adopted in the rst place or sustained in the long term; this may be because of specic resistance to their adoption or vulnerability to the pressures of the institutional spaces into which they emerge. A useful starting point for thinking through this problem can be found in the work of scholars who take political and social contestation over and in language as a central concern. Their work is helpful in thinking more specically and closely about how such struggle within language happens and is manifested.

Much of this

work tends to focus on words of a particular type— concepts.

These are ‘inescap

able, irreplaceable parts of the political and social vocabulary" which become crystallized into a single word but contain a range of meanings within them. The concepts on which these scholars focus their attention as key sites of political struggle are often somewhat abstract or ambiguous; it is this quality that makes them attractive and amenable to deployment to e€ect social and political change. In consensus-based policy-making environments such as the United Nations, concepts of this sort are particularly appealing sites of contestation. They provide ‘a spacious kind of hanger on which those of di€erent persuasions are able to

Shepherd, Gender, violence and security, pp.

-. In a similar vein, a signicant body of feminist scholarship in

international law and policy has unpacked contested understandings of such key concepts as ‘security". See

e.g. J. Ann Tickner, Gendering world politics: issues and approaches in the post-Cold War era (New York: Columbia Gender in international relations: feminist perspectives on achieving global security (New York: Columbia University Press, ).

Shepherd, Gender, violence and security, p.

See Bebbington et al., The search for empowerment; Sophie Bessis, ‘International organizations and gender: new

paradigms and old habits", Signs

See Raymond Williams, Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society, rev. edn (New York: Oxford University

Press,

); Reinhart Koselleck,

Futures past: on the semantics of historical time

, ‘Studies in contemporary German social thought" (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,  ); uentin Skinner, ‘Language and social change", in Mean- ing and context: uentin Skinner and his critics , ed. James Tully (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).

Melvin Richter and Michaela W. Richter, ‘Introduction: translation of Reinhart Koselleck"s “Krise", in

Geschichtliche Grundbegrie

Koselleck, Futures past, pp. , 

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Sam Cook

International A?airs

92: 2, 2016

Copyright ©

2016 The Author(s). International A?airs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International A?airs.

hang their coats". Concepts that are malleable and non-specic also allow policy- makers a space in which to t a range of future practical programmes.

Several

feminist policy interventions at the UN (and by activists in other institutional arenas) have taken this form of ‘conceptual" engagement—whether attempting to x the meaning of particular signiers as they enter new institutional spaces (as in the case of ‘gender") or attempting to shift or expand the meaning of existing concepts (as in the case of ‘international peace and security"). In the case of WPS policy, despite cogent reasons for attending to the concept of gender, the gure of the woman-in-conict has become the site of contesta tions over meaning. Even when not named as such, she is the ever-present referent in policy discussions, the shadow gure on whose behalf advocacy is carried out and policy adopted, criticism advanced or action demanded; deployed by a wide range of actors, in a multitude of ways and to various ends, she appears ‘in person" from time to time on behalf of civil society at the Security Council open debates. Credibility and recognition are given, at least partly, on the basis of the perceived ‘authenticity" of those representing her ‘needs and interests". The woman-in- conict and her ostensible needs and interests emerge in discourse that is created through the various meaning-making practices within the policy community, not all of which are linguistic phenomena. Discourses are not simply ‘sets of ideas" deployed and then shared by policy communities, politicians or social movements. Even where attempts are made to shift ideas and understandings through language, meaning emerges not only as a matter of particular linguistic choices but through what people do—that is, through social practices which are intelligible and meaningful only if considered in their relational social context and with reference to the ‘rules of the game" in that context. As ‘systems of meaningful practices", discourses establish a structure of relations, forming the identities of and connections between subjects and objects, and ‘providing subject positions with which social agents can identify".

Partic

ular subject positions may be made available and others precluded, and it is these positions that allow or foreclose the possibilities for future actions—including those thought of as ‘implementation e€orts" to make ‘real" the WPS resolutions. The civil society statements at the open debates, such as the one delivered by Ms WPS discourse and, as the focus here, the production of the subject position of the woman-in-conict.

Harriss, Depoliticizing development, p. ; Sidney G. Tarrow, Power in movement: social movements and contentious

politics Ryerson, ‘Critical voices and human security", p. .

David R. Howarth and Yannis Stavrakakis, ‘Introducing discourse theory and political analysis", in David R.

How arth, Aletta J. Norval and Yannis Stavrakakis, Discourse theory and political analysis: identities, hegemonies and social change

David R. Howarth, Discourse, ‘Concepts in the social sciences" (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open Univer-

Howarth and Stavrakakis, ‘Introducing discourse theory and political analysis", p. .

See Shepherd, Gender, violence and security.

INTA92_2_FullIssue.indb 35825/02/2016 15:21:32 The ‘woman-in-con?ict" at the UN Security Council

International A?airs

92: 2, 2016

Copyright ©

2016 The Author(s). International A?airs © 2016 The Royal Institute of International A?airs.

Security Council open debates as a site of practice Of course, the open debates are not self-evidently worthy of analysis. Some maintain that they are nothing but an empty ritual which, rather than producing any concrete outcome (except, on occasion, another resolution whose provi sions must be implemented), serve simply as an opportunity for governments to engage in listing their accomplishments in mutual self-congratulation even as they bemoan, in mostly general terms, the ‘lack of e€ective implementation". Having attended many such debates during ve years spent as a policy advocate for an NGO in the UN WPS policy community, I am well aware that these day-long events can turn into a mind-numbing fog of undi€erentiated speeches of just this sort—a sensation not alleviated when analysing them in transcript form in my new location in academia. Sheri Gibbings, in her research in the same UN policy environment, notes concerns expressed to her that member states ‘might be making public statements that express their commitment to gender equality, but in reality they would act di€erently".

Yet it seems clear from the number

of states delivering statements in each such debate (and from the interviews I am conducting for the research project out of which this article emerged) that even those jaded by the experience of ‘non-productive" open debates over the years seem unwilling to pass up the next opportunity to speak. debate, civil society speaker Julienne Lusenge of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) seven years later she ‘thought long and hard before deciding to come back here, and wondered whether or not it was worth the e€ort".

Clearly she had decided

it was; and, as Gibbings notes, despite complaints that the ‘UN was just words ... [advocates] a€orded importance to its speeches and language". The open debate forum has attracted signicant numbers of representatives from UN member states that are not members of the Security Council and, while not directly engaged in policy-making, are implicated in its implementa tion. This has particularly been the case in anniversary years considered in the UN as especially signicant (multiples of ve and ten). The th anniversary debate saw member states requesting speaking slots and was the largest open debate ever hosted on any theme.

The tenth and

th anniversary debates were also declared to be ‘high-level" events—signifying the attendance of high-status government ministers (such as, for example, the US Secretary of State and otherquotesdbs_dbs25.pdfusesText_31

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