Abstract
The study aims to explore the identities of women in the framework of the protection and participation discourses by the United Nations Security Council. Even though women play several roles, such as peace negotiators, mediators, and victims, a narrowing of the discourse often happens. Zürn points out that an intersectional approach allows us to understand and analyse the interwoven nature of social categories, which shape one’s identity. Through a poststructural analysis of several UN Security Council Resolutions on the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, the writing of women’s roles will be deconstructed. The fact that women are only partially written as multifaceted actors with overlap** identities contributes to their lack of participation on an equal footing, even though Security Council Resolutions show indirect references to intersectional approaches.
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Notes
- 1.
Although the NGOs of the working group vary greatly concerning their legal traditions (Schäfer 2016) and feminist backgrounds, several of them highlight their intersectional aspirations. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) did so, when it linked gender and race in several historical statements (Woehrle et al. 2016, 281 f.). In 1995, WILPF adopted an extensive anti-racist policy: “WILPF shall include its anti-racist or various and equal opportunities policy on all of its policy statements and confront all other forms of discrimination, internally and externally” (WILPF 1995).
- 2.
Sam Cook (2016) also addressed the construction of women’s roles in conflict through actors engaged in the environment of the UN Security Council. His study focuses, for example, on Arria-formula meetings and the writing of women’s roles there.
- 3.
Especially within the German context “race” is a problematic term, as it is socially constructed to justify all the related discriminatory structures. However, it is the only single term which is able to show racial discrimination and racism, as alternative terms could lead to veiling of the discrimination issue (Winker and Degele 2009: 47).
- 4.
The narrowing of the WPS policy around the aspect of protection from SGBV (Kirby and Shepherd 2016: 380 f.) could be one reason for that.
- 5.
The focus of this article lies on the discourse of the SC. For a complete picture, further research would be needed. Carrie Reiling (2017) examined the discourse of Ivorian women about their identities. In this framework, they reclaim for example vulnerability as a frame and challenge simultaneously the international discourse about women’s identities.
- 6.
Various identities are the subjects of several research projects, such as the identities of states (instead of many Campbell 1998), but also of specific groups like victims of famine (Edkins 2000) or women. For the study of women’s identities based on the dichotomous distinction from men in the nineteenth century in Europe, see Elshtain (1981) or Pateman (1983).
- 7.
Roxanne Lynn Doty (1996, 51 f.), for example, examined the scientific discourse on North–South relations and assigned the attributes “positive sovereignty”, “real states”, and “effective government organisation” to the North.
- 8.
Even though the differences within the discourse still exist.
- 9.
Additional social identity-building categories besides gender, race, and class are for instance physical able-ness or sexual orientation (Zack 2005: 7). Due to individualisation processes, intersectional approaches should be open to further categories (Winker and Degele 2009: 59) and therefore work abductively.
- 10.
- 11.
This was criticised by several scholars and NGOs, as they were apprehensive about the abandonment of the multifaceted WPS agenda and therefore too huge a focus on women as victims (Barnes 2011: 28).
- 12.
- 13.
Ban Ki-Moon formulated the target of increasing the proportion of women to 10% by 2014, but the target was not met.
- 14.
Even though several actors agree that women’s participation is necessary, they argue this in different ways. So their right to participate is also mentioned as otherwise unused resources as well as essentialist reasons (for a critical approach of several arguments, see Cohn 2008).
- 15.
As the discourse analysis copes with local women as participants in peace processes, additional aspects of women as participants, like women associated with armed forces, are not discussed here. SCR 1889 also thematises female participants in armed groups and their special needs (S/RES/1889: 4).
- 16.
Moreover, the former constellation of the writing of women as victims and “all parties” as those to end violence is repeated (S/RES/1889: 3).
- 17.
As evidence shows that the UN lags behind its own goals (see section “Discussion”), this is also often the case when it comes to National Action Plans. Nicola Popovic and Anna Antonakis show in this volume that there are states such as Afghanistan, Finland, or Rwanda, which cope with intersectionality, but also highlight that other states are not able to incorporate such approaches due to various challenges.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Manuela Scheuermann for her very helpful suggestions and ideas as well as the other participants of the ICAS:MP workshop for their productive comments.
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Zürn, A. (2020). From Sex and Gender to Intersectional Approaches? UN-Written Identities of Local Women in Participation and Protection Discourses. In: Scheuermann, M., Zürn, A. (eds) Gender Roles in Peace and Security. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21890-4_2
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