Women, Peace and Security as Evolving and Contested Terrain: A Review of New Directions

Sep 28, 2020 | Aiko Holvikivi and Sarah Smith
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In the WPS agenda’s twentieth anniversary year, New Directions brings academics, practitioners and activists into conversation in a book that demonstrates the evolutionary breadth and depth of WPS policy and scholarship. In the introduction to the volume, Soumita Basu, Paul Kirby and Laura Shepherd sketch the contours of the WPS agenda as something broader than the text of the policy frameworks that United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 instigated. They characterise the agenda as the focal point of a WPS community and as a site of political investments, demands and disavowals. The editors position the book in the “new politics of WPS…in relation to geographical, temporal and institutional scales” (p. 2) and map, as much as can be done, the trajectory of WPS in scholarly and policy fields: beginning as a feminist activist agenda at the margins of international security, to a policy agenda ingratiated in the ‘masculine’ space of the Security Council, to an agenda that is diffused outside of the politics of the Security Council in local and other institutional spaces (pp. 5-6).

The form that the contributions to this impressive collection take in themselves demonstrates a plurality of engagements with the WPS agenda. Some chapters are presented as academic papers, while others take the form of conversation between researchers, practitioners, and those who blur attempts to establish a firm distinction between the two. This shift between formats makes for compelling reading and invites the reader to reflect on what it means to practice WPS across a range of contexts. Together, the chapters demonstrate that the trajectory of the WPS agenda does not lend itself to a discrete or linear understanding, but rather that multiple actors are involved in shaping and contesting this agenda in parallel and in interconnection. A recurring theme then is of conceptualising WPS as contested, with boundaries that are both pushed and that push back. Overall the volume demonstrates that this agenda is best approached with conceptual complexity that discourages definitive pronouncements on what WPS is or is not, and who its proper subjects are.