Event

Fifteen years after the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, it is time to reassess and revisit not only implementation, but the content of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda itself. The current WPS agenda, while tremendously valuable, is also severely limited. 

Specifically, while it has been important tool to highlight women’s need for protection in war and women’s right to participate in political processes meant to resolve wars, there has been too little engagement with substantive questions of “what next?” That is, how can women (and men) ensure that peace processes and post-war reconstruction projects work to build social and political structures that are gender equitable and capable of sustaining peace?

Knowledge useful for answering that question has been developed by feminist activists, practitioners, researchers and scholars in fields that typically have not been understood as part of, and have not been in dialogue with, WPS. So, for example, while WPS has encompassed feminist work in areas such as security sector reform, the broadly understood area feminist political economy – an integrated feminist analysis of issues including finance, livelihoods, displacement, healthcare, housing, urban planning, infrastructure, environment and disaster rebuilding – has largely been outside the international WPS agenda.

Dr Carol Cohn is the director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security.

Dr Cohn’s contributions to these fields have been many and ground breaking. Her research and writing have resulted in numerous publications for both academia and the policy world. Her most recent book, Women and Wars: Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures, looks at the multiple roles and experiences of women in war. She has also published on U.S. national security elites, the relevance of gender for the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and gender mainstreaming in UN security policy. Her advisory work includes: working with women leaders from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Melanesia and Kosovo; advising governments and the UN as with the Iraqi ministries of Women’s Affairs and Human Rights and assisting the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations on mainstreaming gender in peacekeeping operations and implementing Resolution 1325.

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