Gendering the Agenda - Discursive Constructions of Gender within the Security Council’s ‘Women, Peace and Security’ Agenda

Abstract

In 2000, the adoption of Security Council resolution 1325 on the issue of ‘Women, Peace and Security’ (WPS) heralded the Council’s adoption of a new gender-sensitive approach to security. While an extensive literature has ‘assessed the impact’ of the implementation of this new agenda, limited attention has been paid to interrogating the ways in which WPS policy and its resulting implementation have functioned to discursively reproduce certain understandings of the power relations between women and men. Through a discursive analysis of the four WPS resolutions, this thesis problematises the ways in which the Council has understood and reproduced understandings of gender. It then extends previous analyses of the Council’s practice of WPS policy through a quantitative content analysis and a qualitative discursive analysis of the gender content that appears in the 609 non-WPS resolutions that have been passed since resolution 1325. The study concludes that while gender-sensitive policies may seek to address and prevent gendered forms of oppression and exclusion, the discourses of gender that underpin these policies can function to unconsciously reproduce these very forms of oppression and exclusion.