An international legal analysis of the UN Security Council's agenda on Women, Peace and Security (WPS).

In 2000, the UN Security Council adopted the ground-breaking Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) placing women at the centre of the agenda, thanks to years of campaigning. The Resolution recognises the differential impact of armed conflict on women and men, draws attention to the 'inextricable links between gender equality and international peace and security' and stresses the 'important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts and in peace-building'. But what exactly is the WPS agenda and what is its content? What are its implications for peace and for security? And what does it mean for international lawyers? Through the narratives of women's activism and of international law this book seeks to make the WPS agenda better known to international lawyers and to ask whether it is, or could become, an international legal regime that conforms and responds to the realities of women's lives.

What does gender equality mean for peace, justice, and security? At the turn of the 21st century, feminist advocates persuaded the United Nations Security Council to adopt a resolution that drew attention to this question at the highest levels of international policy deliberations. Today the Women, Peace and Security agenda is a complex field, relevant to every conceivable dimension of war and peace. This groundbreaking book engages vexed and vexing questions about the future of the agenda, from the legacies of coloniality to the prospects of international law, and from the implications of the global arms trade to the impact of climate change. It balances analysis of emerging trends with specially commissioned reflections from those at the forefront of policy and practice.

Greater participation by women in peace negotiations, policy-making, and legal decision-making would have a lasting impact on conflict resolution, development, and the maintenance of peace in post-conflict zones. Women, Peace, and Security lays the groundwork for this enhanced participation, drawing from insightful research by women scholars and applying a feminist lens to contemporary security issues. This timely collection of essays promotes the adoption of a feminist framework for international security issues and presents the voices of some of the most inspiring thinkers in feminist international relations in Canada. Women, Peace, and Security provides insightful recommendations to researchers conducting fieldwork, as well as methodological insights on how to develop feminist research design in international relations and how to adopt feminist ethical considerations. Contributions include gender-based analyses of the challenges faced by the Canadian military and by families of serving members. From Canada's Famous Five to the women's marches of 2017, lessons are drawn to inform new generations of women activists, concluding with a clarion call for greater allyship with Indigenous women and girls to support decolonization efforts in Canada. Offering a unique range of perspectives, narratives, and contributions to international relations and international law, this volume brings women's voices to the forefront of vital conversations about fundamental peace and security challenges.

Recent developments such as Sweden's' Feminist Foreign Policy, the "Hillary Doctrine," and the integration of women into combat roles in the U.S. have propelled gender equality to the forefront of international politics. The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, however, has been integrating gender equality into peacekeeping missions for nearly two decades as part of the women, peace and security agenda that has been most clearly articulated in UNSC Resolution 1325. To what extent have peacekeeping operations achieved gender equality in peacekeeping operations and been vehicles for promoting gender equality in post-conflict states? While there have been major improvements related to women's participation and protection, there is still much left to be desired. Sabrina Karim and Kyle Beardsley argue that gender power imbalances between the sexes and among genders place restrictions on the participation of women in peacekeeping missions. Specifically, discrimination, a relegation of women to safe spaces, and sexual exploitation, abuse, harassment, and violence (SEAHV) continue to threaten progress on gender equality. Using unique cross-national data on sex-disaggregated participation of peacekeepers and on the allegations of SEAHV, as well as original data from the UN Mission in Liberia, the authors examine the origins and consequences of these challenges. Karim and Beardsley also identify and examine how increasing the representation of women in peacekeeping forces, and even more importantly through enhancing a more holistic value for "equal opportunity," can enable peacekeeping operations to overcome the challenges posed by power imbalances and be more of an example of and vehicle for gender equality globally.

Laws and norms that focus on women's lives in conflict have proliferated across the regimes of international humanitarian law, international criminal law, international human rights law and the United Nations Security Council. While separate institutions, with differing powers of monitoring and enforcement, implement these laws and norms, the activities of regimes overlap. Women's Rights in Armed Conflict under International Law is the first book to account for this pluralism and institutional diversity. This book identifies key aspects of how different regimes regulate women's rights in conflict, and how they interact. Using country case studies to reveal the practical implications of the fragmented protection of women's rights in conflict, this book offers a dynamic account of how regimes and institutions interact, the extent to which they reinforce each other, and the tensions and gaps in regulation that emerge.

This book provides a critical assessment of the impact of UN Resolution 1325 by examining the effect of peacebuilding missions on increasing gender equality within conflict-affected countries. UN Resolution 1325 was adopted in October 2000, and was the first time that the security concerns of women in situations of armed conflict and their role in peacebuilding was placed on the agenda of the UN Security Council. It was an important step forward in terms of bringing women’s rights and gender equality to bear in the UN’s peace and security agenda. More than a decade after the adoption of this Resolution, its practical reality is yet to be substantially felt on the ground in the very societies and regions where women remain disproportionately affected by armed conflict and grossly under-represented in peace processes. This realization, in part, led to the adoption in 2008 and 2009 of three other Security Council Resolutions, on sexual violence in conflict, violence against women, and for the development of indicators to measure progress in addressing women, peace and security issues. The book draws together the findings from eight countries and four regional contexts to provide guidance on how the impact of Resolution 1325 can be measured, and how peacekeeping operations could improve their capacity to effectively engender security. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, gender studies, the United Nations, international security and IR in general.