Author: drlaurajshepherd

Why We Wrote Governing The Feminist Peace

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This is the first post in a new book symposium, on Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd’s Governing the Feminist Peace, which was published in 2024 by Columbia University Press.

Laura is Professor of International Relations in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, and served as President of the International Studies Association from 2023-2024. She is a former Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2018-2022), and has been a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security in London, UK, since 2016. She is a member of The Disorder of Things authorial collective.

Paul is Reader in International Politics and a Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. He was until this year a Co-Director of the GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub, a multinational, interdisciplinary research consortium investigating the politics of gender justice and inclusive peace. A founding editor of this blog, he is our own Pablo K.

Following this opening post, we will share contributions from an august roster of colleagues over the coming days, followed by a response from the authors.

Book cover of Governing the Feminist Peace

In late April 2019, Nadia Murad addressed the United Nations Security Council during its annual open debate on sexual violence in conflict. Murad had gained an international profile as a courageous and articulate survivor of atrocities carried out by Da’esh – the so-called Islamic State – against the Yazidi ethno-religious community in northern Iraq. In her short speech, Murad urged the council to end its reliance on slogans and finally prosecute sexual violence and other grave crimes. Accompanying Murad was her lawyer, Amal Clooney, who challenged the Council to rise to its “Nuremberg moment, its chance to stand on the right side of history” by triggering an International Criminal Court or hybrid court process. The meeting culminated in a new resolution, the ninth in the series of Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) resolutions, consolidating the status of ‘the agenda’ as the most extensive of all the Security Council’s thematic commitments.

Murad’s six-minute speech was but one instance in a still-unfolding mosaic of events and relations, institutions and movements, talk and text, united by reference to conflict-related sexual violence. Similar constellations of actors may be found throughout the WPS agenda, working across boundaries of domestic and international, formal and informal, state and society, military and civil, lay and expert, public and private. Sexual violence is but one – and the most controversial – in a docket of gender issues, encompassing equal rights, the benefits of women’s substantive participation in promoting peace, the contribution of a ‘gender perspective’ to military planning, the urgent need for global disarmament, recognition of gender diversity, changes to humanitarian practice, inclusivity in refugee, disaster and climate change management, and more besides. As well as the national governments that are invariably the target of appeals for resources and action, the WPS circuit runs on an expansive cast of women’s groups, humanitarian agencies, freelance consultants, celebrity activists, academics, private philanthropic foundations, lawyers, investigative journalists, religious authorities, intergovernmental agencies, international courts, treaty bodies, think tanks, and military alliances.

Governing the Feminist Peace is our attempt to come to terms with this dizzying array of issues and agents. WPS is (still) celebrated as a success for feminists in that a coalition of civil society actors managed to get the Security Council to not just acknowledge the gendered quality of war and peace but to pledge – and on some accounts to legislate – for concerted global action towards feminist goals, from demilitarisation to indigenous peace-making. In formal policy terms it is embraced not only by the Security Council but by over a hundred countries, dozens of regional bodies, and, increasingly, a range of sub-national actors. An accompanying cottage industry has sprung up to track the pace of adoption. For all this energy, WPS is also frequently, almost reflexively, announced as partial, faltering, betrayed, coopted, and securitised. In our terms, a wellspring of vitality and a vortex of failure. These aspects of WPS are not mere opposites, with advocates celebrating vitality and cynics documenting failure. The relation is more intricate, with failure as often a spur to greater implementation efforts as a reason to abandon the agenda, and with vitality in the sense of official adoption to some extent dependent on the failure of the more radical versions of the agenda.

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Feeling (in and out of time)

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The fourth in our coronacrisis series.

Andes_In_A_Crystal_Ball_(190455783)

Photograph: ‘Andes in a Crystal Ball’ by Luis Ezcurdia. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA-3.0.

On Monday, my day began at 7am, giving feedback on a PhD student’s research proposal and ended some fifteen hours later, when I gave up trying to contact a relative who is locked down alone and I finally managed to calm the insistent panic that they were not ok. They were ok, they just forgot that we had set up a call. Lost track of time.

I learned about the three seasons of the Ancient Egyptian year and the key features of their agricultural production (Year 7 Human Society and Its Environment) and how to design a fair and reliable experiment (Year 7 Science). I reminded my kid to log in to his Google classroom on the hour every hour and perform his virtual attendance, because his school has been very clear that this is the only thing that they care about during these extraordinary times and it takes less emotional energy to play by their rules than it does to point out all of the ways in which their rules surely don’t apply at this time. To this time.

I hosted the first weekly virtual coffee morning for colleagues in my Department and listened to PhD students tell us about how hard it is juggling childcare, space to work, and in many cases completely redesigning their project because it’s clear that the fieldwork they have planned for this year is likely no longer possible. I suggested that it was important to give these students space to grieve their lost projects, their other selves.

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Seeing Politics, Seeing the Self/Knowing Politics, Knowing the Self

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The first contribution in a symposium on Sophie Harman’s Seeing Politics (McGill-QUeen’s University Press, 2019) (other symposia are also available). The symposium is today introduced by Disorder regular Laura Shepherd. Laura is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of International Relations at Sydney University. Laura is also a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security in London, UK. Her primary research focuses on the United Nations Security Council’s ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda. Laura is particularly interested in gender, security and violence, and she has strong interests in pedagogy and popular culture. Laura is author/editor of several books, including, most recently Gender, UN Peacebuilding and the Politics of Space (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Routledge Handbook of Gender & Security (edited with Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg; Routledge, 2019). Her work has been published in journals such as European Journal of International Relations, International Affairs, and International Feminist Journal of Politics. She tweets from @drljshepherd and blogs semi-regularly right here.

The contributions to the symposium will be collected at this link as they appear over the next weeks.

Stories have a privileged place in the communicative practices of Western Anglophone cultures; they are a way of learning, and of passing on learning. Sophie Harman’s book is motivated by the insight that the stories of Pili and other HIV-positive African women remain largely untold in scholarly and policy discourse on international politics. As Harman writes in the opening pages, ‘Their stories are instrumentalised for funding, political will, and campaigns but they are one-dimensional stories of success in adversity, educational and sanitised narratives, or morality tales of risk and redemption’.[i] Harman goes on to explain that the partiality of the stories that we tell is not unrelated to the methods that we use to conduct our investigations of world politics; a decolonial feminist perspective enables a different kind of seeing, wherein such ‘methods of seeing need to allow such women to see and represent themselves and to value the knowledge and co-contribution to the research process’.[ii] This sets the scene, so to speak, for the development of film-as-method.

Harman’s is not an uncontroversial intellectual undertaking. International Relations, Harman’s discipline and the discipline in which I also (somewhat uneasily) situate myself, seems a particularly disciplined discipline. The idea of a discipline (noun), in the academic sense, clearly derives from the verb: both relate to establishing clear boundaries between what is right and good (behaviour/research) and what is wrong and bad (behaviour/research); both have ways to correct transgression when an uninitiated (or resistant) person strays. We are trained to recognize the boundaries of our discipline and to stay carefully with them, and the artefacts and agents of International Relations police those boundaries furiously, both explicitly and implicitly.[iii] ‘Among other things, international relations students are quietly forbidden from looking for, let alone importing, valuable insights from art, fiction, and literary criticism’.[iv]  Yet – and thankfully – an ill-disciplined, dissident series of scholars have refused to be bound by such strictures and have delighted in music, photographs, sculptures, murals, novels, and films as ways of encountering, and presenting encounters with, world politics.[v]

Seeing Politics Harman

Harman’s book in some ways continues in the tradition of these scholarly works, exploring ‘the potential of film as method and scholarly output for seeing politics’.[vi] But Harman achieves much more than this. She deftly interweaves telling and showing, reading and seeing, to complicate both how we understand the empirical focus of her investigation – the lives of Pili and women like her – and how we approach and apprehend knowledge itself in our quest to better understand the practices of world politics, and she is centrally concerned with the story of her research – or rather, the stories, plural. Harman presents a many-layered narrative in Seeing Politics, drawing in her own research story, the stories of the women that she worked with, the stories of film-making, and stories about the broader political economy of media production, distribution, and consumption. As Harman explains, ‘[n]arrative feature film is an important method in capturing who speaks and who sees IR; however, it also provides an important insight into the relational aspect of knowledge production and consumption and the role of the researcher within this’.[vii] Within every story, there are multiple stories, and within those stories, worlds to tell. Harman writes with a remarkable sensitivity towards these stories, a sensitivity that I can only describe as an ethic, a mode of encountering the world and her own research as a social practice within that world. This research ethic, and mode of both encountering and producing knowledge, situates Seeing Politics as a different kind of intervention.

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