Governing the Feminist Peace: The Vitality and Failure of the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda

The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda is celebrated as a landmark global framework for achieving gender equality in peace and security governance. Its power is visible in two decades of United Nations resolutions, national action plans, regional initiatives, and countless activist, academic, and philanthropic projects. Yet despite this vitality, it is haunted by failure, as a lack of political will and stubborn patriarchal resistance frustrate its promise.

This book offers a groundbreaking critical account of the WPS agenda, exploring its evolution in relation to the wider politics of global governance and feminism. Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd argue that WPS is not a settled, cohesive policy but a field in flux, defined and disrupted by a growing number of national, supranational, subnational, and transnational agents who in turn act on an expanding catalogue of threats, from climate change to homophobia, challenging traditional boundaries of peace and security. Kirby and Shepherd reconceptualize WPS as a ＂policy ecosystem,＂ tracing interaction and contestation around the agenda across levels from the UN Security Council to military alliances to feminist activists. They combine analysis of a vast dataset of policy documents with key informant interviews and close readings of diplomacy, statecraft, the politics of indigeneity, counterinsurgency, antimilitarism, human rights, and the arms trade across the first twenty years of WPS. Far-reaching and incisive, Governing the Feminist Peace poses a provocative question: What if we abandoned the idea of the WPS agenda as a unified political project altogether?

Paul Kirby is senior lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London and a codirector of the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund Gender, Justice and Security Hub.

Laura J. Shepherd is professor of international relations at the University of Sydney and author of Narrating the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Logics of Global Governance (2021).

Kirby and Shepherd are also coeditors, with Soumita Basu, of New Directions in Women, Peace and Security (2020).