How women are imagined through conceptual metaphors in United Nations Security Council Resolutions on women,peace and security

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 is a landmark pronouncement on the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. Not only does this resolution highlight the important role of the involvement of women in peace processes, but it also stresses the importance of their equal participation in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace. Furthermore, it also triggers the approval of some other resolutions, which are all further elaborations on that first document. The aim of this paper is to analyse, from a cognitive linguistic perspective, the way in which women are actually narrated in these pronouncements by means of the two conceptual metaphors that are most often repeated: WOMEN ARE VICTIMS, typically found in earlier resolutions, and WOMEN ARE AGENTS OF CHANGE, as the metaphor that has gained more strength and visibility as new resolutions have continued to appear. As metaphors are the cognitive lenses we use to make sense of abstract concepts, it is important that we look closely at each of those metaphors to see how they shape the characterization of women in times of armed conflict and post-conflict and, in doing so, how they guide our understanding and behaviour towards them.     

Women,international law and international institutions: The case of the United Nations

This final article considers the evolution of women's rights concepts and mechanisms within the United Nations. Gaer writes about this subject both as an historian of and a longstanding activist for women's human rights. She provides a critical history of how “women's” rights have been separated from and connected to “human” rights within the UN.     

Beyond cold war pipedreams: What the West was not

In much of the debate about the current role of frontier development (settlement, colonization) in many so-called Third World countries, frontiers in the latter are invariably compared negatively with the late nineteenth-century experience of the IIS frontier held up as an example that others should attempt to follow Recent approaches to the history of the IIS frontier however have questioned the Jeffersonian and/or Turnerist ideal of an egalitarian democracy ofsmall farmers who managed to construct an harmonious and viable frontier in the New World. Rather than contributing positive cultural and political attributes and characteristics to American society, as was claimed by many IIS historians during the Cold War era, the IIS frontier involved genocide, demographic collapse, ecological devastation, economic exploitation and dependency, widespread inter-ethnic violence, social polarization, political corruption, disempowerment and ideological intolerance. The IIS frontier experience did not represent an agrarian reform favouring small farmers, nor was it one of equal opportunity: it should not, therefore, be held up as a model for the rest of the world to imitate if at all possible.     

‘A whisper in the assembly of nations’ United States' participation in the International Movement for Women's Rights from the League of Nations to the United Nations

This work examines North American feminist activities in the international arena from the end of the First World War to the early days of the United Nations. Led by Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party of the United States, feminists attempted to obtain greater equality for women by having nations agree to an Equal Rights Treaty and an equal Nationality Treaty. But they ran into opposition from more moderate social reform women's organizations. Believing protective legislation for women in industry to be more important than legal equality, and antagonistic to the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States' Constitution, reformers objected to the international feminists on ideological grounds. They also disapproved of the radicals' militant tactics and active publicity seeking, thereby extending the quarrel to the realm of personality differences. Thus the divisiveness caused by the ERA in the United States disrupted the international women's movement as well. Working through Pan American Congresses and the League of Nations, and continuing into the United Nations, feminists devoted more than a quarter of a century to fighting for equal rights world-wide. While their actual achievements were not notable, in the end their equalitarian ideas proved to have more enduring value than reform theories.     

Towards food sovereignty: interrogating peasant voice in the United Nations Committee on World Food Security

The goal of the direct participation of food producer constituencies – and other citizens – is a key component of food sovereignty, the policy framework first launched by La Vía Campesina and engendering the much wider food sovereignty movement. In this paper, I outline the reasons why the reform of the United Nations Committee on World Food Security (CFS) can be regarded as historically significant to this goal. Focusing upon the CFS's aspirations for inclusivity, I outline a framework for interrogating the experiences of social movement activists representing food producer constituencies seeking to convert their formal right to participate in the CFS into substantive participation. Going beyond the capturing of their experiences, the framework also reveals the different ways in which their challenges in attaining substantive participation can be overcome, with a particular emphasis upon adjustments within the arena itself. The paper concludes with an overview of the research agenda suggested by Raj Patel (2009), amongst others, and alluded to further in the content of this paper.     

Women in the shadow war: gender,class and MI5 in the Second World War

During the Second World War, the women employed in Britain’s secret Security Service (MI5) far outnumbered their male colleagues, with a ratio of twelve women for every five men. Their numbers grew rapidly over the course of the war and by 1941 stood at over 800. Despite the vast influx of female labour into the agency, attitudes towards the role of women in intelligence, be it as wartime workers or as secret agents, demonstrated remarkable continuity with those of the interwar period. Women were near universally restricted to subordinate roles; typically of clerical and secretarial nature in the case of office staff. Similarly, internal attitudes regarding those traits which produced the best agents and intelligence officers, shaped by wider understandings of both masculinity and social status, demonstrated considerable resilience. Drawing upon declassified official records, this article argues that MI5’s wartime experiences did little to alter the agency’s attitudes to gender.     

trans- bodies in/of war(s): cisprivilege and contemporary security strategy

This article explores a gendered dimension of war and conflict analysis that has up until now received little attention at the intersection of gender studies and studies of global politics: queer bodies in, and genderqueer significations of, war and conflict. In doing so, the article introduces the concept of cisprivilege to International Relations as a discipline and security studies as a core sub-field. Cisprivilege is an important, but under-explored, element of the constitution of gender and conflict. Whether it be in controversial reactions to the suggestion of United Nations Special Rapporteur Martin Scheinin that airport screenings for terrorists not discriminate against transgendered people, or in structural violence that is ever-present in the daily lives of many individuals seeking to navigate the heterosexist and cissexist power structures of social and political life, war and conflict is embodied and reifies cissexism. This article makes two inter-related arguments: first, that both the invisibility of genderqueer bodies in historical accounts of warfare and the visibility of genderqueer bodies in contemporary security strategy are forms of discursive violence; and second, that these violences have specific performative functions that can and should be interrogated. After constructing these core arguments, the article explores some of the potential benefits of an interdisciplinary research agenda that moves towards the theorisation of cisprivilege in security theory and practice.     

The agrarian origins of US capitalism: The transformation of the northern countryside before the civil war

This article examines the women and environment linkage which characterises not only ecofeminist thought but, increasingly, also development discourse and practice ‐from NGOs to the World Bank. It suggests that gender analysis of environmental relations leads to very different conclusions, of potentially conflicting rather than complementary agendas, for gender struggles and environmental conservation.     

United or divided? Women ‘inside’ and women ‘outside’ against male lawmakers in Australia

Is it possible, under patriarchy, for women's liberationists and feminists to instigate and control the direction of law reforms, particularly in areas of law directly affecting women's daily lives—such as rape laws?This article covers one instance, in New South Wales, Australia, where women agitated for law reform and played a large part, at least for a time, in formulating a new law on rape. At the end, however, women's liberation women and feminists lost control because women in the bureaucracy sided with men in the bureaucracy, despite their stance of ‘sisterhood’.Will women ‘outside’ inevitably be sold out by women ‘inside’ the bureaucracy? Once inside, does an allegiance to the establishment (the patriarchy) develop which ousts allegiance to women's liberationism? Or is it true that women inside the system ultimately recognise the system is not ‘of them’, or ‘for them’, and therefore when the barricades are up, will align themselves with women outside, rather than with the true insiders, men?     

Refugee women in Serbia – invisible victims of war in the former Yugoslavia

In this paper, I explore the experiences of women who found refuge in Serbia during the war in the former Yugoslavia. I look at the women's experiences of both leaving home and coping with everyday life in refuge. The exploration of refugee women's experiences is mainly based on analyses of their own stories, which I collected while researching women and war. In spite of all the hardship of their lives, refugee women who fled to Serbia have been treated by Western media, the public and aid organizations as ‘UNPEOPLE’ or as non-existent. Making their experiences visible as women, refugees and citizens is the main purpose of this article.