Gender, UN peacebuilding, and the politics of space: locating legitimacy

The United Nations is an organization founded at least in part on hope: hope for a postwar future offering security, human rights, justice, 'social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.' This work documents some of the ways in which the UN engages with peacebuilding as a practice of hope, under the auspices of the UN Peacebuilding Commission that was created in 2005

The United Nations Peacebuilding Commission (UNPBC) was established in December 2005 to develop outlines of best practice in post-conflict reconstruction, and to secure the political and material resources necessary to assist states in transition from conflict to peacetime. However, a 2010 review found that the hopes of the UN peacebuilding architecture had yet to be realized. Laura J. Shepherd draws upon original fieldwork that she conducted with the UNPBC to argue that the spatial politics of peacebuilding are not only gendered--such that they further marginalize and disadvantage indigenous populations in peacebuilding activities--but also perpetuate hierarchies that privilege the international over the domestic realms.