Suchergebnisse

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on 'women, peace and security' was passed in 2000 to recognise and enhance women's participation in peace-building. The Resolution has growing global significance in conflicted societies yet there is limited analysis of its implementation in specific social contexts. Utilising feminist theory on gender in conflicted societies and original empirical evidence from key grassroots community activists in Northern Ireland, I will consider the potential of the 1325 framework as a tool for conceptualising and achieving gender security and equality. This article contributes to an understanding of the importance of deep contextual interpretation for implementation of the women, peace and security agenda and argues for a feminist intersectional interpretation of the Resolution to enable its transformative potential for both peace-building and gender equality.

Feminist critics of power-sharing argue that power-sharing structures privilege ethnic/ethnonational identity and impede women's descriptive and substantive political representation. This paper extends these arguments to consider the extent to which consociational theory addresses the role of civil society and women's political voice in postconflict societies. We argue that power-sharing is overly concerned with formal representation to the detriment of understanding the role civil society can play in peace building. Whilst we acknowledge the importance of civil society retaining a critical distance from political institutions, we suggest several mechanisms for incorporating civil society into power-sharing arrangements. We argue that a consideration of civil society can highlight the gendered issues that are ignored in power-sharing settings, and we conclude that a broader understanding of both "politics" and "conflict" is required for power-sharing to be more equitable to women's descriptive and substantive representation.

Reproductive rights are an under-theorised aspect of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, most clearly typified in United Nations Security Council resolution (UNSCR) 1325 and successive resolutions. Yet reproductive rights are central to women's security, health and human rights. Although they feature in the 2015 Global Study on 1325, there is less reference to reproductive rights, and to abortion specifically, in the suite of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions themselves, nor in the National Action Plans (NAPs, policy documents created by individual countries to outline their implementation plans for 1325). Through content analysis of all resolutions and NAPs produced to date, this article asks where abortion is in the WPS agenda. It argues that the growing centrality of the WPS agenda to women's rights in transitioning societies means that a lack of focus on abortion will marginalize the topic and stifle the development of liberal legalization.

Kathryn McNeilly, Fiona Bloomer, and Claire Pierson explain the background and implications of the recent ruling which, although found Northern Ireland's abortion law to be incompatible with human rights law, dismissed the case on technical grounds.

Consociational democracy has become the most influential paradigm in the field of power-sharing institutional design and post-conflict peacebuilding. Consociation institutes representation for certain formerly excluded groups. However, it simultaneously inhibits effective political representation for groups that do not align with the societal divisions that consociation seeks to accommodate, specifically the 'additional' cleavage of gender. Given the extensive use of the consociational model as a peacebuilding tool in divided states and the growing awareness of the disproportionate negative effect of conflict on women, there is a surprising lack of consideration of the effect that consociational power-sharing has on women's representation. This article considers the specific impact that the consociational model has on women's representation. We argue that because gender is an integral factor in conflict, it should therefore be integral to post-conflict governance. With empirical reference to contemporary Northern Ireland, it is illustrated that consociationalism is a 'gender-blind' theory.