Suchergebnisse

This case draws lessons from feminist fieldwork methodologies in three West African countries to inform the study of international relations. It uses the implementation of the UN Security Council's Women, Peace, and Security agenda to examine the meanings of peace and security for women and how women's local activism works with national governments and international agendas. This case study demonstrates that feminist-driven field research is a valuable research methodology in that it is, at its core, highly reflexive. One of the benefits of using feminist fieldwork practices to study the impacts of international policies is that the researcher is continually working to avoid exploitation and the pretense of objectivity. In particular, this case explores how researchers and participants in conflict and post-conflict contexts can share knowledge and mobilize collectively, as well as how researchers can understand their data relationally across sites and crises.

Advocating for Themselves: Seeking Security Through Women's Peacebuilding Organizations in Cote d'Ivoire, is a study of the UN Security Council's Women, Peace, and Security agenda and how it is implemented in Côte d'Ivoire. I examine local and national women's security and peacebuilding organizations' understandings of security and the ways they establish and advocate for their priorities while working with the United Nations, transnational NGOs, and the national government. Much of the prior research on this topic suggests that international efforts to implement this agenda clash with national and local priorities. But I demonstrate that the reality is more complex: while multiple international and transnational discourses have sometimes-competing, sometimes-cooperating effects on the local implementation, Ivorian women's understandings of security also shape the agenda' implementation. To understand the local dynamic of women's advocacy, I interviewed local NGO, government, and UN representatives and conducted participant observation over eleven months in Cote d'Ivoire, funded by a Fulbright Fellowship. I make three central arguments. The first is that two kinds of global actors—international and transnational—try to shape the Women, Peace, and Security agenda, but they do so in distinctive ways: through the state and bypassing it, resulting in poorly coordinated directives. The second is that this agenda in Côte d'Ivoire has narrowed to a focus on security sector reform at the national level, with the assistance of international actors, which privileges mechanisms of traditional security and co-opts women into existing structures of power. Third, local women's organizations perform a pragmatic skepticism, working with international, transnational, and national actors to achieve their own goals, reclaiming some of the essentializing discourses told about them. With insights from African feminism and critical feminist peacebuilding literatures, my findings call into question the assumptions of women's roles in international security policies and the interrelation of actors in policy implementation.

Abstract
Beginning in the 1990s, Morocco increasingly became a de facto host country for sub-Saharan migrants and asylum seekers originally intending to reach Europe. While the government's treatment toward these groups was characterized by informality and violence throughout the early 2000s, Morocco embarked on a reform process in 2013 that included a regularization process for irregular migrants. During the regularization process, the Moroccan government automatically granted all women applicants residency status due to their presumed 'vulnerability'. This paper asks: What are the implications of assuming that women are 'inherently vulnerable'? Drawing on in-person interviews and an analysis of policy documents, this article adds to the gendered migration and refugee literature by demonstrating that supposedly humanitarian policies toward women can also victimize them, stereotype male migrants and refugees as threatening, and strengthen the patriarchal role of the state and its ability to carry out violence in the name of protection.