Women, Peace and Security Implementation- a Bureaucratic Phenomenon?

Abstract

Across the globe, the incorporation of women and gender-perspectives into peace and security governance remains dismal despite an impressive paper trail of organisational, national, regional and local action plans. These plans have become the primary recognised strategy for implementing the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda as it is articulated in UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and those that followed. However, scholars have long warned that bureaucratisation and technocratisation of the WPS agenda can reproduce the very hierarchies such frameworks seek to transform. The stated aim of WPS action plans is in fact to address this critique by localising the cluster of norms which forge gender-responsive peace processes. However, often, such action plans are both developed through highly technocratic procedures and expected to be implemented by diverse sets of bureaucrats in ministries, government departments and local governments. Far from neutral, bureaucracies themselves mirror the societies, political context and social histories. As feminist institutionalism and policy research have demonstrated, beyond “neutrality” are normalised gender norms, racial hierarchies and class assumptions – or in stark opposition, activist policy entrepreneurs. This panel traces how feminist norms travel through bureaucratic, institutional, and technocratic processes across diverse contexts—from Côte d’Ivoire to Uganda, Ukraine, the United States and to the African Union. Bringing together case studies that span Global South, postcolonial, and conflict settings, the panel interrogates how the WPS agenda is translated, resisted or re-politicised within international organisations, ministries and local governments, while locating concrete bureaucratic tools for pursuing and resisting feminist transformations. The papers discuss the uses of technocratic means both for the contestation of the WPS agenda and, in contrast, for solidarity with the feminist movement. The panel centers micro-level analysis – the everyday, the complications within “velvet triangles” between bureaucrats, experts, practitioners and activists, the street-level bureaucrats and finally, the norm entrepreneurs and anti-preneurs at an institutional level. In doing so, the panel offers a transregional analysis of the contested boundaries of feminist governance in contemporary peace and security politics.

Title	Details
Bureaucratizing Women’s Security: Côte dʼIvoire’s Security Sector Reform	View Paper Details
From Rupture to Fracture: A Decolonial Analysis of LRA Women Returnees in the Acholi Sub-region, Northern Uganda	View Paper Details
In Defence of Women, Peace and Security: Resisting Dismantling and Neglect	View Paper Details
From Frameworks to Frontlines: Localisation of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in Ukraine’s Regional and Local Governance	View Paper Details
Women mediator networks trickling down Women, Peace and Security policies. An analysis of the localization of FemWise-Africa	View Paper Details