Gender, Race and Women, Peace and Security

Recent efforts to implement the Women, Peace and Security Agenda and the creation of National Action Plans have resulted in a set of international policy discourses and practices on gender, peace and security. Critics have challenged WPS for its focus on “adding women and stir” and its failure to be transformative. This article contributes to this debate by showing that the implementation of the WPSA is not only about “adding women”, but also about gendering in racialized ways. This can have significant transformative, but challenging and unintended, implications in conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction. Drawing on poststructuralist and postcolonial feminist theory and on fieldwork in post-conflict contexts, I propose a critical reading of WPSA policy discourse in order to examine its inherent logics, tensions and consequences. This discourse draws on gendered and racialized dichotomies with the aim of normalizing certain forms of subjectivity in the global South while rendering invisible and marginalizing others, contributing to (re)produce certain forms of normativity and hierarchy through a powerful set of policy practices. Deconstructing such processes of inclusion and exclusion is essential as it allows for the identification of sites of contestation and provides an entry point to challenge transplanted feminism logics and practices.