The Women, Peace and Security Agenda and Post-conflict Political Institutions: A Feminist Institutional Analysis

Since the inception of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) in 2000, feminist academia has been closely interested in the developing Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda in international affairs. The majority of this work has emerged from within feminist international relations (Mcleod, 2015; Shepherd, 2008) and feminist legal studies (Bell and O’Rourke, 2010; Ni Aolain, 2016). Less attention has been paid to the WPS agenda by feminist political science. As a result, less consideration has been given to political institutions within the WPS framework. This paper argues that the design and implementation of post-conflict political institutions is an important component of the WPS agenda, and one which deserves greater attention. It demonstrates that using certain tenets of feminist political science, and feminist institutionalism in particular, can offer key insights into greater understanding of the importance of political institutions within post-conflict societies. The paper illustrates how political institutions have been under-considered within academic work on the WPS agenda. It then argues that political institutions are an important part of the puzzle when it comes to implementing the WPS agenda and furthering women’s rights in post-conflict societies. It shows how feminist institutional theory can help to provide key insights into the nature of post-conflict institutions, and the ways in which they might be made more gender-friendly both in terms of their policy-making and their practices.