Advocating for the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

On 31 October 2000, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security-the first formal and legal document from the Security Council explicitly requiring parties in a conflict to prevent violations of women's rights, to support women's participation in peace negotiations and in post-conflict reconstruction, and to protect women and girls from wartime sexual violence. Several resolutions followed, which together constitute the normative framework for what is known as the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Civil society played a central role in both the creation and evolution of the agenda, giving them a degree of ownership, and making it nearly impossible to discuss or act on WPS without acknowledging their influence and expertise. This book examines how networked civil society advocates for the WPS agenda with all the effects and affects thereof. It focuses on the UK case, arguing that its geopolitical positioning and vibrant civil society network make it a site of particular relevance to the wider study of the WPS agenda, and especially the role of civil society therein, but with applicability elsewhere. Drawing on a large body of original material-including interviews and documentary sources from both government and civil society-and grounded in feminist theory, the book explores the discursive and affective politics of networked WPS advocacy. It situates the analysis within a discursive, material, and affective framework-one that acknowledges the political economy of NGOs, the affective entanglements shaping the agenda at the intersection of state and civil society, and the wider forces of militarism, imperialism, neoliberalism, and patriarchy into which they are interpellated. Advocates and organisations are shaped by power relations, serve as sites for advocacy performances, produce and are reproduced as gendered and racialised subjects, and navigate various power/knowledge systems. These systems are not only structures in which they are interpellated but also forces that they paradoxically challenge, serve, and reproduce. Historically and institutionally grounded in the UK case-with its distinctive gendered logics-the book illuminates the contradictory politics at the heart of WPS advocacy.

Columba Achilleos-Sarll is an Associate Professor in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. Before joining Birmingham in 2021, Columba was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, an affiliated research fellow at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs (OIIP), and a visiting researcher at the Centre for Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her primary research examines the United Nation's Security Council's 'Women, Peace and Security' (WPS) agenda. More broadly, her work focuses on feminist and post/decolonial approaches to international relations, civil society and advocacy, feminist foreign policy, and visual global politics.