 trickle in and then I and Amanda or Amanda and I will start introducing ourselves, welcoming you properly and open up the event. So we'll wait for a few seconds to let everyone settle. Counting in all our the whole audience at the moment, I think we should start to begin with, I'll just introduce myself, my name is Dr Andrea Elna, I am a lecturer in the Defence Studies Department and Amanda will introduce both of us more formally in a minute but then at least you know who's speaking to you at the moment. Welcome to our roundtable. Before I start I've been asked to make sure that everyone understands that this is this is being recorded this session at the event and it is being live streamed at the same time. We are also encouraging everyone to engage in discussions on Twitter with the handle of Women, Peace and Security and if when we're getting to the questions session please ask your questions in the Q&A box. Amanda and I will monitor the questions as they're coming in that you don't need to wait until all the speakers have finished because it will just make it more efficient because we can then start engaging with the questions. How we're going to run the session I will explain, Amanda and I will explain in a few minutes. So let's start. Formerly now hello and welcome everyone to the School of Security Studies, Kings College London, Sponsored Roundtable on Women, Peace and Security. Reflecting upon how we achieve the initial resolution 1325 and subsequent resolutions that make up the WPS agenda, the current challenges and sticky points we are facing and where we need to go to achieve the initial radical and emancipatory potential the first resolution promised. UN Resolution 1325 was unanimously passed by the UN Security Council on 31st of October 2000. The resolution recognised that violence against women in conflict and post-conflict was not an unfortunate but somehow natural part of war, but a war crime. It is rooted in a long tradition of feminist thinking and activism that sees such violence as part of a continuum and whose approaches to and practices of conflict, resolution, peace and security put the pursuit of social justice and the abolition of structural violence at their heart. What more can we do to facilitate in practice and at every level of global politics the pursuit of the possible futures this agenda could engender? Over to Amanda. We're very excited to bring together a group of esteemed colleagues each providing important insights and entry points into understanding the evolution of the WPS agenda over these past two decades and explore where we might go from here. We're very grateful for our panelist time and for sharing their thoughts, experiences and expertise with us and we're also very grateful for you for tuning in. Let me briefly introduce myself as the co-chair of this roundtable like Andrea mentioned. I'm Amanda Chisholm. I'm a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies here at KCL and I teach and research on gender and global security feminist IR and feminist global political economy. My research focuses on global labor forces that support private military and security companies and I'm particularly interested in how the privatization of warfare impacts the WPS agenda. Again I'm joined here by Dr. Andrea Elner and like she said she's a lecturer in the Department of Defense Studies and she teaches on the WPS agenda and global security and on gender armed forces in war. Her research focuses on women in Germany during the Second World War and under occupation, the integration of women in the armed forces as well as civil military relations and ethics particularly moral injury. Together we are joined by six panelists. Our first speaker is Dr. Sumita Basu. Dr. Basu is an assistant professor of international relations at the South Asian University New Delhi. Dr. Basu has written and researched extensively on WPS and has made important post-colonial and decolonial interventions. Her most recent publication is a co-edited volume New Directions in Women, Peace and Security published by Bristol University Press this year with Paul Kirby and Laura Shepherd. Our next speaker is Dr. Jamie Hagen. Dr. Hagen is a lecturer in international relations at Queen's University Belfast where she is the co-edited co-director of the Center for Gender and Politics. Her work at the intersection of gender security studies and queer theory appears in a number of peer review journals including international affairs and critical studies and security. Next we have Dr. Swarna Rajagopalan. Dr. Rajagopalan is trained as a political scientist and has had an academic and political interest in questions relating to gender and security. She continues to write academically and in the general media on WPS topics. Swarna is a founding member of the Women's Regional Network, a Women's Peace Network in South Asia and the founder of the Prajna Trust, a non-profit working on gender equality and peace education. Great, IT. Here I am. Sorry, I'm mute of myself. Dr. Rajagopalan is followed by Cynthia Petrie. Cynthia is an international expert in support to societies and transition with 20 years experience in the field in West and Central Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Her company, Beyond Peace, specializes in providing training and advisory services to armed forces on international norms in supporting peace processes through women's participation and in monitoring human rights violations. A member of the UK Stabilization Union, she regularly works with the EU, the UN, the OFCE, and the San Remo, IIHL, and in academia. Next, we are pleased to welcome Dr. Aiko Holvikivi. Dr. Holvikivi is a research officer at the LSE Women or Center for Women, Peace and Security and a guest lecturer at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. Her research covers different thematic areas of the WPS agenda, including gender training, peacekeeping, and forced displacement. Her recent articles appear in European Journal of International Security and the European Journal of Politics and Gender. Before returning to academia, Aiko worked in the field of gender insecurity with civil society and intergovernmental organizations, and her work continues to combine research with policy engagement and stakeholder outreach. Finally, I'd like to introduce Professor Saskia Stasiewicz. Professor Stasiewicz is a professor of international politics at the University of Vienna and the Scientific Director of the Austrian Institute of International Affairs, OIIP. She was an affiliate scholar at the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting scholar at the School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research interests are in critical security and military studies, feminist and post-colonial theory in international relations, privatization of security, gender in the military, EU border security, transnational actors including contacts, and parliamentarianism, anti-Semitism, and the politics, political history of Austrian Jews. This round table is divided into two parts where we've asked each of our panelists to consider specific questions and provocations. The first part is themed around how did we get here, and asks each person to reflect upon the history of the rise of the agenda and the activism that underpinned the resolutions. The second part is themed around current challenges but also thinking about the potential features of the agenda. We've asked the panelists to consider the current state of affairs but also what interventions we may need to do in order to realize the initial promises of WPS and Resolution 1325. Each part is 45 minutes, 15 minutes of Q&A from you, the audience. As Andrea mentioned, you can trickling questions through the Q&A chat box you'll find at the bottom of the screen as they come to you. We hope while you're doing this you can indicate which panel member you'd ask the question to and who you are that would help us out a great deal. Also, like this is being live streamed so please join in the conversation on Twitter with hashtag WPS and you can tag the School of Security Studies or any of us and hopefully we can pick it up there. We have agreed on a speaking order for the panelists so we'll move on to hearing them now. I want to thank you again for tuning in and I'm going to hand the floor over now to Sumita. Thank you Amanda and Andrea for organizing this panel discussion and a big hello to everyone joining us today. The first question as was mentioned that's been identified for us is how we got here and this question has a special meaning for me because my PhD thesis has written a long time ago now focused on the passage of 1325 in the year 2000. So I take this opportunity to return to that point in the evolution of the WPS agenda and well I'm glad that I'm speaking first in this session. There's much that can be said so I decided that my comments today would be centered on the institutional context of the UN Security Council, a theme that I've examined a fair bit in my research. We know that the provisions of resolution 1325 and its nine sister resolutions are not particularly radical from a feminist perspective but that these have got so much importance because the Security Council now says so for better and as some feminists would also argue for the worst. So how did the institutional context matter in 2000? I will highlight three aspects of this. First if we look at all the hard work that went into the advocacy for the passage of the resolution we find that even though civil society actors were the driving force and there's a consensus in the literature on this they took seriously the protocol that marks former council deliberations. Anecdotal evidence as well as research publications by those involved suggested while the NGO working group worked feverishly behind the scenes they made sure that they did not appear to be driving the agenda and that member states had the ownership of the draft resolution. This they did even as they maintained a public critique of the UN and member states in their press briefings and statements as at important junctures such as the Beijing plus five review meeting in June 2000 and the WPS Arya formula meeting in October 2000. Further the WPS advocates systematically put together were rooted in the council's mandate. The advocates that I'm now talking about were also from UN especially UNIFEM and permanent representations of governments. My second point relates to the role of member states in the council. Needless to say there are differences in their standpoint on gender and its relevance in the council's agenda. Certain countries are also hostile to the idea. Resolutions and debates on WPS however offer an opportunity for non-permanent member states to leave their mark on the council. Namibia which held the presidency of the council in October 2000 when 1325 was adopted was also driven by its recognition of the role played by women in the United Nations Transition Assistance Group on its own soil in 1989-1990. And in later years we find for instance that the US and France have focused on protection issues in keeping with their thematic interests in protection of civilians in armed conflicts and children and armed conflict respectively. Finally I return to the debate on the WPS agenda regarding the association with the council. Well approximately five months before the passage of resolution 1325 the sanitation of the Beijing platform for action. The report presents a deeper assessment of issues relating to women and armed conflicts than a resolution 1325 does. For instance a direct link is made between military expenditures and social and economic development related to women's lives. But how often is this report cited? Clearly the resolution is regarded as a more important document by feminist scholars as well as member states directed against its setup and mode of functioning is still understood to be the most important international entity as far as deliberations on international peace and security are concerned. That's it for me. Thank you. I've unmuted. Can we hear me now? So it's fantastic to be here at this round table today. Sumita was actually the chair on the first panel I ever presented work on women, peace and security. So it's fantastic to have the opportunity to be on a round table and contribute to this conversation thinking about you know how did we get where we are with the now 10 resolutions. So building on some of the thoughts about really the role of this being rooted in civil society the way I think about women, peace and security and where we are now is really thinking quite expansively if not clearly right about women's empowerment and agenda perspective and peace and security work. So yes of course we have 1325 in the year 2000 very pivotal very important you know in my first week on gender, peace and security in our MA module we read 1325 and we talk about the text in detail right but I also think that it's important to remember of course women's engagement peace and security work did not begin with 1325 we have decades of work before that and there's a long legacy of this work that's really been unrecognized as being part of peace and security work now just making sure that everyone can hear me my audio was cutting out but I think you cannot hear me. So I think as I'm thinking through the roots of 1325 and the women, peace and security agenda I think about this conversation I had with Charlotte Bunch in 2012 I interviewed her and you know Charlotte Bunch if you don't know is a lesbian international human rights organizer and activist and was part of has done really groundbreaking work at the UN but was part of the gender quality architecture reform gear which then led to UN women and I think it is important for us all to remember that the UN infrastructure of all of this is relatively new it's all kind of we're in the messiness of all of it right now but that said there's there is tons of there's decades of work in in unrecognized spaces of doing of doing peacekeeping and peacebuilding that that this is built on right so that's what I'm thinking about I'm thinking about the resolution but I'm thinking about all that went into and got edited out of that work to then lead to the 10 resolutions but one of the things that Charlotte said to me in the work that she does is that human rights are indivisible and as someone who's motivated to think about a gender perspective that is of course inclusive of LGBTQ voices that is something that's really grounding for me to think about human rights as queer rights and and women's rights as human rights I also find it super fascinating that the first president of the women's international league for peace and freedom Jane Adams was a lesbian and so we're talking about in 1915 one of the leading voices of the women's peace party in the US is a lesbian and I imagine a lot of people don't know that and I think that matters I think that matters if that part of the story of women's the women's peace movement is not something that people are terribly knowledgeable about but moving into my final point here Bunch in our interview also really emphasized the importance of every country taking a lead in the human rights struggle and certainly this is just more broadly thinking about human rights organizing but very much applies to the women's peace and security agenda so when I learned about 1325 I learned about it through peace women and the global network of women peace builders I urge you to check out the work that they're doing if you're not familiar and the founder and CEO of GNWP Mavic Cabrera Baleza was pivotal in really helping me understand what it means to look at women peace and security at work so in the work that GNWP does it's part about part of that is about localization trainings and helping local and regional initiatives define women peace and security in based on what human rights issues are most pressing and how how they understand them so you know I think as Mavic explains she trains women and girls in international laws on gender equality women's rights and peace and security work so that they can use these laws to assert their rights and demand their important role in decision-making so like this is sort of as I see it women peace and security 1325 is really another tool in opening up space to allow for this right to you know the NGO working group as was mentioned earlier is about you know bringing these perspectives to the fore to hold states accountable for actually having a gender perspective and peace and security work which was written into that resolution that you know gender perspective must be included and I think today we're just seeing you know 20 years of work to continue to find new and powerful ways to continue to do that Hello everyone thank you for inviting me to this panel I'm so delighted to be here I'm going to speak today from my location as an independent scholar as a peace educator a writer and a citizen working towards gender equality and peace on October 31st 2000 I was a postdoc at Michigan State and I was sitting in my office dodging ladybugs that were falling from everywhere and playing a newly discovered toy the UN web tv stream which was crystal clear and on the stream at that point with the speeches and security council uh preceding the the adoption of 1325 and I sat there and I listened to them and worked not quite realizing what a historic moment it was um and then I didn't think about and there are so many UN resolutions most of them fairly empty from the point of view of the average person I didn't think about this again till about 2011 when I was invited to conference in 1325 so how did we get there one part of the history of the resolution is of course recorded in the resolution but um you know I work in this little corner of the universe and in a very small organization writing things that very few people read talking to groups of 10 15 on a lucky day and 1325 symbolizes something very hopeful to me the change does come so the romantic the miraculous part of 1325 is coming into being for me is really the history of women's peace activism that others have mentioned as well local and transnational for over a hundred years prior to its passage weaving in a dozen other struggles illustrating that peace is more than no war women activists were also among those fighting for better labor conditions the suffrage for nationality against colonial rule they wrote letters petitions newsletters traveled when they could where they could and internationalism was integral to their thinking as they supported efforts to stop war to bring peace they supported the formation of the league of nations and then the united nations most of you know this history better than i do in the post-colonial era as well even before the global women's conferences women continued their efforts to network raise common concerns build solidarity there were differences then and there are differences now sometimes they seem insurmountable but that doesn't really stop us and i'm thinking particularly for example about the tribunals in the 70s around um question of comfort women sexual violence and conflict a huge amount of effort must have gone into putting them together and surely some funder asked well did you have any impact how are you going to measure impact and it would have been impossible to answer this question then but less than 20 years later the tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda clearly established rape and sexual violence in conflict as crimes against humanity and within a decade of that you have the passage of the adoption of 1325 we now agree as if we always have the sexual violence in conflict is an abomination and completely unacceptable it's a very long journey in a very short time and you think about how short 30 40 years are in the human experience and it seems to me to be near miraculous that we have walked in the years that i can remember as an adult from thinking that rape is one of the spoils of war for soldiers to agreeing now that it's completely accept in unacceptable each of the pillars of 1325 comes from a history of activism by women that illustrates both the fact that women do engage competently with issues of peace and security and that if you keep working on the big issues in your small way change comes it does add up cynicism is very very cool and people always ask what is the point of what you are doing how can you measure it where will all this effort lead what is the point of this campaign what is the point of the un which is now 75 quite pointlessly and i i'd like to close this part of what i want to say by actually pointing to 1325 that is the point chipping away year after year day after day wherever you are alone and together with others you can make things change and i think if that's the only purpose that this resolution ever served it would be good enough for me good morning everyone or good afternoon for those who are following us from Asia i'm delighted to be here i will just add a few words after what we heard from the other panelists the adoption as the outline of 1325 is the result of the joint hard work over decades of civil society organizations of the un and governance and i believe there were two main factors that enabled its adoption the first one as i think was just explained by by uh swarno is that after the celebration of the Beijing 95 conference which was very successful public opinion and women's groups discovered the shocking extent of the use of rape in conflicts that were well covered by the media uh bosnia and the genocide in ronda so women's groups pressured the un and governments to put an end to violence against women in war but i think the second factor that enabled that is that in 2000s we were a few years only after the collapse of the cold war era political systems and they had not yet rearranged there was room for consensus and for progressive policies would this have been possible today probably not because today the political space has shrunk the state is back with a revenge and we can see a very confrontational political landscape full of shows of toxic masculinity winner takes all approach as we can see every day in the media so it was i think this international environment that helped women's group promote their their agenda so what's the significance of of 1325 it is in the huge shift it means that the conceptual the social and the political levels a shift from civil society organizations being in the background to civil society organizations taking the front stage and the shift from women's roles and safety as a social issue to women's roles and safety as an international peace and security issue so what we need today in spite of the difficult political context uh i just reminded is to take this major shift to the next step because 1325 is definitely an achievement but women are still the objects of the policy the next step is that women are not only the objects but the designers and the implementers and we will address this this level and the path to to that in the next session okay hello everyone i'm delighted to be here and i'd like to thank Amanda and Andrea for posing this first question because i think it's always important to think back on how it is that we got the WPS agenda and that's partially in service of the feminist ethics to acknowledge what sumi madhawk calls our feminist debts um but also partially to interrogate what we might have forgotten along the way and what lessons we can draw from what went before um now as all the previous speakers have rightly highlighted the WPS agenda builds from at least a century of women's peace activism and in this tradition getting security council resolution on women peace and security was seen as a as one pragmatic step along the way not simply to getting women into existing structures of power but to take meaningful steps towards transformative change and ultimately peace um and now the agenda has arguably developed um somewhat of a focus on security over peace um despite reminders from advocates such as core wise that its aim was never to make war safe for women um and so i think it's worth revisiting some of the historical steps along the way and the aspect that i'd like to draw attention to is the development of WPS in the context of broader initiatives towards gender equality within systems of global governance um arguably it was instruments such as c-daw so the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women as well as advocacy around women and later gender in development um in conjunction with the UN world conferences on women that helped build the normative concepts in which a security council resolution on gender and conflict became thinkable um so on the one hand i think this raises questions of what we can learn from these fields um for example we've seen in the WPS context the development of initiatives um such as my research area gender training for peacekeepers um as well as the use of instrumentalist arguments like the fact that gender perspective increases operational effectiveness um but what we don't always remember is that gender training was delivered delivered to development practitioners already in the 1990s so before we had a WPS agenda um and that the incorporation of gender analyses and development work was often justified in similarly instrumental terms such as investing in women is good for development um and i bring these up to suggest that WPS scholars and practitioners might have some things to gain from studying international development and what the history of this field might teach us about some of the opportunities opened up and the political dangers that i've heard some of the strategies we're using um similarly there's an argument to be made um such as one suggested by madeline recent a recent publication that the WPS agenda could gain from fostering closer linkages to human rights frameworks such as sida and that's partially because these come typically with more established monitoring mechanisms than what we have um with the WPS agenda but also because an attentiveness to human security which includes economic security that these human rights frameworks give us could help ensure that the WPS agenda addresses the concerns of a diverse range of women so when it comes to the question of how we got the agenda i think it's important important to bear in mind the traditions and goals of women's peace activism that it draws from as well as to retain and review how WPS fits in with a broader normative frameworks on gender equality thank you hi everyone good morning from vienna um thank you so much to all the speakers who already mentioned so many interesting aspects of how we got the resolutions i would like to add just one more point to this because there's this this common narrative that foregrounds the relentless lobbying and strategizing of women's organization in how um women's peace and security got institutionalized at the level of the security council and beyond and it's certainly a very important aspect the work of women and women's struggles to take gendered insecurities to the highest level security organization but there's also another layer to this story and um carol herrington has written about it in her 2011 paper on post cold war feminism in the un uh where she says uh that it's also been geopolitical power relations that mattered a great deal at the end of the cold war and uh that superpower politics at the rise of the u.s as the lone superpower uh was an important context particularly in how the u.s began to substantially argue its geopolitical claims in connections to democratization and women's human rights and the problematics around that sort of legitimization um so i'm not bringing this up to diminish the work of feminists and women's NGOs obviously not and neither does herrington but i think it's an important reminder that the power constellations that uh shape such agendas are meaningful and they're likely to have an impact a long way from um you know the the establishment of the resolutions themselves and there's there's no real way out of this we have the institutions we have and we operate under the constraints that we do uh but i think it's important to reflect on it and to not engage you know in unproductive conflict among uh different feminist approaches to the agenda and this is probably also leading a little bit into into the issue of what's what's up next uh is that i see two you know main strands of critique around why a wps has not achieved yet what it uh was designed to do uh and simplistically said i think there's there's two ways of approaching this issue and one was a more pragmatic strategic approach focuses on the formulation of national action plans evaluation and most often on implementation of the many uh institutional technocratic challenges that hinder the realization of the agenda and the other is a more critical approach that scrutinizes the broader narratives and stereotypes underlying the agenda and um criticizing it quite vocally um about its you know tendency towards essentialist universalist sometimes orientalist representations of women and their security needs particularly around the issue of um addressing women mainly as victims of violence and forgetting about uh the very important issues of participation and representation of women as act as actors and active agents um in their own interests uh and like in many other feminist inner feminist debates i think we definitely need both approaches to keep pushing for change but also to hopefully engage more with each other because i think the the institutional constraints and the underlying narratives and stereotypes very much feed off of each other and um there i think there's there's a lot to gain here from from connecting these two critical strands especially around this uh much criticized focus on gender-based violence and and forgetting you know other more emancipatory uh issues around wps and that's it for me in the first row great oh my goodness i'm in awe of the the sharp analysis um and reflections our our panelists have done so far um yeah so we have a few questions here that i guess i'm just going to read them all out and then i'll get uh the panelists to respond afterwards we have um four one is specific for Sumita um from Cornelia Wise and she just wants to obtain a copy of your dissertation so um Cornelia we can get that done i think um Sumita's going to email that out and we can we can distribute that i'm sure so um yeah that was an easy question uh and then we've got another one from uh i'm a grizzilla oh it it was answered i guess or just moved away wait grizzilla um yeah so the department of politics sir university and she says hello just a small commenting question on the 28th of august 2020 another resolution was adopted resolution 2538 on women in peace keeping operations that's making the total of wps resolutions 211 and then the question is shall we celebrate or think that having one resolution after another is becoming a ritual with little accountability so um so i'm going to delegate that to swanna to to respond since she typed something in so we'll let maybe swanna way in on that one first but before we move to the panelists we also have two other questions that are posed uh how can we increase awareness of historical women's activism um in a fora beyond academia and a following question is there a risk that wps as interpreted by state actors is constraining recognition of women's work so um i guess we can we can decide who will answer those important questions but right now i'll just um pass on to maybe swanna to answer the first question if that's okay sure you want me to turn on the video yes please yeah but the answer that i wrote was that i would actually vote for it being uh for it becoming a ritual um i think that there's something there seems to be some sort of clock one and this year we've actually had two resolutions like there was one in april as well um this is in danger of becoming one of those typical un agendas but annually a resolution is passed but nothing much comes of it and in part it comes from something i want to talk about a little later as well but everything hinges on states adopting and implementing so the question that i would append to calling this a ritual is so what are we going to do about it and um i think that kind of relates to the second question that Amanda read out which was about taking this up and doing some more is that remembering that right but i'll leave that for someone else to answer that's the thank you thank you um swanna for that sorry i'm just working out the tech i'm assuming everyone can hear me um great so uh samita has um volunteered to go up next to respond so i'll give the floor to samita now thank you and uh thank you razi alla for your comment um since i'm so focused on the the politics at the council today i just wanted to um add a comment to your comment which is that if that was adopted um it is not a women women and peace and security one instead it is actually a resolution on peacekeeping operations and i would just um uh you know i think that is an important distinction uh when you do not name a resolution women and peace and security but instead a wps resolution is titled uh as under the theme of peacekeeping operations what does that mean for the wps agenda moving forward it's too recent to to be able to come up with and i and i'm not familiar with the politics behind the scenes for this particular resolution uh but i just wanted to highlight the title for our discussion thank you i i also uh believe this is a very good question so i also want to add a few words thank you razi alla because we all share your frustration at some points i've shared this kind of frustration and i still do sometimes so i i totally understand this but i have to say these resolutions are not somewhere up there in the world of theory they are useful because we can task governments to act about them and i will take an example uh in my work with my company beyond peace we do train uh military uh with compliance with international norms meaning respecting itel and the prevention of sexual violence and if you show up in a military camp as a civilian woman and say i want to tell you to stop raping women um you will not be as well received as if you come and say your country has signed this UN Security Council resolution and as military your duty is to work for the political objectives of your government and so i think that if it is up to us to take these resolutions and make something with them go and see governments go and see military go and see diplomats and say listen this is what you've signed and this is how we're going to help you implement it and and i have used that a lot and i think you know even if it's sometimes frustrating because we would like to have more these resolutions are very useful because we can uh task governments uh decision makers armed forces to do things about them and to let us come in with our agenda and work for the improvement of women's rights of women's recognitions of women's roles at all stages there's still a lot of work to do and we'll take this in the second part but i want to say i have found them very useful because for some uh politicians for some military it is a language they can understand thank you hi everyone i also hi cross nela i also wanted to come in on your question um and and you might have been building towards this anyway but i would i would argue that it's pretty both right and and because that's the fantastic thing that feminist thinking and theorizing gives us is the ability to move from either or thinking to both and um and and perhaps adding to some of the reasons to celebrate i mean it kind of shows i was an event recently where one of the one of the activists who was who was involved in an NGO working group getting resolution 1325 passed brought up that you know when that happened she didn't think that anybody in the security council thought that there would be another one that that was going to be kind of the end of it so the fact that it kind of keeps going demonstrates something of an institutionalization and then an establishment of the agenda and also i mean it does in some ways demonstrate the kind of point that i was making earlier about perhaps the agenda focusing on security over peace and and developing certain kinds of focus but i think the passage multiple resolutions also demonstrates that it's a field of ongoing contestation um and this is something that was captured so wonderfully in Samita and Paul Kirby and Laura Shepherd's recent book about WPS as a community in a in a field of ongoing contestation so in some ways these kinds of debates of which way the agenda is going resolutions that that focus on different aspects of it in some ways demonstrate a maturity of the WPS field um and i think there is definitely something to celebrate there thanks great so we have a few more um questions coming in so i'm just going to read one from um from one of our panel panelists is the resolution linked to peacekeeping distracting from WPS or gender mainstreaming so that's one question for our panelists to consider and um the um and the second question actually from an anonymous audience member which actually i i think probably can be addressed in the second part but we'll flag it here um the attendee writes hello all thank you so much for such a great webinar i don't have any one panelist member in mind i understand that this resolution takes women peace and security as a societal issue to an international peace security issue um though it is a huge step but in particularly some countries where laws to protect women from sexual abuse and violence and their rights are largely absent how do you see this resolution going forward and creating space for women in such societies and states again i think this is a great question and i'll flag it hopefully our panelists will be able to address that one in particular in the the next um part of this round table where do we go from here um and then we have one question that just came in now from victoria share do you think the WPS agenda can finally change power structures in the security council thanks a lot um so that question in particular i wonder if i can actually pass that off to samita i'm sorry i'm just flagging you up because i know you've written on this so i wonder if you might want to respond to victoria's question i'm afraid the short answer is not so much uh because we're working with a very rigid institutional structure in the form of the um the veto power and just the the the membership of the security council itself and charter changes haven't really happened in a long long while um so in that sense no but at the time that the resolution was adopted and even some years after that we saw uh while that while the council had not changed formally but informally there were processes that were suggesting a more democratic way of functioning so from from the 90s onwards we see the aria formula meetings which suggest a greater engagement with civil society actors and these seem to be uh they seem to have become uh quite a norm we have civil society actors including several prominent wps advocates speaking at security council open debates um and um while of course the uh permanent members uh have much greatest uh saying the deliberations of the council and they have the kind of institutional and historical memory that the non-permanent member states do not have yet there was uh there is a greater appreciation of uh the need to bring on board uh non-permanent member states and so we see a really interesting diplomatic negotiations starting at with recent developments and i will go on to speak uh in the second half uh there is a return to some of the older ways of working so this is going to be a bit of a dated example uh uh when there was talk about having a resolution for peacekeeping operation in ukraine and ukraine floated a proposal and you usually work with that draft proposal but russia actually floated its own proposal as well and so uh i don't have very optimistic on that aspect right now the second thing is which i briefly looked at it was uh in relation to the wps agenda is the participation of women in council deliberations as sort of female ambassadors of member states and in a number of media publications that there was a personal acknowledgement of what gender means but it's it's not ultimately national interest is the priority and and so the power structures and the national interest of the state state thank you great thanks amita just um real politic always coming into play isn't it um so yeah so we have a little bit of time before we take a bit of a break um there was just one question i just don't know if any of the panelists want to to answer um while we wait for other questions to come in um and that is is the resolutions linked to peacekeeping distracting from wps um or gender mainstreaming um so uh i guess we have swarna that has volunteered to respond to that question which is fab so swarna i'll just um pass it over to you actually this i when i was listening to shamita earlier this question crossed my mind as well i mean the fact that you would have a resolution on gender and not flag it as wps is that a sign that gender issues are finally being mainstreamed at the un um and i think this is something that we need to be conscious of it's a broader question as well isn't it do we want how long do we want to have things flagged as gender for women or you know wps and at what point do we want them to just become the way things are so it depends in some part on how well we think the wps agenda is doing if the resolutions are in fact have in fact been effectively implemented um or whether this is just some way of um forgetting that we even have that agenda so i think that the choice that we make of whether it is the one or the other depends a little bit on our political reading of that moment as well as um as well as how prepared we are for becoming redundant you know the wps is no longer a thing it's just normal so i leave it at that and let somebody else pick it up from there thank you swarna that's not really interesting and important reflections to have um well um other people are pondering that we have a specific question for jamie from tracy at the uk defense academy and tracy asks to what extent are transgender women included as part of the wps agenda great question um and i think this brings us back to the question of what the women peace and security agenda is and i think also reminds us that from what i see women peace and security agenda is very different in different places and it comes down to how people actually operationalize it so if you look at the texts of the resolution certainly transgender women aren't written in explicitly but um in the work i do and when i have conversations with practitioners one on one uh so i came to after doing my work with the gnwp and peace woman i was disturbed to not see the words lesbian lesbian let alone transgender or bisexual appear in any of for the most part basically none of the reporting i would say up to 2015 really um in thinking about the agendas so when we're looking at indicators of implementation a lot of times the gender is used read sort of with a default to heterosexual women and so if someone had a background where they were queer inclusive and were thinking of trans women when they were implementing gender work as gender advisor implementing women peace and security then perhaps they are looking for transphobic violence perhaps they are looking to serve trans women but was it explicitly written into programmatic work is it explicitly written into the resolutions at this moment uh no that that doesn't mean that there can't be ways to be intentional and inclusive and that doesn't mean that when people are doing what I would consider uh women peace and security work that may not be you know capital wps work that they aren't you know doing intersectional inclusive um trans inclusive even trans led work um and certainly you know i'm i'm in belfast and there's you know an organization trans and i when you have a gap in terms of what the state is able to provide in terms of basic everyday needs that uh ultimately uh are about your human security your personal security then the people feminist and queer organizing um may be very intentionally trans inclusive so i think it depends on which level we think about and i think it uh again as i said uh when i was speaking earlier uh i think there's a real opportunity to think expansively and to continue to um let the discourse be really broad about what gender means and um i appreciate you asking that question and i think we need to be asking that question in every room where we're talking about a women peace and security agenda is this queer and trans inclusive if it is what does that mean if it isn't why isn't it right so um i'll definitely be speaking about that more in our next panel thanks so we've got some more really interesting questions coming in but i think they're they're reflecting on uh moving away from how we got here to more around the theme of where do we go from here so i'm going to hold these two questions in particular and i guess um we we should transition into now that we're kind of evolving with our questions as well transition into the um where do we go from here so what we'll do now is we'll get the the panelists each to then you know reflect upon that question we're doing reverse order so we're starting with saskia this time and then after that we'll return to the questions but please i do encourage you all throughout this is just to keep popping questions in the q and a and also through through twitter hashtag wps and um tagging the school of security studies and we will pick them up shortly but uh in the meantime i'm going to put saskia on the spot and hand it over to her to to reflect upon where do we go from here hi hi thank you i'm learning so much from this um i get to start on talking about where we need to go and that's a bit scary because there's so many directions obviously uh i just want to pick up three things that uh you know from my own positionality within the eu uh seem to be important at this point in time and the first one is really we have a new eu action plan on wps that came out last year i think this needs to be used to reignite the national implementation activities that in very many cases are really dormant within the eu as well and and use this as a resource to support those that are already fighting for these issues within their national institutions for a while um and there are just a few things about the action plan that i think should be you know uh put center stage really and the one the first one is the emphasis on knowledge and capacity building really asking for institutional cultural change um supporting the point that if before we even start thinking about implementing a wps in any foreign policy or any external action we need to build the institutions that are actually capable of doing that and this of course needs to go through training um and a lot of measures that we already know but they need to be thought of much in a much broader way and really not only provide specific gender trainings but really incorporate that knowledge into every training every material every measure in all the ministries and embassies that are charged with that and i think this is really a point where the financial and personnel resources are lacking in many member states the action plan in objective three uh is also uh foregrounding the integration of civil society we know this already this is very important but how can we get to a really an institutionalized consultation process that is structured that is regular it is professional that is building long term relations and networks among those that are affected by conflict uh activists NGOs academia research um and so on and so forth um third point uh probably a little specific but sexual reproductive health and rights i think we need to remember that the UN Security Council is no or has not really been a very reliable partner in the struggle for these issues uh for a while now and there's this growing pressure on women's rights in this regard and the EU should really be uh filling this void um and put all of these issues conflict related sexual violence support for survivors safe abortions emergency contraception and all health related rights of pregnant women and mothers put that on the front of the agenda and also think about ways that men and boys can be included in these efforts to really have a change in gender norms and a final point within the action plan is the issue of refugees and migration in the EU that's usually handled under justice and home affairs but of course that's a foreign and security policy issue as well we know that gendered violence is a driver of migration is perpetuated on migration routes and it is um also you know a problem in transit and in destination countries we have the huge catastrophe in maria right now why is there not you know more consideration for also from a wps point of view and integrate that into border management integrate that into all the if we need to have border externalization which i think we shouldn't have from from a human rights perspective but if the EU is going down that road further then all agreements between the EU and third countries need to factor that in um so these were my my thoughts on the on the action plan two more issues that i would just like to briefly bring up the one is i think wps is still very state-centric focused on state forces international forces which in the end are also state forces so how can we think thoroughly about the link between global corporate actors and gendered violence i'm thinking here about also amanda's work and my own private military and security companies these are a huge factor in many global conflicts around the world and they're also implicated in gendered violence we know all of this already but how can we make a wps more responsive to these issues and then also beyond the issue of of security providers there are so many you know transnational corporations that are also a factor in in conflict around the world i'm thinking for example of columbia my colleague julia saxata has written about this how transnational companies through collaboration with armed actors were involved in gender-based violence and in displacement particularly of afro-descendant and indigenous women so um what can we do about you know this part of the agenda that is you know one step away from from the state-centric focus of it and last but not least i think covid right now of course is is not only keeping us from celebrating wps it is also putting new problematics and hindering the realization of the agenda in many ways it has a detrimental effect on gender equality in terms of labor divisions rise of gender-based violence of course in post-conflict and conflict settings this is even more so um so think i think we should think about the ways we can not only fight exclusion from conflict resolution but also from covid resolution how can women be meaningfully integrated into everything we do about the pandemic basically and how can we understand global health security as a wps issue and factor gender into the analysis of the crisis and how we can get you know women and women's networks and NGOs involved in the resolution i have a few more things to say about that but um i'll i'll leave that that right now and if there's any more questions i'm happy to discuss that further thanks hello again um i would basically like to endorse everything soscia laid out in terms of where we should be going but um i'll start my my remarks reflecting on where we are at now and pick up and maybe build a little bit on the point about institutionalization i do find it remarkable the extent to which wps is being institutionalized across a range of spaces from kind of dedicated NGOs through to military institutions um my own work focuses largely on peacekeeping um and that's an area where we can see the institutionalization of training programs the establishment of reporting requirements on gender and the creation of gender advisory possessions in military institutions and and they often work closely with civil society and with academic experts in these endeavors and and while these are all laudable steps towards institutionalizing wps i think it's also worth interrogating what the effects of an increasing professionalization of this work are so in this environment where civil society actors and security personnel build up a form of expertise on gender there is always a risk that the figure of the woman in conflict so the figure who acts best worked hard to convince structures of power is a subject worthy of international protection and inclusion for her to become something of an abstraction um whose needs and interests are presumed to be already known and this can be particularly limiting what we examine the extent to which gender expertise located in the global north is privileged in international for decision making and and here i'm very much also implicating my own work um so i think it's crucial that wps work maintains its connection to the plurality of women who are affected by conflict and that any interventions are designed with their diverse empirically established needs and priorities in mind and in order to do that going forward i think we need to be constantly asking ourselves who do we imagine to be doing wps and who do we think it's done to or for so who gets consulted and who gets to have a voice in these initiatives um and that asking these questions might also prompt us to critically re-examine our understandings of what counts as expertise and who is conflict affected and how um and i think it's questions such as these that have generated work and activism and scholarship to to revisit and to contest the boundaries of wps arguing for many of the things that sescha mentioned right so for the agenda to better address a continuum of violence um harms brought by economic disempowerment or the inability to access reproductive rights right so to look at look at kind of actual lived experiences of insecurity of women and and to think about that across perhaps what have been quite narrowly defined traditionally you know conflict or non-conflict contexts and conflict related harm and non-conflict related harm so there's there's some some questioning that's happening around around how those boundaries get drawn um there's also work that argues uh for for the wps agenda it's a better sense of questions of how the environment and climate change relates to conflict and gender um and how women's knowledge can can also in this field um has been has been marginalized again kind of at the at the hands of the technocratic um expert expertise that's situated in a global global structures of power um as as well as work on on where displaced women sit in relations with their agenda and in particular attending to the fact that displacement doesn't always stay within the conflict zone right so so women can be conflict affected after they flee and what does the and how does is the wps agenda able to see that and then what can we do to remedy if not and and again in the contemporary moment this attentiveness to security concerns beyond traditionally defined conflict is particularly pertinent right um in light of the current global pandemic it's becoming increasingly um untenable for the wps agenda to to not attend to a continuum of violence and insecurity as well as for its failure to interrogate global racialized hierarchies um that it's embedded in but i'll probably end on in terms of where we should be going i think it's worth noting that while these interventions are often critical they're not necessarily if we if we think of a distinction between critique and criticism they're they're a form of critical engagement because they point to significant investments in the agenda going forward they point to the fact that that we want more of it or we wanted to do more things um so so i think there's still an investment in around this community and the transformative potential in the agenda and i will end there thank you yes um i want to speak of three things um forging an alliance taking the driver's seat and defending women at the front line um so many women in Yemen in Cameroon in the Philippines in Lebanon in Belarus are doing extraordinary things um with a lot of courage and imagination but they don't always receive the right exposure and support how do we connect these energies and give them the right support and and visibility how do we create stronger networks we all know as we mentioned earlier in this conversation that the stars are not aligned we need to align the stars that's that's a job for us and we need to find a new alliance like the one which permitted the adoption of 1325 not a new organization god forbid but a new alliance between local and international between governments the UN NGOs and the private sector so that's about forging an alliance the second step is that while acknowledging the important role of civil society organizations um we have to keep imposing it's not anymore advocating promoting imposing women's roles also at other decision-making levels um and governance levels not only as civil society not only as carers not only as victims women have shown leadership in the covid crisis we have seen how women have have shown leadership and have managed far better than other leaders uh the control of the the pandemic and the protection of the population women have shown courage from Sudan to Lebanon to Philippines to Cameroon women they have shown a lot of courage and I want to bring here the question about the global south and we will we will speak more in the in the questions and answers but a lot of women have are showing incredible courage exactly in countries that don't have yet the right legal framework they have shown effectiveness there was this study run by Goldman Sachs on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the voting rights for women in the U.S. and they found that all women or mixed gender U.S. fund teams outperformed all May portfolio management teams so this is this shows that even in the financial sector people start looking at effectiveness of women not only in social issues not only in political issues and also another fifth quality that that is shown these days is the ability to dialogue across the spectrum I want to refer here to an initiative from the Cameroonian women for a ceasefire in in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon there's a conflict for the past three to four years and women in Cameroon have launched actually two days ago this campaign lower your arms to ask for a ceasefire now why do they paint their bodies and this brings me to the third point defining the women at the front lines why why do they paint their bodies first because they don't want their bodies to be the battlefield and second because this allows them to remain anonymous because all these women who are who are asking for a ceasefire have received death threats we need to put more effort to protect the women who are at the front lines because they are the ones doing the job and there is their lives so what I want to say where we are now and where where we go from now is a new alliance we have to align the stars and we have to acknowledge women's courage effectiveness creativity imagination ability to to dialogue across the spectrum leadership and position them in leadership roles and the third one I think we have to defend women at the front lines because without them all our work will be only theoretical and academic which is very interesting but is not enough we have to be out there where real life happens and where women are fighting for all of us my remarks in this round are going to be a little bit awkward and hard to package co-gently so just bear with me because that is for a reason now for the last 10 years that I've been paying attention 1325 I've done some academic work I've done some work as a consultant and I also talk about 1325 in in sort of ordinary contexts where I give a talk or I do a workshop to people who are not necessarily experts or diplomats or generals so in in these three worlds that I walk in and out of 1325 is a really awkward beast and that's one of the two things I want to talk about in this section and I also want to say a little bit about the global south question at the end you know ironically I was I waxed eloquent about feminist activism leading to 1325 but 1325 then handed this agenda quite naturally is a UN resolution to member states now why would member states deeply embedded invested in existing power structures actually set about changing them so I think right away you start off with something that's a really bad fit and it's a hard expectation to have now I live in a state where the state in fact says that 1325 is not relevant because there are no conflicts in this day so the usual route the prescribed route of law being for the national action plan has proven fruitless how do you what do you do with that now an act as an academic it's really easy because then I go on and I say you know it applies to traditional conflicts although the resolution expressly deals with one kind of conflict it applies to non-traditional conflicts such as those over natural resources the structural conflict presumably after all you know engaging women in decision-making protecting their rights taking their views on board and reconstruction all if this is part of any situation and complex emergencies but then I have a piece as a peace educator I have two challenges the first challenge is that to redefine conflict to my audience and then I have to drag 1325 over to show how it fits I work in an area which ostensibly has no conflict it's one thing for 1325 and if you look at states that were the first to adopt national action plans many of them were in were part were undergoing transitions out of conflict that were in some measure managed or facilitated by the UN so it makes sense to talk about 1325 and have a national action plan but if you sit in South India sometimes it makes no sense at all so then I then I'm talking about in I'm I broaden the frame and I wonder now why didn't we put this effort into promoting CEDAW or the universal declaration of human rights you know that the kind of energy we have put into talking about 1325 we have not put as far as I know into other instruments the international covenant on civil and political rights the international covenant on economic social and cultural rights the core messages of the same democracy inclusion rights justice and a state that delivers these and security to all sections of the population but these are very wordy and then 1325 has a pity handle I just say 1325 and I have four pillars one two three four and I'm done so is it that we live in an era dominated by marketing professionals and so that which is the prettiest is the one that we work with I actually want to know the answer to this 1325 is also now a UN member state agenda funding comes from them and as a peace educator working high in a very hyper local mode really well where am I working is working on 1325 and working on peace about world law being government or is it about public education is there a meeting point between these worlds you know it feels like you're trapped in an endless game of twister to bridge these the gulf between the conversation with government and the conversation with citizens because I think this is something that is part of the challenge of implementing 1325 that there is that gulf between government and citizen in almost every country now I think we all have to drop our pretenses on this my second concern is is a feminist it's the journey of WPS resolutions that keep circling to be circling back to sexual violence and conflict and the last the April resolution had to do with in a manner of speaking with sexual and reproductive health rights you know the point is not as kind of I said to make more safer women but that seems to be the low hanging fruit that the UN and member states are happy to reach one all of us possibly the point is to prevent wars and create peaceful societies and we miss in this WPS discourse a marriage of missions between 1325 and UNESCO's building the defenses of the peace as a gender equality activist in general I'm more and more unsettled but how despite all the changes in our thinking that I earlier celebrated we are returning to make women's existence about their bodies and every day news in the WPS discourse we must guard against essentializing women as their bodies that need protection from violence that needs special kinds of health care and that must be supplied with special goods like sanitary napkins the fact that most people explain the prevention pillar and I love how shamita describes this is the weakest P in the 3025 board the fact that most people explain prevention as preventing sexual and gender based violence is an illustration women like all other human beings are much more than their physical selves and their physical needs they have aspirations they have hunger they have creativity they have political ambition they have voices their health needs go beyond the reproductive system in their bodies and we forget this because it is simpler to talk about women to talk about ourselves as our bodies our sexualized bodies our maternal bodies and in this the WPS discourse begins to mirror the thinking of our societies it is so much easier to draw attention to violence whether domestic violence during COVID or street sexual harassment at other times than to talk about exclusion from electoral politics for which we might be responsible or the lack of access to credit or the gendered impact of poor infrastructure on educational access violence against our bodies is a tangible thing even in the 20 3025 context protection of rights gender mainstream and consultation with women's movement groups seems much more abstract so it's easier to say well you know let's talk about naming and shaming for sexual violence and so the agenda once set by feminist peace activists veers back circles back veers towards protection and protection alone and the journey into a slightly different looking different sounding world that is still patriarchy so while the WPS agenda seeks to protect women in war we must protect the agenda from patriarchy I wanted to say something about the question about the global south this is actually already happening whether or not women know about 1325 they are in fact they are in fact participating in peace processes in political processes and the Afghan example is the most striking one right now as Afghan women have organized by themselves for themselves to get a seat at the peace table so I'll leave it at that and thank you fantastic things to reflect on which I'll try to build on in my thoughts here about the future of the agenda and you know I really loved the question about or the way of thinking about WPS about who is doing women peace and security and also who it's being done to and this again reminds us of the really too easy binary global north global south and the way that that is perpetuated by states and by a lot of and I'll talk a bit more about how this has come up and some of the work I'm doing but you know I I'll go back to saying that I think the and this links to two of the questions we've had so far that I think focusing on what we mean by a gender perspective there's a lot of opportunity to really shift this in the future and I think a necessity actually because experts on women peace and security continue to predominantly be heterosexual global north speakers right and we can talk about how that manifests in publications around what's seen as women peace and security work you know I'm based in an academic institution so I'm certainly thinking about this when I'm putting together a syllabus but in recent years outright action international joined the NGO working groups so that there was actually representation from an organization looking at LGBTQ issues in peace and conflict and this is certainly new in terms of being official I mean you only have eight organizations that have eco sock consultative status anyway so it's very important to have this voice be part of the NGO and civil society work that is promoting what women peace and security will look like in the future we can also look at the gender subcommittee in Colombia and the work of organizations like Columbia diversa which continue to publish on the work they're doing so this is accessible to other organizations to other certainly practitioners if you're interested in what it means to take on a more expansive look at gender that does think about LGBTQ experiences that does think about transphobic and homophobic violence not of course not as other speakers have said this participation component and protection component shouldn't just be about responding to violence but it does also matter to understand why and when homophobic and transphobic violence is part of conflict and in fact we already know that if we were paying more attention to targeted violence against queer communities we would have a different understanding of conflict right so queer organizations have been doing this work so in the future a more expansive gender perspective could help us see that but also when I'm thinking about protection I'm thinking about peace building work that going back to who is doing women peace and security I'm thinking about transformative justice strategies and also restorative justice strategies and abolitionist work which in recent months I would say over the past six months the events around thinking abolitionist thinking and queer mutual aid projects that's just kind of exploded on the international scene in a way that is very welcome so there's communities that have been working to draw attention to ways to provide security beyond policing beyond and even we see this of course within women peace and security we see we see the essentialism and we see the slippery slope into it's a is it feminist if we have more women in peacekeeping if we have more women police officers and looking at the work at some of this abolitionist work and books like beyond survival and the revolution starts at home these are transformative justice organizations that are led by people of color queer people of color most often and in a sense I think that peacekeeping work that isn't looking at the community-based initiatives for that sort of work are really they got some catching up to do because a lot of these organizations aren't looking to the state so I think this also speaks to this gulf between civil society and the state queer organizations in a lot of spaces have never been able to rely on the on the police right I had a conversation recently with someone who wrote an entire monologue about how when she in northern Ireland experienced homophobic violence did not feel at all comfortable going to the police and so this is just to say that we we know that there have been other forms of community protection and security and ways of thinking about building peace and so I just urge a thinking about the future of women peace and security that's also integrative of that and also I think that while it's important that we're moving towards the and have resolutions that talk about the need to pay attention to men and boys there's a there can be sort of a siloing of women and girls men and boys in a way that kind of misses how masculinity and femininity are operating in a way that isn't binary actually and so I think attention to gender-based violence while there's been an increase in looking at sexual violence against men which is necessary to be looking at that I still think there's room to be looking more intersectionally in a way that doesn't oppose these as forms of violence but actually understands again looking at how transphobic and homophobic violence and and maybe paying more attention to how masculinity and feminities are operating in different contexts it can actually get at the root of what's going on with this violence in a way that is perhaps more productive but I guess as a final thought here I am I do think it's kind of right it is a bit curious why do we why are there so many resolutions to do something that states actually are quite in many and many uh there there there's no funding for this right like it continues to be sidelined over and over again but it's highlighted in certain spaces and now we have what 11 resolutions and I think part of that we can also look to the way that LGBTQ human rights sometimes have been co-opted right so I think lessons on the way that homonationalism and pink washing operates are incredibly important to thinking about why it might be interesting to have the panel on women peace and security while you continue to have rampant misogyny and horrific levels of sexual violence within the same institution that's interested in highlighting the really important women peace and security agenda so I just think that it's it's important to and it's an ever-present challenge how do you highlight something that's that's so important in a feminist capacity when you also still just want to be able to be in the room at all and that's again something that queer organizations are constantly struggling with and I have more thoughts about the way that localization has actually operated and especially thinking about global northern and global south dynamics but I just wanted to end on one more thought because I saw that one of the questions was you know how as a white western man in the room can you be a WPs and security like ally right and I think again well first of all everyone has a sexual orientation and gender identity and I think that's important to remember and also women peace and security is about gender it's not just about women so I think it's always important for those who are in the position of privilege to see who's in the room and to advocate for those who are not and to do that again and again because and do that at the beginning of a process and not at the end because it's very frustrating to be you know part of the organization that's consulted towards the end of a peacekeeping mission because you can't actually mainstream gender or bring a queer perspective or an LGBTQ organization meaningfully into a project if it's you know a one-day consultation towards the end of your project so that I just I'm sure other people will want to speak to that as well but I'll go ahead and leave it at that for now thanks. Okay so there is not much left to see after all those brilliant remarks by fellow panelists and I was just telling Amanda that I'd much rather listen but I will very quickly go back to my theme for today boring old politics at the Security Council and discuss what the disinstitutional context might mean for the future. So first for the last few years I find myself going back to an article that Anne Marie Goertz wrote for open democracy after the election of Antonio Guterres as the 9th Secretary-General and one of the challenges that she identifies for him is that he'd have to work in a world that is re-nationalizing within ports and the challenge that this poses for multilateralism and this of course has had an impact on the work of the Security Council. For instance we've seen backtracking on issues like sexual and reproductive rights in the 9th and 10th resolutions reportedly at the behest of the United States. The good news though is that we have these resolutions and I keep changing my mind on this but mostly I think we are fine with with the resolutions that we have and we perhaps don't need another one for some time and that these are enough and in terms of international norms and mechanisms and that we that the focus should really now be on implementation just in terms of you know accounting mechanisms as well that there are accountability mechanisms there are a few so really let's try and fund some of this work again which which brings us to this aspect of donor organization donor member states as well as other organizations and the political economy of the WPS is something that has been discussed I mean as far as the council is concerned and the council doesn't have money right it would have to come from the the member states or for the general budget or for the pre-keeping budget. The second point is that again something that has sort of been has has come up and well while on the one hand the council is is sort of central to the element or often they're not suffering surprising that member states in the world have been skeptical of the WPS agenda and to add some of Swarna's comments about engagement in India I remember when I resumed working in India I was surprised by the fact that not just the government but many civil society actors also maintained a sort of distance from 1325 and preferred to rely rely on CEDAW which is a binding but also B does not have the tricky association with the Security Council so this is partly in response with to the question on the WPS and the Global South that we need to recognize and again something that's been mentioned before that important feminist work on peace and security work that does not use WPS vocabulary is very vital and it needs to be recognized as such and this particular point I want to wrap up by recalling what Felicity Hill and Edith Ballantyne of Wilf have said in 2007 quite early on and you know before there was a second resolution really that today said this in context of Wilf's that more effort needs to be put into Wilf using 1325 rather than 1325 using Wilf and so that is something I think we all need to take account of in our work including in academia to what extent do we let WPS kind of drive our research and practice and finally while my own work has focused mainly on armed conflicts I'm very interested in the advocacy and scholarship that is seeking to link WPS to non-traditional issues such as climate change related migration and human trafficking that came up in our book on your directions and even to traditional security issues where WPS for one reason or the other had not featured substantively so we now see references to gender-based violence in the UN Armed Trade Treaty which is really something that needs to be celebrated or the recent research that looks into the relevance of WPS for as far as privatization of what is concerned and the role increase in companies so this is a rather the rather generic comment but I would like to think that it would hold us suddenly holds me in good stead to recall that when we talk about WPS the issues that need to be considered in WPS that we need to locate those conversations in this you know in the continuum of violence a feminist concept that was referred to earlier and that when we are thinking about responses to these issues that we locate WPS you know not only in its own policy architecture but the complex policy architecture around gender equality that includes you know starting from UDHR to CEDAW especially general recommendation number 30 the Beijing platform for action and the critical areas of concern and more recently the sustainable development goals thank you that's me. I hope excuse me I've just lost my video and my microphone but I think everyone can hear me now thank you so much for a roller coaster of ideas this has been such an exciting event for now so far and I'm sure we will use the last 20 minutes with great benefit to everyone as well I have been trying to make notes and thinking about how I could sort of summarize the themes that we've just been hearing about and where we might find some sort of focus and structure I think that the one focal theme is probably the teasing out that every speaker has just done of the inherent contradiction between the radical potential and philosophy of of what lies behind WPS and I specifically say lies behind because it's got this over a century worth of women's activism that lies behind it and the implementation of the dependence to some degree of its implementation on some form of state support advocacy maybe even resources and that contradicting with state interest so we might develop this in further contributions to and answers to the questions I will probably start going coming from the the most recent questions and then go oh no I was no I will start actually I will start with Molly Brat's question which is directed at Cynthia and then we gradually we've worked out some form of order for the question and answer session so I'll start with Molly Brat who asked who's 17 and so it's a crucial question for her that she poses to Cynthia Petrie I have done or to Cynthia I have done a bit of research into your NGO Beyond Peace this was inspiring I would love to do something along the lines of women's NGOs with my future please can you tell me how how you got into this is there anything you can recommend I should study engage in best wishes so over to Cynthia who can then also move on to Ed Fraser's question as a white Western European man deploying on peacekeeping operations often in countries that don't have their own UNSCR 1325 national action plan what advice do you have for me if I am to be an effective WPS ally I know that several panelists have already indicated that they would very much like to engage with that question so Cynthia would you like to take over from me thank you Andrea and thank you Molly for the question how I got there I was angry you have to be angry to get in this field of studies and one would hope you know I mean my early 50s one would hope that in your generation you don't need but I think you still need to get angry at what you see around you in the beginning I was not at all in gender studies and this line of work I work in humanitarian work I work in conflict resolution and I realized I was the only woman sitting in the in the negotiating room at peace table for the peace process in Mindanao it has developed a lot later and even the chair of the government panel was with a woman and so on but when I started there in 2009 I was the only woman in the room and the governments of Philippines didn't have a women negotiator the moral islamic liberation front needless to say they didn't have a female negotiator the facilitator as well etc and we were the international contact group and by kind of coincidence all the other members they were ambassadors or heads of NGOs they were male I also worked monitoring ceasefires I was the only woman there I you know I worked in military camps training military in behaving better I was the only woman in the teaching and officers level and and so on and I heard and saw a lot of very annoying things and so slowly slowly I started specializing in in this field so it's anger and the second reason is I saw that when you give a job to women when you work with women it's it's it's very rewarding every time I've worked with women uh it it was very rewarding because they were 100% at what they were doing they were able to build alliances they had creative ideas they were effective so you need to do you are young and you need to get more angry and we would love you to join us because we need uh women and men from all generations and all walks of life to work on this I'm sure my uh uh colleagues the the fellow panelists will have a lot to say so I will I will keep it short for that one and I think you know we will hear uh other stories now now coming to Ed's question uh thank you Ed thank you I've worked with a lot of military I think the first thing you need to do is to ask women in the country where you work because there is no one size fits or there is no one answer and there is no one woman who can tell you you know how to work with other women elsewhere I think in every context you have a different situation and you have very resourceful women who will find the best way to work uh as I showed earlier these Cameroonian women are painting on their body to ask for a ceasefire in another country it will be something completely different so women who take risks who are in the field uh know what works in their context and what they need is support so ask them and sometimes my experience is that in military camps it's quite a closed environment obviously for for because of security reasons because of the the the overwork because of all all the good reasons that we know often military don't have access to a broader range of information as we do in the civilian uh uh work so what I would advise is whatever country you you're working with to take the time to connect with you are you are British I think uh uh if you're British with like the the the the the the Defeat uh uh advisor the conflict advisor at the embassy or the high commission to connect with is there a UN mission with the gender and the focal point uh is there a local umbrella organization for women so reach out to to them they will be surprised but they will help you so go and speak to them and ask them how can we help you and uh and and I think that's that's the first step and from there you will you will embark on this beautiful journey and we will be there for you you can also I think what's important in this field of work because we are often very lonely in what we are doing is to build alliances and support so uh Andrea who who is one of the facilitators of this uh of of this conversation knows that she she even uh suggested when when I went to to car before I went to car to work in in a military mission she said you will need support so we created the support group so when I was there and and it was very lonely for a civilian women to be in that military context I was contacting them I need help with this uh I'm fed up with that so building alliances asking for someone's advice so Ed when you are out there consider us as your advisory group and we can you know help you with ideas but the first group you need to speak to is the women in the country where you are working thank you okay thanks Cynthia I think Ed's question inspired a lot of us to um to reflect on and I wanted to pick up on it um also because I think there's elements in it that are useful for all of us to remember right um because so Ed asks as a as a white white man in the British military how can you do WPS and I think the first part of that is something that is already being done in the phrasing of that question um which is to interrogate what position we're coming at this from right like how does and and to bear that in mind with the work that we do you know whatever sexual orientation or or you know how we're racialized or so on presents is is for all of us to think about you know how how is my particular positionality affecting how I'm doing this work what problems I'm seeing what kinds of solutions I come up with um and I think that's a useful reminder for all of us to keep in line and and on the second part of what what actually practically to do I completely endorse what Cynthia was saying about consultation um so not letting us fall into to the assumption that we already know who conflict affected women are and what they need and want right is to figure out ways of consulting of studying what is happening and and with the important recognition that you know conflict affected women are a diverse group and and how factored and their experiences are mediated by factors including gender but also including race, ethnicity or sexual orientation and so forth so to to allow for the answer to be that there isn't one priority that all conflict affected women necessarily necessarily share um and I also wanted to point out because at the end of the last session we had this question about um what does resolution 1325 do in contexts where domestic laws on on sexual violence for example are insufficient or absent and actually we have an answer to that question also in the questions box so Grotsela Pika is is kind of picking up on the on the linkages between the convention on the elimination of discrimination against women and WPS so human rights frameworks in that work and you and women already in 2012 Grotsela says we're doing extensive work on the complementarity of these two two agendas um CDAS general recommendation over 30 addresses violence against women and CDA which is you know the most widely ratified UN human rights treaty has obligations in a first aid parties to remedy um these kind of shortcomings and domestic legal frameworks so to work with with kind of a broader array array of questions what 1325 or the WPS agenda what's what's in it um on that question is is the question of security sector reform right post-conflict building up of of security injustice institutions which may open up spaces to address some of these some of these legal caps and I'll be there and pass it on to you okay I'm not sure it's Andrea next ah here we are thank you so much we now have six minutes left and loads of really really excellent and important and wide-ranging questions so I will try to bunch a few together so we can at least have some further discussion points but I would like at the end to address the question how did we all get into um or how did all the panellists get into the women's peace and security field so one of the questions we have how do we make the feminist WPS agenda more accessible to women in the global south where the emphasis emphasis is more on representation rather than agency and emancipation and unfortunately both are not working I specifically refer to this question because we said we would talk about this um in the second part and I don't want to miss this um we have a similar sort of range of questions to what extent from Tracy McSephanie to what extent is the WPS agenda simply about good leadership and education um and then another one is the WPS agenda or some of its pillars experiencing a backlash especially from some members of the security council what can activists do to address it now I will hand over to um who would like to go first Sumita would you like to start off on this I know I'm dropping you in it a little bit there um to start off with the question maybe is there a backlash against from members of the security council um I'm on that question I'm mostly familiar with the politics relating to sexual and reproductive rights on health and as I mentioned yes it's it's it's been contested and the the specific phrases which were included in previous resolutions are not included in in the more recent ones so clearly that is a sign of backlash against this and in fact there has been quite a bit of worry about backtracking on other aspects of the agenda as well which um I've heard being mentioned at different forums um shall I briefly perhaps I could also briefly refer to the the question about um the relevant how to make WPS agenda more relevant for the global south um I if if you could come back to me please because I want to pull out the specific questions so as not to get it wrong so if you could move on to another speaker please thank you I'm not entirely here we go um swanna would you like to address the global south question or is someone else keen to jump in if not then I did actually in my um yeah you did talk about that in your in your presentation in which case can we use the last three minutes please to reflect on flora vickers's question she's a king's college to langen graduate and she's asked she's um her quest her point is hello hello all thank you for this interesting roundtable discussion very interesting can you discuss how you found the field of WPS and how you have arrived at your job today now some of you have already spoken to this um but swanna would you like to take over me I I think the short answer given the short term time is I do this because I am I am a woman and I want to live in a peaceful world and it's a very simple thing um there are longer stories that I could tell but we'll do that another day thank you very much swanna we have been considering whether this is actually a question that needs to be addressed in a in a wider forum so you've given us a job to do flora um we will consider maybe putting on a different event we'll see how we can how we can make this something because we all agree it's an excellent question it's a very important question particularly today um because because we have all these concerns about where the women peace and security agenda might be going considering the wider geopolitical developments so what I would like to um to do to close off is to perhaps start again with Saskia because it's been a long time since we've had the opportunity to hear from her um for a final set of reflections not more than about 10 15 seconds each of you and we'll just use the same the same speaking order as we had in the second round Saskia are you on standby I am brilliant over to you and then if we do the same thing as we did in the two panel sessions well um that's again a very difficult task I really just want to make one yeah two really brief points and one is again from a european perspective I think what we haven't talked about at all is a rising trend towards neo-authoritarian rule in Europe um semi-democratic systems being set up fake democracies and so on and so forth so I think seeing that the women's rights are unscrewed to me in in a lot of contexts and that WPS will be facing new and probably unexpected challenges in a lot of the established democracies in the world that's a more a larger point and a smaller more practical point I think this question about do we need new resolutions and how effective are they and should we have that what I'm hearing from from national actors all they say is please no more resolutions because I don't think we realize how much many countries are behind terribly behind in just implementing and setting up national action plans on the you know the earlier resolutions so I'm not saying we shouldn't have more I think we should have more but I think we have to consider the enormous stresses we're putting on national institutions and actors that are already fighting very hard to make even the most basic points relevant in their own national context and that's it for me thank you so much we're getting the same order um one of the things that I always find hopeful and generative about WPS is the amount of community it has created around it whether we're talking about activist communities scholarly communities practitioner communities not that those are always neatly separable we kind of shift in a lot of roles and and what I learned I'm very excited that moment we're just starting a new academic year and welcoming a new cohort of gender peace and security students so this is a community that's growing constantly and one of the things that I have learned from from speaking with people who who work in this field is how how what sustains this community is not necessarily the institutional trappings or the resolutions but rather the ability to build feminist networks across that and and sometimes in contradictions what's happening in the in the institutions of power of how that's a source of of sustenance so I would like to thank all of you being part of that community and and enabling us to learn from each other's work and and hopefully that's something we can keep growing as a source of sustenance I want to answer flora's question as a conclusion I said earlier that I got in this field because I was angry and I decided to use this anger not in a violent way but in a constructive way and I think it is this kind of constructive and loving energy that is a feminine energy and we need more of that today and I want to thank Amanda and Andrea and all the panelists and all the audience and I think this is a start of a new very beautiful network and I look forward to seeing you again online or in person or in writing thank you thank you I think it's easy and particularly for those of us that have trained as academics it's easy to pick holes in the resolutions in the discourse and the institutions in our governments but this is where you you sort of default to the peace educator location and say well how much do I own this agenda how important is it to me and where do I find the spaces and the platforms and the opportunities in my everyday life to bring a little bit of this of these values into the world so that is the question I would like to leave everyone with how much do you own the WPS agenda yeah I think that's such a fantastic point and I also I'll try to be quick here so I would say in addition to anger which is right on it's also curiosity that brings me to the work I do and I'm going to point to Cynthia Enlo and and you know the question of what where are the women when we think about peace and security but of course I'm just kind of sifting through all the work and I'm like where are the LGBTQ people right like and knowing they're there like we know those of us who are doing activism we know they're in the room we know they're doing this work so what's going on that it's not necessarily showing up in some of the spaces that you would expect it to right and I mean the short answer is patriarchy but that you know my commitment in women peace and security work is to you know shift that and to constantly be asking where the queer queers in these spaces agree no more resolutions and I also think to the earlier question our resolutions can already do the work of supporting queer and trans communities so what does it mean to look to make the resolutions do the work that we as feminists know that they can do and I guess the final point is indeed ask for help and also understand that yeah once you ask for help there you know reach out for help and understand that especially those those in a position of privilege you know you don't have to be part of the queer community to advocate and and lift up those folks so yeah I just think thank you so much for this this roundtable and let's definitely continue these conversations. Thank you again Andrea and Amanda and all my fellow panelists I've really enjoyed the session today in the 10 15 seconds loosely understood I will quickly just three points one addressing the question from Sarah Valentine on on the US sexual assault in the US and sexual assault against women in the US military the question was if they can't get their own house in order how can they expect other nations to do it and so a couple of things on the one hand we know that there's a lot of hypocrisy that goes on in in the kind of work that's done but the all another thing to remember is that the WPS agenda is not a US resolution it is a resolution that has been put together by member states of the UN and countries from the global south and global north especially women and peace activists had a lot to do with it so we need to own that and then make member states and other actors make sure that they implement it and they make the necessary changes. Second the question on how to make feminist WPS agenda more accessible to women in global south I don't think we need to make the agenda necessarily accessible there are a lot of groups that are already doing the important work that needs to be done so it's a question of providing support to those groups and bringing in international norms where necessary and to further recognize that WPS is actually not as expansive as has already been discussed there are other international policy instruments that can play a very important role and finally regarding my own interest so I take note of anger and curiosity and then say that my own work was very naive interest in how this change happened and you know the fact that the security council adopted a resolution well how did that happen and how can we learn from that to bring about other kinds of progressive transformations so that's what got me interested in the WPS agenda thank you and thank you everyone again now thank you very much to all our panelists who have really excelled themselves at presenting us with a feast of thoughts and ideas and reflections which we I think all of us will continue to have to digest for the foreseeable future if this hasn't enthused people to engage with the women peace and security agenda and really put their thinking caps on and start developing ideas of how we might be able to do better then I don't know what can so thank you very very much to all our panelists we've done you've done an amazing job here I shall not try to sum up anything because it's impossible but instead hand over to Amanda so that she can put the final concluding remarks on this rather amazing session thank you to all and of course to our audience and their engagement with the speaker's contributions thank you Andrea for passing the job to sum up to me I too can't really sum this up other than this is just again the continuing of the conversation and collaboration and feminist solidarity networks that you know I could particularly spoke to too and Sumita writes about and we all you know had this such a vibrant conversation I just quickly five seconds this for me this feels fantastic again to be engaged in such vibrant intellectually stimulating discussion that I feel so nourished and I want to keep this conversation going but unfortunately we went way over our two-hour slot but again I think a panelist you rock you're awesome clapping hands to all of us and audience for asking such fab questions these are really important questions and just watch this space there's more collaboration coming and I hope we're all leave the space energized for lunch or or a drink cup of tea or otherwise depending on where in the world we are tuning in so again thank you so much for participating and coming along and have a great day thank you thank you