Feminist Politics and the Use of Force: Theorising Feminist Action and Security Council Resolution 1325

This article reflects on the ten-year anniversary of ‘Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security’ (hereinafter, “Resolution 1325”). The article contextualises the Security Council’s approach within feminist legal thinking, using Resolution 1325 as a springboard for increased feminist conversations on the recurrent themes of essentialism, victim feminism and praxis. It is argued that feminist action in the Security Council should extend these debates. To this end, the article concludes with reflection on the possibility of force to save women, arguing that this fourth axis of feminist debate be taken up with some urgency by feminist scholars and activists

War’s Perpetuity: Disabled Bodies of War and the Exoskeleton of Equality

This paper responds to battlefield technologies that enhance the endurance and capacities of the wearer, known as exoskeletons. Following the argument that exoskeleton technology is set to provide equality for bodies on the battlefield in the near future, I look at how both law and war construct and continually re-deploy a male body as the standard form of materiality within a deeply embedded masculine subjectivity. As such, the male body provides a persistent indicator of what it means to be human. Assistive technologies, such as exoskeletons, work to render female bodies ‘closer’ to male capabilities in armed conflict situations. At the same time, the maiming of male bodies in conflict can be charted as a persistent outcome of armed conflict that has received scant attention within the study of the gendered effects of armed conflict. War’s production of the disabled male body has also led to significant developments with respect to assistive technologies, via the work of, in particular, the US military. I argue that the investment of the US military into the development of exoskeletons, when understood alongside the US military’s investment in assistive mobility technologies for returned soldiers, raises questions about the futility of creating technology only to perpetuate the existence of the battlefield. Far from a project built on gender equality goals, investment in exoskeleton technology seemingly underlines the manner in which the male body of war will increasingly be able to return to the battlefield, to be maimed and to be restored in perpetuity. I conclude by arguing exoskeletons should be used to reimagine subjectivity, via debility, with a mindfulness of the material effects and underlying philosophical traces within subjectivity. I argue for a shift in approaching subjectivity via an intersectional and post-human model, rather than a legal subject that perpetuates modernist man, that promotes a thin understanding of gender equality or deploys exoskeletons as a tool for the destructive impulses of armed conflict

Security Council Resolution 2242 on women, peace and security: progressive gains or dangerous development?

This paper challenges the UN Security Council’s approach to women, peace and security through a detailed analysis of participation initiatives in the eight resolutions on women, peace and security, alongside study of the recent shift to include countering terrorism and violent extremism provisions in resolution 2242. Through review of a range of feminist approaches that remain ‘outside’ the strategies leading institutional gender perspectives I scrutinise the shifts across the resolutions on women, peace and security. In particular, this article analyses how Security Council resolution 2242, produced after the High-Level Report studying the fifteen years after resolution 1325, includes important developments in the articulation of participation. However, the risk of progressing work on women, peace and security within global structures without attention to the diversity of women’s needs, lives and experiences drawn from a feminist commitment to anti-militarism and postcolonial listening is likely to produce a series of regressive outcomes that perpetuate victim feminisms and which fail to dislodge the intersection of gender with colonial and racial power structures within global institutions

Embodied Ecologies and Legal Wars: The Use of Force, Ukraine, and Feminist Perspectives on International Law

In this article, I examine the international law on the use of force alongside a feminist analysis of the ongoing Russian aggression in Ukraine. I draw on records of mushroom foraging to evidence how everyday practices of communities are destroyed by military aggression that disrupts the embodied ecologies reproduced in intergenerational human and nonhuman encounters. The mushrooms foraged in Ukraine, the mushrooms destroyed during military encounters, and the mushrooms growing beside land mines provide an aperture for shifting both feminist and international legal accounts of armed conflict. I argue that ecologies of harm produce means to understand the gendered violence in armed conflict prompting a shift beyond the status quo of international law and legal relations on the use of force and the preoccupation with justifications and authorisations for military force

Article 51 Self-Defense as a Narrative: Spectators and Heroes in International Law

The subsequent three parts of this article take the following form. Part II introduces Article 51. Part III considers the manner in which Article 51 produces a narrative of spectatorship for the West. I draw on Al-Radi\u27s narrative to highlight the massive gap between the narratives of Article 51, as it is perceived in mainstream academic accounts of Operation Desert Storm, and the reality of living with the consequential force. I am particularly concerned with the legal features of proportionality, collective self-defense, and the state as a self defending. In Part IV, I use the work of Mclnnes, Orford, and Salecl to demonstrate how the West use a form of self-projection to become both spectator and hero in internal cultural narratives. Drawing on the methodology developed by Gunning, I attend to the inherent essentialism of these narratives rather than attempting to offer alternative non-Western narratives. Finally, in Part V, I return to the force/violence distinction contained in Article 51. How does this regulator of force as legal, and violence as illegal, interact with recent claims that there is also legitimate force that can be used, for example, to halt humanitarian crises? I take the words of Arendt and question the shift from force as justified to force as legitimate, to conclude with further questions about emerging narratives of force that currently preoccupy Western cultures.\u2