Transformative Disarmament: Crafting a Roadmap for Peace

Notwithstanding their absence in the formal structures of power, women have engaged actively with disarmament for over a century. Their activism has been rich and complex. It is, however, not a history that is generally familiar to those outside the world of feminist activism and scholarship. This article tells the story of feminist activism and scholarship and how women have sought to overcome exclusion, marginalization, and silencing in both policy and law in pursuit of what the author describes as a transformative disarmament agenda. It is concerned not only with women’s political activism and the struggle for equal participation in disarmament circles, but also demonstrates the ways in which feminist thinkers have worked to reposition and reframe the disarmament discourse and challenge mainstream thinking on and around weapons and disarmament by probing established assumptions and generating critical analyses in order to provide new solutions to old problems

Yemeni activists pay the price for their political agency

Women’s rights groups in and outside Yemen have become increasingly concerned about the fate of women and girls who have been detained by Houthi forces in the territories under the control of the rebel group. Louise Arimatsu and Rasha Obaid write on the women that have been targeted and the responsibility of States and the UN system to stop this unlawful detainment and bring justice for human rights violations

From Haiti to Kosovo, it’s time for the UN to accept legal responsibility for its human rights violations

Ban Ki-Moon’s apology for the role of the UN in the cholera outbreak in Haiti, reignited the debate on the need for the UN to recognise its legal responsibility for human rights violations. Louise Arimatsu and Christine Chinkin suggest that the UN’s failure to accept legal responsibility for the human rights violations of its mission in Kosovo threatens the credibility and legitimacy of the organisation

Violence and warfare in prehistoric Japan

The origins and consequences of warfare or largescale intergroup violence have been subject of long debate. Based on exhaustive surveys of skeletal remains for prehistoric hunter-gatherers and agriculturists in Japan, the present study examines levels of inferred violence and their implications for two different evolutionary models, i.e., parochial altruism model and subsistence model. The former assumes that frequent warfare played an important role in the evolution of altruism and the latter sees warfare as promoted by social changes induced by agriculture. Our results are inconsistent with the parochial altruism model but consistent with the subsistence model, although the mortality values attributable to violence between hunter-gatherers and agriculturists were comparable

War, law and patriarchy

Gender systems, norms and identities saturate the war in Ukraine

Climate change is a women’s human rights issue

General Recommendation 37 (GR37) marks the first time a UN body has addressed the links between human rights and the gendered impact of climate change. Keina Yoshida and Lina M. Céspedes-Báez review GR37 and address the growing conversation on climate change in the context of the Women, Peace and Security agenda

Correction to: ‘Violence in the prehistoric period of Japan: the spatio-temporal pattern of skeletal evidence for violence in the Jomon period’

Whether man is predisposed to lethal violence, ranging from homicide to warfare, and how that may have impacted human evolution, are among the most controversial topics of debate on human evolution. Although recent studies on the evolution of warfare have been based on various archaeological and ethnographic data, they have reported mixed results: it is unclear whether or notwarfare among prehistoric hunter–gathererswas common enough to be a component of human nature and a selective pressure for the evolution of human behaviour. This paper reports the mortality attributable to violence, and the spatio-temporal pattern of violence thus shown among ancient hunter–gatherers using skeletal evidence in prehistoric Japan (the Jomon period: 13 000 cal BC–800 cal BC). Our results suggest that the mortality due to violence was low and spatio-temporally highly restricted in the Jomon period, which implies that violence including warfare in prehistoric Japan was not common

Women’s peace activism can end conflict

There is a need to take stock of current global developments in the field of disarmament, reflect on the successful strategies that have been pursued and identify additional entry points to advance disarmament through international law. Louise Arimatsu and Keina Yoshida look at what a feminist approach to disarmament would look like, and how international law can be more effectively harnessed to further disarmament goals and peace, with commentary from the recent Women, Peace and Security (LSE) and Graduate Institute in Geneva co-hosted workshop