The state of play: securities of childhood - insecurities of children

This article is broadly concerned with the positioning of children, both within and outside the subject area of International Relations. It considers the costs of an adult- 5 centric standpoint in security studies and contrasts this with investments made seemingly on behalf of children and their security. It begins by looking at how children and childhoods are constructed and contained - yet also defy categorization - at some cost to their protection. The many competing children and childhoods that are invoked in security discourses and partially sustain their victimcy are then illustrated. It is 10 argued that at their entry point into academia they are essentialized and sentimentalized. Power relations which subvert, yet also rely on children and childhoods can only be disrupted through a reconfiguration of politics and agency which includes an engagement with political literacy on a societal level and acknowledgement of the ubiquitous presence of war in all our live

Women’s path to leadership through values work in a context of conflict and violence. Kap. 9

The leadership journey is experienced differently by women around the world. In this chapter, we analyse the stories of women leaders from South Kivu, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Through these stories, we aim to contribute to the knowledge on how women compete and negotiate paths to leadership through values work in a context of conflict and violence. Focusing on education, religious civil society organisations and the fight for women’s rights, the stories reveal that women as actors strategically negotiate and navigate implicit and explicit values in their families, institutions and in the society at large

Changing Discourses, Changing Practices: Gender Mainstreaming and Security

Contains fulltext : 193982pub.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, entitled ‘Women, Peace and Security’, asks UN member states to mainstream gender in all peacekeeping missions. Although the governments of Great Britain, Sweden and Germany have been quite involved at the UN and in the EU in promoting SCR 1325, this article illustrates that they have implemented the resolution in rather different ways on the national level. The study adds to two existing strands of literature. First, it builds on growing research and debates relating to gender mainstreaming, in which security policy thus far has received little attention. Second, it engages in the literature on norms. Taking SCR 1325 as an expression of the gender-mainstreaming norm at international level, we argue that different interpretations of the norm are possible on a domestic level. Because the norm itself is vague, various actors understand and apply it in dissimilar ways. The evidence gleaned from the three cases demonstrates that, depending on how the norm is interpreted, implementation ranges from changing existing policies or decision-making processes to reaffirming the status quo. The varying interpretations make it difficult to determine precisely what constitutes a breach of the norm. They suggest that simply looking at policies or laws is insufficient to determine norm adoption. Instead, we also need to examine how the norm has been understood