1325 – is that a taxi number? Implementation of the National Action Plan on 1325 and 1820 in Nepal – Punam Yadav (4/2017)

“When I go to the rural areas and ask people about 1325, they say, what is that? Is that a taxi number? Even educated people don’t know about 1325. How can we expect people in the village to know all these numbers and remember them? They don’t know what the Security Council is and what UNSCR 1325 is. They may memorize it for once but they forget after the programme is finished because the Security Council doesn’t sound “real” to them”.

1325 - is that a taxi number? Implementation of the national action plan on 1325 & 1820 in Nepal

When I go to the rural areas and ask people about 1325, they say, what is that? Is that a taxi number? Even educated people don’t know about 1325. How can we expect people in the village to know all these numbers and remember them? They don’t know what the Security Council is and what UNSCR 1325 is. They may memorize it for once but they forget after the programme is finished because the Security Council doesn’t sound “real” to them

Can internally displaced women in the entertainment sector be part of the Women, Peace and Security agenda?

Many women who were displaced during the People’s War have sought employment in Nepal’s entertainment sector due to vulnerabilities created by the conflict. Punam Yadav brings attention to these forgotten survivors and questions the role of the WPS agenda in addressing their needs

Capitalising on UNSCR 1325 : The Construction of Best Practices for the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

This article explores a narrative of peacebuilding best practice: the national efforts to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in Nepal. We demonstrate how the contested realities of post-conflict gender politics are skilfully transformed into internationally transferable policy knowledge. We argue that in order to construct a peacebuilding best practice, policy entrepreneurs draw on their social capital to make claims about policy as simultaneously local and context-specific as well as global and universally applicable. The credibility of the claims is based on the extent to which they can be presented to international policy audiences in formats suitable for their consumption.Peer reviewe

Chapter 9 Continuums of Violence

"This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of feminist approaches to questions of violence, justice, and peace. The volume argues that critical feminist thinking is necessary to analyse core peace and conflict issues and is fundamental to thinking about solutions to global problems and promoting peaceful conflict transformation. Contributions to the volume consider questions at the intersection of feminism, gender, peace, justice, and violence through interdisciplinary perspectives. The handbook engages with multiple feminisms, diverse policy concerns, and works with diverse theoretical and methodological contributions. The volume covers the gendered nature of five major themes: • Methodologies and genealogies (including theories, concepts, histories, methodologies) • Politics, power, and violence (including the ways in which violence is created, maintained, and reproduced, and the gendered dynamics of its instantiations) • Institutional and societal interventions to promote peace (including those by national, regional, and international organisations, and civil society or informal groups/bodies) • Bodies, sexualities, and health (including sexual health, biopolitics, sexual orientation) • Global inequalities (including climate change, aid, global political economy). This handbook will be of great interest to students of peace and conflict studies, security studies, feminist studies, gender studies, international relations, and politics.

Gender and new wars

This brief introduction to the special collection outlines the main features of new wars and discusses some of the conceptual thinking around gender in the context of new wars and how it relates to international frameworks, such as UN Security Council resolutions on Women, Peace and Security. It considers in particular different forms of women’s participation and constructions of masculinities in new wars. This introduction argues that the binary narrative of gender has been damaging to both women and men and that the focus instead should be on understanding how subordinated populations are made vulnerable to the exercise and abuse of asymmetrical systems of power. To this end further academic research is urged

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and the role of social media in ethnic minorities groups in the UK

COVID-19 vaccines have been developed and administered at record pace in order to curtail the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccine hesitancy has impacted uptake unequally across different groups. This study explores the drivers for vaccine hesitancy in ethnic minority groups in the UK, the impact of social media on vaccine hesitancy and how vaccine hesitancy may be overcome. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted, coded and thematically analyzed with participants from ethnic minority groups in the UK who identified as vaccine hesitant. Social media played a significant role in vaccine hesitancy. For those who considered themselves healthy, seeing misinformation of extreme side effects relating to COVID-19 vaccinations on social media resulted in the opinion that the risk of vaccination is greater than risk from COVID-19 infection. For women, misinformation on social media regarding fertility was a reason for delaying or not getting vaccinated. Access and trust of sources of information outside of social media increased likelihood of vaccination. This study identified the broad spectrum of views on vaccine hesitancy in ethnic minority groups in the UK. Enabling factors such as a desire to travel, and positive public health messaging can increase vaccine uptake, whereas a lack of trusted sources of information may cause vaccine hesitancy. Further research is required to combat misinformation and conspiracy theories. Effective methods include actively responding and disproving the misinformation. For an inclusive vaccination programme that reduces health inequality, policy makers should build trust amongst marginalized communities and address their concerns through tailored public health messaging

Unruly wives in the household : Toward feminist genealogies for peace research

Feminist scholars and activists have historically been written out of peace research, despite their strong presence in the early stages of the field. In this article, we develop the concept of "wifesization" to illustrate the process through which feminist and feminized interventions have been reduced to appendages of the field, their contributions appropriated for its development but unworthy of mention as independent producers of knowledge. Wifesization has trickle-down effects, not just for knowledge production, but also for peacebuilding practice. We propose new feminist genealogies for peace research that challenge and redefine the narrow boundaries of the field, in the form of a patchwork quilt including early theorists, utopian writing, oral history, and indigenous knowledge production. Reflections draw on the authors' engagements with several archives rich in cultures and languages of peace, not reducible to a "single story." Recovering wifesized feminist contributions to peace research, our article offers a new way of constructing peace research canons that gives weight to long-standing, powerful, and plural feminist voices, in order to make peace scholarship more inclusive and ultimately richer.Peer reviewe

Examining relational social ontologies of disaster resilience : lived experiences from India, Indonesia, Nepal, Chile and Andean territories

Purpose The neoliberal resilience discourse and its critiques both contribute to its hegemony, obscuring alternative discourses in the context of risk and uncertainties. Drawing from the "ontology of potentiality", the authors suggest reclaiming "resilience" through situated accounts of the connected and relational every day from the global south. To explore alternate possibilities, the authors draw attention to the social ontology of disaster resilience that foregrounds relationality, intersectionality and situated knowledge. Design/methodology/approach Quilting together the field work experiences in India, Indonesia, Nepal, Chile and Andean territories, the authors interrogate the social ontologies and politics of resilience in disaster studies in these contexts through six vignettes. Quilting, as a research methodology, weaves together various individual fragments involving their specific materialities, situated knowledge, layered temporalities, affects and memories. The authors' six vignettes discuss the use, politicisation and resistance to resilience in the aftermath of disasters. Findings While the pieces do not try to bring out a single "truth", the authors argue that firstly, the vignettes provide non-Western conceptualisations of resilience, and attempts to provincialise externally imposed notions of resilience. Secondly, they draw attention to social ontology of resilience as the examples underscores the intersubjectivity of disaster experiences, the relational reaching out to communities and significant others. Originality/value Drawing from in-depth research conducted in six disaster contexts by seven scholars from South Asia, South America and Northern Europe, the authors embrace pluralist situated knowledge, and cross-cultural/language co-authoring. Thus, the co-authored piece contributes to diversifying disaster studies scholarship methodologically.Peer reviewe