Dr Laura J. Shepherd reflects on the most recent United Nations Security Council open debate on Women and Peace and Security, exploring the role such events play in global politics and identifying common rhetorical themes in member state contributions

Shepherd, Laura

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Promises to Keep: Reflections from the 2016 UN SecurityCouncil Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security blogs.lse.ac.uk /wps/2016/11/08/promises-to-keep-reflections-from-the-2016-un-security-council-open-debate-on-women-peace-and-security/Dr Laura J. Shepherd reflects on the most recent United Nations Security Council open debate on Women andPeace and Security, exploring the role such events play in global politics and identifying common rhetorical themesin member state contributions.The woods are lovely, dark and deep,But I have promises to keep,And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep.Robert Frost, 1923, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’The UN Security Council hosts an Open Debate on the thematic area of ‘Women and Peace and Security’ (WPS)each year, traditionally in October to coincide with the anniversary of the adoption of the foundation resolution,UNSCR 1325. I attended my very first Open Debate this year. I passed through the airport-style security, proceedingto the third floor of the Secretariat, and took a seat in the gallery, above the famous horse-shoe table. As we waitedfor the debate to begin, people all around me (and on the floor of the Council chambers as well) took selfies andscenery shots, clearly as excited as I was to be witnessing this performance. And what a performance it was:surreal, fabulous, fascinatingly dull.One of the things I was most struck by was the fact that the purpose of this debate is clearly not to debate. Eachstatement is given, and received, and while there is ‘right to reply’ there is no real interaction between the actorsinvolved. After several hours, moreover, there can be no reasonable expectation that those present are paying closeattention to the statements as they are delivered. So, it is manifestly not a debate, as such, which led me to wonderwhat it was… A performance, I concluded. A tightly scripted, exceptionally well-staged, and well-rehearsedperformance, with particular political functions.1/4The first of these political functions is outward-facing, and relates to the affirmation to an external audience that theCouncil itself, and its member states, are enacting their support of the WPS agenda. Video snippets of the debatehave been archived through the UN’s WebTV channel and it is live-streamed. There is widespread discussion of thedebate on Twitter, with various media departments tweeting pictures of their representatives. So there is a sense inwhich the performance of the Open Debate is indeed open: its mediation – through television, Twitter and otherplatforms – opens up the Council chambers, normally assumed to be (or in actuality) closed to public scrutiny andpublic engagement.And then there is an inward-facing function: it delimits the parameters of Women, Peace and Security discourse,producing (while simultaneously productive of) the boundaries of intelligibility in the sphere of Women, Peace andSecurity politics and practice. This changes – slightly, sometimes imperceptibly – year on year; part of my ongoingresearch is to investigate the process and implications of these discursive shifts because one of the key contentionsI make in relation to Women, Peace and Security (and other political phenomena) is that discourse matters.Women, peace, security itself emerge through the discourse that is (re)produced, in part, at these Open Debates.There are five key features of contemporary Women, Peace and Security discourse in the Council chambers (noting,2/4of course, that discourse is contextually, and temporally, specific) that I perceived as particularly prominent:1. Women are not only victims of violence but agents of change. Feminist scholars and practitioners haveconsistently argued that to consistently represent women as broken, bleeding bodies, as violated and/orinherently vulnerable victims of violence is to diminish or preclude entirely the possibility of constitutingwomen as agents in peace and security governance. The significance of this invocation, then, is in the veryfact of its ritual incantation: the boundaries around the subject of women are differently constituted whenwomen’s agency is acknowledged.2. Peace agreements are 35% more likely to last 15 years when women are involved in peace processes . Thisis a statistic drawn from the 2015 Global Study; I draw attention to this articulation in part because it wasstriking how many member state officials recited this statistic in their statements, and in part because itspeaks to the construction of women’s agency: the change that women are expected to effect in Women,Peace and Security discourse relates to nothing less than lasting peace.3. We commend the creation of the Informal Experts Group and/or the National Focal Points Network and/or theadoption by the UN Peacebuilding Commission of the institution’s first Gender Strategy. The Informal ExpertsGroup was founded in UN Security Council Resolution 2242 (2015), the eighth Women, Peace and Securityresolution. The National Focal Points Network, by contrast, is a member state initiative led by the Spanishgovernment that brings together government officials to discuss best practice in the formulation andimplementation of National Action Plans. Overall the performative function of holding up these moments ofpractice for recognition and plaudits is to firmly situate the ‘hard yards’ of Women, Peace and Security workwithin the practices of member states and the UN itself. Reciting commendations for these practices –valuable though they might well be – serves to anchor Women, Peace and Security in the realm of the stateand/or inter-state co-operation.4. Boko Haram/ ISIL-Daesh are perpetrating terrible violence against women . This is doubtless empirically,shockingly, horrifically, true. But the repeated invocation of this reality also functions not only to locateviolence against women over there in Syria, Nigeria, Iraq (and, simultaneously, locate the perpetrators of thisviolence over there, thus configuration the perpetrators of violence according to specific logics of gender andrace) but also brings Women, Peace and Security into closer alignment with global efforts to counter terrorismand violent extremism. This move has significant implications for the future of the Women, Peace andSecurity agenda.5. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still more to do… This is, at first glance, a refreshingly honest admissionfrom member states about the limitations of implementation, which is also a commitment to continued effort inthe sphere of Women, Peace and Security activities. But there is another reading of this little lament. AsNadine Puechguirbal notes, ‘“We still have a long way to go” is the catchphrase used by patriarchy to gaintime, justify its opposition to change and lull feminist analysers into believing that real progresses are made’.It seems churlish indeed to refuse to celebrate the modest achievements of member states and of the UNitself when they are by their own admission modest, and when by their own admission they ‘still have a longway to go’. Churlish, unreasonable, idealistic, even radical to demand not just incremental gains and littlewins but transformational change. The function of this statement, then, is to appease and to discipline. ‘Bepatient’, is the message, which too often means ‘Be quiet’.The performance of the Open Debate forces member states to recite their achievements and commitments, toarticulate – on one day each year – their account of Women, Peace and Security. It is for civil society organisationsand individuals to leverage this account into accountability. The four-minute statements delivered by eachambassador or delegate are seductive, alluring in their promise of change underway, but it is the change to comewe must focus on, and we cannot rest. Member states have promises to keep – and we indeed have miles to gobefore we sleep.3/4About the authorLaura J. Shepherd  is Associate Professor of International Relations at UNSW Australia and aVisiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security. In addition to verymany scholarly contributions on gendered representations of security and violence, often but notexclusively related to the WPS agenda, Laura is also a member of the Steering Group of theAustralian Civil Society Coalition on Women,  Peace and Security which was formed in 2012 tochampion the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda in Australia.She can be found on Twitter as @drljshepherd.4/4

Promises to Keep: Reflections from the 2016 UN Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security

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