Gender Limitations in the WPS Architecture

The WPS architecture refers not only to the eight Security Council resolutions passed between 2000 and 2015, but also to the international NGOs monitoring WPS and the policy developed to implement the WPS documents. Each of these three elements offers different spaces for voices and representation of women concerned with international peace and security. Individuals’ ability to participate

in the WPS architecture is limited by their lived intersection of social, economic and political access.

The words ‘gender’ and ‘women’ are often used interchangeably, an especially problematic practice in implementing the WPS resolutions and operationalizing the WPS architecture. The conceptual slippage between woman and gender is a topic with which feminists have long grappled, as Terrell Carver explains: ‘In many contexts one finds that a reference to gender is a reference to women, as if men, males, and masculinities were all unproblematic in that regard—or perhaps simply nothing to do with gender at all.’24 Carver continues: ‘Why map gender onto sex as one-to-one, just when the term was helping to make visible the ambiguities of sexuality, orientation, choice, and change that have been undercover for centuries?’25 To develop this point, violence against gay men is arguably not relevant to the work of the WPS architecture when considered from the perspective of sex, though this limited view neglects to account for the way assumptions pertaining to masculinity and femininity operate as a part of social norms and practices about gender.