A Sign of Weakness ? Disrupting Gender Certainties in the Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325

This Article will examine whether efforts to implement the Resolution suggest new ways to address the old problems: the reliance on stereotyped gender representations to rally women in the cause of peace and the vexed strategic question of how movements for transformative change might influence the mainstream institutions of international law and politics. The first concerns the way that the category of gender is deployed by women\u27s peace activism and by international institutions as they respond to it. The author’s question is whether it is possible to rally women to promote peace, while also challenging the gender dichotomies that underpin the notion of a distinct women\u27s contribution to peace; whether there are disruptive gender identities that can form an emancipatory basis for solidarity between women and men in the cause of peace. The second problem is whether the pacifist and equality goals of women\u27s peace movements can best be pursued from outside or within mainstream institutions, systems of location which carry their own gendered dichotomies. The long experience of women\u27s peace activism suggests that the most that can be achieved is a position that is partially inside. Rather than treating partial entry as a failed attempt at full inclusion, the suggestion is that this position might provide a foothold for resistive activity; that it may be possible to use this in-between space to remain accountable to anti-militarist outside movements while also working from the inside to transform military practices and ideologies. This suggestion has important implications for the ongoing struggles for a non-militarized peace and women\u27s equality, and for future feminist efforts to influence and shape international institutions and their practices in law and politics