Considered a landmark in feminist international politics, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda of the UN Security Council has been the object of many feminist explorations. Feminist legal scholars, however, have grappled with the ‘shadowy’ legality of the agenda, mostly analysing it as an ‘unsuccessful’ legal project: a partial or in progress legal norm, a defective legal form that attests (and furthers) the exile of inclusion of feminists in international law, or yet a formalistic discussion with lesser impact for feminist activists on the ground. Drawing from Avery Gordon’s considerations on taking shadows seriously in our production of knowledge, I propose, however, that reckoning with the shadows of the WPS’s legality enables a more comprehensive analysis of how the agenda has been a successful legal project in its own way. Offering a ‘shadow hauntology’ for the legal status of the WPS, I zoom in on the competing legality perceptions shared by relevant actors, the (gendered and colonially-continuous) shadows that have haunted those perceptions into formation, and how these competing visions have shaped the legality of the WPS as a shadow of its own. This study then offers an alternative way of studying legality both to feminist legal scholarship and studies on international legal sources more broadly. More concretely, it embraces the irresolvability of the legal status of a norm to take stock of the different legal projects and legality perceptions advanced by feminist actors and gender experts, in an effort to understand, in their own terms, the successes achieved.

In recent years, Brazil and Poland have elected governments that are sceptical of both the liberal international order and gender. In both cases, contemporary administrations have bolstered the pre-existing anti-gender offensive of religious and secular conservative forces and converted this into legislation and public policy. Yet, at the same time, both have also created National Action Plans around the UN's Women, Peace and Security agenda. Why is this the case? Why do two governments that see gender as an ‘ideology’ continue to work on WPS? Using a feminist institutionalist framework, this article draws on content analysis of the NAPs and semi-structured in-depth interviews with stakeholders in Brazil and Poland to explore this puzzle. We argue that the WPS agenda has survived in these political contexts due the presence of key ‘femocrats’ within the state; the influence of international institutions; and the symbolic power that the WPS agenda gives to these countries on the world stage. As such, the article makes a key contribution to the literature on the WPS agenda and also bolsters the argument for a complication of the idea of gender ‘backlash’ – in domestic and international audiences, states are willing to adopt different attitudes to gender if it furthers their interests.

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and women's participation in peace processes are strongly supported by states. Yet financing to support the implementation of WPS has lagged behind overt international commitments to the agenda. WPS scholars and practitioners have highlighted the funding shortfalls for enabling WPS implementation and continued under-investment in gender-inclusive peace. In this article, we ask how much are donor states financially backing the implementation of gender-inclusive peace agreements which they promote? We use a high ambiguity-conflict model of policy implementation to explore the mechanisms of bilateral and multilateral financing for gender-inclusive peace. We trace to what extent international investments are supporting specific gender provisions in two progressive gender-inclusive peace processes, the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement and 2015 Comprehensive Peace Agreement in the Philippines. In both case studies, we reveal a drastic gap between the international donor rhetoric and the funding. Patterns of financial investment do not follow nor support the life cycle of inclusive peace processes. We suggest key strategies for further research to address this policy and recommend that all gender provisions of peace agreements be monitored in-country and all gender-responsive investments be tracked and evaluated.

As part of the roundtable, “Moral Injury, Trauma, and War,” this essay explores the relationship between revisionist just war theory and moral injury. It proceeds in four sections. First, it offers a brief overview of the just war tradition, focusing on traditionalist and revisionist accounts, respectively. Next, it explores the relationship between moral injury and armed conflict. Then, it explores the links between moral injury and revisionist accounts of just war theory. Finally, by way of conclusion, the essay signals two potential complementary paths forward that future research could use to clarify the revisionist position and its link with moral injury.

More than 20 years after the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, the international community is concerned with taking stock of its implementation in countries undergoing transitions from war to peace. This article contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics involved in implementing the Women, Peace and Security agenda through a focus on the frictional interactions that take place between different actors promoting women's participation in the peace process in Mali. Based on extensive fieldwork in Bamako between 2017 and 2019, it analyses interactions between different international and local actors in the Malian peace process through a discussion of vertical (between international and local actors) and horizontal (between local actors) friction. It finds that the way different actors respond to friction shapes relationships and impacts norm trajectories by triggering feedback loops, which in turn trigger new responses and outcomes.

Angelina Jolie's high-profile visit to NATO in 2018 signals a move to brand the alliance's strategic narrative within the language of celebrity through engagement with popular culture. The partnership represents a significant change in the alliance's approach to global security. It also builds on a shift in NATO's self-narrative through the advocacy of gender justice related to the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Rather than fading into the background, NATO appears to be pursuing the limelight for the purpose of ‘awareness raising’ as a tool to implement the WPS agenda. Drawing upon feminist scholarship on the WPS agenda, NATO, and research on celebrity humanitarianism and politics, we provide a critical study of this change in NATO's strategic narrative, through the analysis of visual and textual material related to Jolie's visit to NATO. Our focus is on the significance of this partnership and its contribution to legitimising the alliance's self-defined ‘military leadership’ in the area of conflict-related sexual violence. While Jolie's visit to NATO opened the alliance to public scrutiny it also symbolised a form of militarism, surrounded by orchestrated visual representations. As such, it only marginally disrupted the militarist logic present in NATO's wider WPS engagement.

As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay connects the past of the United Nations to its future from the perspective of the Global South. When the UN was created, most developing countries were colonies that played no role in writing the rules and designing the architecture of the post-1945 UN-centric global multilateral order. Today, countries in the Global South command a majority of the UN membership, but still mostly function as norm takers and are severely underrepresented in the UN Security Council—which functions as the geopolitical cockpit—and also in the senior ranks of the UN system, in the key posts in the Secretariat, and in the UN's funds and agencies. Gradually, however, these countries are using their numerical strength to give voice to their distinctive preferences, priorities, and values. This essay provides a broad-brush sketch of the changing nature of the North-South partnership on the UN's four overarching normative mandates of security, development, environment, and human rights. It includes a brief comment on the coronavirus pandemic within the framework of its main narrative of the continuing need for a UN-centric North-South partnership.

Since its inception in 2000, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has conceptualised the conflict-affected woman as a subject worthy of international attention, protection, and inclusion. In the wake of Europe's ‘refugee crisis’, this article examines how the remit of WPS has broadened from women in conflict zones to refugees in Europe's borderlands. A minority of European states now attend, in their WPS policy, to these conflict-affected women on the move. This inclusion productively challenges established notions of where conflict-affectedness is located. It exposes Europe as not always peaceful and safe for women, especially refugees who flee war. Conversely, the dominant tendency to exclude refugees from European WPS policy is built on a fantasy of Europe as peaceful and secure for women, which legitimises the fortressing of Europe and obscures European states’ complicity in fuelling insecurity at their borders, cultivating an ethos of coloniality around the WPS agenda. The inclusion of refugees is no panacea to these problems. If focused solely on protection, it repositions European states as protective heroes and conflict-affected women as helpless victims. The WPS framework nonetheless emphasises conflict-affected women's participation in decision-making and conflict prevention, opening space for recognising the refugee women as political actors.

The proliferation of legal and normative standards regulating women's rights in conflict has been accompanied by concerns about their efficacy. The article examines the activities of the CEDAW Committee and the UN Security Council and considers how synergies might be advanced. The article finds that, while the Security Council has unique authority over UN system activities, sanctions and peacekeeping, the CEDAW Committee—as a human rights treaty monitoring body—possesses the more effective system of State accountability and the more robust commitment to women's equality and rights. The article proposes measures for the optimum interaction between both institutions in order to maximize overall accountability for women's rights in conflict.

This article examines the evolution of military operations by the Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS) and the South African Development Community (SADC) over the last three decades. By looking at constitutional (treaty) developments and organizational practice, it questions whether these sub-regional organizations have displaced the primacy of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in matters pertaining to international peace and security, as foreseen in Articles 24(1) and 103 of the United Nations Charter (the UN Charter). The relevance of this question is underscored by the fact that ECOWAS and SADC have engaged in various peace operations since the 1990s. The article concludes that, since all the interventions under discussion were underpinned by the consent of the recognized government, it would be premature to suggest that the practice of African sub-regional organizations amounts to the emergence of a new customary right to engage in ‘first-instance enforcement action’.

The question whether external actors have a right of intervention within a sovereign state which is committing grave violations of human rights assumed particular significance in the case of the civil conflict that began in Libya in February 2011. Within the international response to the Libyan regime's attacks on its population, the Arab League, the United Nations and NATO favoured the use of military force, whereas the African Union favoured a political solution to the crisis. This article considers the question of African Union intervention within the framework of the concept of ‘responsibility to protect’. It argues that the reason why the African Union did not act militarily in Libya was that it lacks the will to confront incumbent leaders, something which undermines the organization's ability to provide effective solutions to African crises.

This article reviews Dutch contributions to international law and focuses on the last 100 years to mark the centenary of the Netherlands Society of International Law. It poses the question whether this is a missionary burden, resulting from the constitutional duty incumbent upon the Dutch government to ‘promote the development of the international legal order’, or enlightened self-interest on the part of the Netherlands. The article briefly recalls the two Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 and Dutch initiatives for a third that had been planned for 1915 at a time when the Dutch pursued a policy of neutrality. It also reviews some Dutch initiatives in the context of the League of Nations and Dutch policy during the San Francisco Conference that established the United Nations in 1945. The German occupation and membership of the United Nations marked the real end of the Dutch policy of neutrality. From the outset, the Netherlands became an active participant in nearly all principal fields of the United Nations' activity. The article highlights a number of Dutch international law initiatives in the fields of human rights, development, peace and security, international humanitarian law, and the peaceful settlement of international disputes. It concludes with final observations on the preoccupation of the Netherlands with international law.