Description
This paper traces the UK’s enactment of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda from the colonial past to the racial-migrant present, responding directly to the relative absence of ‘race’ across the WPS literature. The paper examines a large corpus of documentation on WPS produced by the UK government between 2004-2018 – though centres the analysis around National Actions Plans (NAPS) and Annual Reports to Parliament, as well as interview data with both state and civil society actors. This examination exposes the relationship between the collective erasure of race in WPS, the structural and institutional practices that organise the UK’s enactment of WPS along lines of race, and the gendered and racialised subjectivities of ‘self’ and ‘other’ that are produced and reproduced through this enactment. Thereby addressing the research question: How does race dis/appear alongside gender in the Women, Peace and Security agenda? It highlights that ‘race’ is an ‘unspeakable thing unspoken’ in the UK’s enactment of WPS appearing in a series of practices that construct and reconstruct ‘race’, and which are legitimised through a state-based imperial feminism. These practices are evident spatially through the discursive language of import and export which reiterates ‘race’ in terms of culture, spheres of influence, and policy ownership and, in terms of knowledge production, through the discursive construction of expertise, best practice and case studies. It concludes that these reiterative practices are constitutive of, and constituted by, gendered and racialised sovereignty.
