Description
This paper explores the role of civil society in relation to the UK’s enactment of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. It takes into account the relative positioning of civil society in relation to the state, and focuses in particular on the micropolitics that constitute these relations. This paper builds on existing critiques of civil society, but theorises civil society in relation to the constitution of gendered and racialised sovereignty. It draws on a combination of interview data and public-facing advocacy documents. Situating civil society as both ‘humanitarians’ and ‘patronised feminists’, it explores the complex entanglements between state and civil society, tracing how WPS advocacy repertoires are being pursued in and through the state. By interrogating intimate encounters between differently positioned humanitarian subjects and the state, it proposes a typology of advocacy that is built around three loosely defined subject positions: the ‘critical friend’, the ‘shouty NGO’ and the ‘outsider’. This typology reveals a network of gendered and racialised hierarchies that reflect subject positionality, organisational ‘types’, and communicative acts. It argues first, that civil society is not a unitary actor, second, that it is not completely distinct from the state and, third, that it does not always hold the state to account. This exposes the complex afterlives of colonialism linked to the contemporary struggles of civil society who operate both against, and as part of, the imperial framework and neoliberal ideology of state power.
