Description
The Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (PSVI) was founded in 2012 by then-UK Foreign Secretary William Hague and UNHCR Special Envoy and movie star Angelina Jolie as a significant programme of the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Almost eight years after the initiative’s founding, this paper provides a new analysis of the initiative’s work to generate political commitments and take measures against conflict-related sexual violence. PSVI is an example of gender expertise or ‘governance feminism’ at work but has also been controversial within feminist IR and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda community. Existing assessments have highlighted the role of PSVI as either ’normative entrepreneurship’, working to consolidate the WPS agenda, or a kind of securitisation, which risks denuding the agenda of its feminist credentials through an excessive focus on security solutions to sexual violence. I instead argue for a view of PSVI as a form of liberal governance, expressed in three senses of ‘governance’. First, governance as the control of war, by implementing, enhancing, or otherwise pursuing restrictions on armed actors through international humanitarian law, and at times signalling a willingness to use force. Second, governance as the proliferation of expertise, primarily through the standardisation of protocols and international standards, but also in deployments of gender experts to conflict spaces. Third, governance as the separation of political space, emphasising the division between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ policy domains, and consolidating hegemonic ideas about the location of violence and the nature of statecraft. I combine policy analysis, interview data and information on spending and deployments gathered from Freedom of Information requests to explore the character and effect of PSVI to date, and to situate it within wider debates about the role of femocrats in international politics.
