Description
This paper shows how governments have ‘domesticated’ WPS in strikingly different ways, from the degree of engagement with WPS norms, to the level of involvement of civil society and the location of the agenda in different bureaucracies of state. In some cases, WPS has been articulated as feminist foreign policy; in others as a less radical way to repackage existing security practices and interests. From these insights into patterns of national WPS we turn to a close reading of policy documents as reproducing the inside/outside distinction (Walker 1992), focusing primarily on the differing treatments afforded to Indigenous peoples and the history of settler colonialism in various WPS contexts (from relative silence in the United States and Australia to limited acknowledgement in Canada and a sustained focus in Guatemala). In showing how elements of the agenda are rearticulated in the discourse of national history and identity, we reveal not only the plurality of the agenda in implementation, but its role in wider constitutions of self and other, the ways in which gender can both accentuate and obscure violent pasts. In un-settling these accounts, we are better able to make out the relations between vitality and failure, and map them onto broader dialogues on colonial legacies and north/south inequalities.
