Description
The United Nations Security Council Resolutions that comprise the ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda form four pillars articulating core WPS principles and priorities: protection, prevention, participation, and relief and recovery. While scholars have already unpacked the discursive constitution and practical evolution of these pillars, they have focussed almost exclusively on their linguistic reproduction, usually through analyses of the National Action Plans (NAPs) of participating countries. We thus know surprisingly little about the role of visuality in the pillars’ reproduction. This paper therefore asks: 1) How do visuals reproduce the WPS pillars in NAPs? and; 2) How are gender, race, and (neoliberal) capitalism visually inscribed into the pillars and with what implications for the reproduction and/or disruption of global hierarchies of power? A visual feminist analysis of all NAPs published to date reveals how different images of men, women, and children are used to represent the pillars’ dominant, sometimes intersecting, themes of liberal feminism (participation), coloniality (protection), neoliberal development (relief and recovery), and the construction of men and masculinities (prevention). We conclude by exploring how the differing ease with which pillars are illustrated reflects broader trends in how comprehensively each policy area is serviced by the WPS agenda.
