Description
The United Nations Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda has become a well-known and internationally recognised framework within the field of peace and conflict studies over the past 20 years. However, one of the critiques of the WPS Agenda is that it privileges gender above any other significant power relation, such as race, class, or sexual identity in understanding women’s experiences in conflict. Although there has been some recent contributions on the Agenda’s failure to take into account intersectionality ( for example, Pratt, 2013; Jansson & Eduards, 2016; Hagen, 2016), there is a lack of clear empirical evidence in relation to how stakeholders at national level understand the WPS Agenda and intersectionality.
This paper will examine how, for example, ethnicity, race, and/or geographical location, affect how the WPS Agenda is utilised and understood in Palestinian by national stakeholders. Understanding this puzzle, allows us to better conceptualise women’s experience and subjectivity, because as Wibben (2011) argues, insisting that there is only one singular narrative on women or security is “itself a form of political violence” (p.2). This paper is based on interviews conducted with 14 civil society organisations and individual experts in Palestine. This paper contributes to the theoretical discussion about intersectionality by using it as a lens through which we can understand women’s experiences at the national level, gaining insights not only into how women experience security but also into how their own identities or social locations can affect the ways in which they are able to participate in decision-making and political processes. This paper demonstrates how, political, racial, and ethnic divisions are problematic when it comes to the implementation of the WPS Agenda and, if they are not taken into consideration, there is a danger of further division, as well as the exclusion and silencing of the different voices that need to be heard as part of the process.
