Description
The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda’s global call for women’s inclusion in peacebuilding has increasingly become a cornerstone of the liberal peacebuilding project. The implementation of WPS priorities around the world has raised a number of criticisms, including questions about the extent to which adoption of WPS national action plans (NAPs) proffers legitimacy for authoritarian countries on the world stage, as well as the myriad ways that the WPS agenda has ignored LGBTQ experiences with peace and violence. I build on these critiques to argue that, in the case of illiberal states with strong resistance towards gender equality and LGBTQ rights, the public acceptance of WPS priorities produces collusion between authoritarian states and liberal peacebuilding processes under an exclusionary, heteronormative framework. Spotlighting post-civil war Burundi as a case study, I argue that civil society’s embrace of the WPS agenda in Burundi has reinforced rigid, binary conceptions of gender and cemented an ideal-type ‘woman participant’ worthy of inclusion in the public arena. Drawing on content analysis of Burundi’s NAPs and interviews with civil society stakeholders, I show how a queering of Burundi’s WPS policies reveals not only that such policies are a symbolic form of power vis-à-vis the Global North, but they also work to solidify a heteronormative, cisgender framing of ‘women’ that accepts only ‘ideal’ women—married, elite, educated, straight, cisgender mothers—as potential leaders in peacebuilding. While these ‘exceptional’ women are increasingly finding themselves a seat at the table, those who exist outside this archetype remain excluded and erased from national WPS priorities.
