Description
This article asks: How does 'race' dis/appear in the UK's Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda? To chart the ways race dis/appears, the article analyses a large body of empirical data including UK National Action Plans (NAPs) on WPS, Annual Reports to Parliament, freedom of information (FOI) documents, parliamentary debates, and interviews conducted with government and NGO professionals working in the field of WPS in the UK. The article examines the relationship between the collective erasure of 'race', the reproduction of (gendered and racialised) subjectivities, and the institutional practices that organise the UK’s implementation of WPS in accordance with global hierarchies of power. This article reveals four practices of gendering and racialisation: the erasure of 'race' and colonialism in UK-WPS discourse; the circulation of imperial feminism; the spatial organisation of WPS that reiterates geographies of conflict and spheres of influence; and the construction of both 'leadership' and 'expertise'. I argue that these interlinked processes are constituted of and constitutive by gendered and racialised sovereignty. Using the WPS agenda to counter-pose ‘us’ from ‘them’ becomes part of the way in which the UK represents itself as secure, sovereign, and gender-progressive.
