Laura Shepherd has written a stellar book. It scrutinizes the processes, participants, and politics that produced the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (known as SC 1325), adopted in 2000. SC 1325 is touted as a watershed or groundbreaking resolution because it explicitly integrates the amelioration of gender inequities and gender violence into the mandate of the UN Security Council. The passage of the resolution also marks the first time the Security Council debated the relationships among gender, violence, and security—some 55 years after the inception of the United Nations. Further, its enactment demonstrates the tenacity and strategic skill of the advocates and experts who organized the Working Group for Women, Peace, and Security, a formal nongovernmental organization, to lobby for its passage and to mark the anniversary of its passage by publicly assessing its implementation.
In Gender, Violence and Security, Shepherd not only charts the development of SC 1325 but also follows the effects of the processes, participants, and politics on its implementation and policy documents. To the readers of her book, it should become clear that the resolution does not simply mark an historic moment. Rather, it equally marks the coalescence of a committed, active, and savvy set of advocates and experts dedicated to its success.
Notwithstanding the remarkable adoption of SC 1325 and the concerted effort of its advocates and experts, Shepherd cautions that the resolution should not be accepted as sufficient to achieve its goals. It is but an introductory step toward acknowledging the links among gender, violence, and security—a step that does little to transform the understandings of each, much less the articulation of each of the three. As she argues in her book, the particular organizational logic of the resolution, specific “discourses of international security and gender violence [that] (re)present and (re)produce liberal modernist configurations of political community and subjectivity,” offers only one possible, one particular and, thus, one partial framework for assessing gender, violence, and security (p. 163). As a result, little transformation is possible: SC 1325 and its advocates cannot alone deliver the “radical reforms” they “purport to seek” (p. 7).
This is a strong claim. Yet Shepherd carefully details how she arrives at it by meticulously analyzing SC 1325 and its policy documents. Moreover, she outlines her understanding and critiques (presented helpfully in a table form) of the literatures in which she is engaged, namely, those explaining gender, violence, and security, and demonstrates how and why their grasp of gender, violence, and security is faulty. She also argues that to understand the particular policy successes and failures of SC 1325, it is first necessary to understand the discursive constitution and organization of its three pivotal concepts—gender, violence, and security.
Drawing on a mixture of theorists who study discourse, Shepherd focuses on a theoretical analysis developed by Jacob Torfing to demonstrate how discourses, as systems of “meaning-production,” define the “terms of intelligibility whereby a particular reality can be known and acted upon” (p. 20, quoting Roxanne Doty). This discourse-theoretical method allows for recognition of the productive and powerful effects of discourse as structuring representation, meaning, and understanding in complex and interconnected ways—both in the moment (such as passage of SC 1325), and over time (the interaction of SC 1325, its experts, the institution of the United Nations, and situations of armed conflict, for example). By highlighting the role of power and temporality through discourse-theoretical analysis, Shepherd also brings to the fore the contingent and political dimensions of meaning.
Gender is a contested concept whose meaning alters depending on the context of its interpretation. For the literatures on “violence against women” or “gender violence,” gender is conservatively identified as an empirical biological fact, as essentially a synonym for women, and as that which men are not in possession of, while also suggesting that experience (as women's experience of violence) and empirics (the number of women experiencing violence and/or gendered violence) lie outside the realm of the discursive. For Shepherd, this resolves the relationship of gender, violence, and security into one of two possibilities: as against women or as gendered in such a way that security is achieved by restraining men from committing violence, thereby rectifying the structural inequalities between men and women. However, those two possibilities exclude a third; they ignore how violence is, itself, gendering, and security is more than the cessation of violation: “Instances of violence are on of the sites at which gender identities are reproduced. Thus, gendered violence is the violent reproduction of gender.” Therefore, security requires the absence of the violent reproduction of gender in all its forms.
For example, SC 1325 mandated that the Office of the United Nations Security General study and report on the impact of armed conflict on women and girls. The report, published in 2002, is a significant contribution to knowledge about the impact of armed conflict on women and children. But, as Shepherd details, its contribution is circumscribed by the very definitions and concepts by which it is structured. The UN study does not radically shift the ways and means by which gender, violence, or security are identified and addressed and, indeed, institutionalizes a particular “reality” of their existence and interaction. As she notes, the report “fixes bodies in relation to a biologically determined narrative of sex difference [that] universally subordinate[s] the female, and require[s] that the female be weak” (p. 106). It is not that some women are weak, and that many women experience sexual violence and subordination. Rather, it is that this presumption is institutionalized as if it were natural, normal, and universal. This clearly prevents the creation of policy that is responsive to differences—for example, the difficulties responding to female combatants who move among positions of power and agency.
Shepherd's book is rigorously researched, theoretically innovative, and empirically sound. It is appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate classes, and of particular interest to scholars of gender, international relations, international institutions (in this case, the United Nations), and international security, as well as those focused on gender and armed conflict. Further, her book could be assigned for multiple reasons: as a treatise on the methodological approach of discourse-theoretical analyses, as an ontological exposition of gender, or as a theoretical exploration of poststructuralism. The only drawback to this book is also, conversely, one of its strongest points—the careful and detailed exposition of each of the theorists and heuristics with which she debates and upon which she draws.
It is a rare feat for one book to be so sophisticated and complex in its elements as to offer an example of how to think about method, ontology, and theory within a grounded, particular case study, and it is evidence of both how and why poststructural analysis is necessary for imagining and instituting a world of change. As Shepherd states, her book, “despite its theoretical leaning and heritage, does indeed have an avowedly practical application” (p. 5). As the first monograph that undertakes the analysis of SC 1325, hers is a notable original in its own right, but her monograph is also one of a few that offers a poststructural analysis from which practitioners and scholars, advocates and skeptics, may learn.
