Internationell fred och säkerhet ur ett genusperspektiv: En diskursiv studie av Säkerhetsrådets resolutioner för kvinnor, fred och säkerhet

Abstract

The Security Council’s resolution 1325 addressed the major negative impact that armed conflict has on women and children. This in turn complicates the Council’s work on maintaining international peace and security. The resolution therefore highlights women’s rights as participants in peace- and conflict processes. The aim of this thesis was to analyze how gender is expressed in the United Nations’ Security Council’s resolutions in the area of Women, Peace and Security. I investigated the way the rhetoric language in the resolutions produce and reproduce gender stereotype conceptions about women and men, and further what this means in a political security context. In this way I generate knowledge about what security is and who security is for as outlined in the resolutions. Through a discursive perspective I investigate power relations between security identities that are constructed in the resolutions. My results indicate that stereotypical conceptions about masculinity and femininity are produced in the Security Council’s resolutions. Through the discursive reading of the resolutions I also found out that the sovereignty of the State remains a challenge for the Council’s work to maintain international peace and security. This because the State is a gendered organization, which in a traditional security context, excludes women. I further conclude that the security issues that are expressed in the resolutions reproduce inequalities between women and men since the language of the Council stereotypes traditional ways of seeing gender as dichotomies of perpetrator/victim, aggressive/peaceful.