The Visual Politics of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: From the UN Security Council to Civil Society
Dr Columba Achilleos-Sarll received a BISA Early Career Small Research Grant to help fund research investigating how the WPS agenda is visually communicated and (re)produced to study the dynamics of its visual politics, including the constitutive political effects. Drawing from an extensive body of new visual material collated and coded at different levels of WPS decision-making, from the UN Security Council to civil society organizations, the project explores how gender, race, class, and coloniality shape the visual politics of the agenda. As the first comprehensive visual examination of the WPS agenda to date, this research will make a significant and timely contribution to WPS scholarship alongside the wider literature on visual global politics.
In 2023, I received a BISA Early Career Small Research Grant to begin data collection for a new project provisionally entitled, Visualising the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. The project explores the visual politics of the WPS agenda at different institutional and policy levels, from the UN Security Council to civil society.
The WPS agenda is an international political framework that derives from the unanimous adoption on October 31 2000 of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) and nine subsequent resolutions. The agenda aims to advance gender equality and mainstream a gender perspective in matters of international peace and security. Despite the expansiveness of the WPS literature, which has developed in response to the proliferation of the ‘WPS ecosystem’ (Kirby & Shepherd 2021) both the visual aspect of WPS communication and its visual politics have received little attention (for exceptions, Achilleos-Sarll 2020; Haastrup & Hagen 2020; Kirby & Shepherd 2024). Scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the agenda’s linguistic reproduction, most often analysing the key texts that govern the implementation of WPS, including Security Council Resolutions and National Action Plans (NAPs) (e.g., Pratt 2013; Shepherd 2016; Holvikivi & Reeves 2020). However, beyond WPS, feminist scholars contribute significant insights into the relationship between aesthetics, gender, and politics, demonstrating how images are deeply entrenched in gendered, racialized, and colonial narratives and discourses of security, conflict, and war (e.g., Harman 2019; Bleiker & Hutchinson 2022; Achilleos-Sarll, Sachseder, & Stachowitsch 2023).
The BISA grant provided the resources for me to work with a wonderful research assistant, Marianna Espinós Blasco, who is currently conducting a PhD at Ulster University on visual global politics using feminist epistemologies and methodologies. Initially, the project has focused attention on the visual material included in National Action Plans (NAPs), the primary vehicles that translates the WPS agenda into a state’s foreign and domestic policy. A centerpiece of WPS activity, NAPs have now been adopted by more than 100 governments, with many in their third and fourth iterations. As NAPs have become increasingly comprehensive in their style and substance, both the quantity and quality of visuals have also increased, forming an important part of these documents. Adopting feminist, poststructural, and post/decolonial approaches to international security, an initial attempt has been made to organise and examine more than 1,500 images.
While the majority of visuals within NAPs are photographs of mostly women and girls in conflict and post-conflict settings, the materials also include paintings, icons, maps, flags, logos, charts, and graphs, each category requiring a different form of (visual) analysis. The 2017 Brazilian NAP, for example, is the only NAP to include an appendix of images, from paintings of historical women to the obligatory photos of smiling peacekeepers. The first image is an oil painting of Maria Quitéria de Jesus Medeiros, who we learn from the caption was the first women to join the Brazilian military (Brazil NAP 2017). Nicknamed the Brazilian Joan of Arc, she served in the Brazilian army during the War of Independence, enlisting against her father’s will disguised as a man. Commissioned as part of the 1922 centenary to mark Brazil’s independence, the painting has a wide aesthetic symbolism. The temporal narrative conveyed through the movement from paintings into colour photos of ‘pioneering’ women works to tell and retell the past, present, and future, signaling national history and identity in visual terms.
Scholars highlight that, because the NAP was published under the Bolsonaro government that viewed gender as an ‘ideology’, it was driven more by identity making and geopolitical considerations rather than a means to advance gender equality or as a politics of feminist peace (Hamilton, Pagot & Shepherd 2021; Thomson & Whiting 2022; Drummond & Rebelo 2023). Facing a resistant military and foreign ministry (Drummond & Rebelo 2023), Kirby and Shepherd (2024, 106) explain that "recovering and elevating historical icons was one self-conscious way in which NAP drafters sought to reassure ‘the military and other actors that were resistant to the NAP that things wouldn’t have to change’”.
However, the majority of visual material in NAPs are photographs, mostly of women and girls particularly from the Global South in various settings. When white subjects feature, they are mostly in peacekeeping or military roles, clearly separated from the ‘local’. They are identifiable by their uniforms, whiteness, and relational composition and positioning relative to the local population, (Achilleos-Sarll 2020) reiterating the racial-colonial, militarist, and white savior politics that infuse the WPS agenda (e.g., Pratt 2013, Weerawardhana 2018, Haastrup & Hagen 2020; Wright 2020, Achilleos-Sarll 2023). In many ways, these photographs mirror the neoliberal images of development that emerged in the 1990s. These images utilised positive, ‘active’ images of Global South women and girls ‘smiling’ whilst engaged in development projects supported by donor governments to project liberal forms of agency and empowerment whilst obscuring relations of oppression, exploitation, and the destruction wrought by war and conflict (e.g., Wilson 2011).
I am extremely grateful to have received the ECSR Grant to initiate this project, and these are just some tentative findings and preliminary analysis. However, there are many more images that fall outside these dominant frameworks and aesthetic patterns that require further investigating, as does other sites of WPS activity, including NGOs and wider civil society. I look forward to developing the project over the coming months and years.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
