Women as Political Subjects: Discursive Constructions of Women in Peace Processes at the United Nation

Why, despite all of the rhetoric around women's inclusion sparked by the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, are women still not included at the table? To answer this question, this study explores the role that language plays in creating reality and how this intersects with gender as a social organizing structure. Taking women's participation in peace processes as the focus, this dissertation contextualizes narratives about women and their inclusion to understand how they are organized and contested and what the implications of such narratives are on women's ability to gain access to peace tables. This study uses feminist critical discourse analysis to look at written narratives from the UN Department of Political Affairs, the UN department responsible for mediation and facilitating peace talks, and the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, an organization advocating for women's inclusion, putting narratives from the two cases into conversation to understand the benefits, dangers and effectiveness of various arguments used for women's inclusion. It finds that mediation and peace processes are framed as masculine spaces that are defined by the exclusion of feminine characteristics. Despite institutional acknowledgement of the importance of inclusivity, women are discursively constructed as external to mediation processes. Instead, the willingness to use violence or the possession of expert knowledge become primary criteria of access to peace tables. Women are framed through their vulnerability, which delegitimizes their presence at peace tables and reinforces their exclusion from negotiations. These findings are contextualized through an analysis of the justifications for women's presence, revealing a discursive mismatch between the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security and the Department of Political Affairs that has the potential to undermine advocacy efforts and reinforce discursive barriers to women's inclusion.