The year 2020 will mark the 20th anniversary of the adoption of United Nations Security Council resolution (UNSCR) 1325, the first resolution to be adopted by the Council under the title of ‘Women and Peace and Security’. With the subsequent adoption of eight further resolutions, ‘Women and Peace and Security’ now represents a significant and well-established thematic agenda for the Council, and its relevance as an area of political practice extends well beyond the Council Chamber at United Nations Headquarters in New York. This research focusses on the stories that are told about the WPS agenda, by the organisation that claims to be its institutional ‘home’ – the United Nations – and those who work in and around this organisation. Presenting a thematic analysis of a new corpus of narrative data, the research examines the ways in which various dimensions of WPS are narrated over time, and explores the political implications of these narrative constructs. 

About the Speaker

Laura J. Shepherd is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of International Relations at the University of Sydney, Australia. Laura is also a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security in London, UK. Laura’s research focuses on gender politics, international relations and critical engagements with security and violence. Laura tweets as @drljshepherd, blogs intermittently at The Disorder of Things, and spends a lot of time watching bad television.