Governing the Feminist Peace Book Launch
Join us for the launch of Paul Kirby and Laura Shepherd's new book Governing the Feminist Peace: The Vitality and Failure of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda (Columbia University Press, 2024). Governing the Feminist Peace offers a groundbreaking critical account of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, exploring its evolution in relation to the wider politics of global governance and feminism. Against ideas of WPS as a settled, cohesive policy, Kirby and Shepherd reconceptualize WPS as a “policy ecosystem,” tracing interaction and contestation around the agenda across levels from the UN Security Council to military alliances to feminist activists. They combine analysis of a vast dataset of policy documents with key informant interviews and close readings of diplomacy, statecraft, the politics of indigeneity, counterinsurgency, antimilitarism, human rights, and the arms trade across the first twenty years of WPS. Far-reaching and incisive, Governing the Feminist Peace poses a provocative question: What if we abandoned the idea of the WPS agenda as a unified political project altogether?
Paul will give a summary of the book before comments from Professor Laura Sjoberg (Oxford), facilitated by Professor Sophie Harman (Queen Mary).
This in-person event will take place in Room GC204 of the QMUL Graduate Centre on Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS. Directions available at https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/qmul/docs/about/Mile-End-campus-map.pdf (The Graduate Centre is Building 18). The event will be followed by drinks at a local pub.
Queen Mary staff and students do not need to register, but for anyone else an idea of numbers would be helpful.
