Female peacemakers worldwide have become increasingly vocal about making their presence known in peace processes in Libya, Syria, Cyprus, Sudan, Colombia, the Philippines, and elsewhere. These women have found allies within UN structures ever since the UN-SCR-1325 has been adopted. Let's expand a bit more on UN-SCR-1325 to understand its significance in various feminist movements.

What is the UN-SCR-1325, and Why Is It Important?

A persistently growing body of research has begun focusing on the importance of involving women in security and peace issues to achieve long-term stability in recent years. In early 2000, UNSC - the United Nations Security Council formally accredited the evolving nature of warfare and how women are continually excluded from participating in the peace process through the creation of resolution 1325.

The resolution particularly addresses how girls and women are disproportionally impacted by war and conflict violence. It basically recognizes the critical role women already do and can play towards the peace-building efforts. The UN-SCR-1325 affirms that security and peace efforts are more sustainable when women are considered equal partners in the delivery of recovery and relief efforts, forging of peace, or preventing violent conflict in the first place.

Revisiting the Three Waves Of Feminism To Understand Gender And Its Relationship With Conflict And Peace-Making Efforts

Radical feminism and its claims about linking gender to the conflict have been fraught quite often, but women worldwide have also seen acknowledgment along with loads of reluctance to adopt their claims as substantial.  Many scholars argue that the claim that achieving women's inclusivity leads to long-term peace is not only empirical but also has political implications. This is primarily because these inclusivity claims are linked to transparency, social justice, and democracy in general.

Hereby, new constitutions can be asserted as opportunities to make policy changes that might have taken much longer to adapt otherwise. But if we consider that conflict can occasion feminist movements, some may argue that feminism can also be inherently seen as a post-conflict condition.

Many conventional western feminism historical accounts locate the feminism movement's progress along the three significant waves attributed to the 20^th century:

• Women's struggle for suffrage and the victories achieved by them in the 1920s  
• Women's struggle for politicization and emancipation with the private sphere during the 1960s
• Women's struggle for the recognition of multiplicities of feminism, discrimination, and genders at the end of the century.  

Transposing them onto the conventional western history draws a close connection of these dates to the three major world wars as well as their consequences: the WWI devastation (1914-1918), the WWII totalitarian specter (1939-1945), and the collapsing of a dichotomist world order during post-Cold War (the 1940s-1990s).  

Historians of the Suffragette Movement often trace connections between the roles played by women in several wars in the USA, Britain, and France to the strengthening of arguments to support their rights of voting. Within the political sphere, women proved their contribution to public discourses during such times, making their exclusion rather untenable (Van Wingerden, 1998). 

Some scholars argue that capitalism proved to be a massive hindrance when it comes to absorbing any gains women would achieve when they can make the most of any political opportunities that come their way.  Many studies pertaining to the second wave note that the parallel trajectory followed the War of augmenting wealth and production on the one hand but also the claims to equality on the other. This implies that the contribution of women to the war effort also contributed to rendering their presence in the expanded labor force.

In addition, it also provided viable context for those women who returned to their domestic duties that helped in critiquing these women's relegation there. Such claims regarding the recognition of domestic work as unpaid labor coupled with the gender pay gap expanded welfare protection of the gender. It led to increased protection outside and within the home surrounding sexual violence and reproduction.

The political-personal sphere constituted amid the second wave, thus, revolved around the sphere of work and rights. Fraser argues that, from a cautionary lens, the opportunity of aligning their interests in the post-war phase also became a liability. However, regardless of the case, the struggle to achieve gender equality became embedded in the western culture and societies during the process of prospering and recovering from the aftermath of the war.  

However, if the attempts to recover from devastations occasioned the gains in equality after both the world wars, it can be said that the end of the Cold War provided the ground for amplifying most pleads for attention to the multiple forms that such gender equality should ideally partake.  The framing of globalization coupled with the collapse of the bipolar order as a multiple yet connected system then offers a context that required reconstitution of second wave fractures in several approaches to sexuality, feminism, positionality, and discrimination. By arguing that they all are connected in terms of struggles within a spectrum, it attempts to unify with a welcoming and dynamic politics of coalition" (Syndarm 2008).

The collapse of the dual order also rendered the dynamics of the global South and North, which is a major turning point of reference considered significant in the reference of the intersectional dynamics during the third wave. At this point, feminist politics gained prominence in international politics, and vice versa, even though some scholars argue that the connections pre-existed (True and Tickner, 2018). The third wave thus became prominent in post-Cold War conditions as two distinct discussions. The first surrounded acuminating in on peace and women, and the second on several cultural questions regarding identity.  

This coalition approach helped forge two major paths out of feminist politics: a lowercase feminist politics in the cultural sphere and the capitalized feminist politics with the sphere of International relations.  

The connection of feminism and post-conflict conditions is indispensable then as it connects the multiplicities of feminism and refocuses the phenomenon of gender equality as one that is perpetually under construction. So, in post-conflict societies, gender equality is rather 'always in the making.' It's a condition that doesn't demand separation of genders within the global hierarchies but one that is common. This means that locating feminism within the three western-centric waves emphasizes remembering that both conflict and feminism connect as much as they might divide different regions of the world. Understanding feminism in the context of post-conflict conditions might offer a more responsive and holistic understanding of why feminist security isn't only to be seen as a subset of human security; feminism must be viewed as a condition that emerged of the post-conflict global politics.

About The Author

The author is a full-time journalist with many articles published about quantitative research methods, methodology, and qualitative political science research. Her prime focus is to use qualitative and quantitative methods to test various social science and International Relations theories to highlight various feminist movements and approaches.