Encountering Metis: Feminist Articulations Of UN Security Council Practice

This project is an exploration of feminist interventions in the policymaking practices of the United Nations Security Council and, specifically in relation to its thematic policy on Women, Peace and Security (WPS). I draw on poststructuralist feminist methods and theorizing in the disciplines of International Relations and Critical Security Studies as a way to draw in and situate my own prior experience working as a feminist policy advocate in this institution. I respond to scholarly critiques that interventions in WPS policy have failed to meet their radical potential and write against those that, in their telling of feminist interventions foreclose the possibilities for future efforts and for feminist community across institutional boundaries. My analysis takes up the conceptual tools of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse analysis; a framework in which the meaning of any particular object, subject or action are seen as dependent on how its identity and significance is constructed by/within a particular discourse at a moment in time and through the operation of power. I argue that feminist interventions in WPS policy can best be understood as attempts at meaning-making that are shaped by, and potentially shape, the day-to-day practices of the institutional space into which they emerge. The fluidity of the discursive space allows me to take up a range of alternative texts and perspectives and provide an alternative reading of the Security Council policy space by taking on the perspective of those feminists assumed co-opted by its hegemonic forms. I use the work of Michel De Certeau and explore feminist interventions as ways of using or working with the dominant practices of the space in order to create or sustain alternative meanings. This opens up space to think in more complex and subtle ways about the possibilities for these interventions. Beyond the specificities of its context, this dissertation engages in the project of ‘theorizing practice’ by confronting, and attempting to move through, the challenges of telling the practice of the everyday. It moves beyond scholarship that focuses on subjects and objects in the abstract and tries to situate and reflect on these in a way that captures something of their interactional dynamics. It does so with a specific interest in exploring feminist articulations of these everyday policymaking practices and how we might tell of those as going beyond mere (re)production of the practices they seek to shift. I argue that feminist articulations of Security Council practice often rely on the invocation of relationships between differently situated feminists. It is in the articulation of these feminist relationships, I argue, that we might look for the trace of a feminist space ‘elsewhere.’

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