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Women, Peace and Security in a ‘Non-region:’ Blind to Local Insecurities, Unprepared for Imperial Violence in Central and Eastern Europe

Women in a circle around a globe
Seminars

This event is part of the Department of Social and Political Sciences’ research seminar series and hosted by Dr Katerina Krulisova and Dr Mila O'Sullivan (IIR Prague).

Past event

Event details

Although firmly established as a global norm, the Women, Peace and Security Agenda (WPS) has been largely driven by the Global North attempting to solve insecurities in the Global South. Postcolonial feminist research shows that this Western-centrism and colonial legacies continue to dominate both WPS practices and knowledge production.

Our work interrogates WPS in Central Europe, a previously ignored ‘non-region’ that remains outside of the North-South divide. Combining post-colonial and decolonial approaches with feminist institutionalism, we interrogate what WPS becomes in the Czech, Polish and Slovakian contexts characterized by illiberal populist and anti-gender governance and politics. We argue that the three countries understand WPS as a key to their Western belongingness and reliability as international partners and replicate rather than challenge the ‘Western’ WPS thinking.

The resulting NAPs are centred around liberal ideas of women’s participation and security problems ‘out there’ which enables them to stay immune to local anti-gender tendencies. Amidst the Russian imperial aggression, however, CE’s WPS agendas serve as mere paper tigers and are failing to address the multitude of domestic and regional gendered insecurities. This failure to apply WPS when urgently needed relates to the deeper challenges surrounding the global WPS policy and practices. For WPS to not become obsolete, we call for localized post-Western WPS which includes the previously overlooked ‘non-regions’.

Booking information

This event is part of the Department of Social and Political Sciences’ research seminar series (2022-2023). The research seminar will take place online and can be accessed using the following link:

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Virtual Event https://www.ntu.ac.uk/about-us/events/events/2023/1/women,-peace-and-security-in-a-non-region-blind-to-local-insecurities,-unprepared-for-imperial-violence-in-central-and-eastern-europe

Past event

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