Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Contradictions of Peace, International Architecture, the State, and Local Agency
- 1 Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland
- 2 Bosnia–Herzegovina: Domestic Agency and the Inadequacy of the Liberal Peace
- 3 Peace Multitudes: Liberal Peace, Local Agency and Peace Formation in Kosovo
- 4 Engendering the Post-Liberal Peace in Cyprus: UNSC Resolution 1325 as a Tool
- 5 Peace Formation versus Everyday State Formation in Palestine
- 6 Afghanistan's Post-Liberal Peace: between External Intervention and Local Efforts
- 7 International Interventions and Local Agency in Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone
- 8 Local Spaces for Peace in Cambodia?
- 9 Timor-Leste: Building on Local Governance Structures: Embedding United Nations Peace Efforts from Within
- 10 Incompatibility, Substitution or Complementarity? Interrogating Relationships between International, State and Non-State Peace Agents in Post-Conflict Solomon Islands
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Engendering the Post-Liberal Peace in Cyprus: UNSC Resolution 1325 as a Tool
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Contradictions of Peace, International Architecture, the State, and Local Agency
- 1 Lockout: Peace Formation in Northern Ireland
- 2 Bosnia–Herzegovina: Domestic Agency and the Inadequacy of the Liberal Peace
- 3 Peace Multitudes: Liberal Peace, Local Agency and Peace Formation in Kosovo
- 4 Engendering the Post-Liberal Peace in Cyprus: UNSC Resolution 1325 as a Tool
- 5 Peace Formation versus Everyday State Formation in Palestine
- 6 Afghanistan's Post-Liberal Peace: between External Intervention and Local Efforts
- 7 International Interventions and Local Agency in Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone
- 8 Local Spaces for Peace in Cambodia?
- 9 Timor-Leste: Building on Local Governance Structures: Embedding United Nations Peace Efforts from Within
- 10 Incompatibility, Substitution or Complementarity? Interrogating Relationships between International, State and Non-State Peace Agents in Post-Conflict Solomon Islands
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish.
Laura Bush, 17 November 2011Introduction: liberalism, conflict and gender
The address from which the quotation above is taken was made to the United States public a few weeks after the launch of strikes against Afghanistan, in the place of the president's weekly radio address. It signalled the launch of a campaign, spearheaded by the wives of US President George W. Bush and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair in support of the war, which focused on the plight of Afghan women and children, placing their liberation as a target of the military intervention. At that point, the legality of the invasion was still questioned, the United Nations Security Council having not issued a resolution that expressly authorised such action. A week later, and days after the Northern Alliance had entered Kabul, the Cable News Network (CNN) described the changes with reference primarily to women's rights, exemplified, amid references to education and healthcare, by the following sentence: ‘Nail varnish and lipstick have resurfaced from the back of women's drawers, and are being worn by women who no longer need a man to accompany their trips beyond their front door’. This attention to mundane and recognisably modern and Western attributes of femininity to promote a politics of gender equality was just one of the many paradoxes of that war, and the War on Terror, in which it was couched. Critical analysis has pointed to that campaign on women's rights as exemplary of how ‘women's bodies have been designated as a focal point for drawing distinctions between the free – those who have a capacity for self-government – and the unfree, whose incapacity for self-governance makes them targets [for violence]’. Liberalism is the discursive frame within which such paradoxes have been accommodated: paradoxes between the hailing of freedom and practice of violence, the hailing of equality and practice of orientalist oppression, and the hailing of legal order and the practice of flouting international law. Critical analyses and an ActionAid report have shown years later that Afghan women's rights suffered a backlash after a brief period of improvement, the promises of the first ladies’ campaigns not having been delivered.
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- Post-Liberal Peace TransitionsBetween Peace Formation and State Formation, pp. 83 - 104Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016