Constructing the local woman peacebuilder in the Women,Peace and Security agenda: Iraqi women’s participation in local peacebuilding programmes

Abstract

The ‘local’ as a site of peacebuilding and as a subject position has played a significant role in scholarly debates on peacebuilding and international intervention, and increasingly so in work on the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Local women are called upon to represent the conflict experience, and localisation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda is becoming part of the rhetoric around implementation. This article examines the impacts of this focus with reference to peacebuilding and women’s inclusion initiatives in Iraq in locations previously held by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. The article analyses three programmatic case studies situated in Ninewa, a governorate in northern Iraq. The analysis offers a four-part typology of local women participants – local women as peacebuilders, a-political (and a-sectarian), non-elite and intermediary – and uses these types to explore how the participation and presence of local women is constructed within peacebuilding programming. By introducing these types, this article makes visible the practical and conceptual impact of the focus on the ‘local’ on the Women, Peace and Security agenda, its implementation in post-conflict contexts, and on how local women and their contributions are perceived in Women, Peace and Security-focused peacebuilding interventions.

Keywords

Iraq peacebuilding women’s participation Women Peace and Security localisation

Introduction

This article investigates the impacts and implications of the ‘localisation’ of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and efforts to increase women’s participation in peacebuilding more generally. By examining case studies of peacebuilding initiatives in Iraq that seek to increase local women’s participation, this study works to make explicit the assumptions underpinning the role ‘local’ women are intended to play in peacebuilding programmes. As the article shows, these assumptions (explored through a typology that highlights different concepts underpinning the ‘local woman participant’) operate on hierarchies linking global actors and norms and local participants relevant to how we understand and examine the WPS agenda, its implementation, and localisation.

As scholarship on the WPS agenda has developed, WPS scholars have sought to better capture and understand how the agenda travels, is translated, rewritten or adopted beyond its normative frameworks and global policy-making settings.¹ For this reason, the ‘local’ has become of increasing interest to scholars working on WPS and its implementation (Achilleos-Sarll and Chilmeran, 2020; George, 2018; Lyytikäinen and Yadav, 2021; Martin, 2021; Shepherd, 2020, 2011). The focus on the local as a site of implementation is similarly featured in the agenda and its Security Council resolutions; using language that draws upon local women as consultative bodies, or as having a role to play in supporting work on sexual and gender based violence. Later resolutions feature more context specific language, and mention regional, national and local implementation efforts.² Lastly, ‘local’ women appear in debates and formal meetings in New York and elsewhere to represent front-line experiences of conflict and peacebuilding (Chilmeran, 2022; Gibbings, 2011). However, this appearance is not benign, but rather sets up under-examined norms, expectations and roles for ‘local’ women and women’s organisations (Achilleos-Sarll and Chilmeran, 2020). A critique of these issues appears in post-colonial and critical engagements with the agenda (Martin de Almagro, 2018), focusing on how the ‘local’ as a subject position and a site of work is hierarchically situated vis-à-vis the global within the WPS agenda itself (Basu, 2016; Chilmeran, 2022; Jabri, 2013; Manchanda, 2021; Shepherd, 2020). As Shepherd (2015) writes, the local appears in relation to the WPS agenda as a source of legitimacy and knowledge, but in ‘extractive’ and ‘subordinated’ ways relative to the global. In extending the lines of inquiry that these scholars engage in, this article situates its analysis and contributions in the very ‘local’ that the WPS agenda draws upon in its global rhetoric, and contextualises that local (and ‘local women’) in local–global relations that shape programming, interventions and the implementation of the WPS agenda itself.

The local as a site of intervention has been of interest to peace and humanitarian intervention scholars in recent decades – including through the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding literature (Leonardsson and Rudd, 2015). The ‘local’ appears in a number of ways, as a critical concept or framework that highlights positionality and power relations across local–global relations in the context of state- and peacebuilding, or (at times simultaneously) as a utilitarian tool that traces the process of transferring power and resources to local authorities after conflict. Scholars in these fields highlight the interactions of international peacemaking institutions with local actors and norms, and the increasing role for local efforts in peacemaking (MacKenzie and Sesay, 2012). Critical scholars highlight the ‘frictional’ relationship between what is local and what is not in the context of peacebuilding (Björkdahl and Gusic, 2015; Hameiri et al., 2017), again bringing attention to the extractive and subordinated positioning that the ‘local’ receives in these interactions (Murrey and Jackson, 2020). However, scholars focused on the gendered power dynamics relevant to local peacebuilding have argued that peace scholarship requires better engagement with gender itself (and indeed how women may experience peace and war differently to men) (George and Soaki, 2020; Rigual, 2018). This debate is both practical and epistemological, with implications for how knowledge and experience are counted in scholarship on peace and for peacebuilding work itself.

Against this backdrop, this article positions its exploration of the role of women in local peacebuilding initiatives, using three case studies from Ninewa governorate in Iraq to illustrate what the focus on ‘local women’ may mean for the WPS agenda, and its applications in efforts to support women’s inclusion in building peace. As explored below, these cases represent insights into what ‘local’ peacebuilding efforts look like, and how they incorporate women and women’s participation. To understand this relationship and its logics better, I ask: How is ‘local’ women’s participation conceptualised in international efforts to support women’s participation in peacebuilding, and with what implications for feminist international relations (IR) research on women’s participation in conflict-affected contexts and the WPS agenda? I pose this question with two aims: to make visible the way the ‘localisation’ of women’s inclusion in peacebuilding is perceived and conceptualised by international actors, and built upon assumptions about the function and contribution of women’s participation at this level; and to contribute to literature that clarifies conceptually what the ‘local’ means in the context of the WPS agenda. I offer a typology of local Iraqi women’s participation in peacebuilding programmes that critically renders visible the logics of women’s inclusion in this space. The four types of women’s participation are as: (a) essentialised peacebuilders; (b) a-political; (c) non-elite; and (d) intermediary. This typology is not designed to affirm these logics, but to ensure their visibility in future scholarly and policy discussions on the ‘local woman’ in the WPS agenda. This article also provides an important empirical illustration of ‘local’ initiatives, grounding them in the local–global relations, funding streams and programming design.

Methods: researching the ‘local’ in Iraq

This article builds its argument on a small number of case studies designed to illustrate a wider logic underpinning women’s participation, and how it is conceptualised, in local peacebuilding interventions. The interviews included in this manuscript come from a larger project on women’s participation in peacebuilding and violence prevention after 2003 in Iraq, with a specific focus on the uptake of the WPS agenda. For the larger project, I compiled an array of documents and conducted 39 interviews (in person or via telephone/Skype), all between June 2017 and April 2019.³ This article, however, draws upon five to six interviews that make up the ‘case studies’ and upon the broader interview set in the analytical sections. The case studies were chosen for their context, as they represent projects from Ninewa governorate at a time when peacebuilding interventions were at their peak, as well as for their illustrative quality – representing a type of project that focuses on ‘local’ women participants, albeit drawing on slightly different yet interconnected logics.

The analysis, and broader methodology underpinning this research, draws upon a feminist research ethic (Ackerly and True, 2020) – not only highlighting positionality, but also attempting to uncover gendered power relations often left silent in interview material or in policy and project documents. For this reason, the analysis and coding of interview material and reports draws on inductive coding, to uncover and make sense of the gendered norms underpinning women’s appearance in peacebuilding initiatives. Feminist research reminds us that a singular narrative can illustrate the power dynamics at play in conflict and post-conflict settings (Hedström, 2021).

While inductively reflecting on the fuller breadth of interviews, the three projects used as case studies below stood out as using coded language for ‘local’ in ways that imply something about gender, women’s participation and the intersection between local actors and international expectations, and so this article provides a space to explore the implications of these constructions for the WPS agenda and for women’s participation more broadly.

The localisation of peacebuilding interventions in Iraq

Iraq is no stranger to intervention-driven statebuilding and peacebuilding. In the 20 years since the invasion, the nature of these interventions has of course changed, as has the focus of scholarship examining peacebuilding efforts in the country. Scholarship on peace in Iraq focused immediately after 2003 on international intervention, state- or institution-building (Herring, 2008; Kahler, 2008), highlighting the varied impacts, complexities and challenges of these processes. Later, scholars explored context-driven conflict and peace dynamics (Watkins and Hasan, 2021), diversifying the understanding of institutions that contribute to peace and security in Iraq (Alshamary, 2021; Bourhrous and O’Driscoll, 2023), as well as different ways of understanding peace in an ‘everyday’ or more ‘localised’ way (O’Driscoll, 2021). As these studies show, there is a shift from centralised institution-building towards localised efforts to understand and contribute to peacebuilding. However, the gendered impacts of this, and the gender-focused aspects of these interventions (like the WPS agenda), are relatively understudied.

The local and international effort to support women’s participation in Iraq after 2003 takes on a similar trajectory – largely because it is part of the intervention that occurred in 2003 and the statebuilding processes that followed – which encompasses the WPS agenda and its implementation in Iraq. Initially and immediately after 2003, Iraqi women (with some international support) mobilised across two key themes: the women’s parliamentary quota (which was enshrined in the 2005 constitution) and protecting women’s legal status and historic gains (Ali, 2018; Al-Tamimi, 2018), reflecting the focus on institution-building. However, in more recent years and as the nature of conflict in Iraq, a more context-specific (or local) and less institutional approach to supporting women’s participation has become more common. It is here that we zoom in to Ninewa governorate to examine what localisation means in the context of supporting women’s participation in peacebuilding projects and programmes.

Ninewa governorate is in Iraq’s northern region, and the governorate has been the site of international, regional, national and local attention due to the presence of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) from 2014 to 2017. Ninewa was a key stronghold for ISIL and a site where many atrocities were committed by the group and its supporters against minority groups indigenous to the Ninewa region. In ISIL’s aftermath, Ninewa continued to be a site for attention and intervention that took on many forms: as international and national military operations to liberate the region from ISIL control, and, later, as efforts to rebuild physical infrastructure, as well as peace, social cohesion and co-existence efforts that have specifically used ‘localised’ language. Much of this work is built upon strengthening local peace agreements and the architecture linked to their implementation, and building, strengthening or upskilling local civil society (Bourhrous and O’Driscoll, 2023; Parry and Aymerich, 2022; Watkins and Hasan, 2021). The three case studies highlighted in this article are examples of this type of programming, with a specific focus on women’s inclusion.

Conceptualising local women’s peacebuilding

‘Local women’ play a central yet conceptually ambiguous role in the WPS agenda, and, by extension, in peacebuilding programmes that draw on or support women’s participation. Therefore, theorising and empirically clarifying this role is important to making sense of the WPS agenda and its implementation, and its impact on the very women it seeks to support. This study achieves this by deploying a typology of local women participants in WPS-inspired peacebuilding initiatives – types that are drawn from the author’s analysis of language used in peacebuilding programmes and by the practitioners who design or implement them, from literature on women’s participation, and in some instances from the women themselves. However, the function of this typology is not to affirm these types or categorically link them to how women themselves understand their roles and contributions. Rather, the typology works to render visible the way local women’s participation is constructed in the WPS agenda, and the potential impacts of this construction, in which local women play specific roles or provide contributions that centre their identity as local (as opposed to national, elite and already part of the post-intervention political class). These perceived or constructed ‘roles’ are explored through the following types: essentialised peacebuilder, a-political and a-sectarian, non-elite and, lastly, as potential intermediaries. This section outlines these types, the logic underpinning them, and their relationship to local peacebuilding in initiatives in Ninewa, Iraq, as well as the way women appear in the WPS agenda more broadly.

The local woman as an essentialised peacebuilder representation is not new nor specific to the Iraqi case. The justification of women’s participation in peacebuilding and peacekeeping through an assumed embodiment of their inherent nature as mothers, nurturers and providers of feminised care, is well documented ‘in the field’ and in the contexts of global WPS policy-making (Gibbings, 2011). This is mirrored in discussions about the WPS agenda on women’s roles in peace and conflict, and the construction of women’s roles and identities within the agenda (Charlesworth, 2008; Pratt, 2013). As Gibbings (in conversation format) notes, ‘in 1325, women are essentially victims, peace-builders and peace-makers’, rather than instigators of violence (Cohn et al., 2004: 136). In the Iraqi context this type takes on a localised flavour, as there are pre-existing gendered cultural norms which codify women as self-sacrificial, for the sake of their family, in times of war or sanctions (Al-Ali, 2005). However, it should not be assumed that this peacebuilder identity is always externally imposed. Essentialist ideas can be utilised as a political tactic by women themselves, as Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ shows (Spivak and Grosz, 1990). Women have, historically and contemporaneously, deployed their gendered ‘peacemaker’ identity and positionality to gain access, assert their ideas and ensure their participation – often as a point of contrast to their male counterparts.

The local woman as a-political and a-sectarian is removed from the political and sectarian divisions that are associated with politics in Iraq after 2003. The state and its functions are widely understood by the public and many in the international community as corrupt, ineffectual and concerned with re-election rather than with improving the lives of average Iraqis. Women parliamentarians are implicated in this view but are also wishfully expected to be outside it. In the programme analysed below, there is a tension between the hope that Iraqi women parliamentarians can transcend political and sectarian divisions, and the reality of their commitment to their parties, constituencies, and re-election campaigns. In this instance, and indeed in many others where women’s formal parliamentary participation is being encouraged through quotas and other measures, women are expected to become a-political actors who meet the demands of political office while also transcending it by championing a broader women’s cause. The result is the perception that for women’s rights or participation interventions to be successful, women need to be removed from the politics of the state, while ironically needing to engage in it to remain in positions of power.

The local woman as ‘non-elite’ draws upon a well-examined concept related to women’s participation in conflict or Global South contexts – where women who lead organisations or take up political space come from elite backgrounds. The tension between actors who are positioned as ‘local’ and those who embody an ‘elite’ status as a result of their activism or advocacy work exists beyond the Iraqi case, and it shapes the way women activists are understood, categorised and labelled in many contexts (Ferree and Tripp, 2006; Hanafi and Tabar, 2005; Martin de Almagro, 2018). The label ‘elite’ applies a class lens that implies middle- to upper-class university-educated women, and highlights the disparities in women activists’ access to the international – be it funding or space. The label ‘elite’ puts in question the impact and utility of spaces of participation that are difficult to access and typically associated with the international – locations like Geneva and New York, five-star hotels in Iraq or neighbouring Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries, or in Baghdad’s Green Zone, which houses diplomatic missions and governmental institutions. The focus on local participation and the empowerment of local activists represents the opposite of these sites, and accordingly is referred to as ‘non-elite’.

The fourth type, the ‘local woman’ as intermediary, describes how local women can be treated as touchstones for local issues and as access points for the so-called local. This type draws upon work by Parry and Aymerich (2018) on women acting as bridge-builders between women in post-liberation communities in Iraq and security actors. However, women playing the role of intermediaries in the context of international intervention and programming has specific implications regarding identity that are gendered and racialised, with the negative implications of this outlined clearly by Martin de Almagro (2018). In a practical sense, this type of local women’s participation is tied to the desired outcome of a WPS-linked programme run by an international organisation in Iraq, which facilitates local women becoming intermediaries as a way of resolving challenges to women’s participation and women’s access to security actors and protection.

Making these types visible, by observing and presenting them cohesively as part of a typology, highlights the gendered assumptions that exist in relation to the WPS agenda and its application in local, though often internationally funded and shaped, peacebuilding interventions. The purpose is not to vilify the assumptions underpinning these ideas, because, as the sections below show, they are sometimes deployed in useful ways to navigate a variety of barriers to women’s participation. Nevertheless, examining the impact of localisation of the WPS agenda remains an important part of understanding the agenda and its implementation in conflict-affected contexts.

Iraqi women’s participation in local peacebuilding

How does the typology identified in this study appear on the ground? This section explores this question by first describing each of the three programmatic case studies implemented at the governorate (subnational or local) level in Iraq, and then exploring the links to the idealised types of local women’s participation.

Dr Farah Al-Sarraj and the Ninewa Social Peace Initiative

The Ninewa Social Peace Initiative is a women parliamentarians’ initiative started by Dr Farah Al-Sarraj. Al Sarraj, along with female parliamentary representatives from the Ninewa governorate, created the initiative in response to social and political issues stemming from the ISIL takeover of north-western Iraq, and the liberation efforts that followed. The initiative focused on two processes: a series of consultations with communities in Ninewa and the drafting of a declaration coupled with 10 recommendations to the Iraqi government and international organisations working on various issues in post-ISIL Iraq. The recommendations were intended to focus on ‘reconciliation’, community relations and broader social cohesion work that fell outside Iraq’s counter-terrorism laws or the state’s military operations against ISIL at the time.⁴

This initiative represents an ideal ‘local’ women’s initiative in many ways. It is organically started by women from a conflict-affected part of the country, who are part of the political establishment and who are seeking to address social issues post-conflict in an inclusive and representative way outside what can be coded as more militarised approaches.

Women as essentialised peacebuilders

Al-Sarraj’s identity as a woman was central to how she understood her role as both parliamentarian and leader of the initiative. Her identity, she explained, brought authenticity to discussions about personal insecurity and violence experienced by people in her city. The essentialised peacebuilder, therefore, is not only a construction of local women’s identity in global frameworks, but also the self-understanding and strategic deployment of this identity by the women leading the programme. This approach was shaped by the gendered security and political landscape in Iraq after 2003. In the quote below, Al-Sarraj elaborates on these issues:

Women don’t have the strength of a militia behind them but speak as an individual when it comes to being a parliamentarian. This involves the assumption that women are weak but in fact we turn this into a strength – using the identity of a woman as a key force in the conversations that we have and in engaging the actors we engage. Being a woman means you can raise certain issues and discuss them with emotion . . . and relate personally to those issues of personal safety, security and conflict, as you can put yourself in the position of those who have been hurt.⁵

The formation of the group relied on the women’s identities as diverse, as peacebuilders, as women, and as parliamentarians tired of the a political situation in Iraq that slowed responses to the humanitarian needs in the Nineveh region:

There are a lot of material and social needs of people in this region because of the conflict and the presence of ISIS, but the conflict within parliament around power and politics meant that those material needs weren’t being met . . . Women understand the grounded reality of the conflict and insecurity happening in this region.⁶

Although critiqued within feminist literature as both essentialising of women and invalidating of their experiences and agency in conflict, some self-identify with norms of women’s contributions for strategic reasons as well as grounded them in their lived realities. Women often have organised their movements around particular gendered identities as a strategy, mobilising as ‘mothers’ and politicising motherhood to achieve political ends (Carreon and Moghadam, 2015; Waylen, 2007). Similarly, Al-Sarraj deployed her identity as a woman in a specific context to appeal not only to the commonly held notion that women are natural peacemakers, but also to the specificities of ISIL’s conflict in Iraq and its impact on women and the broader civilian population impacted by this conflict.

Local women as a-political and a-sectarian

The Nineveh Social Peace Initiative highlights the association of local women with apolitical identities, which in Iraq at this time also meant a-sectarian. The understanding of women in this initiative as a-political and a-sectarian assumes their distance from national-level processes that are regarded as corrupt and ineffectual. Although Al-Sarraj presented women as untainted by the political and ethno-sectarian divisions of the wider politics in Iraq, in reality the initiative could not escape the politics of its context, locally and nationally.

Al-Sarraj recognised the risk of politicisation, and explained that political actors, including the parties each woman belonged to, would attempt to take credit for the initiative. The timing of the initiative was difficult politically, given the concurrent parliamentary elections and the Kurdistan independence referendum of September 2017. The sensitive political context compelled the group to pursue recommendations rather than a legislative bill, which would require debate in the national parliament.

The initiative was later supported by an international peacebuilding organisation that admired the group’s multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian composition. As the international partner stated, ‘we had really thought, and it was also presented to us that this was a cross-sectarian initiative’.⁷ The group was indeed non-sectarian, but the quote highlights an assumption about women’s participation at this level; that women are able to act outside the political and sectarian confines that shape their participation locally and nationally.

However, this soon gave way to the realities of local and national politics, particularly during an election year. As the international non-governmental organization (INGO) participant explained:

A number of them tried to get the funding channelled through their own respective NGOs. Basically, all of them had NGOs, which were just representing their own community and basically saw the initiative, well quite a number of them saw the initiative, as a way to get funding for their NGOs. That was really disappointing. We made some clear agreements also knowing that at some point elections would come up and [the initiative] could not be used as campaigning opportunities. We said that the idea is that you could go to listen to people and not use it as a PR moment in your campaign.⁸

Some tensions arose from factors outside the women’s control, such as access to specific locations in Nineveh that might host meetings. Some of the women involved ‘could not travel because of their political and ethnic or religious background [and] simply couldn’t go to certain areas’.⁹ This acts as a reminder not only of the political challenges faced by women participation in this space, but the security challenges too.

The efforts of Al-Sarraj and her team are an example of local women’s peacebuilding efforts. The also highlights the challenge of this type of work, due to local dynamics as well as national-level politics, interests and priorities. The project and the recommendations it resulted in show a clear agenda put forward by women from a specific conflict-affected context in Iraq which centres alternative visions of peacebuilding.

The initiative also exemplifies attempts by international organisations to find ‘grassroots’ efforts to support. This example, however, highlights misconceptions about what the local represents, particularly that it would be a site of organic forms of organising which would be removed from national-level politics and tensions. The initiative tried to create an alternative narrative to the peacebuilding process post-ISIL, but the women involved were aware that their roles as women and as parliamentarians were shaped precisely by their positionality in local political parties and constituencies. The assumption that women can overcome the divisions that led to, and were exacerbated by, the presence of ISIL in Nineveh feminises apolitical work. It also burdens these actors with the expectation of a-political-ness, without addressing the ways their participation and presence is shaped by gendered, racialised (or ethno-religious) and political barriers.

The WPS in Community Policing programmes

As part of community-focused security sector reform, a United Nations (UN) agency delivered ‘Community Policing’ programmes in different locations in Iraq. At the time of the interview, the organisation was implementing a WPS component in Ninewa.¹⁰ The WPS-focused programme worked in two ways: training on gender-sensitive practices for community police, and the establishment of Community Policing Forums.

Community Policing Forums in this programme are designed to be ‘an open neutral space with the police which is facilitated by the community police officer where the community can come together’ to articulate concerns.¹¹ The forums themesleves are designed to build awareness of the role of the police and the rights of the community, to build trust and legitimise policing as a response to crime or other harm, and to move the community away from the use of violence to settle disputes or conflict. Given the WPS focus, gender-sensitive approaches are mainstreamed throughout, designed to bolster women’s participation as both community police officers and members of the community.

The forums themselves achieve this by creating spaces where grievances can be addressed by community police officers and civil society actors in the room who may offer relevant services or programmes. The forums are designed to normalise women’s presence in such discussions, and to also facilitate the informal conversations and relationship-building that may occur before or after the formal part of the meeting occurs.

As the UN participant explained:

Women will come and speak to other women. They know that there’s women coming to the CPF [Community Policing Forum]. They generally like teachers and people that are respected in the community and they will know that she [the respected woman from the community] is coming and they say things to her outside of the meeting. Then she will bring it up in the meeting or she may even just directly go to the community police officer and they will try to resolve it.¹²

This process, though difficult to assess in terms of impact, is intended to create formal and informal space for women’s engagement with a community security process, build trust and strengthen women’s leadership in the community, allowing women to serve as advisor or intermediary. In fact, the role of the ‘intermediary’ is precisely what is encouraged as an outcome, specifically for women being trained as female police officers.¹³

Local women as intermediaries

The role of the intermediary as facilitator of other women’s access and participation is a specific logic or entry point for this case study or programme. The role of the intermediary is designed to build trust with other ‘local’ women; to normalise women’s presence in public community spaces (thereby setting an example); and to allow the programme itself to navigate cultural norms and barriers for women’s participation that may be particular to the community (essentially ‘localising’ the programme and navigating barriers that may stop women from accessing a service or programme). The local woman as intermediary is therefore a bridge-builder between other local women, and the security actor or other ‘authority’ at the centre of this programme. This role has the added benefit of normalising a more public role for women from the local community in question.

The reliance on an intermediary to better understand and navigate barriers to participation is a well-established tool for UN programming – as highlighted in the quote below. In this quote, Parry and Aymerich, discussing similar programming in Iraq, explain security concerns raised during focus group discussions with women in Diyala governorate:

When faced with a dispute or wishing to participate in matters related to security, women rarely approached the authorities . . . Women felt ‘ashamed to speak to the authorities alone because they are very much concerned about their reputation,’. . . Another explained that women are reluctant to approach the authorities alone ‘because of the potential for significant social harassment and also because they lack self confidence, they feel like they are not able to address issues adequately on their own’. (2018: 100)

The above quote highlights how an intermediary may navigate the specific cultural, social and political barriers that hinder women’s access to authorities or institutions.

The logic of a more public intermediary role was influential in the thinking of the UN Gender, Peace and Security advisor who designed the WPS in Community Policing approach. As she explained:

That whole idea of intermediaries is something that I'm trying to build upon. Either through the female policing officers . . . and then also within the community themselves, like building networks with women who are able to speak with security operatives. How do we empower or how can we create the conditions for ordinary women in Iraq that live in a place like Anbar or live in Tal Afar to be able to voice their opinion on security with their family even? . . . Having these times to meet and then by working with the women in the communities, like the ones that I was mentioning before . . . It is a knock-on process. If you have a woman who is in the community, who is trusted by other women, and she keeps talking about honour crimes, the potential of honour killings, then her voice will be heard also in the Community Policing Forum. The police should also be able to say: this is what’s going on.¹⁴

As the above highlights, the intermediary local woman is intended to play a specific role designed for women from the community, to navigate barriers to participation, to set an example, to articulate gendered concerns back to the institutions themselves and therefore better facilitate access to other local women and their issues.

The ‘Women in Reconciliation’ programme and ‘mid-level’ women leaders

The last case study is a ‘Women in Reconciliation’ programme run by a US-based not-for-profit organisation that focuses on strengthening democratic institutions. The Women in Reconciliation programme was launched in Iraq in 2017. It operated as a ‘local’ intervention in multiple locations, focusing on women in post-ISIL locations. The programme aimed to work with ‘mid-level’ women leaders (as described by the INGO staff member interviewed).¹⁵ This phrasing, and the logic underpinning the programme and its choice of participants, provides insight into how ‘local women’ are understood by the international organisation involved in this project.

The programme works with 40 women from 4 governorates: Anbar, Kirkuk, Ninewa and Salah-al-Din. The women are defined as ‘not necessarily . . . women’s rights activists’, but rather as ‘professionals, lawyers, doctors, owners of a small business who are engaged politically or interested in becoming more engaged politically’.¹⁶

Ten women from each governorate were chosen and provided with training to support their participation in the programme. Training began with discussions of concepts like peace and conflict before moving to skills-building so that women may take part in and lead policy-drafting processes:

[This involved] translating their experiences and their understanding of the conflict from their perspective and the perspective of others to then engage their communities. To help define what are the priorities, what are the immediate needs, the long-term needs that need to be addressed for a lasting reconciliation to hold.¹⁷

The programme culminated in the publication of a report, A Strategy for Peace in Iraq: A Gender-Sensitive National Reconciliation Platform, intended to ‘provide the Government of Iraq, civil society, and the international community with a blueprint for building peace and promoting gender-sensitive policy priorities’ (National Democratic Institute, 2018: 5). The ‘blueprint’ lists policy suggestions across six themes: women’s empowerment, safety and security, trust and confidence, victims and survivors, education and youth, and governance and distribution of resources. The policy suggestions are similar to the reconciliation suggestions of the Nineveh Peace Initiative and involve public awareness-raising of women’s rights, a focus on women’s economic empowerment, and supporting survivors of sexual violence.

The initiative aimed to underscore local concerns in the recommendations presented by the women involved regarding the national reconciliation process, and to spotlight women who should be involved in the reconciliation body itself. It was designed to take up opportunities that already exist (through local political actors as well as the National Reconciliation Commission) and inject a gender-sensitive perspective. As the project lead explained regarding the women involved:

Right now, they’re starting to have very high-level conversations with top government actors operating in this space. They already, over the last year or so within their communities, have been speaking with decision makers, governors, mayors, political party, representatives, members of parliament from their provinces to get these ideas in front of them and integrated within the new parliamentary mandate with potential provincial council elections coming up.¹⁸

The programme had a clear ideal participant in mind, calling for participation of women from specific governorates who fell outside of the ‘elite’ or leadership present in women’s organisations and networks in Iraq. This description is where the ‘mid-level’ and non-elite type is derived, speaking to a logic of searching for newer and less-established voices outside of central level, well-funded and well-networked organisers and activists. The mid-level distinction, however, is important as it is distinct from hyper local or grassroots, and speaks to a search for women who had a level of leadership, but who remained outside elite circles.

As the staff member at international organisation explained:

We didn’t want to approach it as the means to establish yet another formal women’s network, another women’s organization. What we wanted to do was train up a really select group of women and integrate them into existing structures that are already operating in this space. The government has many, many different committees and councils and things that they just keep establishing but very rarely are women really involved in that process. What we wanted to do is try and elevate the profiles and the skills and the capacities of women to show that they can do this work and that they should be involved in all these committees in decision making spaces.

We identified mid-level women [who were] activists, political party activists, civil society activists, who already had somewhat of a foot in the door or experience in this space. We didn’t necessarily want to work the super grassroots because that would just, timing-wise, it would just take much more time to get women involved in those conversations.

We also didn't want to work with the super elite – the women that everyone knows or the people that everyone know in the country because they already have the platform and we wanted to also coordinate and inject some new blood into that conversation. There was a select group of women actors who have elevated to the level of high profile and who are, I won’t say sitting at the table, but who have the ear of some officials.¹⁹

The quotes from the INGO participant provide insights into how ‘local’ women leaders, activists and participants are understood, particularly vis-à-vis their elite counterparts – other women who are considered the ‘globalised elite’ in similar contexts (Hanafi and Tabar, 2005). It is from this that the type of non-elite is derived. The programme asks for a specific kind of woman to become a participant – non-elite, but also not completely new to leadership or advocacy.

Unpacking the implications of the ‘local’ woman and her participation

The three programmes outlined above, and the four types of local women participants attached to them, represent an insight into the implication of the focus on ‘local’ women and contexts on the WPS agenda. At its inception, the WPS agenda intended to bolster and institutionalise support for women’s participation in conflict resolution and prevention, and to better account for the gendered impacts of conflict. Concurrently, research on the agenda sought to critically examine what the agenda might mean for women’s participation and presence in war and its end. As the introduction of this manuscript highlighted, the ‘local’ operates as a space of work and as a signifier of positioning vis a vis the global policy spaces where the WPS agenda was first actioned and is an increasingly important space to examine in WPS implementation.

Although there has been significant engagement on the top-down nature of the WPS agenda, whether by design or by proxy of it being a framework linked to the hierarchies and power relations of global institutions, this manuscript argues that we must look to the sites of implementation to understand the implications of these hierarchies. This article therefore addresses the ambiguous role that the ‘local’ plays in WPS literature and its practice, with specific reference to empirical case studies in Iraq.

This article presented a typology that highlighted the constructed nature of the role and contribution of local women participants in peacebuilding initiatives in Ninewa governorate in Iraq. The aim of the article is to clarify empirically and theoretically what and who the ‘local’ woman is, critically highlighting the constructed ways women appear in this space, what they are intended to represent, whether consciously or subconsciously, and the knowledge and outcomes their presence engenders. WPS scholarship has, in recent years especially, grappled with the hierarchical nature of the agenda and its application. However, as this article has shown, these hierarchies and constructions live far beyond the Security Council Resolutions of the WPS agenda, and underpin logics that shape women’s participation in peacebuilding in ways that at times misunderstand the political identities of local women in favour of logics that justify their participation. Similarly, as the WPS agenda is ‘localised’, what the ‘local’ is and the purpose that it serves for the agenda in a normative and discursive sense cannot remain unexamined.

The three illustrative cases are different and highlight the complexity of local-global relationships in the meaning-making of WPS and its located implementation. This is an agenda with many afterlives, and so its use to incorporate women, rhetorically and normatively, requires examination beyond WPS implementation in and of itself – the agenda and its ethos will and does appear in UN projects, in funding guidelines, in security sector reform initiatives, in very grassroots initiatives, and in the complicated local–global relationships that exist in post-intervention settings, where so-called local women both benefit from and experience the harshest outcomes of international presence, be it military or otherwise.

A focus on the impact of the WPS agenda, its framing, and its limitations as a security council backed framework, has implications beyond research on the agenda of course. The ‘local’ as a physical context and a concept has a longer and more central history in peacebuilding literature local (Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013; Paffenholz, 2015), in scholarship on statebuilding interventions (Hameiri and Jones, 2017) and on humanitarian and development discourses (Barakat and Milton, 2020; Piquard and Piquard, 2021). However, in these contexts, we should continue to ask what this means for women and their participation.

The primary aim of this article was to render visible assumptions and constructions about the role and contributions of ‘local’ women to peace programmes and initiatives where the local and the global meet. In part, this visibility is important, and on the other hand, the visibility gives way to questions of impact. I argue then that the construction of women’s participation at the local level is a double-edged sword. Their appearance in these programmes can and likely does create openings for women’s participation outside of pre-established women’s organisations and political movements, but that the norms around what the ‘local’ woman should provide and the role she is intended to play can limit her contributions and role, by placing discursive and utilitarian limits of her intended impact built on assumptions about the local and its distance from national level politics and conflicts. For an agenda that seeks to bring women and women’s voices into the broadest efforts to prevent violence and conflict, these dynamics, and their very impact on women, requires our greatest attention.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jacqui True, Katrina Lee-Koo and Melissa Johnston for their engagements in very early versions of this piece. Thanks also to the lead researchers of gender and politics in the Middle East and North Africa project (hosted at Gothenburg University) for building the connections with the co-authors of this symposium. Lastly, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers who provided thoughtful feedback that vastly improved this manuscript.

Authors’ note

Special Issue submission: This manuscript is submitted as part of the special issue ‘A Feminist International Relations Approach to the Middle East/North Africa’. This article, alongside the submissions of my colleagues, speaks to debates within feminist international relations and seeks to centre these on the study of the Middle East/North Africa.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The work was supported by the Australian Research Council Linkage Project LP160100085.

ORCID iD

Yasmin Chilmeran

Notes

Author biography

Yasmin Chilmeran is a research associate with the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, and works as a researcher and consultant with humanitarian agencies in the Middle East. Her work focuses on the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, gender mainstreaming and women’s inclusion in peacebuilding in the MENA region. She completed her PhD in 2020 with Monash University’s Centre for Gender, Peace and Security.

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