Mind the GAPS – Details, episodes & analysis

In the finale of the second season of Mind the GAPS: A Woman Peace and Security Podcast, GAPS staff members Lottie Kissick-Jones, Sangeetha Navaratnam-Blair and Detmer Kremer join in conversation. It is a reflection on the season itself, key political developments and events during the year, and analysis of WPS and related policies. This includes the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the change of government within the United Kingdom and the rise of the anti-gender movement. The conversation includes concrete recommendations on the WPS agenda, the UK’s PSVI initiative and commitments to strengthen funding for Women’s Rights and Women-led Organisations.

Sources mentioned in this episode

2023 Annual Shadow Report: https://gaps-uk.org/assessing-uk-government-action-on-women-peace-and-security-in-2023/

Bridging the GAPS blog: https://gaps-uk.org/home/bridging-the-gaps-a-blog/

The First 100 Days of Government and WPS: https://gaps-uk.org/the-first-100-days-of-women-peace-and-security/

The climate emergency is an existential risk to the planet, and it is already affecting every corner of the world. Climate change is a risk multiplier meaning that it interacts with and compounds existing risks and pressures in any given context, and can increase the likelihood of instability or violent conflict. Those least responsible, especially women and girls in fragile and conflict affected states, are affected most. Indeed, every year the world gathers for a COP but transformative inclusion of gender in climate action remains lacking. In this episode we bring together the WPS agenda and climate action by speaking to Payvand Seyedali, Afghanistan Country Director at Women for Women International and Esther Hodges, Senior Gender Adviser at Conciliation Resources. Both draw from recent publications that not only make clear how the climate emergency impacts women and girls, but that women and girls are critical experts in ensuring effective, affordable and sustainable climate action. The conversation is chaired by GAPS team members Eva Tabbasam and Detmer Kremer.

Sources

Conciliation Resources: Gender, cultural identity, conflict and climate change: https://www.c-r.org/learning-hub/gender-cultural-identity-conflict-and-climate-change

Gender Action for Peace and Security, Conciliation Resources: Beyond Feminist Foreign Policy: Climate Change: https://gaps-uk.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Climate-change-4.pdf

Gender Action for Peace and Security: Defending the Future: Gender, Conflict and Environmental Peace: https://gaps-uk.org/policy-brief-defending-the-future-gender-conflict-and-environmental-peace/

Women for Women International: Cultivating a more enabling environment: Strengthening women’s resilience in climate-vulnerable and conflict-affected communities: https://www.womenforwomen.org/environment-conflict-gender

This episode discusses the domestication of WPS in the UK, with a specific focus on Northern Ireland and the UK's refugee and asylum policy. We are joined for this discussion by Dr Catherine Turner (@DrCTurner), an Associate Professor of International Law and Deputy Director of the Durham Global Security Institute where her work sits at the intersection of international law and global policy in the field of international peace and security, who we talk to about the case of Northern Ireland. We are also joined by Priscilla Dudhia (@PriscillaDudhia), the Campaigns and Advocacy Manager at Women for Refugee Women who discusses with us the lack of policy coherence between the UK's new WPS NAP and their domestic approach to refugee and asylum policy.

You can find out more about GAPS’ work and our future plans on our Twitter @GAPS_Network and by signing up for our monthly newsletter on our website. You can contact us at info@gaps-uk.org. This podcast is made through the support of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs through their funding of the LEAP4Peace Consortium, which GAPS is a member of. This podcast is hosted by Eva Tabbasam, and it is written, produced by Florence Waller – Carr and supported by the GAPS Team. Our thanks also to Andrew O’Connor at Saferworld for the technical support and to Jimena Duran at NIMD, who are the Consortium lead for LEAP4Peace. The music used in this podcast was produced by Tribe of Noise PRO.

This episode discusses women and girls' rights in Afghanistan, and the global response a year and a half after the withdrawal of international forces, the government's collapse, and the country's handover to Taliban forces.  We are joined for this discussion by Maryam Rahmani and Hasina Safi. Maryam has recently joined Womankind Worldwide – a UK-based organization working for women’s empowerment, where she is an Advisor on Afghanistan. Maryam is also a Country Representative for the Afghan Women’s Resource Center  – a local women's organization working in six provinces of Afghanistan, as well as a board member of the Afghan Women Network and a Core Member of the Women’s Regional Network (WRN).  Hasina Safi (@hasina_safi) is a well-known women rights activist from Afghanistan, where she has worked for various national and international organisations, including the International Rescue Committee, Afghan Women’s Educational Center, United Nations Development Program, Afghan Women’s Network, and High Peace Council. She was a member of the Peace Negotiation Team in 2018 and most recently served as the Acting Minister of Women’s Affairs for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover. 

You can find out more about GAPS’ work and our future plans on our Twitter @GAPS_Network and by signing up for our monthly newsletter on our website. You can contact us at info@gaps-uk.org. This podcast is made through the support of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs through their funding of the LEAP4Peace Consortium, which GAPS is a member of. This podcast is hosted by Eva Tabbasam, and it is written, produced by Florence Waller – Carr and supported by the GAPS Team. Our thanks also to Andrew O’Connor at Saferworld for the technical support and to Jimena Duran at NIMD, who are the Consortium lead for LEAP4Peace. The music used in this podcast was produced by Tribe of Noise PRO

This episode is an introduction to the Women Peace and Security agenda and National Action Plans and looks at the future of the UK’s Women, Peace and Security Policy in the context of the launch of their new NAP.

Our guests for this episode's conversation are Dr Paul Kirby and Dr Hannah Wright, both in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.

Hannah is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London, where her research focuses on gender, race and class in the UK national security policymaking community. She previously worked at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security, and before that as a gender adviser at (GAPS member organisation) Saferworld, an international peacebuilding NGO. She's been involved in research and advocacy on the UK's approach to women, peace and security since 2009.

Gender, Justice and Security Hub, and a Visiting Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security, where he previously worked. Paul’s three current areas of focus are the politics of the Women, Peace and Security agenda; the history of feminist engagements with foreign policy and statecraft; and the emerging governance of masculinity in global politics. He is a co-editor with Soumita Bass and Laura Shepherd of New Directions in Women, Peace and Security and has recently published on the failure of WPS on Europe’s borders and the complexity of the WPS policy ecosystem. Governing the Feminist Peace: Vitality and Failure in the WPS Agenda, a book co-authored with Laura Shepherd, will be published later this year by Columbia University Press.

Hannah and Paul are here to help us introduce the WPS agenda and National Action Plans, as well as talk about their paper ‘The Future of the UK’s Women, Peace and Security Policy’ which they wrote with Aisling Swaine and was published by the LSE Center for WPS.

You can find out more about GAPS’ work and our future plans on our Twitter @GAPS_Network and by signing up to our monthly newsletter on our website. You can contact us at info@gaps-uk.org

This podcast is made through the support of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs through their funding of the LEAP4Peace Consortium, which GAPS is a member of.

This podcast is hosted by Eva Tabbasam, and it is written, produced and edited by Florence Waller – Carr and supported by the GAPS Team. Our thanks also to Andrew O’Connor at Saferworld for the technical support, and to Jimena Duran at NIMD who are the Consortium lead for LEAP4Peace.

The music used in this podcast was produced by Tribe of Noise PRO.

Women Peace and Security, or WPS, is an international agenda that has come through a series of resolutions adopted at the United Nations Security Council. Much of the analysis of WPS therefore focuses on the Security Council. However the international architecture is sprawling, with many different mechanisms, treaties, fora, and institutions. Some of these overlap and are set up in complementary ways with WPS, whereas others are fully separate and appear to have few linkages.  It can be a confusing maze, but it also provides different avenues for change to advance gender, peace and security objectives. In this episode, we are joined by Kseniya Kirichenko, United Nations Programme Manager at ILGA World and May Sabe Phyu, Director of Gender Equality Network (GEN) Myanmar. Gen Myanmar is a member of the Leap4Peace consortium. Kseninya and May bring years of experience of engaging with different multilateral systems, including treaty bodies and special procedures. Bringing in perspectives based on LGBTQI+ people and Myanmar, respectively, they make concrete what engagement looks like with these frameworks and what the tangible barriers and impact are. The conversation is chaired by GAPS team members Sangeetha Navaratnam-Blair and Detmer Kremer.

Like the experiences of many other marginalised communities, LGBTQI+ people’s experiences of conflict are often treated as niche or side issues. Yet when we look back at previous conflicts, trajectories of homophobia and transphobia have been integral strands in how conflict erupts and how communities – LGBTQI+ and otherwise – are affected. This is often directly linked to nationalist and often racialised ideas of a pure and deserving nation. It is not surprising LGBTQI+ repression often coincides with other gendered rollbacks for example around abortion access or military conscription. The WPS agenda would appear to be a natural entry point to consider this distinct impact, especially when it comes to the intersecting lived experiences of LGBTQI+ women specifically. However the WPS agenda has often been assumed by many actors including states and civil society, to concern itself solely with cisgender heterosexual women. Meanwhile, feminists have continuously created and re-created a different kind of WPS that is more inclusive and intersectional, including by bringing in queer perspectives. We are joined by Susana Peralta, a lawyer and literature scholar with Colombia Diversa, Neela Ghoshal, Senior Director of Law and Policy and Outright International, and Dr Jamie Hagen, Lecturer in International Relations at Queen’s University Belfast to discuss this topic. The conversation is chaired by GAPS Policy, Advocacy and Communications Officer Detmer Kremer.

Additional Resources

Colombia Diversa, Centre for Gender in Politics, Queering the Women peace and Security Agenda: A Practice Based Toolkit (2023)

Outright International, The Global State of LGBTIQ Organizing: The Right to Register and the Freedom to Operate (2023)

Detmer Kremer, Dean Cooper-Cunningham, Queering Atrocity Prevention: Europe in Focus (2024)

Northern Ireland is key to understanding the domestic implementation of the WPS agenda and how the UK applies this to a region that falls within their borders. The fifth UK National Action Plan on WPS included domestic aspects of WPS, for the first time, which GAPS has advocated for many years. This now opens up the space to discuss what good WPS in Northern Ireland looks like and how the UK can support this. In this episode, we create space to learn from and understand how women-led peacebuilding in Northern Ireland has shaped how gender, peace and security are understood both inside and outside of Northern Ireland. Eva Tabbasam, Director, and Detmer Kremer, Policy Advocacy and Communications Coordinator, both at GAPS, are joined by Eileen Weir of the Shankill Women’s Centre, Jane Morrice, former deputy speaker of the Northern Irish Assembly, and Jonna Monaghan, of GAPS member Women’s Platform. To learn more, read Women’s Platform’s report A Women’s Vision here, which asked women of all backgrounds in NI what NI would look like, if it worked for women. 

In response to the ongoing violence in Palestine, GAPS, together with Oxfam, Madre and WILPF, hosted Palestine is a feminist issue: a conversation on Women Peace and Security in Palestine. This episode is a lightly edited version of that March 12 2024 event. The conversation recognises how the genocide and conflict are forcing the international development and women’s rights sector to respond and grapple with current violence as well as the long-standing history of occupation and apartheid. However, approaches to the conflict have often contradicted the stated feminist values and commitments to women’s rights from states, multilateral organisations and civil society. The speakers are Bushra Khalidi, Palestine Policy Lead at Oxfam; Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School and Queens University School of Law; Laura Varella, Disarmament Programme Coordinator at WILPF; and Maram Zatara, Advocacy Unit Coordinator at the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, based in Palestine. The conversation was chaired by GAPS Director Eva Tabbasam.

Season 2 starts with a discussion on the linkages between Women Peace Security (WPS) and feminist foreign policy (FFP). Joining our Director Eva Tabbasam in conversation are Toni Haastrup, Chair in Global Politics at the University of Manchester, and Ray Acheson, Director of Reaching Critical Will at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. The conversation with these two experts includes an in-depth look at how states with FFPs fail to uphold feminist principles, especially when it comes to confronting power injustices and settler colonialism. Responses to violence against Indigenous Peoples, including Palestinians and First Nations are illustrative, as are increased arms sales. The conversation considers lessons learned from WPS,  interrogates FFP and asks how can this be more than a pink rebranding of the same old patriarchal approaches to policy?

See the full GAPS Beyond Feminist Foreign Policy Briefing Series.