Special Issue
The UN Women, Peace, and Security Agenda at 25: Catholic Perspectives and Reflections
Editors
- Meghan Clark, Associate Professor of Theology, St. John’s University
- Maryann Cusimano Love, Associate Professor of International Relations, The Catholic University of America
- Caesar A. Montevecchio, Assistant Director, Catholic Peacebuilding Network, University of Notre Dame
Description
UN Security Council Resolution 1325, popularly known as the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda (WPS), was first adopted in 2000, making 2025 its twenty-fifth anniversary. The resolution, later supported by nine additional supporting resolutions, advances four key pillars: participation, protection, prevention, and relief and recovery. Women and girls are disproportionately impacted by violent conflict but are generally excluded from peace processes. The WPS resolutions aim to change that. They are good morality, as they expand the aperture for women’s representation and inclusion in peace and security processes. And they are also good policy, as women’s participation creates more constituents for peace and more durable peace.
Today, implementation lags. Women remain distinctively impacted by conflict and war. Sexual violence is a weapon of war, and growing civilian casualties, extremism, and violence against human rights and environmental defenders harm women. Women remain too often excluded from substantive roles in formal peace processes, and gender perspectives frequently remain excluded from post-conflict stipulations. As of May 2024, only 56 percent of UN Member States had developed a National Action Plan (NAP) for UNSCR 1325, and of those NAPs, 30 percent had expired by 2022. And a common critique has remained a lack of accountability for following through on existing NAPs, as well as a lack of resources to implement them. The United States, for example, has updated its NAP several times but has made no budgetary allotment for it.
In most of the places where women are suffering this violence and excluded from participating in formal peace efforts, the Catholic Church has a rooted presence. The Church is a major peacebuilding institution in all four pillars of the WPS agenda across conflicted-affected countries. Activities include accompaniment, mediation and negotiation processes, providing humanitarian relief, advocating for human rights and environmental defense, and working to implement reconciliation and transitional justice measures. These practices are deeply rooted in the Church’s social teaching and moral theology. This puts the Church in a position to engage in very meaningful ways with UNSCR 1325. The Holy See Mission to the UN has offered multiple instances of support for the resolution since its adoption. But at the practical level Catholic actors have had paid minimal attention to it. And the Church internally can do much more to support and empower women leaders and focus on women in its own peace and security efforts.
This special issue invites essays examining the WPS through the perspective of the Catholic Church, in light of the WPS twenty-fifth anniversary. This may include analyses, criticisms, recommendations, connections, possibilities, or mappings, and it may include perspectives that are local, national, regional, or global. Areas of particular interest include the following, but proposals on different topics are welcome:
- Growing women’s roles in formal peace processes, particularly women from faith communities.
- Recognizing women’s leadership in civil society and within communities.
- Sexual violence as a weapon of war and faith communities’ responses.
- Women’s concerns in post-conflict peace plans.
- Engaging male religious leaders for the sake of increasing roles for women.
- Bridging Church teaching and women’s leadership.
- Women’s peace and/or leadership networks.
- The intersections of gender, environment, and violence.
- Mining, extractives, and the roles of women and religion.
- Women’s leadership among refugees, migrants, and displaced persons.
- Modern warfare and the ethics of violence against noncombatants.
- Women, faith, and trauma recovery.
- Comparing diverse cultural and religious norms about sex and gender and women’s leadership.
- Women religious and peacebuilding.
Submissions
Please submit proposal abstracts (about 250 words) by January 31, 2025. (Deadline extended). Authors of selected proposals will be notified by February 15, 2025, and full manuscript drafts will be due by October 1, 2025. Final manuscript acceptance will be determined via the JMT’s double-blind peer-review process.
Please submit proposals by email to: cpn@nd.edu
For inquiries
Meghan Clark (clarkm1@stjohns.edu)
Maryann Cusimano Love (lovem@cua.edu)
Caesar Montevecchio (cmonteve@nd.edu)
Timeline
- Call for papers: November 25, 2024
- Proposal abstracts due: January 15, 2025
- Acceptance notifications: February 15, 2025
- Drafts due: October 1, 2025