The Many Lives of 1325

One of the first hurdles in discussing “1325” is explaining which 1325 you mean. In its narrowest sense, 1325 refers to the text of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, adopted on October 31, 2000. But anyone working in this field knows that “1325” has come to encompass far more in the intervening twenty-five years. Depending on one’s perspective and area of work, 1325 can signify a legal instrument, a set of commitments, a policy framework, a civil society tool, or a field of scholarship. It can be invoked as an agenda, a vision, a set of values, or alternatively, as a sell-out, a perversion of feminism, or even the ultimate co-option of feminist peace goals.

In 2013, while conducting research on feminist strategy in international law, I interviewed feminist activists in Belfast, London, and Geneva—all engaged in various ways in efforts to implement 1325 in Northern Ireland. I was particularly interested in why, among the many available strategies and tools for advancing women’s rights and gender equality, these activists found 1325 to be important and useful. What quickly became apparent from these illuminating conversations was that many of the activists had not actually read Resolution 1325. More importantly, that didn’t matter. 1325 functioned as a vehicle—a conduit—for their feminist visions of peace and justice. Those visions were not constrained by the resolution’s text, its ambiguous legal status, or the problematic power politics of the UN Security Council.

For more than a decade, I have been engaged in efforts to de-centre the Security Council from the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and from international law’s regulation of women’s rights in conflict. The resolution’s remarkable and singular capacity to connect feminist activists, state actors, and international institutions is undeniable. Yet I remain convinced that there are more suitable institutional homes for the WPS agenda than the Security Council. There may once have been a moment when the Council could plausibly serve feminist hopes and projects, but that time has long passed.

Pragmatic engagement can, of course, identify areas of relative autonomy within the Council’s implementation of the WPS mandate—such as through the Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict or the Rule of Law experts—where interpretation and implementation may be delegated to more feminist actors. Nonetheless, institutions such as the CEDAW Committee remain far more reliable partners for feminist projects. Likewise, the UN General Assembly—with its democratic decision-making, the sovereign equality of all states, and its specific role in disarmament—offers a far more appropriate venue for advancing feminist disarmament ambitions.

This practice of forum-shopping and forum-shifting—strategically relocating agendas and instruments from less to more sympathetic institutions—is well established in feminist engagement with international law, and it continues apace. The WPS agenda itself emerged from feminist interactions with the human rights system and, in my view, would be better situated once again within those institutions.

Prefiguring a Feminist 1325

Just as this is no longer the UN Security Council of the early 2000s, this is also not the same transnational feminist movement that engaged the Council at the turn of the millennium. In the late 1990s, pursuing feminist peace agendas through the Security Council may have seemed strategically sound. Today, however, the power of articulating these agendas outside formal institutional frameworks of international law is increasingly evident. This impulse is not new: it echoes the legacy of the 1915 Hague Women’s Conference, whose participants called not only for an end to the First World War but for permanent peace. Their resolutions later influenced the Covenant of the League of Nations.

In my new project, Centring Care in International Law, I am exploring a movement away from harm-centred engagements with international law—and the repeated feminist campaigns to expand and redefine international law’s definition of harm—towards a focus on care. Drawing particularly on feminist care ethics, the project seeks to shift the locus of engagement from autonomy to interdependence. My hypothesis is that international law already contains concepts that are cognate with care, and my task is to surface and centre those concepts to reimagine international law’s principles, processes, and institutions accordingly. One of the project’s outputs will be the collaborative development, with feminist civil society partners, of an “international declaration on care-centred international law.”

We can never predict what future opportunities might arise to connect feminist interpretations of 1325 with formal sites and moments of international law. But in the meantime, understanding 1325 as plural, evolving, and enacted across multiple sites—and not confined by the institutional mandate or power politics of the UN Security Council—is essential if it is to endure another twenty-five years.

Catherine O’Rourke, is a Professor of Law at Dublin City University School of Law and Government