Feminist futures and transformative potential: the paradoxes of CSO engagement in shaping the Women, Peace, and Security agenda

Civil society actors are often sidelined in the theorisation of Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), resulting in a lack of understanding of their role within WPS. This thesis explores how civil society organisations (CSOs) shape and implement WPS and the epistemic impact of centring CSOs in the understanding of WPS. Through a standpoint analysis of the conceptual, relational and practice-based engagements of CSOs in the ecosystem of WPS (Kirby and Shepherd 2020, 2024) informed by a multiperspectival discursive analysis, I ask questions about how and where they produce meanings, how and where they are located, and what role they play in shaping and implementing WPS, shaped by the overarching question of what the impact is of making visible and centring CSOs' contribution to WPS. Based on research across the UK, Lebanon and UNSC, which encompasses 17 semi-structured interviews and 12 informal discussions with representatives from CSO and state-based actors, participant observation at 14 CSO events, and analysis of 12 CSO documents, this work aims to understand WPS beyond its dominant state-based discourses as a site of multiple contestations and nuanced layers. Through this analysis, I argue that CSOs engage with WPS through inherently irresolvable contradictions which are constantly in paradox and that CSOs' continued engagement with WPS both inside and outside the normative state-based institutions of WPS concurrently (re)produces hierarchies and inequalities and maintains its transformative potential. In doing so, I conclude that WPS is not one political project and argue understanding it as such provides the opportunity for meaningful transformation, alongside a necessity to understand that in many guises, WPS is and will be a failure. To enable meaningful transformation, I stress the essential nature of connectivity to continue to work for feminist peace in an increasingly polarised world.