This book is an updated and lengthened version of the lectures that I gave in the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law in October 2016 as part of the Lauterpacht lecture series, which was founded in 1983 to celebrate the unique contribution to the development of public international law made by Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. In keeping with the lecture series, I sought connections between my work as a feminist international lawyer and that of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht in his long career as an academic and scholar, a barrister and judge at the International Court of Justice and, as recounted by Sir Robert Jennings, a ‘remarkable’ teacher.1 In the simplest, logistic terms, he was a lecturer at the London School of Economics prior to taking up his chair at Cambridge and he also lectured at the University of Michigan,2 both places where I hold academic appointments.

I turn now from the brief overview of the substance and institutions of the Women Peace and Security (WPS) agenda to ask what WPS means for international lawyers. The language of the WPS resolutions is not that of international law but primarily that of international relations (‘international peace and security’), good governance (‘participation’, ‘monitoring’, ‘indicators’, ‘reporting’) and development (‘empowerment’, ‘leadership’) with subsets of these disciplines such as conflict, security and peace studies. And, of course, the language of gender permeates the resolutions, albeit largely as a synonym for women and girls. The state-centric emphasis of international law is softened by calls for relevant actions by diverse actors as well as states – international institutions, international personnel, men and boys, civil society. The agenda seeks to shape behaviour, policy and decision-making by all these different actors as well as by states, which raises the question of whether the WPS resolutions create binding obligations under international law, which is the subject of this chapter.

In Chapter 2, I explored whether the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda creates binding obligations for states and other actors under international law. This chapter and Chapter 4 consider further the concepts enshrined in the Security Council’s resolution 1325 (2000): ‘women and peace and security’. In Chapter 1, I addressed the Security Council’s simplistic understanding of ‘women’. This chapter looks at the Council’s conceptualisation of ‘peace’ and Chapter 4 that of ‘security’, both within the framework of public international law. But this is admittedly an artificial distinction: without security there cannot be peace for any person, regardless of their sex, gender, age or any other categorisation of identity, and without peace there is no security.1 And militarised security especially denies peace and, for many, fosters feelings of insecurity.

The Security Council’s series of resolutions on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) have not been adopted in a vacuum but operate within the framework of changing international law and institutional activity. In some cases, this is made explicit, as where the Council calls for respect for existing international legal obligations,1 including those emanating from international humanitarian law (IHL), human rights law, especially the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), refugee law, and the law relating to remedies and trading in small arms.

In Chapter 3, I explained that international law has no definition of ‘peace’. The same is true of ‘security’, a concept that is essentially left to other disciplines such as international relations, security and conflict studies. International relations scholars examine the causes and consequences of conflict with feminists turning the lens to the forms of insecurity experienced by women in conflict because they are women.1 International law has sought to regulate conflict, restricting both legal recourse to war (the jus ad bellum) and the means and methods through which war may be waged (the jus in bello, international humanitarian law (IHL)). These international legal regimes have been scrutinised by feminist scholars to reveal the discipline’s biases and blind spots and how they uphold the structures of power.2 This chapter considers women and security within the framework of international law.

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is rooted in international law – notably international humanitarian law, human rights and international criminal law. UNSCR 1325 specifically calls upon states to respect fully the obligations within these laws, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Subsequent WPS resolutions emphasize the need for commitment to women's human rights and implementation of human rights law, without again referencing CEDAW until Resolution 2467 in April 2019 (UNSCR 2467, para. 18). Despite the evident association of subject matter, the first seven WPS resolutions after 1325 are surprisingly silent about trafficking in women and girls, including in armed conflict. Resolution 2467 does refer to trafficking in persons but only to ask the Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate to include in its country reports information about states’ efforts to address it (UNSCR 2467, para. 29). This does not comprehensively locate trafficking within the WPS agenda.

Since 2016, however, human trafficking has been addressed by the Council in UNSCR 2331 (2016) on trafficking in armed conflict, and UNSCR 2388 (2017) on the maintenance of international peace and security. Resolution 2331 marked the first time that the Council has addressed human trafficking and identified the existence of links between such trafficking – when committed under certain circumstances – and the maintenance of international peace and security, for which it has primary responsibility under Article 24 of the UN Charter. The resolution text indicates that this link emerges from the implication of terrorist groups in the trafficking of women and girls in conflict-related areas and from the fact that trafficking serves as an instrument to increase the finances and power of these organized criminal groups.

Resolutions 2331 and 2388 highlight the relationship between conflict and post-conflict situations and trafficking. They aim at tackling the use of trafficking as a terrorist and a war economy tactic by terrorist groups. They operate at the interface of three UN ‘agendas’: i) CEDAW and WPS (including the work of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict established under UNSCR 1888 in 2009); ii) the fight against trafficking in human beings, the criminalization of traffickers and the protection of victims of trafficking; and iii) the Security Council's broader agenda for the maintenance of international peace and security.