The Critical Research and International Political Studies (CRIPS) graduate working group is happy to invite you to its annual lecture, organised by the 2019-2020 committee. This year, we are thrilled to receive Professor Laura J. Shepherd, Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of International Relations at Sydney University and Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security, for a talk around her new book “Narrating the Women, Peace and Security Agenda”. The lecture will be held on Monday, 26th of April at 10am on Microsoft Teams and will be moderated by Columba-Isabella Achilleos-Sarll.

Through the lens of narrative, the book examines the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, adopted by the United Nations Security Council twenty years ago. The agenda seeks to increase the participation of women in conflict prevention efforts and to protect the rights of women during conflict and peacebuilding. Those involved in the creation of the WPS agenda, including its strategies, guidelines, and protocols, tend to assume that implementation is the most critical element of it. But what can the stories about the agenda's emergence tell us about its limits and possibilities? Laura J. Shepherd examines WPS as a policy agenda that has been realized in and through the stories that have been told about it, focusing on the world of WPS work at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. She argues that to understand the implementation of the agenda we need to also understand the narration of the agenda's beginnings, its ongoing unfolding, and its plural futures. These stories outline the agenda's priorities and delimit its possibilities—as well as communicate and constitute its triumphs and disasters. (Oxford University Press)

Register here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/currentstudents/postgraduatephd/academicsupport/crips/lecture/registration/