Women, Peace, and Security: Getting Women in the Room Is a Start Not an End Goal

This chapter explores the foundational work of feminist scholarship and activism that drove significant gains for women’s equality in international law before considering how this approach serves to inhibit true and full equality. The authors examine the United Nations’ Women, Peace, and Security resolutions and social responses to gendered subjects being bad actors. The chapter argues that the engagement with gender in international legal discourse creates a social inability to comprehend the capacity of gendered subjects to engage in atrocity crimes. This inability leads to an active dismissal of the agency of the gendered subject in their involvement with atrocity crimes—inadvertently reinforcing the masculinist patriarchal society that feminism is seeking to dismantle.