Obstacles to women's progress to be addressed in Beijing

Speakers at the Third Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee Assembly held in December 1994 maintained that power sharing between women and men is still intolerably low and that economic hardship, abuse, and discrimination remain. One speaker announced that society needs to do more to challenge obstacles to women's advancement: poverty, violence, access to resources, women's rights, education, and health. She asserted that, for this reason, the Fourth World Conference on Women scheduled for September 1995 in Beijing must succeed. Discussions and action at the December assembly will constitute a major part of the groundwork for the Beijing Conference. The Committee debate centered on the advancement of women as a cause and effect of development. The 1994 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development shows that economic development may be complexly connected with advancement of women. In societies where women have progressed, the economy tends to grow steadily, while, in societies where women cannot fully participate in development, the economy is stagnant. The Assembly called on the Commission on the Status of Women to ensure that the Platform for Action recognize and incorporate older women's concerns and contributions to development into its strategies, programs, and policies. It also called for countries to protect women migrant workers from violence and corrupt recruitment practices. It condemned the illegal trafficking of women and girls across borders for sexual or economic oppressive and exploitative purposes and for other illegal activities (forced domestic labor, false marriages, clandestine employment, and false adoption).     

Women,Peace and Security as an ASEAN priority

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Secretariat and its member states have repeatedly professed their commitment to the protection and advancement of women's economic and human rights. Such commitments have included the Declaration of the Advancement of Women in the ASEAN Region in 1988, the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women in the ASEAN Region in 2004, and the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration in 2012, as well as the establishment of the ASEAN Committee on Women in 2002 and the ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Women and Children in 2009. However, none of these regional commitments or institutions expressly take up the core concern of the Women, Peace and Security agenda set out in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000. ASEAN has no 1325 regional action plan and, amongst the ASEAN membership, the Philippines is the only state that has adopted a 1325 National Action Plan. The authors explore the possible reasons for the lack of ASEAN institutional engagement with 1325, outline the case for regional engagement, and suggest specific roles for the ASEAN Secretariat, donor governments and individual member states to commit to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 as a regional priority.     

The health dimension

Recognizing the adverse health consequences of violence against women, the World Health Organization (WHO) has emphasized the need for a public health approach to prevention as well as the need for the delivery of care to victims of abuse. The WHO is also aware of the need for intersectoral collaboration to address this complex problem. Domestic violence affects all aspects of women's lives and undermines the basis for sustainable human development while violating women's human rights. The WHO included a section on violence against women in its position paper presented to the Fourth World Conference on Women and has accelerated its activities in this area since the Conference. WHO's work on violence has included a 1996 expert consultation that focused on domestic violence and resulted in recommendations that formed the basis of the WHO's Plan of Action on Violence Against Women. The WHO's work on violence also includes efforts to eliminate female genital mutilation and violence visited upon women during situations of armed conflict. The WHO is developing population-based data, innovative research methods, an inventory and assessment of interventions, policy guidelines, and information and advocacy materials to combat domestic violence. Existing data remain scattered and anecdotal but indicate that domestic violence is a major problem.     

Implementing Australia's National Action Plan on United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325

Australia's victory in securing temporary seats on the United Nations Security Council and the United Nations Executive Board has been much celebrated. This provides an important platform for Australia to further the agenda of women's rights worldwide. As part of this agenda, Australia has provided a commitment to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security through the development of the National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security 2012–2018, released in 2012. This article examines the early thoughts and efforts towards the implementation of this plan. It demonstrates that while there is a broad rhetorical commitment to implementation by Australian actors, there are nonetheless challenges that may threaten its success. Based in part upon interviews with Australian government representatives and policy makers, and activists and advocates of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, this article highlights the success, challenges and opportunities that have so far been associated with implementing this important Resolution.     

The Women,Peace and Security agenda and Australian leadership in the world: from rhetoric to commitment?

What is the ‘Women, Peace and Security agenda’ and why is it relevant now for Australia? During 2013–14, Australia is a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and, with a growing foreign military, peacebuilding and aid presence around the world, the country must play a role in preventing conflict, in protecting women and girls from violence before, during and after conflict, and in encouraging the participation of women in these peace and security decisions in order to create the structural, gender-equal conditions for lasting peace. This article highlights the promises made by Australia during the campaign for the Security Council seat. It evaluates the credibility of the campaign commitments by assessing Australia's foreign policies and overseas aid spending on women and peacebuilding in Asia and the Pacific; exploring the avenues for government-funded research on women, peace and security issues to influence government policies and programs; and taking stock of the government's record of engaging with civil society in developing and carrying out its National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. The article suggests concrete actions that would allow Australia to fulfil its promises and progress its international leadership on the major pillars of the Women, Peace and Security agenda.     

Norm negotiation in the Australian Government’s implementation of UNSCR 1325

The Australian National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security (NAP) offers an apt example of norm negotiation in implementing United Nation Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325). Launched in 2012, the NAP is nearing completion due June 2019. The purpose of this article is to understand how far and in what ways the NAP has thus far supported the achievement of the transformative ambitions of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda to bring about greater gender equality for conflict-affected women. I argue that whilst this transformative agenda failed to diffuse vertically throughout the Australian NAP, this has simultaneously encouraged horizontal diffusion. That is, the sophisticated discourse on gender equality presented in the narrative part of the NAP did not translate into a robust framework for action (vertical diffusion). This failure has, however, allowed the WPS agenda to be negotiated within individual implementing agencies (horizontal diffusion). Through the juxtaposition of policy analysis with semi-structured interviews with NAP implementers, this article demonstrates that the lack of precision around the implementation strategy has—paradoxically—resulted in significant policy development on UNSCR 1325. Simultaneously, it has led to untargeted implementation, ultimately constraining the possibilities for meaningful impact on the ground.     

Promoting Women,Peace and Security in the Pacific Islands: hot conflict/slow violence

How has the Women, Peace and Security agenda been advanced in the Pacific Islands? While some observers argue that this region suffers from a contagion of unrest, violence and state weakness, these estimates commonly ignore the vital work women have performed in the region as promoters of peace and security. Even when such activity places them in direct personal danger, women across the region have spearheaded efforts to bridge communal boundaries and challenge the increasing normalisation of violence, gendered and otherwise, that accompanies threatened or actual incidents of conflict. As this article demonstrates, these efforts have had profound impacts on the ground in conflict-affected Pacific Island countries. They have also received increased recognition at the level of institutional politics, with member states of the Pacific Islands Forum recently accepting a Regional Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. This has been hailed as a significant achievement for the region's women peacebuilders. But much of this plan is focused on women's contributions to peacebuilding at the pointy end of a crisis. This overlooks the extent to which the ‘slow violence’ of environmental degradation, masculinised politics and militarism also compound gendered insecurity in the region. Attention to these issues offers a contradictory picture of the gains made in promoting the Women, Peace and Security agenda in the Pacific Islands. While this advocacy framework has provided important opportunities for the region's women peacebuilders, it may also have discouraged broader reflection on the prevailing structural conditions at work across the region which function in an attenuated fashion to undermine women's security and the achievement of a gendered regional peace.     

Re‐locating Moroccan Women’s identities in a transnational world: the ‘woman question’ in question

This article considers the situation of women in politics and the overall politicization of the ‘woman question’ in Morocco in its historical context in order to suggest why, despite enormous changes in women’s daily lives and roles in society, continued attempts to gain greater rights for Moroccan women and improve their status have been met with strong resistance by certain political groups. Working with interviews conducted with activists during fieldwork in Morocco, I focus on an analysis of two recent sets of events—debates around the Plan for Action to Integrate Women into Development and the Moroccan March 2000 for Women in Rabat and its counter‐march in Casablanca—to discuss how the various oppositional positions on the ‘woman question’ have developed and persisted in Morocco. I argue that unresolved and renewed national conflicts in Morocco, which in part are fueled by the success of transnational feminisms and fundamentalisms, perpetuate the manipulation of the ‘woman question’ for short‐term political gains in such a way that significant progress on this issue has been repeatedly thwarted. I address the tension in transnational feminism between ‘universalist’ and ‘cultural difference’ positions as they have been manifested in the Moroccan context and suggest that a way forward involves problematizing both poles of this dichotomy.     

Embracing the Language of Human Rights: International Women's Organisations,Feminism and Campaigns Against the Marriage Bar,c.1919–1960

This article considers four international women's organisations – the International Council of Women, the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, the International Federation of University Women and the Open Door International – and their campaigns for the right of married women to undertake paid work. It examines how each organisation adopted and engaged with the language of human rights in the late 1920s and 1930s. It is argued that after 1948, precisely because of its formal adoption by the UN, the language of human rights became less usable as a way to make the point that women still faced inequalities, and so other framings became more significant. This article contributes to historiographies on international women's organisations, offers a detailed discussion of their activism against the marriage bar, and challenges the conventional chronology of the concept and language of human rights.     

世界邮驿史上的奇迹：河北怀来鸡鸣驿城

“绝塞参天一柱奇,东南城阙恰相宜”,清初邵嗣尧题咏鸡鸣山与鸡呜驿的诗句,对这座仅距北京140余公里、怀涿盆地西北盆口的古驿城独特的景貌作了精彩的描绘。如今,当年绕行鸡呜山的古驿路,同分列其南北的京张铁路、公路,并存于洋河北岸、鸡鸣山前。     

‘Women are a colonised sex’: Elizabeth Reid,Human Rights and International Women’s Year 1975

This article situates Australian Elizabeth Reid’s contribution to International Women’s Year (IWY) (1975) within ongoing historiographical discussions on development and human rights. The world’s first advisor on women’s affairs to a head of government, Reid used the burgeoning Women’s Liberation Movement’s critique of ‘sexism’ to challenge IWY’s goals of formal equality, a limited and undesirable outcomes that prevented women and men from instead becoming ‘more human’. These ideas were then used to challenge the dominance of economic development over individual and collective rights at the 1975 Mexico City conference, placing Reid as a participant in the 1970s human rights ‘breakthrough’.     

Book Reviews

Book review in this article: Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (ed.) Le moyen age Erika Uitz, Die Frau in der mittelalterlichen Stadt [Woman in the medieval city Gerald Beyreuther, Barbara Pätzold and Erika Uitz (eds) Fürstinnen und Städterinnen. Frauen im Mittelalter [Noblewomen and Townswomen. Women in the Middle Ages] Emilie Amt (ed.) Women's Lives in Medieval Europe. A Sourcebook Autumn Stanley, Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes Towards a Revised History of Technology Constance Wall Holt, Welsh Women: An Annotated Bibliography of Women in Wales and Women of Welsh Descent in America Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon Kimberly Marshall (ed.) Rediscovering the Muses: Women's Musical Traditions Paola Corti (ed.) Annali dell'lstituto Alcide Cervi [Annals of the Alcide Cervi Institute] Margherita Pelaja, Matrimonio e sessualità a Roma nell'Ottocento [Marriage and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Rome] Silvia Franchini, Elites ed educazione femminile nell'Italia dell'Ottocento: L'Istituto della SS. Annunziata di Firenze [Elites and female education in nineteenth-century Italy: The Institute of St Annunziata in Florence] Barbara Kanner, Women in English Social History 1800–1914: A Guide to Research in Three Volumes Jane Lewis, Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England Emily Groszos Ooms, Women and Millenarian Protest in Meiji Japan: Deguchi Nao and Mmotoky Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern Ellen Wiley Todd, The‘New Woman’Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street Julie Wheelwright, The Fatal Lover. Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage Lucie Aubrac, Outwitting the Gestapo Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France 1917–1927 Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain     

Lithic Production and Consumption Patterns from the Great Platform at Late Postclassic (A.D. 1350–1525) Tzintzuntzan,Mexico

Late Postclassic period (a.d. 1350–1525) Tarascan economic activities often included higher degrees of political involvement and territorial control compared with other ancient Mesoamerican societies. Here I examine Tarascan obsidian economies through an analysis of lithic production and consumption patterns from structures excavated on and near the Great Platform at the imperial capital of Tzintzuntzan. Four spatially distinct patterns are evident. Great Platform residents used high-quality obsidian blades as ceremonial items or burial offerings and scrapers for craft production. Lower elite residents of Structure F, outside the Great Platform, produced their own blade tools and consumed a higher percentage of green obsidian than residents of the Great Platform. Excavations at Yacata 3 recovered bifacial arrowheads and obsidian bloodletters associated with disturbed offerings. The spatial distributions of lapidary preforms and highly polished fragments combined with accounts from the Relación de Michoacán (a.d. 1541) suggest that lower elites produced obsidian jewelry near the Great Platform.     

Possible fossil impression in sandstone from the late Palaeoproterozoic-early Mesoproterozoic Semri Group (lower Vindhyan Supergroup), central India

The Lower–Middle Ordovician Zitai Formation of the South China palaeoplate consists of a succession of purple red, nodular argillaceous limestones. Palaeogeographically, it is distributed along the southeastern margin of the Yangtze Platform, and is of late Floian to Dapingian age, correlative with the Dawan Formation of the Middle and Lower Yangtze Platform. In Shitai County, Anhui Province, East China, the Zitai Formation is rich in conodonts, enabling the recognition of four biozones based on first appearance data. Detailed palaeontological and biostratigraphical study of these conodonts reveals that the Ordovician conodont radiation in the Lower Yangtze Platform attained its first diversity peak low in the Oepikodus evae Biozone. This diversification is generally consistent with macroevolutionary trends of brachiopods of South China and graptolites of the Upper Yangtze Platform, but was earlier than that of trilobites and acritarchs of the same palaeoplate. Correlation with the sea-level curve for South China suggests that conodont diversity change during the Ordovician radiation was mainly controlled by regional sea-level fluctuations.     

Localising the Australian National Action Plan on Women,Peace and Security: a matter of justice

In the bid for a non-permanent seat on the United Nations (UN) Security Council, the Australian government emphasised international peace and security and Indigenous peoples as two of the eight key elements supporting its nomination. Australia's positive track record in support of the UN Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, including the delivery of an Australian National Action Plan (NAP) along with recognition of historical injustices to Indigenous Australians, was highlighted as a valid and important argument in favour of its nomination. The Australian NAP, however, has all but ignored the local context in its development and application, focusing instead on its commitments abroad. This framing of the Australian NAP is informed, firstly, by the WPS agenda policy framework applying to conflict and post-conflict situations, and, secondly, by its location within the UN mandate, requiring those situations to be internationally recognised. This article applies Nancy Fraser's tripartite justice framework to reveal that the Australian NAP gives rise to the political injustice of ‘misrepresentation’ in relation to intra-state (violent), domestically situated Indigenous–settler relations, which are denied the status of ongoing internationally recognised conflict. The author suggests that the remedy to this injustice is to reframe and recognise the conflict status of Indigenous–settler relations in the localisation of the Australian NAP. This localisation creates openings for Indigenous Australian women to engage with the WPS agenda in meaningful ways.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Jean Drhze and Amartya Sen (eds), The Political Economy of Hunger. (WIDER Studies in Development Economics) David C. Korten, Getting to the 21st Century: Voluntary Action and the Global Agenda. West Hartford Clive Moore, Jacqueline Leekie and Doug Munro (eds), Labour in theSouth Pacific Walden Bello and Stephanie Rosenfeld, Dragons in Distress: Asia's Mracle Economiesin Crisis Jomo K.S., Growth and Structural Change in the Malaysian Economy David Simon (ed.), Third World Regional Development: A Reappraisal Philip Hunt, Rainforest Politics. Ecological Destruction in South-East Asia Nirmal Sengupta, Managing Common Property: Irrigation in India and the Philippines Siegfried Pausewang, Fantu Cheru, Stefan Briine and Eshetu Chole (eds), Ethiopia:RuraI Development Options Amrit Wilson. The Challenge Road: Women and the Eritrean Revolution David Archer and Patrick Costello, Ltferucy and Power: The Lufin AmericunBuffleground Bjorn Hettne, Development Theory and the Three Worlds     

Christening Masculinity? Catholic Action and Men in Interwar Belgium

Masculine reactions to the ‘feminisation of Christianity’ among Protestants have been widely explored; the Catholic case is less well known. This article focuses on Catholic Action, an organisation regarded as specifically appealing to men. Through an analysis of the discourses of Catholic Action in Belgium, it examines how important masculine involvement was for Belgian Catholicism and how Catholic Action ‘christened’ masculinity. The article also analyses Catholic femininity. It examines the ways that the ideal Catholic man and woman and their corresponding gendered behaviour and role models were defined in relation to each other and the various forms that these ideals assumed.     

The intergovernmental platform for biodiversity and ecosystem services (IPBES) – a role for heritage?

Following establishment in 2011, the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has begun to produce outputs. The initial development of a conceptual framework was an important step in the platform’s development. That conceptual framework identified nature, its benefits to people, the contribution to a good quality of life of those benefits, and drivers of change, as the key areas of work for the Platform. While heritage is not specifically mentioned in the framework, it is by implication. And several of the papers dealing with elements of the programme of work for IPBES, as well as the first Assessment (accepted by the Platform at its meeting in 2016), have explicit mention of heritage and heritage activities. Helping elucidate and contribute to the range of knowledges within the IPBES conceptual framework is an important role for heritage professionals, who can play a key role ensuring heritage issues are appropriately and accurately portrayed in IPBES outputs. In turn, as those outputs produce outcomes they will have lessons for future natural and cultural heritage practice and communication. It is timely, therefore, for heritage professionals to explore ways of interacting with IPBES and its work programme.     

Convergence space: process geographies of grassroots globalization networks

This paper considers grassroots globalization networks, which comprise a diversity of social movements working in association to engage in multi-scalar political action. Drawing upon David Harvey's notion of militant particularism (regarding the problems of effecting politics between different geographical scales), and recent research on networks and their relationship to places, the paper analyses People's Global Action, an international network of social movements opposing neoliberal globalization. From an analysis of the process geographies of People's Global Action, the paper proposes the notion of convergence space as a conceptual tool by which to understand and critique grassroots globalization networks. The paper argues that contested social relations emerge in such convergence spaces and considers the implications of these for theorizing such networks, and for political action.