The Department of Politics and Public Administration seminar series

The Department of Politics and Public Administration continue their seminar series with 'The Data Explosion in Women, Peace and Security: Creating Peacebuilding and Peacekeeping Stories' with Laura McLeod (University of Manchester). In the last decade, the use of indicators to track implementation of international peacebuilding and peacekeeping programmes, policies and practices has proliferated. Indicators are criticised by many scholars for their technocratic, standardised and colonializing effects. Indicators have also been developed to measure many aspect of the United Nations’ “Women, Peace and Security” (WPS) agenda, a global agenda for better considering the needs of women and gender equality in conflict resolution and security governance. In this presentation I consider a number of different indicators used to track the WPS agenda to uncover stories about international peacebuilding and peacekeeping practices, policies and processes. We learn about the contradictory effects of indicators – the ways in which they reinforce liberal, colonialized and unequal structures but also, have unexpected transformative effects. We learn about the myriad and often incoherent directions that the WPS agenda has taken on over the last two decades, and the difficulties of escaping economies and practices of militarism at the centre of contemporary WPS usage. Ultimately, we need to pay attention to the technocratic processes that surround indicators – for indicators do much more than merely track progress: this research seeks to capture some of the unexpected and perhaps hidden effects of indicators.

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