(En)gendering Peace: A Queer Feminist Analysis of South Africa’s (2020-2025) National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security

Abstract

This research paper presents a queer feminist analysis of gendered discourses in South Africa’s (SA) (2020-2025) National Action Plan (NAP) on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS). It builds on an extensive field of WPS scholarship by using the case study of SA’s NAP to illustrate how policy can be used to harness critical gendered language and create possibilities for radical (re)imaginings of gendered peace. While a considerable knowledge base that explores the gendered discourses of NAPs on WPS already exists, a key gap in the literature —that has only more recently begun to be explored with greater rigor— is the bridging of queer and feminist theories to further push the boundaries of discursive policy analysis. Against this backdrop, feminist critical discourse analysis (CDA) was applied to the NAP case study to surface dominant and counter-discourses on gender and their possible inclusionary/exclusionary effects. Key findings centre the potential value of policy discourses which, in their fragmentation, ruptures, continuities and ambivalences, can facilitate opportunities for queer peace at the instrumental level and beyond.

Keywords

• discourse analysis
• gender
• naps
• peace and security
• queer feminist perspectives
• south africa
• women