Logics of empowerment in the women, peace and security agenda

The concept of empowerment, particularly in relation to women as agents of social and political change, has its origins in grassroots development praxis and theorising under the rubric of post-development, but its meaning is highly contested in contemporary international governance. In this paper, we analyse the shifting terrain of empowerment in development, peace, and security governance through the case of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. We present a thematic analysis of the articulation of empowerment, built from a detailed genealogy of the concept and deployed across a dataset of 149 NAPs produced by 90 UN member states. Our analysis shows that the ways in which empowerment is put into discourse in NAPs is worth analysing in detail, and does not foreclose the possible expansion of practice of women's empowerment, despite the restrictive imperatives of neoliberal governance. This suggests, ultimately, that grassroots praxis may continue as an effective site of resistance, despite the co-optation of the concept of empowerment by peacebuilding and development institutions.