The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has long been concerned with the status of women in member states’ armed forces. It therefore came as no surprise that NATO’s adoption of UNSCR 1325 on women, peace and security was subsumed under the wider agenda of increasing the representation women in the military. NATO’s interpretation of UNSCR 1325 therefore goes beyond a strict reading of the Resolution and the intention of the feminists who supported its realisation. A core component of realising an increased representation of women in the military must necessarily include a challenge to essentialised notions of women as victims in need of protection, which underpins militarism and by extension NATO.
This paper examines the central role given to NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division (PDD) in NATO’s implementation of UNSCR 1325 through a content analysis of NATO’s website and social media outputs on Women, Peace and Security. Rather than supporting an emancipatory challenge to the understandings of women and war, this analysis finds the PDD has been limited in challenging essentialised narratives on women and war. The considerable political constraints under which the PDD operates have curtailed the agency of the PDD to move beyond NATO’s adoption of UNSCR 1325 as just a “good news story” in order to support NATO’s wider agenda on increasing the representation of women in the military. This contributes to a wider discussion on the gendered contradictions which underpin and support militarism.
