Laura J Shepherd
Biographic Data
| ID | 369043 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura J Shepherd |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura J |
| FAMILY NAME | Shepherd |
| SIGNATURE | SHEPHERD L J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3069-8596 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 90 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 721 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 86 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Thinking World Politics Otherwise
Thinking World Politics Otherwise presents a variety of critical approaches and perspectives that seek to challenge and rethink orthodox understandings of International Relations (IR). Moving away from traditional approaches based on theoretical and historical schools of thought, this text brings together prominent voices in the field that recognize the importance of engaging with global politics from a range of perspectives and through a variety…
Thinking World Politics Otherwise
Telling Stories of International Relations
This is a lightly edited version of the presidential address I delivered at the sixty-fifth annual convention of the International Studies Association in San Francisco, USA, on April 4, 2024. In this essay, I explore the stories that we tell about the international, and relations, and the possibility of telling different stories—and perhaps the need to tell different stories—in the future. I begin by weighing the international, and exploring what…
Between rights and rightfulness
On care, chocolate cake, and challenging with love
This essay responds to the contributions that make up this forum, which in turn represent the authors’ engagement with my recent book, The Self, and Other Stories: Being, Knowing, Writing (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023). I attempt to answer some of the queries that arise for my interlocutors and to elaborate on some of the themes that I touch on in the book itself. I am not sure I am very successful in either endeavour, because the queries are man…
WPS at 25
United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 was adopted in October 2000, marking a historic commitment to advancing women’s participation in peace and security governance, preventing gender-based violence, protecting women’s rights and safety, and ensuring their needs are addressed in post-conflict relief and recovery efforts (Cohn, Kinsella, and Gibbings 2004). Four years after adoption of Resolution 1325, the President of the UN Sec…
Care ethics and critical friends
Building upon its development in educational scholarship, feminist scholars have incorporated the concept of ‘critical friend’ into their methodologies. Within political science, feminists have articulated critical friendship as relational research praxis, applying the concept to relationships between feminist academics and gender experts in institutions. We bring this research into conversation with feminist care ethics, asking how commitments t…
Pedagogy as care
In this article, we elaborate pedagogies of care, contemplating what it means to teach with and about care in the world politics classroom, situated within the neoliberal, colonial, heteropatriarchal, white western academy. Further, we actively reflect on what it means to work caringly and carefully in practice, exploring pedagogy as care. What are the dilemmas that arise for scholars and teachers, differently positioned in the academy, who seek …
Interrogating whiteness in International Relations
The dynamics of knowledge production in the discipline of international relations (IR) frequently reproduce problematic and outdated idea(l)s about what counts as ‘proper’ scholarship, with positivist research setting the standard for legitimacy. This essay challenges the racialised hierarchies that reproduce unreflective endorsement of these (white, Western) ‘standards’ of knowledge production. Our review begins with an elaboration of epistemic …
Gender and the Governance of Terrorism and Violent Extremism
This book brings together a variety of innovative perspectives on the inclusion of gender in the governance of (counter-)terrorism and violent extremism. Several global governance initiatives launched in recent years have explicitly sought to integrate concern for gender equality and gendered harms into efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism (CT/CVE). As a result, commitments to gender-sensitivity and gender equality in international …
Unlearning the Discipline
The discipline of International Relations (IR) in Australia, as elsewhere, is steeped in historical and ongoing violence, including violences of colonisation. The way that IR is taught and practised in Australia reproduces the discipline's erasures and ignorance of the effects of colonisation and ongoing forms of marginalisation, knowledge extraction, and harm that normalise existing structures of power. In this article, we ask how mainstream the…
The Self, and Other Stories
The Self, and Other Stories is an autoethnographic reflection on the value in the act of writing, illuminating the life of the researcher—in particular the researcher as human. Shepherd explores the multitudes of the academic, feminist self through expanding vocabularies of how scholars, researchers, writers, teachers, and academics can make sense of their worlds. At the intersection of international relations theory and the personal, Shepherd pr…
A Decolonial Feminist Politics of Fieldwork
International studies scholarship has benefitted from insights from anthropology, peace and conflict studies, geography, and other disciplines to craft a thoughtful set of reflections and considerations for researchers to take with them “into the field” when they embark on “fieldwork.” In this essay, we map out a history of critical approaches to fieldwork, starting with the encounters that initially encouraged reflection on the positionality of …
Care conversations
Q Manivannan (they/them/theirs), Dipali Anumol (she/her
Logics of empowerment in the women, peace and security agenda
Gender Bias in Student Evaluations of Teaching
White feminism and the governance of violent extremism
Initiatives to prevent and counter “violent extremism” (P/CVE) are often highly individualised and individualising, and function to reinforce negative racialised and gendered stereotypes. Recently, some feminist and other critical scholars have argued that sexist and misogynistic beliefs are inter-related with other drivers of “radicalisation” and “extremism”, which may lead to the securitisation of forms of sexist and misogynistic violence. Ther…
Introduction
Several global governance initiatives launched in recent years have explicitly sought to integrate concern for gender equality and gendered harms into efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism (CT/CVE). As a result, commitments to gender-sensitivity and gender equality in international and regional CT/CVE initiatives, in national action plans, and at the level of civil society programming, have become a common aspect of the multilevel go…
Funding Precarity and Women's Peace Work in Colombia, Nepal, and Northern Ireland
Civil society supports peace work in many ways, including through education, advocacy, health outreach, data gathering, expertise- and experience-sharing, event-running, community mobilization, conflict prevention, and peacebuilding. However, there are limited funds available to support this work, even though key development, peace, and security actors, including the United Nations Secretary-General, have acknowledged that developing the capacity…
The Social Life of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda
In the twenty years since the adoption of United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 on “women, peace and security” (in 2000), civil society organisations have continued to shape the agenda's development and work towards its implementation, although geographical and other disparities in recognition, access, and authority over the agenda exist. In this research, we explore the online interactions among civil society organisations working on p…
The impact of UN Security Council resolution 2242 in Australia, the UK and Sweden
The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is anchored in ten United Nations Security Council resolutions addressing gender equality and women’s rights in peace and security governance. The codification of the WPS agenda in the adopted resolutions establishes standards of practice to be adopted by UN member states and entities to prioritise women’s role as agents in peace and security settings and respond to women’s specific security needs. This …
BRICS countries and the construction of conflict in the Women, Peace and Security Open Debates
The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is a diverse field of practice comprised of numerous actors, activities and artefacts. Conventional accounts of WPS development and implementation tend to reproduce a narrative that positions states located in the global North as ‘providers’ of WPS, and those in the South as ‘recipients’. This assumption in turn prescribes, and proscribes, forms of WPS engagement and has a constitutive effect on the agen…
Civil Society Care Labour and the Women Peace and Security Agenda
Gender and countering violent extremism in Women, Peace and Security national action plans
Using discourse analysis, this research explores the representation of gender roles and identities in relation to counter-terrorism/countering violent extremism in 38 national action plans for the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) and associated United Nations Security Council resolutions. Representations of gender in relation to counter-terrorism/countering violent extremism in the national action plans tha…
The paradox of prevention in the Women, Peace and Security agenda
Prevention is a central pillar of the ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda, a policy architecture governing gender and conflict that is anchored in a suite of United Nations Security Council resolutions adopted under the title of ‘Women and Peace and Security’. In this article, I argue that prevention is currently constituted within the WPS agenda in multiple ways, all of which are organised in accordance with different logics: a logic of peace; a …
Veiled references
Understanding the ways in which the discursive construction of gender allowed for the US-led attacks on Afghanistan to be considered a legitimate response to the attacks of 9/11 is vital to the study of international relations and for the reclaiming of a feminist politics of the attacks. Through the identification and exploration of various representations of identity in the period after 9/11 and before the attacks on Afghanistan, I will illustra…
Making war safe for women? National Action Plans and the militarisation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda
Cora Weiss, co-drafter of what became UN Security Council Resolution 1325, noted in 2011 that the purpose of eliminating conflict-related sexualised violence must not be to ‘make war safe for women’. UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and subsequent resolutions should not legitimise or normalise war, but rather the agenda should support the demilitarisation of society and facilitate the development of anti-militarist politics of peace. This arti…
Power and Authority in the Production of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325
United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 was adopted in 2000 with the aim of ensuring all efforts toward peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction, as well as the conduct of armed conflict itself, would entail sensitivity toward gendered violence and gendered inequalities. In this article, I contrast two accounts of the writing of UNSCR 1325 that issue from the two institutions that claim authority over the document: the Unite…
Sex, Security and Superhero(in)es
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 was adopted in October 2000 with a view to ensuring that all aspects of conflict management, post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding be undertaken with a sensitivity towards gender as an axis of exclusion. In this paper, I do not dwell on the successes and shortcomings of UNSCR 1325 for long, instead using a discussion of the Resolution as a platform for analysis of subsequent Resolutions, in…
Gender, UN Peacebuilding, and the Politics of Space
The United Nations is an organization founded at least in part on hope: hope for a postwar future offering security, human rights, justice, "social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom." This book documents some of the ways in which the UN engages with peacebuilding as a practice of hope, under the auspices of the UN Peacebuilding Commission that was created in 2005. Hope was part of the Commission's foundational mandate: the h…
Queer International Relations
Questions of borders, boundaries and orders animate this ground-breaking book from Cynthia Weber; throughout, Weber draws attention to the ways in which knowledge is produced in, and about, both ‘international relations’ and ‘International Relations’ (IR), and the fidelity that is demanded (mostly implicitly) to conventional configurations of power, legitimacy and subjectivity. These rely on the shared fiction of meaningful boundaries and borders…
Lessons from Westeros
People learn about global politics not (solely or even mostly) from conventional teaching in the discipline of International Relations (IR) but from popular culture. We use the television series Game of Thrones to expand upon this premise. We show how representations of the gendered foundations of political authority can be found in popular culture in ways that challenge the division of such knowledge in IR. Game of Thrones and other cultural tex…
Women, Peace and Security
This special issue brings together articles that examine how the localisation and implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda occurs in policy and practice. In this introduction, we examine the increasing importance of the Women, Peace and Security policy framework in global politics and the inevitable tensions that surround calls for greater local-level institutional implementation. Drawing on findings from the United Nations 2015 Glo…
Aesthetics and International Relations
if you really want to know us, then you have to root out the raconteurs and listen to them. You see, it's they who guard the treasure. They can teach you, but only if you are ready. To hear them
Visualising violence
This paper explores the relationship between visual representation and claims to legitimacy in the current George W. Bush administration's ‘war on terror’. Drawing on discourse theoretical works that focus analytical attention on the power of visual representation in communicating authority and legitimacy, this paper argues that crucial to such communicative acts is the rendering of a receptive audience complicit in particular interpretations of …
Victims, Perpetrators and Actors’ Revisited
In the discipline of International Relations (IR), which takes seriously issues of war and peace, there has been a lack of attention paid to theorising security in relation to violence. In this article, I explore the potential for a feminist reworking of these concepts. With reference to a range of literature addressing security and violence, I offer some insights into the relevance of such a reconceptualisation. I draw attention to the ways in w…
The futures past of the Women, Peace and Security agenda
The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has developed at the United Nations over the course of the past 15 years, and there have been critical engagements with it for nearly as long. In this article, we first take stock of the operationalization of the WPS agenda, reviewing its implementation across a number of sectors. In the second section, we expose the tensions that have marked the WPS agenda from the start. With others, we argue that ther…
Gender, Violence and Global Politics
In this essay I develop a critique of the war/peace dichotomy that is foundational to conventional approaches to IR through a review of three recent publications in the field of feminist security studies. These texts are Cynthia Enloe's (2007) Globalization and Militarism, David Roberts' (2008) Human Insecurity, and Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics by Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry (2008). Drawing on the insights of …
Trans- Bodies in/of War(s)
This article explores a gendered dimension of war and conflict analysis that has up until now received little attention at the intersection of gender studies and studies of global politics: queer bodies in, and genderqueer significations of, war and conflict. In doing so, the article introduces the concept of cisprivilege to International Relations as a discipline and security studies as a core sub-field. Cisprivilege is an important, but under-e…
Aesthetics, Ethics, and Visual Research in the Digital Age
Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age
JESSICA AUCHTER9 The un-scene affects of on-demand access to war 137 M
The Women, Peace and Security agenda and Australian leadership in the world
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 th…
Constructing civil society
The United Nations Peacebuilding Commission was created in 2005 to have oversight of United Nations peacebuilding operations. In the foundational resolution, adopted simultaneously by the United Nations Security Council (S/RES/1645) and the United Nations General Assembly (A/RES/60/180), the Peacebuilding Commission is mandated to encourage meaningful participation in peacebuilding-related activities by civil society actors. This article investig…
Peacebuilding and the postcolonial politics of transitional justice
The literature on transitional justice tends to conceive of transition as a bounded process that takes place immediately following a conflict, rather than envision the process as part of building peace. Significantly, this literature tends to separate historical conflict and contemporary transition. While the similarities between historical and recent conflict are often acknowledged, the remedies available under the transitional justice framework…
Women, Peace, and Security
The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda is a global peace and security architecture conventionally understood as emerging from a suite of UN Security Council resolutions and accompanying member state action plans over the last twenty years. The agenda serves as a major international gender equality initiative in its own right and as a prominent example of the broadening of security practices in global politics. In this paper, we present the f…
Victims of violence or agents of change? Representations of women in UN peacebuilding discourse
The Women, Peace and Security agenda at the United Nations is the policy architecture that assures the meaningful participation of women in UN peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction activities. It is a reasonable expectation that UN entities would leverage WPS principles and priorities to inform gender-responsive peacebuilding and recovery. This paper investigates the imbrication of WPS discourse in the discourse of the UN Peacebuilding C…
Stop Rape Now
Inspired by the themes of violence, masculinity and responsibility, this article investigates the visibility of male victims/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in war. Despite the passing of UNSCR 1820 in 2008, the formulation of UN ACTION (United Nations Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict), and the appointment of a United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General to lead policy and practice in this issue area, we…
A Decolonial Feminist Politics of Fieldwork
International studies scholarship has benefitted from insights from anthropology, peace and conflict studies, geography, and other disciplines to craft a thoughtful set of reflections and considerations for researchers to take with them “into the field” when they embark on “fieldwork.” In this essay, we map out a history of critical approaches to fieldwork, starting with the encounters that initially encouraged reflection on the positionality of …
White feminism and the governance of violent extremism
Initiatives to prevent and counter “violent extremism” (P/CVE) are often highly individualised and individualising, and function to reinforce negative racialised and gendered stereotypes. Recently, some feminist and other critical scholars have argued that sexist and misogynistic beliefs are inter-related with other drivers of “radicalisation” and “extremism”, which may lead to the securitisation of forms of sexist and misogynistic violence. Ther…
Reintroducing women, peace and security
This special issue of International Affairs, launched on International Women's Day 2016, explores the potential and limits of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, a global policy architecture supporting gender equality and today a significant reference point in the management and resolution of, as well as recovery from, violent conflict. The Women, Peace and Security (conventionally abbreviated to WPS) agenda was formally inaugurated by United N…
A User's Guide
In his preface to Security as Practice, Barry Buzan (the editor of the series of which this book is a part) suggests that “the book is set up as a useable text that should fill many an awkward gap in methodology courses” (p. xiiv). Part of the book's innovation in this regard stems from the way in which Lene Hansen uses what she calls the “‘case plus study’ [of the Bosnian war] ... as a medium for continued theoretical and methodological discussi…
Veiled references
Understanding the ways in which the discursive construction of gender allowed for the US-led attacks on Afghanistan to be considered a legitimate response to the attacks of 9/11 is vital to the study of international relations and for the reclaiming of a feminist politics of the attacks. Through the identification and exploration of various representations of identity in the period after 9/11 and before the attacks on Afghanistan, I will illustra…
Loud Voices Behind the Wall
Efforts to criminalise gendered violence in the international domain, through legislation such as the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (1993), can only ever have limited success. Through my analysis of DEVAW, I argue that the Declaration is produced through discourses of gender, violence, security and the international. What is meant by these concepts is reflected and reproduced within the document. Therefore, in order to …
Victims, Perpetrators and Actors’ Revisited
In the discipline of International Relations (IR), which takes seriously issues of war and peace, there has been a lack of attention paid to theorising security in relation to violence. In this article, I explore the potential for a feminist reworking of these concepts. With reference to a range of literature addressing security and violence, I offer some insights into the relevance of such a reconceptualisation. I draw attention to the ways in w…
Security
Gender, Violence and Security
How do understandings of the relationships between gender, violence, security and the international inform policy and practice in which these notions are central? What are the practical implications of basing policy on problematic discourses? In this highly original poststructural feminist critique, the author maps the discursive terrains of institutions, both NGOs and the UN, which formulate and implement resolutions and guides of practice that …
Visualising violence
This paper explores the relationship between visual representation and claims to legitimacy in the current George W. Bush administration's ‘war on terror’. Drawing on discourse theoretical works that focus analytical attention on the power of visual representation in communicating authority and legitimacy, this paper argues that crucial to such communicative acts is the rendering of a receptive audience complicit in particular interpretations of …
To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’
This investigation explores the ways in which discourses of security functioned to allow military intervention in Iraq to become ‘thinkable’, and how these actions serve to reconfigure not only the identities of states – the US and Iraq – but also the characteristics of the international as a spatial and conceptual domain. In the weeks preceding the military intervention in Iraq, significant negotiations were conducted between the US government a…
Power and Authority in the Production of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325
United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 was adopted in 2000 with the aim of ensuring all efforts toward peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction, as well as the conduct of armed conflict itself, would entail sensitivity toward gendered violence and gendered inequalities. In this article, I contrast two accounts of the writing of UNSCR 1325 that issue from the two institutions that claim authority over the document: the Unite…
Gender matters in global politics
Gender, Violence and Global Politics
In this essay I develop a critique of the war/peace dichotomy that is foundational to conventional approaches to IR through a review of three recent publications in the field of feminist security studies. These texts are Cynthia Enloe's (2007) Globalization and Militarism, David Roberts' (2008) Human Insecurity, and Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics by Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry (2008). Drawing on the insights of …
Morality, legality and gender violence inAngel
This article explores the dynamics of morality, legality and gendered violence represented in one episode of the television series Angel. In this episode, simply titled 'Billy', a young man is hunted down by Angel, who is both a private detective and a vampire with a soul, to prevent him from unleashing 'primordial misogyny' in the men he touches. I argue that the dominant themes of the episode are gender, morality and legality. Whereas the latte…
Gender Matters in Global Politics
Foreword Cynthia Enloe Part 1: Theory/Practice 1. Sex or gender? Bodies in world politics and why gender matters Laura J. Shepherd 2. Ontologies, epistemologies, methodologies Lene Hansen 3. Feminist International Relations: Making Sense... Marysia Zalewski 4. Postcolonial theories and challenges to 'first world-ism' Anna Agathangelou and Heather Turcotte Part 2: Ethics and the Human Subject 5. Ethics Kimberly Hutchings 6. Body Politics: Human ri…
Women, armed conflict and language – Gender, violence and discourse
Facilitating critical reflection on the words and concepts used to write policy enables practitioners to avoid unconsciously reproducing the different forms of oppression and exclusion that their policies seek to overcome. In this article, the author provides an analysis of Chapter 5.10 of the United Nations Integrated Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Standards , arguing that policy makers, scholars, students and practitioners cannot…
Aesthetics and International Relations
if you really want to know us, then you have to root out the raconteurs and listen to them. You see, it's they who guard the treasure. They can teach you, but only if you are ready. To hear them
Gender, Governance and Power
One of the foundational aims of this journal is to enable articulations of globalisation other than those conceived of within a narrow, economistic modality. The articles that comprise this special issue, in our view, make a timely and innovative contribution to the plurality of analytical insights that have been published in this journal since its inception. Further, this issue represents the first issue of Globalizations that, in its entirety, …
Sex, Security and Superhero(in)es
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 was adopted in October 2000 with a view to ensuring that all aspects of conflict management, post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding be undertaken with a sensitivity towards gender as an axis of exclusion. In this paper, I do not dwell on the successes and shortcomings of UNSCR 1325 for long, instead using a discussion of the Resolution as a platform for analysis of subsequent Resolutions, in…
Annick Wibben. Feminist Security Studies
Reviews Annick Wibben. Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. ISBN 978–0–415–45728–6. This book makes an innovative contribution to feminist security
Gender, violence and popular culture
Gender and Conflict
Trans- Bodies in/of War(s)
This article explores a gendered dimension of war and conflict analysis that has up until now received little attention at the intersection of gender studies and studies of global politics: queer bodies in, and genderqueer significations of, war and conflict. In doing so, the article introduces the concept of cisprivilege to International Relations as a discipline and security studies as a core sub-field. Cisprivilege is an important, but under-e…
Critical Approaches to Security
Foreword, Ken Booth 1. Introduction: Critical Approaches to Security in Contemporary Global Politics, Laura J. Shepherd Part I: Theories: How do we See the World? 2. Feminist Security Studies, Laura J. Shepherd 3. Human security, Natalie Florea Hudson, Alex Kreidenweis and Charli Carpenter 4. Green security, Emma Foster 5. Securitisation Theory, Jonna Nyman 6. Security as Emancipation, Soumita Basu and Joao Reis Nunes 7. Poststructural Security S…
A handful of nothin’’
The State of Feminist Security Studies
This forum comprises seven pieces conceived in response to the recent Politics & Gender Critical Perspectives section, titled “The State of Feminist Security Studies: A Conversation” (P&G2011, Vol. 7, Issue 4). Throughout, we refer to this collection as “the CP section.” We are pleased to take this opportunity to continue the conversation begun in the CP section and to offer sympathetic yet critically engaged contributions in response to the orig…
Women & Wars
Political science (79 works) · Sociology (73 works) · Law (64 works) · Politics (56 works) · Gender, Security, and Conflict (46 works) · Law (46 works) · Peacebuilding and International Security (30 works) · Gender Politics and Representation (27 works) · Gender Studies (27 works) · Public Administration (26 works)