Recognised, but are they represented? Victimhood, survivorship, and agency in the WPS resolutions on conflict-related sexual violence

Abstract

This thesis examines how those affected by conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) are discursively constructed across the United Nations Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) resolutions (1325-2493), and what these constructions imply for the emergence and limits of survivor-centred approaches (SCAs) within this agenda. Through a feminist critical discourse analysis, with a genealogical orientation, the study traces how CRSV is constructed through legal, human rights, security, technocratic and, more recently, structural frames. It also examines how these overlapping constructions shape which responses are prioritised and which remain marginal. Within these differrent understandings of CRSV, the analysis examines how victim/survivor terminology, alongside recurring references to “women and girls” and “women and children”, constitute those affected and delimit the subject positions available to them. The study argues that those affected by CRSV are largely constructed as feminised, vulnerable subjects whose relationship to institutions is one of protection, assistance and redress rather than political agency. In most provisions, they appear as recipients of institutional measures, with very little sustained attention to those affected by CRSV as actors in more substantive roles; the most developed, though still constrained, examples appear in Resolution 2467. The thesis reads the SCA in Resolution 2467 in light of this pattern, arguing that an approach premised on recognising survivors’ agency is introduced into a setting where survivors have rarely been constructed as agents. It suggests that, in this context, the SCA is taken up mainly as a managerial framework premised upon organisnig existing legal, service and participation measures around survivors' needs without redistributing power or centring their knowledge. It concludes that the forms of response imagined across the resolutions keep international and state institutions at the centre of CRSV response, leaving relatively little discursive space for responses defined and driven by those who have been affected by CRSV.