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This article analyses the United Nations Security Council Resolutions on sexual violence in contexts of armed conflict. It understands these resolutions as a securitization process through which sexual violence becomes punishable, preventable and something to be fought against in the international realm. The article argues that by circumscribing sexual violence to the security paradigm, these Resolutions end up nevertheless undermining the understanding of sexual violence as a broader socio-political issue, anchored in gender representations and ideologies and related to dynamics of power and violence on a global scale, compromising its emancipatory potential.

In the past several decades, various actors have sought to promote peace in the periphery, their actions framed by the dominant logics of global interventionism. Amongst these, former colonial powers, such as Portugal, have intervened in spaces that were once under its colonial yoke and where long and complex processes of violence have occurred. This article critically analyses the role of Portugal in promoting peace, within this double frame of former colonial relations and global interventionism. It briefly examines the thought and practice of interventions and the context of Portuguese foreign policy post-revolution, to then explore the case studies of Guinea-Bissau and East Timor. Finally, the article considers criticisms of this interventionism and its implications, from a post-colonial perspective.

This article analyses the limitations of the United Nations Security Council resolution on Women, Peace and Security (1325/2000) as a product of the concepts of gender, violence and security underpinning it. Although it represents an important historical advance, offering women the chance for a recognized role in peacemaking processes and post‑conflict agreements, and ensuring that violence against them is taken seriously both nationally and internationally, the Resolution nevertheless has a number of limitations and challenges. It is argued here that the Resolution is (only) a first step towards the recognition of the connections and possibilities of dialogue between gender, violence and security, and that it does not necessarily transform the way each concept and the connections between them are understood within the United Nations, its member states and even non‑governmental organizations dedicated to matters of gender, particularly women’s groups. The limits of the Resolution are questioned by analyzing contexts of armed violence other than wars or post‑conflict situations that are not covered by 1325, focusing particularly on their gender dynamics.

Twenty years after the Peace Accords (1992), El Salvador is still considered one of the most violent countries in the world. The most visible and feared agents of this violence are the gangs which have fought each other for some two decades, and which are accused of various acts of sexualized violence, including against their own female members. These women, who are simultaneously or alternately victims and perpetrators, are generally viewed as abnormal or perverse examples of womanhood, exceptions and therefore ignored. This article explores the reasons why so little attention has been given to these women’s motivation and participation in violent groups, and to the violence inflicted upon them. It deconstructs the clear cut oppositions and dichotomies associated to war and peace, highlighting the fluidity of the connections between them. The conception of war and peace as well defined separable states in which war is viewed as an exceptional and legitimate form of violence is not considered to be neutral from the point of view of the reproduction of violence in “peace” time. Indeed, it is argued that it ultimately masks and justifies dehumanization processes, which doubly victimize women within gangs and cause them to be neglected in the academic literature and by victim support and violence prevention policies.

The fact that it is men who kill and are killed most in times of war has led to the invisibility and neglect of other actors involved in these contexts. Women, in fact, have represented the prime social absence in analyses of armed conflicts and in post-conflict reconstruction policies. This wartime invisibility is prolonged into the post-war period. If during the armed conflict certain groups are not considered significant participants, being involved in, and suffering the impact of, wars in a different way – as is the case with women and children – in the post-war reconstruction period their needs remain marginalised. In addition, in order to turn the post-war period into a period of peace, violent practices must be silenced, and subsequently take on new characteristics. Through an approach foregrounding the analysis of continuums of violence beyond what may be considered the official war scenarios, and on the basis of Angolan, Guinean and Mozambican contexts, the aim of this article is to demonstrate the proximity of war and peace zones, specifically with regard to insecurities not considered relevant to the planning and implementation of post-war policies. In particular, the intention is to analyse the forms of violence practised against women within these contexts.

Abstract This article intends to challenge the dominant assumptions that undermine the potential application of peacebuilding frameworks beyond formal post-war contexts. It analyses the gangs’ truce that recently took place in El Salvador as a privileged laboratory to rethink hegemonic understandings and practices of peacebuilding by specifically addressing the importance of overcoming dichotomised categories such ‘war and peace’, ‘criminal and political’, and ‘success and failure’. It is claimed that while the truce fostered a discourse pointing towards an ongoing peace process and enlarged the public debate on the failings of post-war policies and on the structural roots of violence, it was also decisively undermined by the inability to surmount the dichotomy that juxtaposes the criminal and the political domains. It is argued that a peacebuilding framework, inspired by a set of critical perspectives on war and peace and on the nature of ‘the political’, may thus be of crucial importance for the future of policies aimed at curbing violence in El Salvador and elsewhere.

Abstract This article focuses on media representations of ‘the South in the North’ crosscutting the European mediascape in 2015 and the beginning of 2016. Assuming that both identities and perceptions of in/security are socially constructed, particularly by means of discourse, that security is gendered and gender constructions are in turn built on dynamics of in/security, and that gendered power relations and representations are always entangled with other structures of inequality and domination such as racism, this article argues that gendered categories of othering in the media’s representations have been critical to produce and justify 1) hegemonic narratives of securitisation that aim to protect an imagined European identity and 2) counter-narratives denouncing the racial and cultural discrimination tied to the ‘North’s’ hegemonic representations of refugees. Theoretically, the article proposes a dialogue among critical, feminist, and postcolonial peace and security studies. Methodologically, it analyses through discourse analysis three highly mediatised cases by examining the social representations of the refugees, namely their gendered components put forward by representative European media outlets based in the UK. It explores their implications in terms of the consolidation of stereotypes and hierarchies of suffering according to criteria of credibility/suspicion and vulnerability/threat, and identifies some examples of media counter-narratives on refugee flows through specific gendered and racialised representations.

Requerimientos que exige la sociedad globalizada a la formación de los futuros hombres y mujeres, qué se le exige al sistema escolar y qué cambios implica al currículum y a la formación de profesores.