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More than 20 years after the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, the international community is concerned with taking stock of its implementation in countries undergoing transitions from war to peace. This article contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics involved in implementing the Women, Peace and Security agenda through a focus on the frictional interactions that take place between different actors promoting women's participation in the peace process in Mali. Based on extensive fieldwork in Bamako between 2017 and 2019, it analyses interactions between different international and local actors in the Malian peace process through a discussion of vertical (between international and local actors) and horizontal (between local actors) friction. It finds that the way different actors respond to friction shapes relationships and impacts norm trajectories by triggering feedback loops, which in turn trigger new responses and outcomes.

The frames of counterterrorism and countering violent extremism are increasingly shaping much international engagement in Mali. In this environment, women's contributions are often reduced to their peacemaking potential. This article studies how the UN policy agendas on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) and Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) are translated in discourses on P/CVE in Mali. It draws on feminist and postcolonial scholarship to develop a framework for analysing how local intermediaries in norm translation engage in ‘discursive practices of re-presentation’ and conducts a discourse analysis of interviews with Malian civil society and government representatives. The analysis finds that a re-presentation of women as security actors, constructed as an extension of their roles as peacemakers, dominates the discourse. I use the term ‘new security actors’ to describe the dominant re-presentation of women that emerges in this context: a woman who will contribute to preventing radicalization and violent extremism by influencing, counselling, and/or informing on her family or community members. ‘New security actors’, however, emerges as a problematic re-presentation of women which emphasizes traditional gender roles and potentially exposes women to risks, and in many ways seem to contradict much of the normative aspirations of the WPS agenda.

This article studies the implementation of the global norm of women’s inclusion in the Malian peace negotiations. It constructs a theoretical framework for analyzing practices of resistance, which object to the validity of the norm, and practices of refinement, which engage with the application of the norm. Based on interviews with women who attended the Malian peace negotiations it finds that women face widespread practices of resistance when they demand to be included. However, when pressure is applied concessions often follow, indicating growing acceptance of the norm. Actors also engaged in practices of refinement, observed through a number of disagreements over how, when and which women should be included. The article contributes important insights on the relationship between norms and practices by demonstrating not only that norms influence practice, but how practices of resistance and refinement shape the meanings and life cycles of norms. (Less)

In recent years, increased attention has been given to the role of women in preventing and countering violent extremism (CVE). This potential role of women has been included in the United Nations S...

This article contributes to current debates on the role and agency of actors on the receiving end in norm diffusion processes, and explores the role of the Government of Rwanda in appropriating gen...

Pre-service teachers for secondary schools do not often perceive the academic content knowledge from their university teaching programme to be relevant for their future teaching profession. Hence, they lack motivation to learn those contents, which may have effect on their achievement. The aim of the study was, to develop a specific learning programme to enhance the perceived relevance of academic content knowledge. The learning programme was applied as an obligatory course for pre-service chemistry teachers with three 90-minute sessions and aimed to connect the academic content knowledge with the school-related content knowledge by structured content knowledge. The intervention study with a control group and a pre-post-test design to evaluated this approach involved N = 55 pre-service chemistry teachers (nintervention group = 23, ncontrol group = 32) and analysed the effects of this intervention on the perceived relevance of academic content knowledge. The results showed that pre-service chemistry teachers evaluate the academic course more likely to be relevant for their future profession already before the intervention took place. Nevertheless, compared to the control, the intervention showed a positive effect on the perceived relevance of academic content knowledge and the overall assessment of this academic course. Examining the explanations for the pre-service teachers’ perceived relevance revealed that they reasoned mainly from a school associated perspective, though their explanations remained at a rather low level.