In October 2000, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security (WPS). What started as a resolution has been since transformed into an agenda with nine other resolutions on women, peace, and security. The stories around the origin of 1325, and especially the role played by civil society organizations in its adoption, have been integral to narrating its significance, which is told and retold in research, scholarship, and teaching on the WPS. Narrating the Women, Peace and Security Agenda by Laura Shepherd is not about retelling the story of the origin of Resolution 1325. Instead, it is about studying narratives that make up the women, peace, and security agenda. For this reason, it offers a unique contribution to the literature in this area.

Shepherd conceptually distinguishes between narrative and story, arguing that a story is “the arrangement of discourse that is told within a narrative” (p. 9). Narration is political, and narratives, she maintains, are necessarily partial, selective, subjective, and incomplete. Based on data analysis from 24 interviews and more than 90 documents produced by the United Nations, Shepherd studies the narrative formation and discursive practice around the WPS agenda. Her main argument is that the stories around the WPS are arranged according to four plural, undecidable, and irreconcilable sets of logics: logics of (in)coherence, logics of (im)possibility, logics of (dis)location, and an ambivalent logic of practice. Whereas logics of coherence reproduce the women, peace, and security agenda as integrated, coherent, and complete, logics of incoherence depict it as multiple, incomplete, and disintegrating. In a similar manner, logics of possibility construct the agenda as manageable and implementable, and the logics of impossibility depict it as too broad and hard to realize or operationalize in a meaningful way. Logics of (dis)location situate the agenda in the UN in New York and at the same time in the field, outside elite institutions. Finally, the ambivalent logic of practice consists of attributing fundamentally different values to WPS practice as simultaneously good and bad. Shepherd argues that these four (irreconcilable and all together true) logics structure the discourses around the women, peace, and security agenda.

The book has eight chapters. After the introduction, Shepherd begins by describing the research process and outlining the methodology, distinguishing between working on and with narratives and between narrative analysis and discourse analysis. In chapter 3, she discusses the stories of the origin of Resolution 1325, the advocacy around it, and the ownership of the agenda by civil society organizations. Here, she focuses on the discourses of significance, interconnectedness with other frameworks, and completeness as a political project. Using the four sets of logics, she argues that there is no evidence for a singular truth about the WPS’s origin, real meaning, or content, and whether the agenda is now complete with no need for future resolutions.

In chapter 4, Shepherd examines the success stories of the women, peace, and security agenda. She argues that the story of success is enabled by the very existence of the agenda, but it is also a tale of selectivity built on what counts as progress, and where and whether it can be counted. Shepherd discusses what she has labeled the “anniversary effect” and the performance of commitments around this time by many countries and international actors. She argues that stories about success are also dominated by a discourse of “success in moderation” or “little wins” and a language of WPS champions measured in terms of funding and political commitments. This language, she warns, elevates rich countries from the Global North as leaders organizing WPS activities in countries of the Global South that are in line with old imperial logics of colonial domination.

In chapter 5, Shepherd focuses on the narratives of failure, obstacle, and challenges of the WPS agenda, which she argues are dominated by discourses about lack (resources, political will, and expertise) and about the scope of the agenda itself, seen as too broad to enable meaningful implementation. Shepherd argues that without settling on what the agenda is, it is impossible and perhaps unhelpful to measure its effective implementation and success or failure. She maintains that the idea of success or failure is based on a discourse of completeness of the WPS agenda as a tool to drive change. Narrating the agenda in this way reproduces the logics of impossibility and incoherence.

Chapter 6 investigates the tensions and pressures in the WPS agenda. These consist of a discourse about the different pillars that are thought to make up the agenda and the presumed need for balance between them. The story of tensions and pressures is also told through discourses of institutional and geographical (dis)connections and the power of the Security Council. Here, Shepherd argues that the Security Council in these narratives is represented simultaneously as an enabling and disabling space for women and gender issues. The Council is represented as monolithic but also constituted of disparate states with disparate interests in gender equality, reflecting the logic of incoherence. She argues that the discourse of tension between words and actions reinforces the hierarchical demarcation between policy and practice but also diminishes the value of past and future WPS resolutions as policy documents / legal instruments.

In chapter 7, Shepherd explores the narratives of silences, secrets, and sensibilities around the WPS. She questions the obsession with quantitative data in light of silence on the accuracy of numbers. She also examines the discourse of expertise that constructs the UN as a center of power and authority. Central to this narrative is the silence on the contributions of the multitude of experts responsible for drafting UN resolutions and documents, and the invisibility of civil society organizations that are part of the original story on Resolution 1325.

Shepherd’s book is thought provoking in challenging the idea of the singularity or fixed nature of the WPS agenda, presenting it instead as a site of political contestation and multiple truths. It is only by weaving together the different narratives that make up the WPS agenda that we are able to appreciate its complexity as a political project. Consequently, the contribution of Shepherd’s book to the literature in the area is unique and significant. The book only focuses on narratives produced by elites “working at and around the UN HQ in New York” (p. 11). However, Shepherd recognizes that narratives around the WPS also exist outside the UN and elite institutions. She also acknowledges that exclusively focusing on elite narratives risks reproducing the power and authority of these narratives over others and may be seen as contributing to epistemic bias, silence, and exclusions of voices from the margin. This, however, does not diminish the significant contribution of this work to research on women, peace, and security. The narratives, discourses, and stories produced by the elites that are discussed in this volume remain compelling. I look forward to Shepherd expanding her research on the narrative formation around the WPS in the future, perhaps by including narratives drawn from outside the elite institutions.