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In recent years, Brazil and Poland have elected governments that are sceptical of both the liberal international order and gender. In both cases, contemporary administrations have bolstered the pre-existing anti-gender offensive of religious and secular conservative forces and converted this into legislation and public policy. Yet, at the same time, both have also created National Action Plans around the UN's Women, Peace and Security agenda. Why is this the case? Why do two governments that see gender as an 'ideology' continue to work on WPS? Using a feminist institutionalist framework, this article draws on content analysis of the NAPs and semi-structured in-depth interviews with stakeholders in Brazil and Poland to explore this puzzle. We argue that the WPS agenda has survived in these political contexts due the presence of key 'femocrats' within the state; the influence of international institutions; and the symbolic power that the WPS agenda gives to these countries on the world stage. As such, the article makes a key contribution to the literature on the WPS agenda and also bolsters the argument for a complication of the idea of gender 'backlash' – in domestic and international audiences, states are willing to adopt different attitudes to gender if it furthers their interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction provides an overview of the gendered nature of politics and international relations, before a brief summary of the articles that make-up this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationalism has long been understood to be a deeply gendered phenomenon. This article provides an overview of some of the key concepts and literature in the study of gender and nationalism, including women; gender; the nation and the intersection of sexuality, race, and migration; and gender within nationalist imaginations. It offers some future research agendas that might be pursued in work on gender and nationalism—namely the gendered dimensions of populism or "new" nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the inception of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) in 2000, feminist academia has been closely interested in the developing women, peace, and security (WPS) agenda in international affairs. The majority of this work has emerged from within feminist international relations (Mcleod 2015 ; Shepherd 2008) and feminist legal studies. Less attention has been paid to the WPS agenda by feminist political science. As a result, less consideration has been given to political institutions within the WPS framework. This paper argues that the design and implementation of postconflict political institutions is an important component of the WPS agenda and one which deserves greater attention. It demonstrates that using certain tenets of feminist political science, and feminist institutionalism in particular, can offer key insights into greater understanding of the importance of political institutions within postconflict societies. The article illustrates how political institutions have been underconsidered within academic work on the WPS agenda. It then argues that political institutions are an important part of the puzzle when it comes to implementing the WPS agenda. It shows how feminist institutional theory can help to provide key insights into the nature of postconflict institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist institutionalism is concerned with the ‘rules of the game’ in political institutions. It is interested to explore how institutions create gender-just conditions in terms of the policies and actions they undertake and the make-up of the elected representatives they contain. It also has a growing interest in how institutions can resist or obstruct positive gendered change. It is argued here that employing the concept of ‘critical actors’ alongside a feminist institutionalist framework can further our understanding of why some institutions resist change. Using the example of abortion legislation in Northern Ireland, this article illustrates how the literatures on feminist institutionalism and critical actors can, when combined, help to build a fuller narrative of why gendered policy change does not happen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature considering international human rights mechanisms stresses that they have the best chance of success when they are closest to ideas which already exist within national contexts. Research which addresses women's human rights bodies, such as the Convention Against All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325), argues that they function best when reinterpreted to fit the local context. Yet, situations where this domestic norm translation is occurring, but policy change is not achieved, have received little consideration. Why do some contexts, even where norm translation occurs, resist policy change? This article examines Northern Ireland, where these women's rights bodies are used extensively in the women's sector, but where change has not occurred. It argues that norm translation is not the only important factor, and that a greater consideration of local political structures is needed in order to more fully explain policy resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Westminster's legislation regarding marriage rights for same sex couples has not been extended to Northern Ireland. Similarly, Northern Ireland has never been under the jurisdiction of the 1967 Abortion Act, making abortion effectively illegal in the province unless it is necessary to preserve the long-term life or health of the woman. This article considers contemporary political debate around abortion and same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland to ask; how are controversial (but non-sectarian) issues such as abortion and same sex marriage dealt with in a divided society? Using data from the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey and selected debates from the Northern Irish Assembly, it considers how political parties and post-conflict governance have shaped debate on these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Consociational democracy has become the most influential paradigm in the field of power-sharing institutional design and post-conflict peacebuilding. Consociation institutes representation for certain formerly excluded groups. However, it simultaneously inhibits effective political representation for groups that do not align with the societal divisions that consociation seeks to accommodate, specifically the 'additional' cleavage of gender. Given the extensive use of the consociational model as a peacebuilding tool in divided states and the growing awareness of the disproportionate negative effect of conflict on women, there is a surprising lack of consideration of the effect that consociational power-sharing has on women's representation. This article considers the specific impact that the consociational model has on women's representation. We argue that because gender is an integral factor in conflict, it should therefore be integral to post-conflict governance. With empirical reference to contemporary Northern Ireland, it is illustrated that consociationalism is a 'gender-blind' theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]