The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda: A Normative Investigation of the Agenda in Southeast Asian Countries

Sammanfattning: This research engages with debates about globalizing IR and studies of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda established by the UN in the year of 2000. There have for many years been a lot of literature that is focused on the Agenda in the West using theories which are also established in the same region. This thesis therefore wants to contribute by looking at the WPS Agenda outside the West. This study does so by looking at the Southeast Asian countries of Timor Leste, Indonesia, and the Philippines with a normative investigation. This study adopts questions of how the Southeast Asian region has accepted norms and ideas from the resolution into their own National Action Plans (NAPs) and wants to investigate how these plans conform and differ from the original WPS Agenda. What this thesis finds are a lacking adoption and acceptance of norms in the Philippine, Indonesia, and Timor Leste National Action Plan (NAP). By conducting a conventional content analysis and using the norm-life cycle as a theoretical model this thesis concludes that there are some varying levels of norm acceptance and that the three countries are yet to fully implement the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda (WPS). What the findings also presents is that the local context and culture of a particular country is very important in determining the extent of adoption to international norms and concepts such as those proposed in the WPS Agenda. This means that we need to globalize the study of norms within IR, and we cannot assume that all countries will adopt norms in the same way, or in the same way as the Western states. Based on these findings the research has a small contribution to the larger globalization of IR, Global Political Economy, and studies of the WPS Agenda in the Southeast Asian countries. This thesis recommends future research of other agendas and for additional regions to enhance further knowledge within the normative field of research.