Has the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda made mechanisms toward peace more feminist? This question, asked by feminist scholars and practitioners alike, is approached in The Politics of Women, Peace, and Security in UN Mediation by Catriona Standfield, and the answer is a wailing no. The book explores how United Nations (UN) mediation has adopted the WPS Agenda, arguing that the way in which this adoption has occurred at both UN headquarters and field offices has co-opted and depoliticized feminist goals. By doing so, this book demonstrates how existing power structures prevail within UN peace processes. Yet, this is not just a book about UN mediation and WPS; it is a book about the UN as a “peace machine.” The reader learns how UN mediation’s adoption of the WPS Agenda is part of a larger process of presuming and producing an assumption about a particular ontology of the world. The UN structures its approach to achieving peace on an underlying assumption that there is a shared, universal understanding of what peace entails, and that its chosen strategies are the most effective means of realizing it. Standfield’s argument is that this assumption must be undone, not only to acknowledge the multiplicity of ontologies of the world and peace, but also not to buy into the idea that this is the only way in which peace can be built.

Standfield explores how institutional logics construct UN mediation around two main logics, mediation as science and mediation as art, and the book is structured around how these are organized in terms of narratives, structures, and subjects within the UN. The book makes a strong theoretical contribution to feminist security studies, peace studies, critical security studies, and international relations (IR) at large, as it shows us how the transformative potential of gender equality norms in global governance is limited and reshaped. In relation to previous research on the UN, knowledge production and ontologies of peace (e.g., see Marsha Henry, The End of Peacekeeping: Gender, Race, and the Martial Politics of Intervention, 2024; Lou Pingeot, Police peacekeeping: the UN, Haiti, and the production of global social order, 2023; Margot Tudor, Blue Helmet Bureaucrats: United Nations Peacekeeping and the Reinvention of Colonialism, 1945–1971, 2023), this is a valuable contribution as it exemplifies another perspective and process in which the UN produces a certain regime of truth.

The logic of mediation as science concerns the professionalization and bureaucratization of the UN and considers how mediation skills and processes are learned in training, made into “best practices,” and institutionalized. While it makes sense to systematize practices and ideas of mediation within the largest international organization for peace and security, this logic, based on efficiency, effectiveness, and linearity, results in an instrumentalization and depoliticization of women’s knowledge and labor. Gender is co-opted as an area of expertise and used to make UN mediation more “effective.” Standfield argues that the main beneficiary of UN mediation when it is constructed as a science is the UN itself, rather than women and affected communities.

The logic of UN mediation as an art, on the other hand, systematically excludes women and gender from negotiations, as according to this logic, mediators should hold certain inherent personality traits and skills suited for mediation. The mediators are selected because their personality reflects a “political man” with the right liberal values and act as an embodiment of what the UN represents. The logic of mediation as art also focuses on bonding between the mediator and the mediated in informal settings, often coded as masculine. This logic further ties participation in mediation to being political, and thus, seemingly not neutral, which is considered to negatively affect mediation processes. Taken together, the logics of mediation as science and art, both exclude women for being “too political” in mediation settings, while they are also depoliticize women and turn them into consultants for gender questions.

The book shows how institutional frameworks actively redefine feminist terms to align with bureaucratic and masculinist norms. In doing so, it strengthens feminist critiques of liberal gender reforms that offer symbolic inclusion without redistributing real power. This challenges assumptions about the UN as a neutral actor and demonstrates the UN as a site of power struggle, not merely a vehicle for reform, but a kind of “peace machine.” Standfield shows how the UN, in its liberal and bureaucratic character, reshapes mediation and uses it as a part of the process of creating a certain ontology of peace and the world. The book argues that UN mediation is specifically “worlded,” resting on the assumption that there is one way of understanding the world and how to achieve peace in it. This invites us to think seriously about the politics of knowledge production in the UN and IR at large. Does the UN serve a feminist and decolonial peace? Is it able to? The last few decades have demonstrated a UN in decline, or even crisis. The organization faces criticism from both left and right, and without delegitimizing (the idea of?) the UN, we should indeed think about what the UN is, and perhaps more importantly, what the UN does. This is part of a larger discussion about what kind of world, and what kind of peace, the UN imagines and produces, and for whom. Standfield writes that, “the concept of ‘peace’ is either taken for granted, an empty signifier, or simply absent” (2025: 187).

This book is a sharp and illustrative example of the UN’s production of a specific regime of truth, a single ontology, or a specific understanding of the world. Yet, as a feminist scholar, I am taught to continue asking “where are the women?.” The exploration of UN mediation according to the logics of science and art, and how this illustrates that the UN is worlded and disregards multiple ontologies of peace, seemingly has a kind of spillover effect on Standfield’s own work. There is a lack of voices of women from affected communities throughout the chapters, and I argue that the argument could be made stronger by not only theoretically suggesting that we challenge how we think of UN mediation, but also by engaging with it more empirically. In other words, to include more voices from the women and the communities affected by UN mediation. It would have been informative (and interesting!) to understand how the mediated understand UN mediation and its adoption of the WPS Agenda. This would not least engage with the author’s own suggestion to undo the production of a single ontology of peace within the UN. One example, drawing from the book itself, is the suggestion to decolonize gender expertise. Standfield suggests that the practice of training local women assumes that these women have something to learn from UN trainers. A decolonized approach would rather recognize that local women know just as much, or perhaps even more, than UN trainers, and even that these women could, rather, train the UN. Could this perspective have been adopted in this book, too? Could it have engaged with these women to think more deeply about multiple imaginaries of peace, and of the world?

Standfield is herself aware of the limitations and ends the book with some suggestions on how to take the next steps in making the UN, and global governance, more feminist and decolonial as she invites other feminists to advance the scholarship on how we can “re-world,” or “multi-world” the UN. I agree that the book is an important starting point in thinking about the UN as worlded, and I am curious to see where this scholarship takes us next.