Chapter 2 provides background on the WPS Agenda and UN mediation. It first discusses the politics of the WPS Agenda in the UN by focusing on three main dynamics: how UN actors articulate what the WPS Agenda is, how the UN's mediation architecture has adopted the Agenda, and how actors within the UN resist the Agenda, both passively and actively. It then provides an overview of the UN's mediation role and how it is institutionalised. The chapter illustrates the different forms UN mediation can take by describing three processes that come up throughout the book: the Great Lakes of Africa (which deals with the national and regional dimensions of the conflict in the DR Congo), Syria, and Yemen. This chapter is especially useful for readers who may not be familiar with the WPS Agenda in the UN system and/or UN mediation.

Chapter 4 examines how the logic of UN mediation as a science produces and disseminates technical knowledge. It focuses on the practices of conflict analysis and the circulation of ‘best practices’ in implementing the WPS Agenda in Syria and Yemen. The beginning sections argue that conflict analysis produces instrumental knowledge about conflict by fixing actors and issues in a schema that is legible to interveners. It emerges from colonial schemes of knowledge production that diagnose the local sphere as lacking in capacity. As such, ‘gender-sensitive conflict analysis’ – a common tool for implementing the WPS Agenda in UN mediation – is subject to many of the same problems. The remainder of the chapter analyses the UN's institutional learning practices, arguing that its ‘best practice’ case studies of WPS in mediation depoliticise knowledge about gender, position the UN as the protagonist of women’s participation by erasing its own resistance to WPS, and diminish local women’s agency. Crucially, these best practice cases also elide ‘participation’ with ‘consultation’, undermining the WPS Agenda’s call for the meaningful participation of local women in UN mediation.