To demonstrate why a more feminist approach offers potentially greater success than the more masculine approaches already tried, and failed, this article provides a case study of US deterrence strategy towards Iran during the most recent presidential administrations, two Democratic and two Republican.  Analysis will focus on whether each administration’s stance towards Iran has been traditionally masculine, feminine, or a mix. From that examination, recommendations are made regarding development of effective US-Iranian deterrence strategy in the future.

The US military withdrawal process from Afghanistan brought politicized accusations of multiple foreign policy—military, intelligence, and diplomatic—miscommunications and misconceptions. Notably, however, critics (from Congressional members and oversight committees to members of the military, intelligence, and diplomatic communities) stop short of considering the drawdown a failure to implement domestic law—specifically, the Women, Peace and Security Act of 2017 (WPS Act) and the US Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS Strategy). This omission from the ongoing political debate demonstrates that—despite the United States in the late 2010s being “the first country in the world with a comprehensive law on WPS, and de facto, the first with a whole-of-government strategy that responds to such a domestic law”¹—its government and security communities have not yet fully integrated critical WPS concepts and theories or understood their practical applicability for US security and policy decisions.

This paper argues that the US failed to implement the WPS Act and offers a practical demonstration of how to analyze Afghanistan’s security situation from a WPS lens before making three policy arguments regarding what the United States can learn from this error. The goal is to demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of incorporating WPS analyses in national security considerations and to encourage the Biden administration, as well as national security professionals, to better incorporate WPS in future national security strategies and routine drawdown considerations.

The news media plays a powerful role in women’s empowerment and advancement and in so doing has a significant impact on international security. Women’s empowerment and leadership is an international security issue because, as the Women, Peace and Security Agenda (WPS) contends, women’s full involvement in all peace and security decisions is essential to global stability and prosperity. News media is an influential tool for advancing WPS because strategically planned content can influence social values directly related to WPS such as encouraging female literacy and education, reducing gender bias, supporting women’s leadership and political participation, and combatting gender-based violence. Conversely, news media that reflects accepted cultural norms, regardless of bias or repressive or violent characterizations, reinforces and strengthens existing gender imbalances.

This paradoxical relationship between news media’s influence and women’s empowerment presents challenges for every society, but has been especially challenging for cultures in the Arabian Gulf as they balance modernization and the influx of liberal Western influences with longstanding conservative tribal traditions. The State of Qatar (Qatar), in particular, stands out due to its influential Al Jazeera Media Network (Al Jazeera), and official stance on advancing WPS and increasing women’s participation in leadership, the economy, politics, and peacebuilding. While Qatar has positioned itself as a modern, educated and open society, there is a disconnect between policy and practice; current Qatari media does not reflect WPS policies. This chapter will therefore explain how WPS connects with the news media, examine the status of WPS and media in Qatar, and make policy recommendations.

If, as Edward Hallett Carr contends, “The function of history is to promote a profounder understanding of both past and present through the interrelation between them” (Carr 1961, 86), then Mona L. Siegel’s Peace on our Terms provides much needed historical context for the global Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and women’s continued exclusion from peace processes and political institutions. WPS, an agenda contending that sustainable peace, global stability and domestic prosperity depend on women’s participation and leadership in conflict prevention, conflict resolution, peace negotiations, and post-conflict reconstruction, disappointingly has not yet manifested into actual change by global leadership. As recently as October 2019, the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General and the Executive Director of UN Women, jointly lamented UN Member States’ poor progress on advancing WPS (UN News 2019). However, Siegel offers hope. Peace on Our Terms goes far beyond its intended purpose of being a work of global history and provides valuable lessons learned from feminists of the past that remain applicable for advancing WPS today. Peace on Our Terms is a ‘must’ for anyone interested in WPS, women’s peace history, feminist historical scholarship, or women and social movements.

In the West, women have practiced law and advocated greater gender diversity in the legal profession for more than a century. In Qatar, concepts such as “equality of opportunity” and “diversity or inclusion in the profession” are virtually unexplored by research and only beginning to appear in casual conversations. While the number of women studying law in Qatar has significantly increased, the number of women practicing law as prosecutors, judges and lawyers has not directly correlated. This article will use Qatar as a case study to analyze how culture and modern development affect the feminization of Qatar’s bar and bench.

The Women, Peace and Security Agenda (WPS) plays a critical role in global peace, stability and prosperity. While the successful implementation of WPS is heavily dependent on the involvement and active participation of the legal community (legislators, scholars, legal practitioners), to date, a large number of legal educators, decision-makers and legal professionals remain unaware of it or dismiss its importance. This article provides a synthetic overview of WPS and highlights its relevance in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, with a specific emphasis on its implementation in Qatar and lessons derived from the same.

The urgency of climate change necessitates considering what types of governance
options are available when the existing approaches are failing. The United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC) Secretariat’s Principal Legal Adviser, Dan Bondi Ogolla, notes that the great challenge of climate change requires complex and vigorous international cooperation solutions guided by effective and clear political and legal frameworks. International climate change law, however, remains in its infancy. The Oxford Handbook of International Climate Change Law aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of this emerging field while explaining the complexities that complicate international efforts surrounding this essential field of policy and law. A book designed not only to educate, it advances scholarship and policy in an array of connected interdisciplinary areas, by both provoking the legal principles founding major legislation and international agreements, as well as challenging established concepts in legal scholarship that go far beyond climate law. Established notions in areas such as tort, climate finance, energy law and economics, to name a few, are all challenged with intensive critique and recommendations. This radical and fascinating collection of chapters is amongst the best contemporary literature available in climate change law.

For decades, educators across the world have been advocating for educational reform that would increase the number of practical skills courses included in traditional legal education. In 2011, Qatar University College of Law established a practical skills class, the Externship Program, designed to teach students real life lawyering skills, encourage graduates to pursue legal careers, and overcome existing administrative, cultural, and social barriers while preserving Qatari identity and customs. This article will first briefly present some existing scholarship regarding the global push for practical skills legal education and then explain results achieved by Qatar University and make the argument that more practical skills education can and should be implemented in the MENA region.