About Article

Since the early 2000s, the United Nations (UN) global counterterror ism architecture has seen significant changes towards increased multilateralism, a focus on prevention, and inter-institutional coordi nation across the UN’s three pillars of work. Throughout this reform process, gender aspects have increasingly become presented as a “cross-cutting” theme. In this article, I investigate the role of gender in the UN’s counterterrorism reform process at the humanitarian- development-peace nexus, or “triple nexus”, from a feminist institu tionalist perspective. I conduct a feminist discourse analysis of the counterterrorism discourses of three UN entities, which represent the different UN pillars of peace and security (DPO), development (UNDP), and humanitarianism and human rights (OHCHR). The article examines the role of gender in the inter-institutional reform process by focusing on the changes, overlaps and differences in the discur sive production of gender in the entities’ counterterrorism agendas over time and in two recent UN counterterrorism conferences. I find that gendered dynamics of nested newness and institutional layering have played an essential role both as a justification for the involve ment of individual entities in counterterrorism and as a vehicle for inter-institutional cooperation and struggle for discursive power.