15/2018 Sam Cook is currently lecturing part-time at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of San Francisco and is planning an online creative pedagogical project titled encounteringwar.  + The “origin” story of Resolution 1325 is probably amongst the most well-known narratives of successful feminist intervention in international politics. 1 Becoming equally familiar is the narrative that the Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) policy discourse has not lived up to the resolution’s transformative promise. 2 The language of these critiques varies, but it is not uncommon to hear the accusation that those who are meant to be “working on the inside” for the feminist project have abandoned the struggle or, as is often averred, have “been co-opted.” 3 This paper does not set out to dispute these claims and I mostly agree with their overall assessment of the “state of play” of WPS policy. 4 However, I argue that interventions to secure particular feminist (or other) meanings in an institution such as the Security Council will “almost inevitably involve the most microscopic struggles around individual and institutional practices.” 5 That is, if we want to understand courses of action in or by the Security Council, for example the acceptance or refusal of certain language in its policy texts, we must account for the prevailing possibilities of language in that space. 6 Laura Shepherd proposes we do this by paying analytical attention to “the discursive terrain of international institutions when analysing the formulation and implementation of security policy.” 7 Although I provide a reading of this discursive terrain, this is not an account of the policymaking practices of the Security Council writ large. Rather my interest here is in exploring how feminists encounter and work within the practices of that space, its rules and procedures, its dominant ways of operating. The discursive terrain I am looking for is thus more than a place with distinct and fnely detailed features and a layered history. It is all that. But it is also a place occupied, a position from which possible future action can and must be calculated. To trace the topography of this terrain, I explore a set of interviews with feminists who either are working or have worked to see feminist approaches and interests included within the Security Council as a WPS policymaking space. I read these not for a defnitive account of Security Council practice, but as texts that provide an account of feminist intervention in, and through, the practices of that space. 8 It was there that I encountered Metis, Titan goddess of good counsel, advice, planning, cunning, and craftiness, bearer of the cunning intelligence needed to act in a world of change. 9 INTRODUCING METIS As may become apparent in what follows, metis has a reputation for being hard to pin down and as impossible to defne with any precision. 10 Philologists Detienne and Vernant – the primary interlocutors of metis in contemporary social theory – describe it in their 1976 text Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (Les Ruses de l’Intelligence) as “a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behavior” that combines “fair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, ENCOUNTERING METIS IN THE SECURITY COUNCIL Sam Cook