Where Next For The Women, Peace And Security Agenda? – Analysis

By Gretchen Baldwin and Marta Bertea

This month marks 24 years since the adoption of the landmark UN Security CouncilResolution 1325 (2000), which was the first stand-alone resolution on mainstreaming gender into peace and security architecture at the multilateral level. Resolution 1325 and nine subsequent resolutions now constitute the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. The anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on the relevance of the WPS agenda today, understand the obstacles its advocates face, and evaluate progress and gaps in its implementation.

Implementation of the WPS agenda has ranged from efforts at the grassroots level towards social cohesion, gender equality and human security to trying to increase women’s participation (or at least representation) in security institutions and peace processes. Two fundamental questions persist in discussions of the WPS agenda’s future. First, should the focus be on expanding the agenda (most often understood as a new Security Council resolution) or strengthening implementation of the existing WPS-related resolutions? Second, how can the drift towards securitization and militarization in implementing the agenda be corrected?

Origins of the WPS agenda

Resolution 1325, championed by diverse coalitions of civil society organizations, was a turning point at the international level for gender equality advocates. For the first time, a multilateral institution had formally recognized the role of gender in shaping the experiences of people in conflict settings and within peace processes. The resolution called for action around four pillars: participation of women at all levels of decision making related to peace and security; protection of women and girls from sexual and gender-based violence; prevention of violence against women; and application of a gender lens to international crisis relief and recovery. The agenda has a transformative core, rooted in the concept of feminist peace and a desire to reshape the traditional security architecture which, paradoxically, the Security Council embodies

Between 2008 and 2019, the Security Council adopted another nine resolutions on WPS. As of May 2024,56 per centof UN member states have adopted at least one national action plan for implementing the WPS agenda,several regional organizationshave taken a similar approach, and some municipal and district governments have adoptedlocal action plans. However, a persistent lack of accountability and resourcing, along with othersystemic challenges—such as shrinking civic space, militarization and embedded patriarchal norms—have significantly hampered progress.

Over the past two decades, mainstream discourse about the agenda’s implementation has skewed towards security rather than peace. Many argue that the agenda has becomesecuritized, while meaningful consultations withwomen’s civil society, women’s participation at the onset of peace negotiations or mediation efforts, or addressinggendered root causes and drivers of conflict(such as nationalistic conceits of men as heroic protectors) are consistently overlooked in practice.

Moving forward: New WPS resolutions or stronger implementation?

A key question in the coming years is how best to move a holistic WPS agenda forward. Advocates have long pushed for the Security Council to ensure that any new WPS resolutions strengthen the agenda rather than simply rehashing existing language. Following this logic, Swedish non-governmental organization Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation gathered the perspectives of women involved in building and sustaining peace on the current state of the WPS agenda.

The study, released around the agenda’s 20th anniversary in 2020, prompted the drafting of a shadow resolution on women’s economic rights, leadership and participation. While such civil society advocacy did not result in a new WPS resolution in 2020, a rather unusual peacekeeping resolution on women’s participation in peace operations—Security Council Resolution 2538—was adopted that year. Indonesia’s decision to frame Resolution 2538 as a peacekeeping resolution rather than a WPS resolution was likely strategic given the difficult passage of the previous two WPS resolutions, but it is nevertheless complementary to the WPS agenda. A few months after Resolution 2538 was co-sponsored by all 15 Security Council members, Russia proposed a highly controversial new WPS resolution, which was not adopted.

Although next year’s 25th anniversary of Resolution 1325 will draw significant attention to the WPS agenda, the prospects of a new WPS resolution, especially one that moves the agenda forward, seem remote. Indeed, while gender has always been a topic of ideological contestation, the processes leading up to the adoption in 2019 of Security Council resolutions 2467 and 2493 sawvetoes being threatenedover language about sexual and reproductive health that had been accepted in the preceding eight resolutions. Disagreement over progressive language on gender is common in debate on Security Council resolutions, but the outright contestation of previously agreed language marked a significant shift. Given the increasingbacklash against women’s rightsand so-calledgender ideology(a term used by conservative movements for anything promoting non-normative gender roles, sexual and reproductive rights, or LGBTQ+ inclusion) as well ascontinued polarizationin the Security Council, advocates for progress on the WPS agenda are understandably reluctant to subject new texts to debate.

Therefore, an alternative way to keep up the momentum on WPS is to strengthen the implementation of the existing WPS resolutions and resist securitization of the agenda. Civil society has longadvocatedfor strengthening implementation, noting that it must be holistic,recognizingthat the agenda’s four pillars are interconnected and that, as such, neglecting one will end up hindering the agenda as a whole.

Redirecting WPS implementation away from securitization

An increasingly common critique of the securitized approach to WPS implementation is that, rather than trying to disrupt the structural conditions that lead to violent conflict, it only addresses the after-effects, such as by supporting survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. There has been very little progress on the consistent inclusion of women in peace negotiations or mediation. 

Consultations with women’s groups and other diverse civil society representation at the start of Security Council policy processes are rare. And, in recent years, strengthening implementation of the WPS agenda has often been interpreted narrowly as achieving gender parity in security institutions. While the ‘participation’ pillar is an integral component of the WPS agenda, a securitized approach often means integrating women into militarized structures antithetical to the transformative roots of the agenda, and deprioritizing the other pillars. The success of Resolution 2538 and its overwhelming popularity, compared with the near-impossibility of negotiating new WPS resolutions in the past five or so years, illustrates a significant imbalance between security-focused and peace-focused interventions.

This is borne out by statistics. For instance,SIPRI datashows that the share of women uniformed personnel deployed in UN and European Union peace operations has been steadily increasing since 2018, when the UN introduced its uniformed gender parity strategy. However, women’s representation in active peace processes led or co-led by the UN dropped from 23 per cent to 16 per cent between 2020 and 2022, according to the2023 Report of the Secretary General on WPS.

Implementation of other WPS pillars is also lagging. For example, a report compiled by the UN Development Programme in 2017foundthat in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Timor-Leste post-conflict reconstruction initiatives failed to significantly address women’s needs, advance gender equality or mainstream gender into mechanisms for mobilizing and allocating resources. The study highlighted the lack of UN-wide standard procedures and criteria to integrate gender into UN-managed post-conflict processes. Demilitarization strategies are alsooften missingfrom national action plans and other implementation tools. Instead, the benefits of increasing women’s participation in uniformed services are emphasized with arguments often relying onharmful gender stereotypes.

Ways forward

The 2024 and 2025 anniversaries of Resolution 1325 present important opportunities to reflect on and revive the transformative potential of the WPS agenda. Given continued tensions in the Security Council and steadily growing resistance against gender and women’s rights norms, genuine progress through new resolutions is unlikely. Instead, the more productive path seems to be full—and accelerated, per the recently adoptedPact for the Future—implementation of all four pillars of the agenda, doubling down against essentialist or stereotyping language about both men and women, supporting localization of WPS to address community-level security concerns and advocating for desecuritization across all aspects of the agenda. The ‘add women and stir’ mentality has plagued the WPS agenda since its early days but, with continued advocacy and creativity, securitized approaches can shift back towards using gender as a tool to upend inequality with the clear aim of fostering positive, sustainable peace.

About the authors:

• Gretchen Baldwinis a Researcher in the SIPRI Peace Operations and Conflict Management Programme.
• Marta Berteawas an intern in the SIPRI Events Team, supporting the organization of the 2024 Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development.

Source: This article was published by SIPRI