Beyond Securitization: Rethinking Women, Peace, and Security for Genuine Global Change
The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda was established in 2000 with the dual objective of preventing conflict and integrating the historically excluded half of the world’s population into regional and global peace processes. The underlying premise was that sustainable peace cannot be achieved without the inclusion of women in negotiations, policymaking, and post-conflict recovery efforts. The UN has incorporated these objectives through Resolution 1325, which has four key provisions: increasing women’s participation in peace and security decision-making; mainstreaming a gender perspective in peace processes and agreements; protecting women and girls from gender-based violence in armed conflict; and gender-inclusive approaches to refugee protection and humanitarian responses. Beyond participation, the WPS agenda sought to address the root causes of conflict—including political, economic, and social inequalities—rather than relying on military solutions. It emphasizes disarmament, demilitarization, and reducing armed violence, recognizing that militarized approaches often prolong instability rather than secure lasting peace.
But more than two decades later, while there has been progress in recognizing the gendered impacts of conflict, major structural barriers still stand in the way of meaningful reform. WPS is treated as an add-on rather than an integral component of security policy. Women’s involvement in peace processes is often tokenistic, and funding for gender-inclusive policies remains inadequate. Between 1992 and 2019, women represented just 13% of negotiators and 6% of mediators in major peace processes. Moreover, while there has been increased rhetoric around gender-sensitive security policies, funding and resources for women’s grassroots peacebuilding initiatives remain disproportionately low, limiting the ability of women-led organizations to implement meaningful, community-driven conflict prevention efforts.
Why the WPS Agenda Has Not Lived Up to Its Potential
WPS has been absorbed into existing militarized frameworks—rather than shifting security strategies toward conflict prevention and gender-sensitive governance. The agenda, which was originally conceived as a vehicle for structural transformation in peace and security, has instead been operationalized in ways that reinforce traditional security doctrines.
In Afghanistan, WPS was framed as a tool for women’s empowerment. However, instead of prioritizing women’s inclusion in peace negotiations or governance, the agenda largely focused on integrating women into security forces, reflecting a superficial commitment to gender equality and a priority on hard power and military intervention. Certainly, women’s participation can improve intelligence gathering and community relations, as they often have access to information and areas that men do not. For example, in Afghanistan, the U.S. Marine Corps’ Female Engagement Teams (FETs) exemplified this by penetrating otherwise inaccessible information networks. In August 2010, a male informant provided an FET member within the Marine Expeditionary Force with intelligence on the location of IEDs and Taliban supporters. Despite being designed to engage with Afghan women, the teams were also perceived as less threatening by Afghan men, allowing them to gather critical intelligence. Their unique status as a “third gender”—neither a traditional woman nor traditional gender—enabled them to build trust across gender lines, demonstrating the unintended but valuable role they played in intelligence collection.
However, focusing solely on increasing the number of women in security roles without granting them decision-making power renders such efforts superficial. This emphasis on security sector participation, rather than systemic reform, left Afghan women vulnerable, as evidenced by their exclusion from key peace talks—including the 2020 U.S.-Taliban negotiations, where only four women were present on the 21-member Afghan government team, while the Taliban included none. When the U.S. withdrew in 2021, female security personnel were abandoned and became immediate targets of Taliban persecution, underscoring the fragility of WPS policies that equated numerical representation in security institutions with actual protection.
Compounding these challenges, the WPS agenda in Afghanistan faltered because its implementation was dictated by international donors—such as the U.S., Canada, and European nations—who were focused on short-term impacts rather than local actors, resulting in programs that were externally driven and unsustainable. Funding bypassed Afghan women-led organizations, reinforcing dependency and short-term project cycles instead of fostering systemic change; as Afghanistan Public Policy Research Organization, which works in support of the NAP 1325 Monitor project, noted, these initiatives amounted to “short-term projects that do not address the underlying causes of gender inequality” and were “often ‘reduced’ to ‘requirements’ issued by donors to include a gender component or perspective in all programming with undefined capacity requirements and without concrete guidance, earmarked funding, or systematic monitoring and evaluation mechanisms.”
What’s more, despite billions of dollars in international aid, Afghan women’s rights activists received less than 1% of the funding earmarked for gender equality. The Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MoWA) itself was severely underfunded and lacked institutional authority, exposing a fundamental flaw in WPS: when gender equality efforts rely on external support without embedding structural reforms, they collapse the moment international attention wanes.
Moreover, despite increased visibility, women are still placed in advisory or symbolic roles rather than having real decision-making power. For instance, globally, women’s participation in peace negotiations has remained low, with women comprising under 10% of negotiators on average over the last decade. Their presence in peace negotiations is often highlighted as a sign of progress, yet their substantive influence remains minimal. Women are confined to discussions on humanitarian issues, gender-based violence, and social reconciliation, which are labeled as “soft issues”—a term that reflects patriarchal biases prioritizing military and political matters over human security concerns. By relegating women to such “soft issues,” peace negotiations reinforce the flawed idea that security is defined solely through military control and territorial agreements, rather than through the stability of communities, economic recovery, and the rule of law. This approach focused on hard power prioritizes short-term political settlements over long-term peace, ignoring the well-documented fact that peace agreements are “more likely to be reached” and “35% more likely to last at least 15 years” when women participate meaningfully in negotiations.
Another key issue is that of National Action Plans (NAPs), which were enacted to help states actionably implement UNSCR 1325. While NAPs signal commitment to gender equality, their implementation has been fraught with obstacles. One of the main barriers is the lack of sustained funding. Many NAPs struggle to secure the necessary financial resources, as governments often fail to allocate sufficient budgets for their execution. The financial commitment to these plans remains insufficient, and in some cases, donor funding is directed away from gender equality initiatives in favor of more immediate security concerns, such as countering violent extremism.
This reallocation reinforces a false dichotomy. Allocating resources to WPS does not mean sacrificing expenditure on security issues, because the issues WPS seeks to tackle are precisely the root causes of many security issues, including violent extremism. The activists working to address issues like poverty, lack of education, political exclusion, gender inequality, and social injustice are directly confronting the root causes of violent extremism and many other security issues. Indeed, one organization from Sub-Saharan Africa noted, “Counterterrorism policy needs to acknowledge our resistance to terrorism as activists and communities; we are all seen as one right now—we are all lumped into the same box.”
Furthermore, even when funding is allocated, it is often not utilized effectively due to a lack of robust financial planning and monitoring. Some countries—such as Jordan, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Philippines, Serbia, and Sierra Leone—have not developed clear costing plans for their NAPs, and even when budgets are set, they are frequently underfunded or mismanaged. The lack of a solid financial foundation undermines the potential for meaningful progress in these initiatives.
The absence of effective enforcement mechanisms also limits the impact of NAPs. The monitoring and evaluation (M&E) frameworks that the UN established are weak due to limited capacity or insufficient political commitment. This results in little follow-up on progress, and countries with ongoing conflicts struggle to integrate NAPs into local decision-making processes, hindering their ability to adapt to emerging challenges. The evaluation of UN Women’s support for NAPs suggests that while strong leadership and coordination mechanisms are critical, they are disrupted by “high turnover of government officials or by reorganization in government structures.”
A Way Forward for WPS
This disconnect between the rhetoric of the WPS agenda and its practical implementation underscores a critical issue: without addressing the foundational power structures that exclude women from leadership and decision-making, the WPS agenda cannot catalyze the transformative change it was meant to achieve. It risks being co-opted as a superficial tool for global diplomacy rather than a substantive framework for peace. To realize its potential, the WPS agenda must move beyond the current militarized focus and embrace systemic changes that prioritize gender equality across all aspects of peacebuilding. This will require both political will and concrete actions to embed gender-sensitive reforms within the institutions that drive security policies and post-conflict reconstruction.
Moreover, the classification of women’s priorities as “soft issues” means security in most peace negotiations remains a militarized concept, with armed factions at the negotiating table determining legitimacy, while those working on the ground to rebuild social and economic infrastructure are treated as peripheral. This hierarchical model ensures that post-conflict governance reflects the same exclusionary patterns that fueled instability, keeping women outside the institutions where policy is made. By accepting that security decisions should remain in the hands of political and military elites, the WPS agenda has become part of a framework that tolerates women’s presence but does not guarantee their influence. This is not just a failure of implementation—it is a failure to redefine the terms of peace itself. As long as women’s contributions are secondary to military agreements, the WPS agenda will remain a rhetorical commitment rather than a tool for real structural change.
There are two main recommendations for achieving necessary change. First, a critical shift is needed in how gender is integrated into security and peacebuilding frameworks. Rather than focusing narrowly on increasing women’s participation within existing military and security structures—an approach that securitizes women’s roles—there is an urgent need to reframe the concept of security itself. The WPS agenda must move away from a militarized understanding of security, which treats women’s participation as a tool for enhancing traditional security operations, and instead prioritize human security. This broader approach would focus on addressing the root causes of conflict, such as poverty, political exclusion, and social inequality, with women’s leadership and agency at the forefront of shaping responses. For instance, rather than just increasing the presence of women in peacekeeping or military roles, efforts should ensure that women have decision-making power over the very construction of peace. Women must be central in determining policies on social welfare, community rebuilding, economic recovery, and social reintegration, ensuring these policies are gender-sensitive from the start.
Women, as bearers of social capital, possess invaluable knowledge, networks, and relationships critical to community rebuilding and reconciliation. Despite their centrality to these processes, women’s contributions are marginalized or relegated to secondary roles focused on “soft” issues. This exclusion risks undermining the potential for sustainable peace, as it overlooks women’s crucial role in fostering social cohesion, trust-building, and economic recovery—the foundations of long-term peace. Women, particularly in conflict zones or post-conflict societies, have unique insights into the social dynamics that fuel conflict and the pathways for healing. Their roles as caregivers, educators, and providers give them the tools to rebuild fractured societies, often bridging ethnic, religious, or political divides to create dialogue spaces, organize peace marches, or facilitate grassroots reconciliation efforts. In Rwanda, for example, women played an essential role in peace-building post-genocide recovery. Women parliamentarians, who make up 63.75% in the Chamber and 53.8% in the Senate, had a profound effect on children and society, and have been instrumental in Rwanda’s post-genocide recovery process.
Second, NAPs must be restructured. While NAPs are viewed as key vehicles for implementing the WPS agenda, their potential is often undermined by a lack of resources, political will, and accountability. Many NAPs, despite ambitious goals, fail to secure the necessary financial or institutional commitments to transform these goals into real outcomes. To shift the paradigm of global peace and security, NAPs must be crafted with realistic funding models, institutional support, and robust monitoring and enforcement mechanisms.
To create an effective NAP, it must be integrated into national budgets, with clear financial commitments tied to specific objectives. There must also be a system of accountability that tracks the execution of these plans through measurable indicators and enforces compliance at the highest levels.
Lastly, to move beyond symbolic gestures and effect real change, NAPs must be viewed as part of a broader national strategy for peacebuilding, governance, and human security. Only by making gender equality a foundational element of national security and development will the WPS agenda transition from rhetoric to genuine, sustained impact.
Views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent the views of GSSR, Georgetown University, or any other entity. Image Credit: U.S. Department of State