Re-“Turning” to the Future: The Women,Peace,and Security Agenda at 25

There is no doubt that the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security (WPS) in October 2000 raised international awareness about the differential impact of war and conflict on women, as well as the need for their active participation in peacebuilding. It laid the foundation for a significant international normative framework for policy action around WPS, in short, labeled as the WPS agenda (comprising a suite of 10 Resolutions) structured around four pillars, namely, participation, protection, prevention, relief, and recovery. With the 25th anniversary of Resolution 1325 drawing near, this commentary is a reflection on the relevance of this policy agenda not only to the security of women and other marginalized groups around the world but also to the planet itself in the Anthropocene. I contend that for WPS to stay relevant, it has to address three disconnects: being too often out of sync with earlier feminist intellectual and activist histories; being out of place for the way in which WPS operates in global, national, and local spaces; and being at odds with a planetary agenda where both the human and the non-human are agents of politics.

The story of the WPS agenda is one of ambivalence—heroic and frustrating at the same time, as Cohn and Duncanson (2020) rightly observe. Heroic for getting the Security Council to place women’s security firmly on the international agenda; frustrating for being couched in weak UN language, making it difficult to enforce a structural change of the international system. It is a tale of fraught and instrumentalist implementation of National Action Plans (NAPs), with little impact on the ground. Armed forces and security sectors have been quick to include gender and women’s participation for the sake of operational effectiveness, but it came at the cost of seeing “long-standing feminist conceptions of positive peace … become captive to the militarized security frame of the Council’s operation” (Otto, 2018, p. 105). Yet, WPS’s success and failure can also be explained in pragmatist terms by weighing the risks of issue dilution against the benefits of learning from “doing WPS” and generating evidence of localization, for instance.

Several feminist scholars have reflected on the “nature” of the WPS agenda and how we got to this point. Tickner and True (2018), for instance, link past and present by drawing lines of continuity between the pragmatism of the women’s peace movement during WWI and the pragmatism evident in the four pillars of the WPS agenda, whereas Kirby and Shepherd (2021) adopt a systems perspective when they describe WPS as a fluid policy ecosystem, defined and disrupted by an increasing number of actors, who continuously expand the range of issues to be included on the agenda. In all these feminist perspectives, there are assumptions of learning and adaptation taking place over time. Building on these framings, I argue that taking a “long perspective” not only helps to see changes and continuities more clearly but also points to openings for reimagining the WPS agenda across time, space, and species toward an agenda for planetary politics.

Out of Sync—Finding Our Way Back to a Feminist Relational World View

The first disconnect relates to the fragmentation of issues that constitute the WPS policy agenda. This in itself is not a new insight. Feminist scholars have extensively outlined the effects of growing international, regional, and national institutionalization and hyper-specialization in narrow security issues related to WPS (Basu et al., 2020; George et al., 2019). Parallel to these observations, critical feminist scholars have consistently pointed out the blind spots in Resolution 1325. Where are the men, the children, queer perspectives, race, migration, the environment, and the gendering of counterterrorism [see Davies and True (2019)]? These are all salient omissions, but they seem to be based on assumptions that everything works through WPS; and that a better and more inclusive WPS is the answer to a sustainable peace. It suggests the lack of a longer-term historical perspective. What I see, in effect, is a perpetual circular exercise of broadening and narrowing of the agenda.

It, therefore, becomes necessary to remind ourselves that there is a “the longer tradition of feminist theorizing about international peace and security” (Tickner & True, 2018, p. 222). In this regard, the work of J. Ann Tickner is foundational for understanding the integrated nature of military, economic, and environmental security. Tickner reminds us that “[b]y more clearly illuminating aspects of gender inequality that contribute to militarism, structural violence, and violence against nature, feminist perspectives can enrich our understanding of the interrelationships between these various forms of insecurity” (Tickner, 1994, p. 51). Similarly, much of the work in feminist peace studies that inspired early feminist international relations (IR) scholarship (e.g., Reardon, 1993) also saw political economy and a feminist conception of security as intrinsically linked.

Equally in the world of feminist activism, there is evidence of continuities between the principles adopted at the International Congress of Women (ICW) conference held at The Hague in April 1915 (e.g., their linking of peace with economic and social justice) and the work of early feminist IR protagonists as well as three of the four WPS pillars (see Otto, 2018; Tickner & True, 2018). Yet the WPS agenda finds itself between a rock and a hard place. The WPS agenda is much less radical than the early feminist radicalism of the ICW because the Security Council’s mandate “enforces” a narrow focus on peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Many threats to women’s security during and after conflict (such as lack of property and inheritance rights, climate change, and corruption) fall outside the Council’s mandate. At the same time, identity and difference in the form of queer, indigenous, and post/decolonial imperatives do not reflect in policy responses. Is it then realistic to keep adding issues if we know that WPS as a policy agenda is constrained in practice?

Perhaps the answer lies in how one views the status of the WPS agenda—as a narrow policy agenda or a broad and shapeshifting ecosystem. As a slightly alternative reading, I see WPS as part of a much more holistic and relational feminist security agenda and history that engages in long thinking, eschewing an ethic of openness and interdependence, as well as respect for difference to “catch” new and older (forgotten) security issues. The practical implications are that we should push for structural reform of the UN system, celebrate the small wins, and continue advocating to radically transform people’s mindsets within and outside WPS.

Out of Place—The Local and Thinking Smaller

Building off the previous discussion on difference, the second disconnect concerns the superficial and instrumentalist way in which the WPS agenda operates in global, national, and local spaces. Whereas the first disconnect was about historical context, the second disconnect addressed the issue of place, expanding on the long-standing feminist assertion (see Haraway, 1988) that knowledge is situated. In current times, where attention to global racial hierarchies of whiteness is much more pronounced, it is no longer enough to call for context-sensitive solutions in the form of local ownership. In this regard, Haastrup and Hagen (2020) assert that the WPS agenda’s potential is limited because of the embeddedness of racism in the broader field of IR.

This straitjacket that WPS finds itself in is best illustrated through the way in which NAPs for the implementation of Resolution 1325 are approached. Several WPS scholars (e.g., Basini & Ryan, 2016; Martin de Almagro, 2018) have highlighted the problematic nature of implementation in localized contexts. As a dominant narrative, localization implies a processual focus on the translation of global norms into local practices, assuming that this process is unidirectional. The instrumentalist use of localization to address the implementation gap means that the local becomes simply the site for the implementation of WPS efforts, and a deep engagement with the grounded and intersectional reality of different groups of women is lost.

The challenge, therefore, for WPS, as it reflects on a quarter of a century’s work, is to draw more explicitly on indigenous (feminist) world views of emplaced security. In such a reading, situated knowledge means challenging the notion that universal human thought is possible; it is emplaced knowledge grounded in the everyday practices, beliefs, and rituals of indigenous communities located in specific concrete places. Since meaning-making occurs in those fixed material sites, it allows for the creation of a place-based agency (Brigg, 2020) while still being situated within a particular historical/temporal context. Thinking smaller by drilling down to the indigenous connections between land, community, and people offers openings for WPS to theorize the local from below while being attentive to the colonial workings of race, gender, and being across scales.

At Odds—Planetary Politics and Big Thinking

Whereas indigenous knowledge was introduced above to frame the local as a counter to racialized and other oppressions, connections between the indigenous and climate security/climate change provide important starting points for rethinking the third WPS disconnect, namely, that the WPS agenda is largely a humanist one—completely at odds with a planetary agenda. Instead of practicing big thinking that ends with the global and runs the risk of being universalist, a planetary perspective transcends the familiar anthropocentric global politics of a world comprising states. Instead, planetary politics is premised on the recognition of a comprehensive and inclusive interdependence of the human and the non-human.

Although the climate crisis is integral to the goals of WPS because it could be a threat multiplier that can exacerbate insecurity in the lives of women, the WPS agenda has been slow in highlighting the connection between gender and the environment (to some extent “forgetting” earlier ecofeminist work that challenged thinking and practices which saw nature as the backdrop to human endeavor). In this respect, Yoshida and Céspedes-Báez (2021) argue that the WPS pillars should engage directly with the environmental and spiritual dimensions of conflict. Their insights on the need to engage with spiritual relationships to land alongside a more humanist gender, security, and peace agenda dovetail with the prioritization of place and indigenous knowledge highlighted earlier. Bringing the environment (back) into WPS, therefore, does not mean a simple addition to an already long list of problems that the agenda seeks to address. In fact, such refocusing cuts across the whole gamut of WPS work and entails extending a feminist intersectional lens and ethics of care to include nature and other non-humans as well.

In this “big picture” approach, making the WPS agenda count in broader terms could, therefore, come through subverting “the mythology that sees the internal separated from the external in policy formulation and implementation” (David et al., 2024, p. 885). Critical feminisms are particularly suited to trouble the boundaries between knowledge and practice that result from the agenda’s policy status.

Conclusion

To conclude, I propose the following way forward: First, to mitigate the effects of an institutionalized and narrowing WPS agenda linked to Security Council mandates, the agenda must be read as one part of a broader, more integrated yet fractiously holist agenda informed by early feminist-relational conceptualizations of peace and security. Instead of concentrating only on the specifics of what is left out (which is also important), we should also pay attention to the first principles of a gender-just sustainable peace. “Long thinking” will help to put the calls for broadening the agenda by a new generation of WPS scholars into a historical context. Second, to address the instrumentalist treatment of the locals in the Global South, as well as the demands of a planetary nature, requires simultaneous big and small thinking. Here, I propose that we center the post-anthropocentric perspectives of indigenous knowledge systems and feminisms that embrace a non-hierarchical interconnectedness within the Earth system. Such a move will not only help to concretize other feminist contributions on situated knowledge but could also decolonize flawed implementation plans in the Global South.

These shifts in thinking may offer openings for reimagining the WPS agenda across time, space, and species and thereby lend greater relevance and legitimacy to it, provided we stick to the task—to be relentlessly self-critical about our own positionality and the conceptual tools that we use to make sense of worlds past, present and yet to come.