Women, Peace and Security: UNSCR 1325 and Implementation

Known as WPS, the Women, Peace and Security agenda is a global policy framework for women’s roles, rights and protection in conflict and peace processes. Launched through the United Nations Security Council at the turn of the 21st century, it acknowledges that armed conflicts affect women and girls in specific ways and that women’s inclusion shapes the durability of peace. In 2025, the agenda reached the 25th anniversary of Resolution 1325, its founding Security Council resolution. It now links UN resolutions and national action plans to peacekeeping practice, mediation networks and grassroots initiatives. The agenda treats women as rights-holders and political actors whose authority should shape peace and security decisions. Scholars and civil society groups still criticize parts of the agenda when implementation remains symbolic, underfunded or detached from women’s organizations in conflict-affected settings. Those criticisms make implementation a test of budgets, accountability and institutional authority, not a ceremonial anniversary exercise.

Summary

• The WPS agenda is a UN-linked framework for protecting women and girls in conflict, preventing gender-based violence, and expanding women’s participation in peace efforts.
• It originated from decades of women’s advocacy, notably the 1995 Beijing Conference’s call to address women’s rights and gender inequalities linked to armed conflict.
• Its institutional starting point is UN Security Council Resolution 1325, adopted in 2000, which recognized women’s roles in peace and security efforts.
• Since 2000, the UN Security Council has adopted 10 foundational WPS resolutions, and UN Women counted 115 countries with national action plans by October 2025.
• Critics note challenges such as the Western character of the WPS Agenda, the securitization of women’s rights claims, the superficial inclusion of women in peace initiatives (tokenism) and insufficient attention to inequalities among women across nationality, ethnicity or class.

What is the WPS Agenda?

The WPS agenda represents a transformative approach within international relations because it links gender equality with global peace and security. At its core, WPS gives women a political role in peace and security and preserves the duty to protect civilians during war. It seeks women’s full and meaningful participation in peace talks, conflict resolution, security institutions and post-conflict governance. Protection remains central since war often exposes women and girls to sexual violence, displacement and loss of access to services. Prevention connects those harms to early warning, accountability and attention to gender inequality. In essence, WPS aims to reform peace and security efforts by bringing women’s authority into decisions about war and peace.

The agenda was born from long-running advocacy by women’s rights activists and organizations worldwide. A key catalyst was the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, where governments pledged to increase women’s role in peace and security decision-making. The conference’s Platform for Action treated “Women and armed conflict” as one of its critical areas. This global consensus laid important groundwork. Five years of additional lobbying then moved the issue squarely onto the UN Security Council’s agenda. In October 2000, the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1325 under Namibia’s presidency and with strong support from Bangladesh and other states. For the first time, the world’s highest security body formally recognized women’s equal participation in peacekeeping and peacemaking. The resolution recognized their role in post-conflict recovery and the need to protect women’s rights during conflict. Resolution 1325 urged UN Member States and all parties to conflict to take specific actions, from placing more women at negotiation tables to training peacekeepers on gender sensitivity.

The agenda’s institutional significance lies partly in this shift of venue. Women’s peace activism had long existed outside formal security institutions. Resolution 1325 brought those demands into the Council chamber. That move gave advocates a common language for asking governments, peace missions and international organizations to report on women’s participation and protection. The gap between commitments and practice remained, yet activists gained a reference point for challenging exclusion.

The pillars of WPS

The Women, Peace, and Security agenda rests on four main pillars that provide a practical blueprint for making peace processes and security policies more gender-responsive and inclusive:

• Participation: ensuring women’s equal presence at all decision-making levels, from peace talks to leadership of peace operations and postwar governance.
• Protection: safeguarding the human rights of women and girls, especially against sexual and gender-based violence in conflict zones.
• Prevention: preventing violence against women and girls, especially conflict-related sexual violence, and addressing gender inequality as a driver of instability.
• Relief and recovery: incorporating gender perspectives in humanitarian aid, refugee settings and post-conflict reconstruction so that women’s health, security and economic needs are addressed.

The implementation of WPS

The WPS agenda is implemented through international and national mechanisms. At the international level, the Security Council has adopted 10 resolutions that form the agenda’s core normative framework. Resolution 1820 treated sexual violence in war as a tactic of terror in 2008. Resolution 1889 focused on women’s participation in post-conflict governance in 2009. Resolution 2242 linked WPS with counter-terrorism efforts in 2015. At the national level, governments use National Action Plans (NAPs) to localize WPS commitments. By October 2025, UN Women counted 115 countries with WPS National Action Plans, making NAPs the agenda’s main domestic implementation tool. These plans outline how governments will increase women’s roles in peace and security, often with civil society input and domestic protection commitments. Many countries are now on second- or third-generation NAPs, which reflects the agenda’s move from recognition toward implementation.

UN and domestic action have turned WPS into a working framework beyond New York. For example, the Philippines involved women at senior levels in negotiating a 2014 peace accord, widely seen as contributing to a more durable agreement. In Liberia, women’s peace activism was instrumental in ending the civil war in 2003, and WPS frameworks later supported women’s participation in reconstruction. In ongoing conflict zones, women peacekeepers and police can improve community relations and protection outcomes even as they remain a minority. The agenda has spurred regional networks, such as the African Union’s women mediators network. Civil society uses the Security Council’s annual WPS debates for regular advocacy.

Implementation depends on funded, monitored national plans that stay connected to local organizations. A plan that lists priorities has little effect when ministries lack budgets or women’s groups enter the process after decisions are made. The strongest WPS practice links national commitments to local expertise. Women in conflict-affected communities often know which risks and exclusions are being missed. Many advocates judge plans by measurable responsibilities, financing and public accountability.

Accountability prevents WPS from becoming a formal label attached to ordinary policy. A government may cite the agenda in speeches and leave peace negotiations unchanged. A mission may appoint a gender adviser and still keep authority over priorities in the same hands. WPS has practical force when participation shapes decisions before mandates, budgets and negotiating positions are settled.

The practical test is administrative as well. National plans need named ministries, budget lines, public reporting and channels through which local women’s organizations can contest weak implementation. A state can describe WPS as a priority and still leave negotiators, security officials and relief planners to work as before. The operational question is how WPS changes who defines risks, who controls resources and who is heard before peace mandates are set. For that reason, implementation debates focus on monitoring, financing and the quality of adopted plans at the national level. The gap between adoption and enforcement is where many commitments lose political force.

The same logic applies inside peace operations and aid programs. A mandate can mention gender, yet field teams still need trained staff, reporting channels, survivor-centered services and ways to consult women’s organizations without exposing them to retaliation. These details determine whether Resolution 1325 changes daily practice or remains a reference in policy documents.

The challenges related to the WPS Agenda

Despite promoting progress on women’s rights in peace and security, the WPS agenda faces criticism over both its assumptions and its implementation.

According to postcolonial perspectives, the agenda often reflects Western liberal feminist ideas that may have limited resonance or practical effect in non-Western contexts. Scholars point out that Western governments sometimes champion WPS without properly consulting or empowering women in the Global South, whose experiences of conflict can differ greatly. The concern is that women most affected by war can be treated as beneficiaries of policy rather than authors of policy. Powerful countries can also use WPS rhetoric to justify military interventions in the name of “saving” women, a dynamic some scholars describe through the “liberal peace critique”. This critique warns against inserting women into existing military and peacekeeping structures without challenging those structures’ underlying militarism or power imbalances.

Another issue raised by specialists is the increasing securitization of women’s rights claims. WPS discussions can become centered on security measures more than peace, including the deployment of women soldiers, intelligence officers and gender focal points inside security institutions. Greater women’s participation in peacebuilding can improve outcomes, although an agenda dominated by security institutions narrows the wider purpose of WPS. The original intent of WPS was to prevent and end conflicts while protecting women and girls from the violence those conflicts produce.

This critique does not reject protection or security work. It asks which institutions set the agenda and which forms of harm receive attention. A WPS program centered only on patrols, intelligence posts or military staffing may miss land restitution, displacement, food access, family tracing, trauma care and political representation. Those issues are still peace and security questions because they shape whether people can return, rebuild and participate after violence ends. The securitization critique pushes WPS back toward its wider conflict-prevention purpose.

Critics also note that the WPS agenda sometimes treats women as a homogenous group, emphasizing women as victims or as inherently peaceful without accounting for diversity among women. A rural African woman may face conditions very different from those of a young Indigenous woman. An LGBTQ+ person in a war-torn society may have needs that a one-size-fits-all approach misses. When WPS policy ignores race, sexuality, disability, class or displacement, it can reproduce the exclusions it claims to challenge. Researchers have shown that WPS policies and NAPs rarely mention factors like race, sexual orientation or disability. As a result, certain groups of women and gender minorities remain invisible and unserved. The push for intersectional WPS approaches is growing so the agenda can account for differences among women affected by conflict.

Even if those conceptual issues were addressed, implementation of the WPS agenda would still face several challenges. Progress has been slow and uneven. UN Women’s 2025 review found that women made up only 7 percent of negotiators and 14 percent of mediators in formal peace processes in 2024. In UN-led, co-led or supported peace and constitution-making processes, women represented 18 percent of negotiators or delegates on average. Those figures show that formal endorsement of WPS does not automatically change who sits at the table.

Additionally, there is concern about “tokenism” in the agenda’s implementation. Some institutions may add a woman or a gender adviser to a team just to show adherence to the WPS agenda, without giving that person influence over strategy, resources or negotiation choices. Tokenistic compliance with Resolution 1325 leaves male dominance in peace and security decision-making largely intact.

Finally, weak data about women’s involvement in peace efforts poses another challenge. Good data is critical for tracking progress in implementing the WPS agenda, including the share of peace negotiators who are women and women’s access to relief services. When governments do not collect or publish such data, exclusion becomes harder to identify and correct. Public evidence makes participation, funding and protection gaps visible when officials claim support for WPS. Civil society groups have frequently had to fill the gap by collecting evidence of women’s experiences during conflict and their roles in peace efforts.

Conclusion

The Women, Peace and Security agenda is a landmark in international relations. It connects the gender equality movement with the peace and security sector. It emerged from a recognition that sustainable peace is weakened when half the population is excluded from negotiation, protection, relief and reconstruction. Through its pillars, Security Council resolutions and National Action Plans, WPS tries to change how institutions approach conflict. The agenda has achieved significant normative and practical effects, yet its promise remains uneven. Stronger financing, better data, less tokenism and deeper inclusion of conflict-affected women are central to making WPS more than a diplomatic formula.