This year marks two decades since the historic passing of the United Nation Security Council resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security (WPS). Its passage on October 31st 2000 is viewed as a transformative turning point in the global fight for gender equality, providing a crucial multilateral framework for women’s rights in conflict-affected zones and beyond. Yet, speaking at the UN Security Council’s Annual Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security, Afghan Activist Zarqa Yaftali highlighted the glaring fact that “20 years of commitments and resolutions by this Council have not changed the reality for women in Afghanistan.”
This sense of disillusionment with the progress of WPS agenda is well-documented and widespread. Ahead of this year’s anniversary events, 558 civil society organizations across 102 countries sent an open letter that epitomised the concern that, ‘formal peace processes have systematically failed to include women, and in doing so, have replicated the inequality and discrimination that caused conflict and violence in the first place.’ It is clear that the problems go far beyond the failures in implementation, to the very nature of the WPS agenda itself. The agenda’s once transformative vision for gender equality and peacebuilding at all stages of the conflict cycle has been minimised over time, and the scope of the agenda narrowed. When juxtaposed against the backdrop of a world in which two billion people still live in countries affected by conflict and the progress made on women’s rights faces devasting regression as a result of covid-19, reaching this milestone for UNSCR 1325 is not simply a cause for celebration, but a call to action.
THE REALITY OF IMPLEMENTATION
The UNSCR 1325 is the most translated Security Council Resolution in the organization's history. It is undeniable that framework provided by WPS agenda has been a critical instrument in elevating the disproportionate impact of war and armed conflict faced by women and girls onto the international stage. By 2012 it had been translated into over 100 national and local languages - a testament to its political resonance that transgresses geographic and cultural borders. Yet, when moving from rhetoric to tangible implementation, studies on women’s participation in security and conflict resolution between 1992 and 2019 highlight that women were just 13 per cent of negotiators, 6 per cent of mediators, and 6 per cent of signatories in major peace processes. Considering the agenda’s prolific uptake in the international community, progress is disappointingly slow and non-linear.
This is perhaps unsurprising when it is noted that only 43% of countries had a dedicated budget to support implementation of action plans by 2018, according to WILPF. Consequently, during the last two decade under the WPS agenda framework there have still been countless examples of exclusionary processes in Central African Republic, Libya, Haiti, Iraq and Somalia, and thus achieving lasting peace have failed and many of these conflicts have continued.
THE CONCEPTUAL NARROWING OF THE WPS AGENDA
The gap between the UN’s current accountability and WPS ambitions is clear. However, this is not simply down to a failure of implementation. This disparity is rooted in the very nature of the WPS agenda itself, and what this has come to represent in the chambers of the UN, the debates of its member states and beyond.
Within these high-level policy circles, the focus is often on the protection of women in conflict zones rather than the issues of gender equality and the continuum of violence that occurs at all stages of the conflict cycle, including peacetime. For instance, the UNSC has given an increased spotlight to the prevention of conflict related sexual violence (CRSV). Whilst this is a crucial aspect of the agenda, focusing on mitigating the consequences of conflict on women and girls, the absence of root-cause analysis minimises the more radical ambitions of Resolution 1325 as a conflict prevention framework. This narrowed and siloed approach to WPS agenda denies the fundamental truth that seventy-nine percent of armed conflicts have taken place in contexts with high levels of gender discrimination, and research has repeatedly confirmed that gender inequality is a root cause of conflict.
Moreover, ongoing state funding for militarisation and militarism also undermines the long-term potential of the WPS agenda. Models of security based on the financing of arms diametrically oppose any professed commitments to achieve lasting and sustainable peace and security. Yet, the current interpretation of the agenda is state centric and framed around national interests, meaning that original aims such as disarmament and demilitarisation are often glaringly absent from current discussions. As Dr Cynthia Enloe has astutely highlighted, ‘the resistance to both the analysis and the effective implementation to 1325 still runs deep, even if most official spokespeople know how to perform their public support.’ Indeed, only last month Russia attempted to pass a resolution that threatened to jeopardized women’s human rights and their meaningful participation. This rollback was supported by China, Indonesia, Russia, South Africa, and Vietnam. Although the resolution was ultimately rejected by the remaining two thirds of the Security Council, the point remains that there are still many who do not see issues of women, peace and security to be a Council issue, even twenty years on.
RESTORING THE TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL OF UNSCR 1325
When the UNSCR 1325 was envisioned by civil society organisations and women’s rights campaigners in the 1990s, they strove for much more than to “just bring a female body to the table”, as UN Peacemaker Radhika Coomaraswamy observed of the narrow ambition of the international community in her global review in 2015. On the contrary, UNSCR 1325 and the ensuing resolutions were envisioned to be an ambitious overarching framework for global gender equality, as well as an attempt to achieve systematic change and a lasting commitment to positive peace, disarmament, and demilitarisation that goes beyond the ‘absence of war’. Yet, interpretations of WPS agenda have increasingly graduated towards state-centrism and siloed from mainstream policy and security debate. While four pillars of the WPS agenda remain selectively implemented, perpetuating gender essentialism or a women exclusivist approach, tensions with the agenda’s original aims will continue to remain. It is evident that the challenge that the more radical, historic ambitions of the WPS agenda poses to current politics and contemporary world order are a point of political contention that is yet to become overcome.
As we look towards the next 20 years, against the backdrop of increasingly regressive gender politics within the UN and in the world at large, the 20th anniversary of UNSCR 1325 must be seen as an urgent call to action: to reimagine the transformative potential of the WPS agenda and re-examine the critical relationship between gender, peace and security in the world today.
Emily is a History Graduate from the University of Bristol. Her fields of interest are the intersection of gender, conflict and human rights as well as environmental justice and the climate-security nexus.