New Report: Perspectives from Feminist Peace Activists on 20 Years of UNSCR 1325

WILPF is proud to announce the release of our new report, UNSCR 1325 at 20 Years: Perspectives from Feminist Peace Activists and Civil Society. 

This report is available in English and Arabic.


report cover.

20 years ago, feminist peace activists advocated for the UN Security Council to pass resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. But two decades later, what do they think about how it has been implemented so far?

Over the past six months, the WILPF WPS programme spoke with WILPF members and partners from around the world to hear their thoughts about the WPS agenda and the current status of implementation. These included a global 3-day virtual consultation, a survey sent to all WILPF sections and groups, interviews with sections, and a call with young WILPF members. 

This landmark report is based on these discussions with feminist peace activists -- the key actors who advocated for the adoption of UNSCR 1325. It documents their assessment of the extent to which Women, Peace and Security (WPS) priorities have been translated into concrete action, identifies key challenges, and provides concrete recommendations at the global and national levels.

Read the report!

 

The report finds that there are three primary challenges to progress on Women, Peace and Security: 

  1. Militarism and militarisation;

  2. The patriarchal and political underpinnings of the agenda;

  3. And lack of accountability for implementation.


Graphic that reads: Disarmament and demilitarisation are starkly absent from debates on and implementation of the WPS agenda. • Resolution 1325 is still seen as a framework that only concerns conflict-affected countries. • The narrow and militarised definitions of conflict, peace, and security directly impede root cause analysis. • Conflict prevention is largely absent in debates on and implementation of the WPS agenda. • Adding women into armed structures of power, specifically the military and peacekeeping operations, has become a major focus in WPS implementation.

 

Militarism continues to be a persistent barrier to the implementation of the WPS agenda. Yet, conflict prevention, disarmament, and demilitarisation are starkly absent from discussions on WPS.


Graphic that reads: The WPS agenda is downplayed as a “women’s issue” and viewed as detached from purportedly high-level matters of peace and security. • WPS implementation suffers from severe pushback on and absence of women’s human rights, including at the UNSC. • Women’s civil society organisations (WCSOs) and women human rights defenders (WHRDs) carry the onus of implementing the WPS agenda, taking on myriad roles to protect and promote women’s human rights. • WCSOs and WHRDs carry out tremendous work to impact change in their communities, as well as at the national and transnational levels, and do so under increasingly precarious and volatile circumstances. • Women’s participation in decision-making processes remains pro forma, without meaningful inclusion or diversity.

 

The WPS agenda continues to be intertwined in patriarchal power dynamics. Implementation of WPS is suffering within a broader climate of pushback on women’s human rights and barriers to civil society.



Graphic that reads: WPS implementation suffers from a lack of holistic implementation, with governments, and international organisations, picking and choosing among issues they deem fit to focus on within the agenda. • WPS implementation is generally marked by a lack of policy coherence, both in terms of a state’s engagement with domestic and international frameworks. • WPS implementation lacks and suffers from accountability not only at the country level, but also on the part of international actors, including the UN. • The localisation of the WPS agenda remains a key challenge, with limited awareness of the agenda, both at the governmental and civil society level, and support for its implementation. • NAPs have become a way to put forth an often public effort of WPS implementation, which perpetuate WPS rhetoric, without always providing substantive and meaningful implementation.
 

The WPS agenda suffers from a lack of holistic implementation, policy coherence, and accountability. There is a persistent gap between rhetoric and concrete action, including on resourcing.





 

Read the new report, UNSCR 1325 at 20 Years: Perspectives from Feminist Peace Activists and Civil Society in English and Arabic.

UNSCR 1325 at 20 Years: Perspectives from Feminist Peace Activists and Civil Society

WILPF_UNSCR-1325-at-20-Years_Web.pdf