The relevance and reinvigoration of the Women, Peace and Security agenda

Since its establishment, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has made considered and important contributions to addressing women’s rights and vulnerabilities in situations of armed conflict. In particular, the elevation of conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence has filled gaping policy and legal lacunae and focused global attention on the prevalence and scale of these violations. Nonetheless, the agenda has struggled to prevent and deliver meaningful accountability for such violence. In turn, the visibility of penetrative sexual violence as the lex motif of the WPS agenda has occluded attention to intersectional and underlying violences for women in situations of armed conflict, including but not limited to structural, maternal and obstetric violations. Multiple tensions are exposed in the WPS agenda, including the failure to meaningfully reflect the lived experience of conflict-impacted women in peace processes and negotiations, the failure to address ordinary and sustained violence for women in conflict sites, and the exclusion of colonial legacies in accounting for the harms of armed conflict. WPS suffers from a failure of representation, and global policy preoccupation with the fact of women’s meaningful presence in negotiation processes overlooks the more necessary problematic of the representativeness of the women who are included in peacemaking. This contribution argues for a fundamental rethink of the WPS agenda to reflect the lived and complex realities of women’s lives, inequalities and needs in conflict and post-conflict contexts.