One of the clearest messages from the 2024/25 Gender Equality and Governance Index Report, newly published by the Global Governance Forum, is that countries at the top of the list—those that prioritize women’s empowerment and gender equality—are the most stable and secure, while those at the bottom tend to be wracked by civil conflict and outright warfare. 

Cross-country surveys draw attention to where individual countries or regions rank in a numerical list, but even more important is the identification of factors where progress towards women’s empowerment and equality has been slow and spotty. This list includes such issues as women’s participation in national legislatures, women’s access to legal protections, inheritance and citizenship laws, land tenure regulations, and more. Not surprisingly, the list mirrors the factors that lead to instability and armed conflict. This is a reminder that we must devote renewed energy to those of our global institutions most closely involved with women, peace, and security (WPS). One such effort now underway is the move to reinvigorate the United Nations and member states’ drive to implement U.N. Security Council 1325.  

Peace agreements that benefit from women’s engagement are two-thirds more likely to stand up ten years after signature than those that do not.

Three truths that drive the WPS agenda

Let us begin with three truths that have emerged from empirical and anecdotal evidence when considering women, peace, and security: 

• First, when social order breaks down and violence reigns, it is women and girls who suffer most.  Abuses come in the form of gender-based violence, human rights violations, destruction of infrastructure that provides health and educational services to women and girls, and forced displacement, to name only a few;
• Second, conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction and stabilization depend on sectors where women often have the most at stake and the greatest expertise, including transitional justice, national healing and reconciliation, reproductive health care, and strengthening of the social services and institutions of civil society;
• Third, the success rate for peace agreements depends in large part on the extent to which women and other marginalized populations have been involved in negotiations and implementation, and can thus bring their agency, ground truth, moral authority, and talents to the process. A key authoritative study shows that peace agreements that benefit from women’s engagement are two-thirds more likely to stand up ten years after signature than those that do not.   

Conflicts in the 1990s show the way

For many of us, these truths were first recognized during work to resolve the numerous global conflicts during the 1990s, including many that had begun as proxy wars during the darkest days of the Cold War. I saw this in my service as US Ambassador to Angola from 1995 to 1998, when there were literally no women in key roles in the peace process, and thus no counterweight to the power-obsessed interests of the armed combatants who took the country to war.   

Concurrent conflicts throughout Central America and the Caribbean, the Balkans, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, and beyond evidence the same reality. Regrettably, with the very concepts of peacekeeping and nation-building under attack, after failures in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and elsewhere, governments and international and regional organizations were slow to respond and adapt.  

And so, drawing on the citizen-led model of the Ottawa Landmine Treaty, civil society groups stepped forward in the late 1990s. After two years of skillful consensus building, drafting, advocacy, “track two” negotiations, and quiet diplomacy, these groups linked with like-minded governments, including Bangladesh, Canada, and Namibia, who were then members of the Security Council.

After more challenges and delays in the Security Council itself, UNSCR 1325 was adopted unanimously in October 2000. This Resolution was historic: it was one of first Council resolutions that addressed a thematic rather than a country-based issue. It called for the full engagement of women in preventing and resolving armed conflict and ensuring successful peace operations. It required the UN and member states to protect the safety and rights of women and ensure their access to humanitarian assistance. It outlined 17 specific steps that the UN, member states, and civil society should take.

Much activity, less progress

There has been much activity over the last quarter century. The mandates of UN peace-keeping missions all incorporate the requirements of Resolution 1325.  A total of 108 countries now have National Action Plans (NAP) to implement its vision; moreover, the organization Our Secure Future has established a 1325 NAP Academy to assist these countries to implement their plans and to encourage others to adopt one.

No fewer than nine new UNSC resolutions elaborate and broaden this agenda, including a particular emphasis on civilian protection and sexual- and gender-based violence. The United Nations created UN Women, and regional organizations such as NATO, the African Union, ASEAN, and the EU have become true believers.

But for all the activity, as the Global Governance Forum’s report shows, progress has been slow, sporadic, and subject to backsliding.  Women still make up fewer than five percent of signatories and participants in peace negotiations. Many peacekeeping operations are devoid of grassroots women’s participation and leadership. Rape remains a weapon of war, and women are targeted by governments seeking to close civil society space.  

Peace negotiations often provide amnesty for crimes committed in the fog of war, meaning that men with guns forgive other men with guns for crimes against women and children. Humanitarian relief, demobilization and reintegration programs, and post-conflict reconstruction provide little support for projects aimed at women and girls.

Looking back to move forward

As we look forward to the 25th anniversary of Resolution 1325 in October 2025, few advocates would call for outright celebration. But there may be a “back-to-the-future” approach to reinvigorating our efforts. 

As in the 1990s, we now face a new wave of seemingly intractable, testosterone-driven conflicts, and scores of civil society advocates, like-minded governments, UN institutions, foundations, and others are coming together to demand progress. One line of effort is the adoption of a joint set of time-bound, measurable WPS goals, with interim targets to be achieved by next October.  Consultations are now ongoing.

To ensure compliance, I propose an approach that uses the “power of the purse and peacekeepers” to ensure women’s engagement, leadership, protection, and security. This approach is based on a simple proposition: the international community should only use our scarce resources to support peace operations that are likely to succeed; and that, by definition, means operations based on gender equality.

Four steps should follow: 

• First, financial donors, troop-contributing nations, and civil society partners would announce that, as of next October, they will support only those peace processes that have at least 30 percent meaningful women’s participation at the negotiating table and the treaty-implementation body, with that percentage rising over time to full gender equality; 
• Second, these groups will stop funding peacekeeping missions for agreements that offer widespread amnesties for serious crimes and thus undercut the post-conflict restoration of rule of law; 
• Third, the groups will support security-sector reforms, demobilization, and power-sharing agreements only when these programs provide equal access for women, measured by sex-disaggregated data; 
• Fourth, they will fund only those reconstruction packages that dedicate at least 15 percent funding to girls’ education, reproductive health care, women entrepreneurs, and other gender-related projects. This provision was part of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s Action Plan for Gender-Responsive Peacebuilding in 2010 but has never been acted upon.  

Donors would devote any resources freed up by the above measures to support the peace and security work of UN Women, other UN agencies, or civil society.  

This line of action would not require a new Council resolution. Many advocates fear that launching such a process might easily result in backsliding. I would go further in suggesting that it might be difficult today to pass Resolution 1325 itself, given that resistance to international “interference in internal affairs” has become a mantra in many countries. This includes Russia, which will be president of the Security Council next October.

Strengthening WPS Compliance

But even this ambitious agenda is not enough. We need to  strengthen the compliance provisions for the existing UN women, peace, and security requirements. There must be enforcement mechanisms, permanent structures to monitor progress, accountable deadlines, sanctions and public lists to name-and-shame countries and non-state violators, and on-budget personnel and financial resources devoted to the WPS agenda.  

These steps could be achieved through a combination of executive actions by the Secretary General, through steps taken by appropriate UNGA Committees, or ad hoc inclusion in new peace operations resolutions.

If this all sounds like a bridge too far, so did Resolution 1325 in 2000.  

The introduction of the WPS agenda at the Security Council by Bangladesh’s Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury in March of that year met with a moment of stunned silence, followed by raucous laughter and shouts that women’s issues did not belong at a table addressing global security.  

But the coalition of advocates was undaunted. The next month, Canada used its presidency under Foreign Minister and Ottawa Landmine Treaty hero Lloyd Axworthy to keep the drumbeat going, and by October, Foreign Minister of Namibia Theo-Ben Gurriab and UN Ambassador Martin Andjaba presided over the unanimous adoption of Resolution 1325.  

Perhaps it is time for history to repeat itself.