The Women, Peace, and Security Agenda Turns 25 

A Reckoning Not a Celebration

Twenty-five years ago the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325, a landmark recognition that lasting peace is impossible without women’s full and equal participation. It was a radical shift in global security thinking: violations of women’s rights and the exclusion of women were not issues to be relegated to the sidelines, they were threats to peace itself.

This anniversary should be a celebration. Instead, it is a reckoning. The global promise of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda is being dismantled, and the United States, once its primary architect, is helping to lead the retreat. 

What Worked

UNSCR 1325 captured a simple truth: when women participate and when their specific needs during conflict are addressed, peace is more achievable and lasts longer. Over more than two decades, that idea became embedded in policy. Between 2000 and 2023, 107 countries and territories adopted national WPS action plans. The U.S. adopted its own in 2011, and by 2019 had required all major foreign-affairs related U.S. government agencies to implement it. 

The results have been tangible. In Sudan, women have been coordinating humanitarian aid, negotiating access, and helping to broker local ceasefires since at least 2020. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), displaced women have been organizing camp based groups to reduce sexual assaults against women collecting firewood. And in Bangladesh’s Rohingya camps, by 2019, over 400 refugee women had organized a volunteer network to influence camp management, protection, education, and global policymaking. These examples reflect the very core of the WPS agenda: that women are not only victims of conflict but essential agents of peace, recovery, and resilience. The WPS framework has helped legitimize and resource women’s leadership in exactly these kinds of efforts, ensuring that their participation in humanitarian response, peace negotiations, and community protection is recognized as critical to achieving sustainable peace and security.

U.S. Leads the Way in Global Backslide

Today, the consensus embodied in the WPS agenda is unraveling, and we are positioned to lose the type of progress described above. Preceding the UN’s annual WPS debate on October 6, more than 600 organizations around the world, including my own, Refugees International, warned that “when we should be paying tribute to the hard-fought achievements of feminist movements, we are instead confronting an alarming backlash against women’s autonomy and rights.”

The data bear that out. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation, and Development (OECD) after more than a decade of growth, over the last five years, aid budgeted for gender equality programs has been steadily declining, marking a worrying reversal at a time when global needs are increasing. Indeed, governments are cutting funds to organizations focused on assisting women at the very moment when their work is most essential. Furthermore, in recent years at least a handful of countries have enacted new restrictions on women’s civic participation, most notably Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Iran, and Venezuela. Even within the UN, diplomats now haggle over whether the word “gender” can appear in resolutions.

The United States’ reversal has been especially damaging. Since early 2025, sweeping aid cuts of almost $800 million have gutted federally funded programs including those supporting women’s political participation, reproductive health access, and gender-based violence (GBV) prevention around the world. As soon as the second Trump administration returned to power, they recklessly shuttered key agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) – throwing into question the future of flagship programs like the Safe from the Start initiative, which was launched in 2013 and ensured GBV-related services were available from the outset of a crisis. 

Soon thereafter, in April 2025 they quietly dissolved the State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues, ending a 25-year institutional commitment first established under Secretary Condoleezza Rice and dismantling decades of bipartisan progress on global gender equality. These actions do more than shrink budgets and end programming: they signal that gender equality no longer matters. They undermine international norms the U.S. helped create through Resolution 1325, and they embolden other governments to follow suit.

The Human Cost

The consequences are already visible. In Sudan, women who once led resistance committees and engaged in humanitarian work are now facing escalating reprisals as well as the shuttering of their clinics and freezing of funding. In Afghanistan, more than 2 million girls remain barred from secondary school, while women who rendered judgments against the Taliban are facing retribution, live in hiding, and fear for their lives. And in eastern DRC, mass displacement has surged once again, and reports of sexual violence continue to climb, with nearly 10,000 cases recorded in just the first two months of 2025. Survivors, many of them children, struggle to access even basic medical care as clinics run out of essential supplies and emergency kits. These crises are not new, but the lifelines that once sustained women and girls are being cut away. As funding shrinks and gender-focused programs disappear, those already on the front lines of conflict now have even fewer resources and protections. Across these conflicts and others, the pattern repeats: when women are excluded and underfunded, conflicts intensify, peacebuilding collapses, and communities are less safe.

What Must Happen Next

For a quarter century, the security council has affirmed that women’s rights and international security are inseparable. But principles alone do not protect people. WPS agenda was never meant to be solely symbolic, it was a blueprint for change.

To salvage it, leaders must act on four fronts and do so quickly:

1. Restore funding for women-led organizations. Congress should immediately reinstate the roughly $780 million in rescinded aid that included contracts focused on increasing women’s political participation, GBV prevention, and reproductive health programs. A sizable portion of the restored funds should go directly to local, women-led organizations.
2. Rebuild institutional leadership on gender equality. The State Department should  recreate a dedicated Office for Global Women’s Empowerment/Issues reporting directly to the Secretary of State. The National Security Council should reconstitute its WPS interagency task force and designate a senior coordinator to oversee gender integration across all foreign policy portfolios. Congress should codify these structures through a renewed WPS Implementation Act, ensuring future administrations cannot dismantle them by executive order.
3. Make women’s participation a condition for peace. The White House should make women’s representation a prerequisite for U.S.-supported peace processes, cease-fire negotiations, and reconstruction compacts. U.S. envoys and special representatives should be evaluated on whether women’s groups are meaningfully engaged in the processes they oversee.
4. Defend gender equality at the global level. Nations committed to Women, Peace, and Security should lead a bloc within the UN that publicly defends inclusive language in Security Council and General Assembly resolutions. These nations should commit funding to implementing UNSCR 1325 and should be proactive in supporting gender inclusive language in multilateral forums. 

The WPS agenda proved that gender equality is a key pillar in the foundation of lasting peace. Today, that foundation is cracking, and the United States is chief among those striking the blows. Whether leaders, especially those in the United States, choose to defend or further erode it will determine if we move forward toward justice and peace, or backward into exclusion and instability.