Once a breakthrough landmark in recognising women’s disproportionate experiences of conflict and their essential role in peace and security, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) is being sidelined by hard security priorities and hostile politics.
Since its adoption in 2000, UNSCR1325 has transformed global security debates. It has embedded gender in normative and policy frameworks; expanded women’s participation in conflict and peace processes; strengthened women’s protection from violence; and pushed institutions to recognise peace as inseparable from equality.
Yet as we mark the resolution’s 25th anniversary, its promise feels precarious. Progress is being eroded by global backlash against the human and equal rights of women, and by efforts within states and multilateral security institutions to relegate the WPS agenda to the margins. Commemoration, therefore, must not be self-congratulatory; it must be a reckoning for the future.
As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres outlined in a sobering 2024 statement, ‘Amid record levels and armed violence, progress made over decades is vanishing before our eyes.’
Women’s rights are facing unprecedented backlash. Authoritarian and populist governments, religious fundamentalists and anti-feminist movements frame gender equality as a threat to traditional values or as a Western imposition of values that ‘contradict’ human nature. In Afghanistan, for example, four years after peace talks mostly excluded women, Taliban directives have stripped women and girls of their rights and dignity.
And in peace and security debates, women’s participation is dismissed as secondary to hard military priorities, despite such participation leading to more durable peace. Indeed, according to the UN Secretary General’s 2024 report on WPS, women were virtually absent from talks on ending conflicts in Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen, Myanmar and Libya.
The backlash is also evident in multilateral arenas once seen as champions of WPS. At the UN, consensus on women’s rights has fractured. In Security Council negotiations, references to sexual and reproductive health are increasingly contested, with WPS language watered down or omitted. Divisions among permanent members have paralysed progress, turning gender equality into a bargaining chip. Gender backlash does not only appear in authoritarian states such as in Russia, but also in liberal democracies such as the United States, which backtracked on its commitments this year by closing its governmental Global Office on Women’s Issues and cancelling the Department of Defense’s WPS program.
Within NATO, the pattern is subtler but no less damaging. WPS is often portrayed as a soft concern, overshadowed by defence imperatives. This was evident at the 2025 NATO Summit, when NATO allies pledged to allocate up to five percent of GDP to defence spending. In contrast, the summit’s accompanying declaration made no mention of funding WPS efforts, despite NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept committing to integrating the WPS agenda across its three core tasks: deterrence and defence, crisis prevention and management, and collective defence and security. Such moves betray the spirit of UNSCR1325, which was never about symbolism but about transforming security by embedding women’s equality, perspectives and participation at its core.
Even when policies exist, implementation is hampered by entrenched institutional cultures. Gender advisers, who facilitate the implementation of the WPS agenda, are frequently sidelined, facing organisational and resourcing challenges and harmful workplace cultures. Institutional doctrines continue to privilege kinetic operations, treating gender perspectives as peripheral rather than integral to mission success, despite the UN and NATO calling for their member states to increase women’s full, meaningful and equal participation in armed forces and military operations. These practices reflect the persistent hegemonic masculinities within security institutions that equate strength with dominance and dismiss feminist-informed approaches as irrelevant or political.
Rhetorical support for inclusion has grown based on evidence that woman’s participation makes peace talks more sustainable. Despite this, material and political support has lagged far behind. These challenges extend beyond institutions. Women’s grassroots peacebuilding movements—the heart of the WPS agenda—remain chronically underfunded, even as global military expenditure soars. In the past quarter-century, these gaps between promise and practice have become an increasingly common feature of WPS implementation.
Commemorating UNSCR1325 at 25 must therefore be a call to reclaim the agenda from those who would weaken or instrumentalise it, and to re-centre feminist analysis that challenges militarised security logic. We need to resist narratives that frame WPS only in terms of operational effectiveness rather than as a transformative tool to guide genuine participation, protection and prevention efforts. This involves the promotion of an effective human security approach that reconfigures security within a non-traditional framework and positions WPS as integral to protecting civilians, dismantling gendered insecurities and creating inclusive peace, rather than simply supporting military operations. The WPS agenda was never intended to soften security or ‘make war safer for women’. It was designed to redefine it—to make clear that sustainable peace and security cannot be achieved through military means alone.
The 25th anniversary of UNSCR 1325 is not a celebration of mission accomplished; it is an inflection point in the face of regression. The global institutional and political backlash against women’s rights is real and the erosion of multilateral consensus is concerning. But the resolution’s transformative vision endures. To honour it, states and institutions must recommit to the principle, as the Australian government affirmed in 2021, that peace and security are inseparable from gender equality. Peace depends on nothing less.