Somewhere between the fifth email about rescheduled meetings and the third cup of coffee, another email arrives. It’s about Women, Peace and Security (WPS).
A few people skim it. One or two frown: ‘Didn’t we already do DEI training last month?’ The rest delete it or file it, unread, under ‘woke stuff’ and move on.
And just like that, a framework designed to reduce civilian harm, improve operational effectiveness and support inclusive peacebuilding is reduced to a misunderstood human resources initiative.
It’s not malicious. It’s not even deliberate. But it’s a problem, because when we conflate WPS with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), we mislabel and sideline it. In doing so, we quietly remove a strategic capability from our national security arsenal.
WPS and DEI may share some of the same vocabulary, such as ‘inclusion’, ‘participation’ or ‘equity’, but they are very different concepts.
WPS is a suite of commitments grounded in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 and subsequent resolutions. It was forged from battlefield experience and post-conflict failures. It asks militaries and governments to consider how gender shapes security, who participates in conflict, who is most affected, who gets excluded from peace processes and who is missing from the decision-making table. In short, WPS is about improving the quality and sustainability of peace and security operations.
DEI, on the other hand, is about workforce demographics and institutional culture. It’s internal and focuses on who gets hired, promoted, mentored or sidelined. Unfortunately, DEI is often treated as a side quest: cursory, cosmetic and occasionally politicised. But at its core, it’s about making institutions smarter, fairer and more resilient. Diverse teams challenge assumptions, inclusive cultures retain talent, and equitable systems ensure we’re not overlooking capability just because it doesn’t look like what we’re used to. In national security contexts, that matters, not because it’s morally fair (although fairness is hardly a vice) but because homogeneity can be a liability. DEI, when done well, is about removing internal friction so that institutions can perform better.
The confusion usually starts innocently enough. A gender advisor is placed under the People and Culture branch. A WPS reference is dropped into the same slide deck as internal mentoring programs and inclusive language guides. Before long, WPS is bundled in with leadership pipelines, flexible work policies and International Women’s Day cupcakes. And just like that, a strategic framework intended to shape our approach to armed conflict is reclassified as a staff wellbeing initiative.
This mislabelling wouldn’t be such a problem if it didn’t come with consequences, but it does. When WPS is seen as DEI, it is treated as a distraction. Soft. Political. The sort of thing you can shelve during periods of high operational tempo or quietly defund when budgets tighten.
That’s when the blind spots emerge: intelligence misses the early warning signs of conflict because it wasn’t looking at gendered indicators; peace processes fail because half the population was excluded from the table; or a deployed force undermines its own legitimacy through sexual exploitation and abuse, and no one in the chain of command recognises the strategic fallout until it’s too late.
These aren’t abstract risks. They are known failure points. WPS exists precisely because we’ve seen what happens when gender is ignored in the planning phase: short-term tactical success followed by long-term instability, resentment and mission fatigue. In other words, when WPS is conflated with DEI, it’s not feelings that get hurt; it’s operations.
One of the great misconceptions about WPS is that it’s about being nice. That it’s an ethical add-on, the policy equivalent of a fruit platter at a working lunch: worthy, but not exactly mission-critical. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
WPS isn’t about niceness. It’s about power: who holds it, who’s targeted by it, and who is left unprotected when it fails. It involves mapping threats more accurately, understanding populations more deeply and designing operations that don’t unravel at the first contact with lived reality. These are strategic issues, and recognising them isn’t political correctness; it’s situational awareness.
WPS is about sustainable peace and enhanced operational decision-making, while DEI is about institutional fairness. You need both, but they are not interchangeable. Collapsing WPS into DEI is sometimes a convenient shortcut for those who find both concepts uncomfortable. The word ‘woke’ quietly creeps in, and suddenly decades of operational lessons can be dismissed without a second thought. But when we dismiss WPS on these grounds, we don’t just throw out the map; we throw out the compass, the GPS and the situational report, blinding our troops on the ground.