Disillusionment with the United Nations (UN) Security Council has perhaps finally reached its zenith. Inaction on Gaza extends a longstanding pattern of inaction on key conflicts like the war in Syria. Meanwhile, Russian aggression in Ukraine has posed fundamental challenges to the system of collective security, as one of the council’s permanent members (P5) breaches international peace and security without consequence from the Security Council. The council’s current crisis of legitimacy—certainly not the first such crisis, but the most recent—meets longstanding and increasingly acute feminist concern about the Security Council’s women, peace, and security (WPS) agenda.

These developments combine to present an opportunity to fundamentally rethink feminist strategies for engaging the Security Council. Initial feminist motivations for approaching the council were connected to decades of feminist peace and disarmament advocacy. There is a strong argument to be made that enduring failures to effectively integrate disarmament into the WPS agenda at the Security Council mean that it is now timely to redirect feminist efforts away from the council and toward the General Assembly. In particular, this institutional shift is essential for advancing feminist disarmament objectives through the WPS agenda.

Peace and Security at the Security Council

Resolution 1325, the founding resolution of the WPS agenda at the Security Council in 2000, is rightly viewed as the product and outcome of the women’s movement and women’s peace activism, with origins in the 1915 International Women’s Peace Conference. Feminist activists initially pursued the WPS agenda through the Security Council because they wanted to secure legally binding normative commitments, to influence the United Nations’ response to threats to international peace and security, and, ultimately, to challenge and reframe the notions of peace and security themselves. Nevertheless, Resolution 1325 contained no references to one of the most fundamental peace and security challenges: disarmament. Subsequent WPS resolutions adopted over the ensuing two decades likewise remained silent on disarmament and, indeed, on the structural causes of conflict.

With a singular mandate to respond to threats to international peace and security, up to and including the authorization of the use of force, the Security Council is an unlikely conduit for a feminist agenda on international peace and security. The anachronism of the P5’s composition is but the most apparent of many limitations, while the P5’s veto power has effectively marginalized the council as a significant actor in responding to several of the most acute and ongoing contemporary threats to international peace and security.

Unlike the General Assembly, which due to its universal membership has a role in the “progressive development of international law” through inter alia the adoption of resolutions and treaty texts, the Security Council is not entitled to engage in international lawmaking and legislative-like activity intended to bind all UN member states on broad thematic areas. Nevertheless, since the 1990s, the council has clearly undertaken this sort of activity, including in areas ostensibly related humanitarian and “human security” issues, including civilian protection, children and armed conflict, and WPS. However, the council has exercised this legislative role most forcefully not on human security but on counterterrorism.

In its response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Security Council “legislated” to require specific counterterrorist responses by all UN member states. Although the council’s action on counterterrorism has been unanimous, without the objection of any state, it remains difficult to justify under the UN Charter. This action goes beyond the council’s power by requiring states to act on specific threats in specific situations, ultimately constituting a significant expansion of the council’s coercive power. This coercive power remains effectively unchecked by requirements such as judicial review, participation of all states (much less of civil society actors) in decision making, and procedural fairness and transparency, as negotiations take place in private and involve Security Council members only. Commentators have observed how “the increasing prominence of the Security Council in international lawmaking marks an important shift of power and influence away from the General Assembly.”

Peace and Security at the General Assembly

Contrary to Security Council inaction on disarmament, the General Assembly has prioritized disarmament from its inception. From its very first session, the General Assembly has maintained an impressive output of resolutions on disarmament, including efforts to reframe the question of disarmament from one exclusively of state security. The General Assembly’s formal request to the International Court of Justice in 1994 to rule on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons is a good example of this, as the initiative aimed to foreground the environmental, humanitarian, and human rights implications of nuclear weapons.

In recent decades, with the revival of so-called “humanitarian disarmament,” the Security Council’s silence on disarmament in its WPS resolutions contrasts strikingly with the General Assembly’s adoption of several disarmament treaties. As the latest in a series of disarmament treaties for which feminists and other actors lobbied through the General Assembly, the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons continues a trajectory of feminists’ relative success in international law. The diverging fates of the WPS agenda at the Security Council and disarmament treaties at the General Assembly are a sober reflection of the challenges to institutionalizing feminist peace agendas in international law.

Moreover, while the Security Council is the UN organ tasked with responding to threats to international peace and security, the council’s inaction has frequently forced the General Assembly to lead responses to these threats, particularly when council action is blocked by a veto. The assembly takes such action through the Uniting for Peace mechanism, whereby the assembly recommends collective measures to respond to threats to international peace and security when the council fails to act.

Resolutions passed under the Uniting for Peace mechanism have been both significant and wide-ranging. For example, the General Assembly has established peacekeeping operations (Congo, 1960) and a variety of non-use of force measures, such as establishing a commission of inquiry (Hungary, 1956); calling for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Jordan and Lebanon (1958) and from Afghanistan (1980); providing assistance to East Pakistani refugees (1971); requesting an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the legal consequences of the construction of a wall in the occupied Palestinian territories (1997); and, most recently, demanding Russia’s withdrawal from Ukraine (2023). In addition, General Assembly resolutions have called for a range of “voluntary sanctions,” particularly around the supply of weapons and military assistance to particular conflict settings.

Ways Forward for Centering the WPS Agenda in the General Assembly

In recent years, feminist activists have increasingly sought to decenter the Security Council’s role in defining, interpreting, implementing, and enforcing the WPS agenda. My own work has been prominent in efforts to shift the agenda to the international human rights system. Others have proposed its movement to the regional, national, and subnational levels. All of these efforts should be understood as part of broader feminist efforts to limit the Security Council’s exercise of its powers, or at least to hold it accountable.

On a spectrum from modest to radical proposals for rethinking the roles of the General Assembly and the Security Council in the WPS agenda, one might start with an inter-organ dialogue on peace and security in which the General Assembly scrutinizes the Security Council for its exercise of coercive powers. In rare instances, the General Assembly has condemned Security Council inaction, for example by “deploring the failure” of the council to ease the humanitarian crisis in Syria in 2012. The General Assembly has also acted as an additional enforcer of Security Council decisions, for example by passing a resolution noting a state’s failure to comply. Further, the General Assembly can make recommendations to the Security Council on the appropriate exercise of its powers. Examples include the General Assembly recommending to the Security Council to uphold procedural fairness in its terrorist sanctions regime.

Inter-organ dialogue could be a valuable avenue for highlighting—and challenging—some of the most problematic aspects of the WPS agenda at the Security Council. For example, the General Assembly could call attention to failures by the Security Council to integrate its WPS commitments into its country-specific activities. Furthermore, the General Assembly could support enhanced domestic implementation and monitoring of the WPS agenda by endorsing the adoption of national action plans on WPS and by endorsing the secretary-general’s WPS Indicators, both of which the Security Council has notably declined to do. The General Assembly might also condemn the council’s ongoing refusal to establish a Working Group on WPS and recommend that the council do so.

More radically, the General Assembly could model an alternative use of Security Council powers, embodying a different type of international peace and security—one connected to human rights, development, and disarmament—for example through the Uniting for Peace mechanism. A worthwhile example is peacekeeping. In a period of insufficient Security Council consensus to establish peacekeeping missions in the Suez and Congo, it was instead the General Assembly that shaped the development of core principles of peacekeeping, such as host consent, the financing of peacekeeping missions, and impartiality.

Drawing on its strengths, the General Assembly could take on a similar normative role today on the WPS agenda. A WPS agenda advanced by the General Assembly has the potential to prioritize disarmament, both in terms of the immediate cessation of active conflict and in longer-term peace and reconstruction. Furthermore, in line with its longstanding work on disarmament, the General Assembly could frame the WPS agenda around development and human rights, as distinct from state security. Importantly, the General Assembly’s universal membership would also allow for much broader participation and deliberation—including, critically, by conflict-affected states—in setting a WPS agenda.

A greater role for the General Assembly in setting the WPS agenda could help address some of the shortcomings of a WPS agenda set by the Security Council. In particular, it could bring together two longstanding feminist demands that have been separated: the demand for women’s participation in peace and security, which has been channeled through the Security Council, and the demand for disarmament, which is being channeled through the General Assembly. In a period of renewed crisis at the Security Council, this bifurcation of feminist activism ought to be reconsidered.

Catherine O’Rourke is Professor of Global Law at Durham Law School.

This article is based on the author’s research published in March 2024 in the Journal of Conflict & Security Law: Disarming the Women, Peace and Security agenda: the case for centring the United Nations General Assembly.