This month marks the 25th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security (WPS). What is the state of the WPS agenda 25 years on? While the WPS agenda has gained broad acceptance, it faces growing headwinds at the global level.

Yet as Toni Haastrup argues in this interview, we need to look beyond the UN for the future of the WPS agenda. Toni Haastrup is Chair in Global Politics at the University of Manchester, and in her research, she has taken a postcolonial and decolonial approach to WPS. She sees the aspirations that gave rise to Resolution 1325 as being carried forward by grassroots movements that might not frame their work around WPS—from feminist protesters in Kenya to LGBTQ activists in Ghana.

Despite the challenges it faces, the WPS agenda has achieved some notable successes over the past two and half decades. What are a few key successes you would point to?

The fact that WPS is now discussed beyond feminist circles is significant in and of itself. Since the first WPS resolution in 2000, there have been nine more WPS resolutions. There’s a lot of contestation as to whether nine extra resolutions were necessary, but the fact that we kept revisiting WPS at the global level is an achievement.

It’s an achievement that the EU External Action Service treats WPS as an important dimension of peace and security. It’s similarly an achievement that the African Union created the Office of the Special Envoy for Women, Peace and Security; the first envoy retired this year and there’s now a second envoy. That process of institutionalization is really important.

The WPS agenda has also given a space for women’s rights and feminist activists to say, “Look at the things you’re doing wrong and how they affect us. You’ve made commitments to promote the aspirations of the WPS agenda.” This gives us a tool for accountability.

Finally, in 2025, we can say that WPS is a global norm. It isn’t uniformly embedded, and there are exceptions, but most states seeking status and recognition in the international system want to be associated with this agenda. One might argue that this broad acceptance dilutes the potential for the agenda to be radical, but it also shows how it has evolved into a norm. Even if it means different things to different people, there is now a shared vocabulary around WPS.

Let’s turn to some of the challenges the agenda is facing. One challenge is the growth in anti-gender mobilizations. How would you describe these mobilizations, and how are they manifesting themselves when it comes to WPS?

When we talk about anti-gender mobilizations, we’re talking about resistance to feminist gains more broadly—not just with respect to WPS. A lot of anti-genderism has been ascribed to or aligned with right-wing politics, and we see its impact in areas like LGBTQ rights and sexual and reproductive rights—issues that we haven’t typically considered in discussions on peace and security.

But this may be starting to change. If WPS is the main normative framework for thinking about gender, peace, and security, then we can’t define gender in strictly binary terms—in that sense, “women” is a misnomer. But once we expand WPS to really encapsulate gender, we see that anti-gender mobilizations start to encroach on areas traditionally considered within WPS.

For example, in the United States, the secretary of war recently specifically targeted WPS. To me this was ironic because it was during the previous Trump administration that Congress passed the 2017 WPS Act by unanimous consent. Now, the secretary of war is suggesting that WPS undermines the military’s efficiency, even though folks within that same organization say it’s been useful. We’ve reached a time when anti-gender mobilizations are no longer confined to domestic politics. What does that mean for the US military’s obligation to protect women from sexual and gender-based violence in conflict? Or for the championing of women’s participation in peace processes, or the emphasis on women’s lived experience in humanitarian contexts? There are real consequences, and I don’t think we’ve paid enough attention to the implications for WPS—though that is starting to change.

Another challenge facing the WPS agenda is the trend toward militarization. Military expenditures are rising faster than at any time since the Cold War. You’ve argued that this militarization risks hollowing out the WPS agenda. How do you see that playing out?

Even among folks who broadly support WPS, there has been a tendency to try to make it relevant to those invested in the ideology of militarism. Militarism is an ideology that is tightly coupled with capitalism. Even if there’s no war on the horizon, we’re still told to prop up arms manufacturers because it is supposedly good for the economy. Once this system of militarism gets going, it’s really difficult for folks on the outside to say that WPS is what we should be focusing on. These companies pay billions in taxes, so why are you talking about WPS? Nobody wants to hear about that.

Feminists around the world are building transnational solidarity networks to push back against these negative trends. What are some of the ways you’re seeing feminists mobilize?

In Kenya, over the last 12 months, we’ve seen intense feminist campaigns against femicide and against the finance bill, which would have harmed everyone, but especially the historically marginalized.

In Nigeria, a few years ago, there were spontaneous protests against police brutality through the #EndSARS movement. Some of the most visible challengers to state power in this movement were feminists—a new generation of feminists who were not just women’s rights activists but feminists interrogating hierarchies of power in the state.

There are also the Sudanese women who pushed Omar al-Bashir out of power in 2019 and who had a vision for their country—though the reversal since 2023 showed how quickly patriarchal norms and militarism can reestablish themselves.

We’ve seen similar feminist-led protests against sexual and gender-based violence in South Africa and Senegal. As I analyzed in a recent article, across many countries, feminist mobilizations address local injustices while linking them to broader, transnational struggles around issues like sexual violence and state abuse of power. These movements are not just “protests” or “human rights efforts”; they are very political in nature.

You’ve mentioned all these examples of grassroots feminist mobilizations in Africa, most of which probably wouldn’t situate themselves within the WPS agenda. The WPS agenda is still sometimes seen as a Western construct, and you’ve written about how it can reproduce global hierarchies of power and knowledge. How does the WPS agenda need to be reshaped to include women from Africa and other parts of the world who are often on the front lines of feminist mobilizations?

Jamie Hagen and I have argued that we can’t assume that just because feminists were behind the WPS agenda it’s immune to racial hierarchies. The WPS agenda reproduces those hierarchies, particularly in how Global North countries “do” WPS in the Global South and in how knowledge about WPS is produced.

The 25th anniversary is an opportunity to reflect not just on what Global North countries put in their national action plan but also on how we study subaltern places. These should not only be case studies; they should be recognized as sites of knowledge. A lot of feminist activists in the Global South have long been theorizing about and discussing these issues, but their writing usually exists outside “the literature.”

These hierarchies are also perpetuated by funding structures. Countries like the US, UK, and Netherlands can decide to cut off funding at any time, deciding that gender equality is not a priority anymore.

It would be fantastic if critiques of the WPS agenda were taken seriously—not just cited by academics but used by decision makers. There was a moment when I was hopeful this would happen. After the first generation of feminist foreign policies—Sweden’s in 2014 and Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy in 2017—subsequent countries developing feminist foreign policies engaged more with civil society. Those conversations allowed for a second generation of feminist foreign policies with more liberatory understandings of feminism, including of WPS. Germany’s Africa strategy even addressed race, colonialism, and reparations; on paper, it’s beautiful—until Germany made it clear that this didn’t apply to Palestinians.

So there was this moment of optimism where a global normative framework had countries taking liberatory feminism seriously, thereby correcting global power hierarchies. But that optimism hasn’t been sustained, given increased militarization and the focus on geopolitics.

When you were interviewed for the Global Observatory five years ago for the 20th anniversary of Resolution 1325, you said Secretary-General António Guterres was more visibly committed to WPS than any of his predecessors. Five years on, how would you assess UN leadership on WPS, and are there any lessons for the next secretary-general?

I still stand by what I said five years ago—Guterres remains the most visibly supportive secretary-general we’ve had. In fact, he’s since gone further in embracing ideas like feminist foreign policy, and about a year after that interview, he was at the forefront at the Generation Equality Forum. It felt like feminism had finally arrived in global institutional spaces.

But what has happened since then is constant firefighting—when you put out a fire on one side of the house, there’s an explosion on the other. The last five years have reinforced the intergovernmental nature of the UN. It doesn’t matter that Guterres believes in gender equality because the UN is still dependent on funding from member states, and more member states are cutting funding and mobilizing against gender. Listening to the interventions at the Security Council open debate on WPS last week, I found myself thinking, “What is the difference between the US and Russia at this point?”

Maybe we shouldn’t put all our eggs in the UN basket. WPS exists beyond the traditional framing of peace and security, including in areas like policing that the UN rarely takes up—and certainly not in the context of WPS. The aspirations of the WPS agenda did not come from the Security Council—feminists just used the council to give their aspirations visibility and get states to commit and do something.

Going forward, we should reimagine WPS beyond something that’s encoded within the UN. The UN is just one of many sites for WPS. In a few weeks, “WPS Week” will take place in New York. Most people who should probably be there won’t have access, in some cases because they’re denied visas. Others, myself included, are choosing not to be there because of encroaching fascism in the US. We’re still talking about WPS, but in other places: online, in Geneva, Nairobi, Amman. We’re doing WPS our own way.

Are there any thinkers or leaders or organizations you’re looking to for guidance on the future of the WPS agenda?

I think the work of “fellow travelers”—particularly in Africa—has implications for WPS, even if they might not say they’re working on WPS specifically. A lot of folks leading campaigns for LGBTQ rights are at the forefront of what I think should be important going forward.

I have colleagues at Researchers Without Borders in Uganda who work specifically on WPS—building knowledge, convening, engaging different folks. Then there are long-standing organizations like the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Ghana, which has always taken WPS seriously through its training programs.

What I’m most interested in are the smaller outfits and collectives that are not leaning on WPS as a UN framework but are clearly doing feminist work grounded in gender, peace, security. There are too many to mention, but I think people should start paying attention to these groups and look beyond the labels.