We concluded our recent book, Governing the Feminist Peace, with an exhortation to “forget WPS”—to abandon attempts to force coherence onto an agenda that had become so sprawling and intricate over its first two decades. Imagine our horror when US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth proudly announced on Elon Musk’s X earlier this year that he had “ENDED the ‘Women, Peace & Security’ (WPS) program inside the @DeptofDefense,” adding “GOOD RIDDANCE WPS!” to underscore his contempt. With the parallel dismantling of USAID, practically the entirety of US efforts on gender equality in war- and peacemaking had been obliterated. A few friends and colleagues sent wry messages reminding us to be careful what we wished for.

To be clear, ending is not the same as forgetting—at least not in the sense in which we intended. For many years, we had been frustrated by the shape of “WPS” in scholarly and practitioner discourse, where different factions have advanced competing narratives on the origins and purpose of the agenda, casting others as partial, coopted, or naïve. By contrast, for us, the agenda was better understood as multiple and relational—as having many pasts and futures unfolding in tandem—without a single unifying standard, or “norm,” as scholars of international politics say. We resisted the urge to impose an illusory coherence on the agenda, instead committing to sit with its constitutive plurality: a WPS ecosystem. It was the supposed unity of WPS that we entreated others to forget.

Forgetting, in this sense, is also an act of fidelity insofar as it allows us to embrace the more open possibilities for WPS that had in part animated earlier feminist coalitions. In this vision, what matters is less states’ adherence to a list of rules emerging from Security Council resolutions treated as canonical and more the usefulness of particular elements of WPS to equality and peace activists. Those activists might be drawing on a range of agendas and norms and may not see the value of formal WPS resolutions at all. Forgetting does not mean gender advisers should be fired en masse or that activists should cease lobbying governments. Rather, it means refusing to fetishize WPS as a definitive international standard.

Fundamental Tensions at the Core of WPS

When we sent our book to print—more than a year before Trump’s reelection—we anticipated that the WPS ecosystem would continue to face six fundamental tensions.

First, there is a question of what gender even entails. It is a common critique that the WPS agenda reproduces and stabilizes the gender binary. For many, especially recent generations of feminists, there is too much essentialism and simplification at work in such a framing. Where the unifying force of “women” as a collective subject of peace begins to fray, the agenda becomes necessarily multiple.

Second, the WPS agenda embodies a clash between vulnerability and agency—an abiding tension between “protection,” with its emphasis on marginality, violation, and suffering, and “participation,” with its focus on knowledge, rights, and leadership.

Third, the feminist peace project is caught between hegemony and multiplicity. The WPS agenda has often been viewed as a Western feminist endeavor—sometimes even an imperial one when invoked to justify wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya. By contrast, an alternative agenda begins from below—as many advocates for Resolution 1325 originally intended—with local women peacebuilders supported by feminist foreign policies and a multipolar order embracing distinct regional approaches to WPS.

Fourth, there is a contest between an ethos of inclusion and one of abolition. Should the WPS agenda focus on equal opportunity and inclusion within existing institutions or structural critiques of states and militaries?

Fifth, there are clashing hierarchies among different issues within the WPS agenda. Which of the four “pillars”—participation, protection, prevention, and post-conflict relief and recovery—should take precedence? Who should get what resources? And as the agenda has diversified, how will the original promise translate into new policy areas such as climate change, organized crime, arms control, labor rights, cybersecurity, and global health?

Finally, the WPS agenda wrestles with a foundational and perpetual tension over the time and space of “international peace and security”—all the ways in which violence and freedom escape neat boundaries of before and after, here and there.

These tensions lie at the core of the agenda. WPS is at once essentialist and anti-essentialist, irreverent and paternalistic, hegemonic and diverse, inclusive and abolitionist, narrow and plural, militarized and pacificist.

WPS in the Reactionary Crosshairs

On this 25th anniversary of the WPS agenda, the deepening of some long-standing political fault lines is imperiling the project as a whole. “Gender” has become a trigger term for organized movements on the political right, which are suturing together reactionary ideas of sex, family, and nation. These movements are targeting workplace policies, academic programs, and cultural movements that had once helped to mainstreamed egalitarian ideas.

For WPS, the effects of these populist anti-gender movements can be seen in the defunding of government offices dedicated to gender and de facto bans on progressive language, as exemplified by Trump’s Executive Order 14168. They can also be seen in increased threats to women’s rights activists, even as reactionary forces appropriate the language of “protecting women” for their own ends. The hypocrisy is stark: one in four countries reported a backlash against women’s rights last year. The return of macho geopolitics leaves little room for states to make concessions to women’s agency.

That will hardly stop women peacebuilders from acting, as they always have—but they will face stiffer headwinds. They will face more political pushback and receive less funding for their efforts. UN Women surveys suggest more than half the women-led organizations working in conflict and fragile conflicts will shut their doors before the end of 2025. Smears and budget cuts also threaten the core institutions supposed to combat sexual violence, the secretary-general’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, UN Women, and the International Criminal Court among them.

As military budgets rise, one might expect at least the potential for further investment in advancing women’s inclusion in security institutions. Yet what we are seeing is the opposite. Within NATO, for example, commitments to raise military spending have not been matched by commitments to fund the WPS agenda. Across the Global North—including among self-proclaimed WPS “champions”— the redistribution of funds from aid to rearmament comes at the expense of programs on conflict prevention, humanitarian response, and reparation and recovery. This will have huge consequences for women and girls.

Holding on to the Fragments

What does all this portend for the next 5, 10, or 15 years of WPS? Some may put their hopes in the next set of elections and the return of a liberal international order at least somewhat receptive to feminist voices. Yet the plausibility of such redemption depends on how one reads shifts in global political tectonics. Even without Trump, the underlying trends are not favorable: intensifying geopolitical competition accelerated by an artificial intelligence arms race; the collapse of the aid paradigm and human rights compacts; the willingness of nominally progressive parties across the Global North to abandon their base and retreat into nationalist parochialism; the resulting weakening of multilateral institutions; and deep cynicism over the Global North’s moralistic bromides in the ruins of Gaza.

Of course, crises can also create openings. At its peak, the WPS agenda drew criticism for its replication of hierarchies between the Global North and South, for a professionalization that divorced some of its advocates from local movements, and for its cozy relationship with governments deeply implicated in the arms economy, neoliberalism, and settler colonialism—however “liberal” their face. The 25th year of the agenda may, in time, be recognized as a crisis in the sense of a turning point: a moment where new champions emerged alongside those who had kept faith, when advocates of feminist peace reconnected with social movements.

Under these conditions, the unity of WPS will likely be shown to be even more illusory, as fragments of the agenda are taken forward by those who find a use—some political purchase, some amplifying power—in the principles and protocols developed over the last two and a half decades. In such a global environment, fragments may be all we can hope for—but we must hold on to the possibilities that each fragment offers, even as we forget the WPS that was.

This essay draws in part on the final chapter of our 2024 book, Governing the Feminist Peace.