The WPS Agenda Needs Strong Wills to Counter Rough Headwinds

Many people around the United Nations are bracing for annual commemorations of the women, peace and security agenda this month as reflections on gains made on women’s rights in conflict will be clouded by worries about progress lost.

Celebrating WPS month, as it’s known, is usually a moment to reflect on positive developments since the agenda was founded in the Security Council in 2000 and to think through ways to advance women’s political participation, protection from and prevention of gender-based violence and recovery efforts that meet the needs of women and girls in conflicts around the world.

But as global backlash against gender equality resounds ever-louder through the halls of the UN, clear political messaging in this crucial moment for ensuring gender equality is urgently needed to protect the rights of women and girls in conflict zones.

As always, the UN Security Council will hold a debate on WPS; this year, it is slated for Oct. 6, hosted by Russia as rotating Council president. In a departure from the usual circulation of guidance so that Council members know which questions they should consider in their remarks, Russia has circulated no such parameters. Council member statements are therefore likely to touch on a diverse range of WPS and non-WPS topics, as they use the opportunity to voice whatever level of support they wish for the agenda while also taking advantage of the lack of direction in an open meeting to hash out their positions on the top-priority crises of the day.

This undirected format means there is a risk that UN members are unlikely to cohere around clear political messages supporting gender equality just as they’re needed most.

It’s clear that gender equality commitments have been eroding in recent years, but few experts could have expected the sledgehammer that the United States is taking this year to principles that many people had taken for granted but fought to dismantle, not least the very idea that many societies have historically nurtured inequality, uplifting men in positions of power and relegating women to the political and social sidelines.

Now, commitments to gender equality aren’t just falling by the wayside — they are being bulldozed to the ground. Global aid reductions are cutting access to health care, education and other essential programming for women and girls. But the decrease in financial support is also being undermined by a US-led normative and moral attack on international frameworks like the WPS agenda. Since January, the US has emphasized only two gender identities — those of men and women — in UN documents and has tried to steer the Security Council away from supporting women in peacekeeping, among other attempts to wipe out WPS commitments.

Efforts by member states and the UN to mitigate the damage have been sporadic. There is certainly an understanding among longstanding WPS supporters that the drop in aid is causing more suffering for women and girls in conflict zones. And there have been instances of some Security Council members banding together to prevent damage to WPS-related functions in peace operations like that of South Sudan. But the US wields considerable influence over many other UN member states, and fear of tariffs, a need for security guarantees and other economic and political pressures mean there are few attempts to directly counter the US anti-gender equality narrative.

Meanwhile, the UN is trying to make its work more palatable to the US and is not in the financial position to risk further wrath from the Trump administration. While some governments were always reluctant to advance gender equality unless they were pressured externally, fear of US retaliation and a drop in exertion from outside governments and other entities who previously advocated for gender equality as part of their foreign policy and conflict resolution efforts now cause them to deprioritize the issue even more, unless it is linked to potential sources of funding.

Yet, calls for new funding options are not the only way to prevent momentum on WPS from slackening further. Political messaging is crucial if progress that has been made is to materialize in practice.

Take Colombia, where international pressure was crucial to including gender programming in the 2016 peace agreement, and key to the subsequent implementation of those measures. The country is also among 100 other nations that, according to UN Women, is training its police forces to support survivors of gender-based violence.

But a more nuanced understanding of how this provision is carried out reveals that many of these countries do little to ensure that training is more than a box-ticking exercise. Security personnel in Colombia told Crisis Group that clearer political messaging from government leadership to lower ranks would show that preventing gender-based violence is a genuine priority. National institutions like the police and the Ministry of Equalities, however, don’t have the bandwidth or the coordination channels to make a concerted effort to promote such messages, so the implication to the rank-and-file is that gender-related training is a tokenistic gesture. Pressure from international partners to Colombian security-sector leaders could help drive national authorities to ensure that training is practiced at all levels and that it matters.

Colombia also recently developed an oft-used policy tool to realize the WPS agenda nationally, called the National Action Plan. While deficient financial backing is frequently cited as to why these plans fall short of expectations, political will to bring them from paper to practice is similarly lacking. The tumult of President Gustavo Petro’s governance and the fact that gender equality is now associated negatively with his administration have delayed national adoption of the plan, which contains measures on protection of women social leaders, prevention of gender-based violence and livelihood support for women affected by conflict.

Government officials and civil society are concerned that without stronger political messaging from outside Colombia and from the national government to subnational authorities, local roll-out of the plan will be delayed or halted in zones where the leadership does not see gender equality as a priority or actively opposes it. National and subnational officials see the plan as part of Petro’s policy: something that many authorities are positioning themselves against as they hope the opposition will take back majority control in 2026. It is therefore unlikely that any national authority will urge subnational entities to incorporate WPS measures into their policies and budgets without a push from outside Colombia.

The lack of direct political messaging from ostensibly pro-gender-equality governments and the UN against the US and toward governments in conflict is at best a result of overwhelmed officials focusing their attention elsewhere and at worst a decision not to speak out on gender equality for fear of US retaliation. Instead, plans for October at the UN promise events and statements with general — and perhaps unrealistic — calls to advance the WPS agenda and optimistic requests for financing alternatives.

But somewhere between naïveté and optimism lies an acute need for political messages that counter the US narrative and help prevent the agenda from backsliding further. One format that could be helpful is the group of Security Council members (other than Washington) who have signed WPS commitments — including Denmark, France, Greece, Guyana, Panama, South Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia and the United Kingdom.

Although the US is a signatory and has prevented consensus-based press statements being made by the group since the beginning of the year, the pro-WPS signatories can still draw on their power in numbers to motivate others to be more vocal as well. Both among Council members and in the broader UN membership, this month’s many WPS platforms should be used wisely to counter the repudiators and remind member states of commitments where political will, not just funding, is the missing ingredient.