In an early conversation on the relevance of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, the resolution is described by Carol Cohn as presenting “an important tool to all of us who seek the empowerment of women and sustainable peace, and who believe that the two are interconnected,” and by Sheri Gibbings as a “tool to justify military occupation on behalf of ‘liberating’ women” (Cohn, Kinsella, and Gibbings 2004, 138–9). Both prospects have been borne out in the 25 years of the implementation of, and rhetoric relating to, UNSCR 1325 and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda that emerged from the landmark resolution. There is substantive documentation of, and scholarship on, the implementation of the agenda (see, for example, Coomaraswamy 2015; Davies and True 2019). It is evident from this literature that the realization of feminist peace, which propelled civil society advocacy for the passage of UNSCR 1325, has not been the only driving factor behind this implementation. In practice, the WPS resolutions have been employed by a range of actors for varying purposes.

United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 was adopted in October 2000, marking a historic commitment to advancing women’s participation in peace and security governance, preventing gender-based violence, protecting women’s rights and safety, and ensuring their needs are addressed in post-conflict relief and recovery efforts (Cohn, Kinsella, and Gibbings 2004). Four years after adoption of Resolution 1325, the President of the UN Security Council made a statement applauding “the efforts of Member States in implementing Resolution 1325 (2000) at the national level, including the development of national action plans” and encouraging states “to continue to pursue such implementation” (United Nations Security Council 2004, 3). National action plans (NAPs) are domestic policy documents that articulate their commitments to the implementation of the women, peace, and security (WPS) agenda,1 providing insight into the WPS interests and priorities of states.

As we mark 25 years since the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), the place of this landmark agenda on the global political stage has never been more fragile, nor more fraught. In the same breath, the importance of paying careful and critical attention to men, masculinities, and their positioning in and relationship to the WPS agenda — and peace and security writ large — has never been more apparent, nor more urgent. By calling attention to women’s diverse roles in and experiences of armed conflict within the world’s paramount security body, the unanimous adoption of UNSCR 1325 by the Security Council was groundbreaking.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many Latin American countries transitioned from dictatorships to democracies, paving the way for the structural redesign of their foreign policies. In response to sustained feminist mobilization in civil society, by the 2000s several of these countries had established gender divisions in their Ministries of Foreign Affairs. These divisions prioritized the incorporation of gender equality norms in their national and international legal obligations and established protocols to implement gender equality measures. As part of this process, there was also a push for increased participation of women in the foreign policy arena, especially in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Uruguay (Fuentes-Julio et al. 2022).

This paper examines the gendered foundations of citizenship status among first-generation immigrants in Western Europe. It posits that foreign-born women are more likely than foreign-born men to become citizens in their new homeland if they originate from countries with greater gender inequality. Moreover, this relationship is amplified among highly educated female immigrants. In contrast, no gender gap in citizenship status exists among newcomers from origin countries with low gender inequality. The empirical analyses based on the individual-level data from the European Social Survey (ESS) 2010–22 confirm these expectations. These findings have important implications for our understanding of immigrant political integration in western democracies and the consequences of gender inequality around the world.

For nearly a decade, the concept of feminist foreign policy1 (FFP) has garnered global attention, with numerous countries adopting or expressing the intent to adopt such policies. However, the roles of Africans within these discourses, as both target and agents of FFP, has been uncertain. The particular attention paid by FFP to the Global South makes the exclusion of African knowledges especially jarring.

Existing research often interprets the limited impact of candidate gender on vote choice as evidence of minimal gender bias in politics. However, this overlooks the dual role of candidate gender, as both a heuristic for substantive representation and a trigger for sexism in voter decision-making. These competing mechanisms can diminish the effects of each other, obscuring the true influence of gender bias in electoral behavior. Using conjoint experiments in South Korea, a context where gender issues are highly politicized and sexism remains widespread, we examine how candidate gender affects voter evaluations in low- and high-information environments. Our findings reveal that in low-information settings, candidate gender serves as a cue for substantive representation, leading to co-sex voting among women, while simultaneously activating hostile sexism among male voters, reducing support for female candidates. In high-information settings, explicit candidate policy positions diminish the reliance on gender cues but do not eliminate gender bias. Instead, sexism manifests through opposition to gender-equity policies rather than direct discrimination against female candidates. These results suggest that information environments shape the expression of gender bias, rather than eliminating it, offering a more nuanced understanding of the conditions under which candidate gender influences electoral preferences.

Many countries globally have adopted national policy commitments to address violence against women (VAW). Yet the implementation of these policies largely relies on subnational governments’ actions. Why do some but not all subnational governments adopt policies to implement VAW response services? Surprisingly, few studies have addressed this question. Drawing on norm diffusion and gender policy reform theories, we assess the factors driving the adoption of these local policies in Indonesia. Since Indonesia adopted its domestic violence law in 2004, only one-third of cities/regencies have adopted local regulations (peraturan daerah) on VAW response services. Using event history analysis, we analyzed data from 509 cities/regencies from 2004 to 2022. Our findings show that the presence of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) connected to national and transnational VAW advocacy networks, and women’s local legislative representation are significant factors. However, province-level morality regulations constrain the progressive effects of the VAW advocacy networks and women’s political presence.

Expert institutions are increasingly expected not only to provide the best professional expertise but also to ensure equal presence of women. Yet while descriptive gender representation in bureaucracies and courts is extensively researched, we largely lack studies of women’s presence on expert advisory bodies. Drawing on large-n data on the composition of Norwegian expert advisory commissions, the paper investigates and evaluates how the share of women on these commissions has developed over the last half-century. It finds that while overall gender parity was achieved in recent decades, women remain strongly under-represented among commission chairs, particularly academic chairs, and among academic members from the powerful economics discipline. Normatively speaking, the developments toward parity are promising, and we find no empirical indication that proportional representation and competence requirements are in tension. On the contrary, persistent gender gaps among economists on commissions and academic chairs may endanger adequate provision of expertise into policy-making.

Research on extremism has increasingly incorporated a gender perspective, revealing how the politics of extremism and gender fuel one another. Yet most evidence of the gendered politics of extremism is on far-right and Islamist non-state actors, neglecting other forms, including state-sanctioned extremism in which the state is complicit with the violent effects of extremism. This article investigates a type of state-sanctioned extremism, wherein nationalist movements, supported to varying degrees by governments, seek to “protect” Buddhism across Asia. Gendered motives, forms, and impacts of political extremism can be observed in Buddhist Protectionism movements, manifesting in societal conflict, hate speech and other acts of violence and intolerance against ethnic and religious minorities. We ask to what extent gender norms and structures affect the motives, forms, and impact of Buddhist extremism using an original dataset encompassing nationally representative surveys and qualitative research in selected communities in Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar. We find that extremist discourses and practices exist on a Buddhist Femonationalist Continuum across the three cases with misogyny and anti-Muslim threat narratives played up, both affirming the power of masculine hegemony and justifying the use of violence to control minority populations and women.

Past research alerts to the increasingly unpleasant climate surrounding public debate on social media. Female politicians, in particular, are reporting serious attacks targeted at them. Yet, research offers inconclusive insights regarding the gender gap in online incivility. This paper aims to address this gap by comparing politicians with varying levels of prominence and public status in different institutional contexts. Using a machine learning approach for analyzing over 23 million tweets addressed to politicians in Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we find little consistent evidence of a gender gap in the proportion of incivility. However, more prominent politicians are considerably and consistently more likely than others to receive uncivil attacks. While prominence influences US male and female politicians’ probability to receive uncivil tweets the same way, women in our European sample receive incivility regardless of their status. Most importantly, the incivility varies in quality and across contexts, with women, especially in more plurality contexts, receiving more identity-based attacks than other politicians.

Partisanship is the primary driver of voter decision-making in the United States. Partisans expect to prefer their party’s candidates’ issue stances and personal characteristics. Even when they learn negative information, motivated reasoning often keeps them from changing their candidate evaluations or vote choice. However, there is a “tipping point” at which partisans will update their priors and may vote against their preferred party’s candidate. This study seeks to determine whether voters are more likely to reach that tipping point when they see a woman in their party, and under what circumstances. We use a unique experimental design to vary a candidate’s gender, congruence with major elements of the party platform, and their participation in a scandal. We find that women are often evaluated more negatively and that subjects rely on substantive information more when evaluating women candidates. Our findings suggest that campaigns and campaign information may matter more for women candidates.

Recently, former colonial powers in the Global North have begun addressing their colonial pasts through their foreign policies. Some of these states pursue a feminist foreign policy (FFP). However, to date, only one FFP makes explicit mention of colonial legacies: that of Germany, adopted in 2021. How does German FFP discourse address this and what political work does this do? Contributing to critiques of coloniality in FFP, we analyze the discursive representation of Germany’s colonial past in foreign policy texts since 2021. Drawing on the socio-critical concepts theater of reconciliation by Max Czollek and remembrance superiority by Mohamed Amjahid, we find that the discourse powerfully establishes gendered notions of caring, responsible, and reflexive German statehood. This organizes how Germany’s engagement with its colonial past is told and which forms of engagement with former colonies are rendered intelligible. We argue that German FFP erases colonial structures that permeate German foreign policy and reproduces coloniality through discursive representations.

The adoption of a feminist foreign policy (FFP) by Mexico took Mexican feminist civil society by surprise. In September 2019, without prior consultations or dialogues with local feminist civil society, the Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary announced its FFP during the 74th session of the UN General Assembly. While the UN New York City headquarters roared with applause in response to the Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary’s claim that the “Mexican government is feminist,” many feminists in Mexico interpreted the statement as an effort to pinkwash the government’s poor track record on gender equality within its borders. Moreover, Mexico’s FFP was charged with racial and colonial undertones since its inception, colloquially known as the “first FFP from the Global South” (Thompson 2020; Thompson, Ahmed, and Khokhar 2021).

As more governments commit to feminist foreign policies (FFPs), this commitment trickles down to a central foreign policy area: peacebuilding. As a field, peacebuilding has historically been dominated by western states and western-dominated institutions performing interventions along the hegemonic liberal peacebuilding paradigm (Lederach 1997; Mac Ginty 2008). This has, in turn, provoked significant feminist criticisms and interventions (Duncanson 2016; Hewitt and True 2021; McLeod 2018). When Germany, the largest peacebuilding funder globally (Rotmann, Li, and Stoffel 2021; UN Peacebuilding 2024), announced their FFP in 2023, this development opened up the prospect for substantial feminist change, but also raised questions about what such change might look like in practice.