Women’s political representation is a key indicator of peace and stability in postconflict states, but we do not yet fully understand the factors that lead to sustained increases in women’s representation after conflict. This article proposes and tests a new variable affecting changes in women’s legislative representation in postconflict states: types of women’s participation in the peace process. Using multivariate regressions, this study finds that local women’s participation in high-influence roles and in both Track I and II processes significantly increases women’s representation after conflict, while international women in peace processes do not. Women’s movements only increase women’s representation after conflict in combination with local women in peace processes. These findings illustrate one important outcome of local women’s inclusion in peace processes and highlight the importance of inclusive peace processes for postconflict democratic outcomes.

How do women ex-combatants navigate rebel-to-party transformations? While many rebel groups transition into political parties after conflicts, the gendered dynamics of these processes remain underexplored. This article theorizes how militarized social reproductive (MSR) labor—care, emotional, and community work embedded in the armed struggle—can shape women’s postwar political trajectories. MSR can constrain agency through socialization that can reinforce gender norms that marginalize women from politics, yet MSR can also enable collective post-war mobilization through organizational memory. We identify two factors that condition these effects: (1) whether women’s units performed gender normative or transgressive activities and (2) the degree of unit cohesion. Drawing on interviews with members of the Bangsamoro Islamic Women Auxiliary Brigade (BIWAB)—the all-female unit of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines—we show how gender-normative roles led to exclusion, but internal cohesion enabled BIWAB members to repurpose their shared labor into informal political advocacy.

How do the gendered patterns of foreign aid operate in the rare occurrence when refugee men are the focus of aid programs? This article uses critical narrative analysis to understand refugee men’s navigation of gendered hierarchies in the aid program Darfur United, a refugee men’s soccer team formed in eastern Chad’s refugee camps. Through juxtaposing the objectives and aims of Darfur United as a program for men with those of aid programs for refugee women and children, I argue that men must demonstrate innocuous and essentialized practices of masculinity to receive care, while ultimately serving as conduits for increased humanitarian support for refugee women and children. This analysis extends existing literature on the absence of humanitarian programs for refugee men and disrupts dominant understandings of gender and refugee men. By centering men’s own understandings of aid’s gendered patterns, it expands contemporary discussions on gender, displacement, and humanitarianism.

Do improved family policies meet women diplomats’ concerns about balancing work and family? Using a feminist institutionalist approach, the article analyzes the interaction of formal and informal institutional rules, the role of informality, and interactions between actors and rules to address whether and how family policies improve women diplomats’ experiences balancing work and family. Narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews with Japanese women diplomats — most at the top ranks of diplomacy — surfaces the informal institutional rules at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). The article finds that informal institutional rules along with the lack of transparency in promotion limit the effectiveness of family policies.

While scholarship on feminist foreign policy continues to proliferate, the impact of anti-feminist objectives on foreign policy requires attention. In this article, I critically examine the intersection of abortion politics and U.S. foreign policy, arguing that American foreign policy has long been shaped by an anti-feminist practice. The U.S. has systematically restricted access to abortion abroad for over 50 years through legislation and executive actions. Applying quantitative and qualitative research methods, I trace the history of abortion-related foreign policy from 1973 to 2022, analyze all congressional foreign policy bills referencing abortion, and draw on interviews with legislative staff and issue advocates from the 115th Congress (2017-18) to highlight how anti-abortion advocacy shapes U.S. foreign policy decisions. These findings suggest that while feminist mobilization has constrained anti-abortion efforts domestically in the US, foreign policy remained a key battleground where anti-feminist actors have historically been more successful. This case underscores the importance of analyzing domestic policy dynamics to understand the broader implications of feminist and anti-feminist agendas in international relations.

A growing number of states are adopting a feminist foreign policy (FFP). While this change has excited much scholarly attention, the process by which countries decide to adopt FFP remains unclear: How can we explain their journey toward the formal adoption of FFP? What factors create an environment in which these states were willing (and able) to declare their foreign policy feminist? We bring together literature on FFP and foreign policy change to identify the factors that lead to the uptake of FFP. The roles of a favorable domestic context, policy entrepreneurs, a new governing coalition, and the international context for feminism are highlighted as having clear impact on the decision to adopt FFP. The paper focuses on two different cases: Sweden, which pioneered the idea of FFP until a rollback on its position following domestic elections in 2022, and Chile, which only adopted FFP in 2022.

Germany’s 2023 Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) Guidelines commit to a transformative, intersectional agenda across diplomacy, security, and climate policy, but omit migration. This article examines how and why migration was excluded, despite its centrality to foreign policy and the involvement of civil society in the drafting process. Drawing on practice theory, Black feminist and postcolonial scholarship, we analyze state–civil society consultations as a community of practice shaped by epistemic hierarchies based on race and coloniality. We show how the Foreign Office’s reliance on established, Germany-based policy actors with limited expertise in gendered mobility sidelined migration as a feminist concern. The consultation format constrained participation and reinforced boundaries around what counted as legitimate feminist knowledge. Bridging literature on migration and FFP, the article advances understandings of how institutional and epistemic power shape feminist policy-making. It calls for a more inclusive FFP attentive to the gendered and racialized dynamics of mobility.

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).

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.

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.

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).

The United Nations Security Council’s passage of Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) in October 2000 marked a groundbreaking moment in time for women, policymakers, peacebuilders, and feminists across the globe. With this resolution, states tasked with maintaining international security signaled their agreement that the involvement of women in political leadership, politics, and peacebuilding was crucial for the maintenance of international peace and stability. They urged the incorporation of women’s perspectives into all policies and post-conflict frameworks. UNSCR 1325 has served as the centerpiece of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda for more than two decades, and scholars and policymakers have been both critical and supportive of this key document. As UNSCR 1325 reaches its 25th anniversary in October 2025, I asked leading scholars in the field to reflect on the current state of UNSCR 1325 — in particular, where it has brought us and where they expect it is or should be going.

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.

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.

Which stories of conflict we hear, and who gets to narrate future visions for peace matters. Nearly a decade ago, I published an article in International Affairs (Hagen 2016) highlighting the need to challenge cisgender and heteronormative assumptions embedded within the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Since then, I have had the opportunity to speak widely about what motivated me to write on the topic: a lack of attention to lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women in what at that time was 15 years of work on WPS. As a queer feminist lesbian I am emotionally and intellectually invested in transnational women’s rights organizing. I was perplexed by the near absence of sexuality as an intersectional dimension of gender justice, despite the prominent role lesbians have always played in the movement globally. This weakness within the women’s peace movement’s coalitional organizing is now under significant strain amid growing anti-trans attacks with governments turning to securitizing responses to moral panic over trans rights (Leigh 2025, Currah 2022). Still, queer and trans organizers like Amani in Tunisia persist in working for their own visions of a peaceful future, taking advantage of opportunities for allyship where possible.