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).

What does it mean to be a brave woman? In 2020, we saw Belarusian women take to the streets dressed in white to oppose the violent dictatorship that had been in power for twenty-six years. In 2021, our television screens showed the Fall of Kabul, and the takeover by Taliban fighters, who overnight began to reverse decades of women’s empowerment. In response, and despite the risks, women demonstrators took to the streets in Kabul to demand their rights to work, education, and political participation. And in late 2022, we saw Iranian women fight for freedom, cutting their hair and burning their headscarves as they called for women’s rights in the context of brutal repression. These are but a handful of the myriad examples of women transgressing what is societally expected of them. They go out into the streets, they post on social media, they protest governments and make demands for change. Around the world, we see women being brave. They do so at great personal risk, and often when the potential benefits of being brave are infinitesimally small.

Scholars of gender have long realized that questions regarding gender, women, and politics require a multi-method, nuanced approach. When a plurality of white women voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, social scientists increasingly began to recognize the urgency of undertaking new approaches to understanding gender, race, and voting behavior in the United States.1 Since then, researchers have helped us understand why so many white women support right-wing candidates and policies that aim to suppress their autonomy, offering explanations such as the influence of belief in traditional gender roles (Christley 2022), “possessive investments in white heteropatriarchy” (Strolovitch, Wong, and Proctor 2017, 354), and “gendered nationalism” in American politics (Deckman and Cassese 2021, 278). In more recent years — as election results and polling suggest growing numbers of men of color have shifted rightward — there has been increased interest in employing an intersectional approach to analyze the gulf between men and women of color.

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.

Nancy Pelosi makes history. She was the first woman elected to a high-ranking position in the US House of Representatives when she became the Democratic Whip in 2001. She made more history as the first female Democratic Leader in 2003, and first woman elected as Speaker of the House in 2007. She made history by remaining the Democratic Leader even after losing the House majority. Pelosi made history yet again when she was again elected Speaker in 2019, joining Sam Rayburn as the only House leader to lose and then regain the Speakership.

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.

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.

Over the first quarter of the 21st century, the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda became established as the most important policy framework linking gender issues to peace and security problems. WPS work has proceeded along two tracks: a nongovernmental track comprised of women’s rights activists and gender scholars; and a policy track directed by national governments and intergovernmental organizations (Brown and de Jonge Oudraat 2025). Both tracks have been instrumental in advancing the WPS agenda, including the adoption by the UN Security Council of ten WPS resolutions—starting with Resolution 1325 in October 2000. The 25th anniversary of UNSCR 1325 is an appropriate occasion to assess WPS accomplishments to date and define WPS priorities for the years ahead.

UNSCR 1325, which in 2000 formally announced the international Women and Peace and Security (WPS) agenda for action, enjoins a battle that can never end, one in which women will always find themselves on the back foot—but one which remains worth fighting. It is the battle to make the ear of man listen to what women know about security and about peace that men might not. It is also the battle to understand that there will be no peace within and between nations until and unless there is peace between men and women. In this essay, penned in May 2025, I reflect on the current situation of the WPS agenda, with an emphasis on the United States, and what the future of that agenda may be.