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.
The contributors in this series of seven essays reflect on three central questions: (1) UNSCR 1325’s successes and failures since implementation, (2) ideal visions for where it should go, and (3) challenges and opportunities for feminists that have been critical and supportive of this key document today. In this introduction, I provide an overview of how the scholars in this series have touched upon these questions, describe important frameworks that emerge from the set of essays when read together, and identify several questions that remain in light of these perspectives.
Recognizing Successes
The contributions highlight numerous successes associated with UNSCR 1325. The Resolution has helped actors coordinate a range of offices and policies, including drafting national action plans (NAPs) to embed and further define the WPS agenda (Asante and Shepherd Reference Asante and Shepherd2025; Hudson Reference Hudson2025). Since its implementation, UNSCR 1325 has served as a critical document for bolstering the mobilization of women activists, creating spaces for feminists to meet, consolidate around a specific agenda, and generate actions to advance women’s participation in peace and security efforts, as well as the protection of women and girls from violence (Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025; Basu Reference Basu2025; Hagen Reference Hagen2025). UNSCR 1325 has generated increased attention to protection of women and girls in armed conflict (Schulz and Lewis Reference Schulz and Lewis2025). It has helped to garner governmental support for WPS objectives — both genuine and self-interested in nature — even while facing substantial backlash (de Jonge Oudraat and Brown Reference De Jonge Oudraat and Brown2025; Basu Reference Basu2025). Indeed, activists use UNSCR 1325 to respond to challenges posed by an increasingly authoritarian world (Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025). Ultimately, UNSCR 1325 made possible what Hudson (Reference Hudson2025) refers to as the “halcyon days” of the WPS. It created space for the WPS agenda to grow even if that space is now increasingly contested.
Yet, success is also difficult to define and depends on the goals in mind. As Asante and Shepherd (Reference Asante and Shepherd2025) argue, state adoption of NAPs, the primary implementation mechanisms of UNSCR 1325, should not be understood as immediate signals of success for UNSCR 1325 or the WPS agenda. Rather, only a subset of NAPs achieves specific and often limited goals. While some NAPs fail, it is also clear that others succeed, serving to advance and broaden the WPS agenda.
Different scholars attend to different goals within the WPS agenda. For some scholars, the focus is on addressing the insecurity of women and girls in conflict. For others, the WPS agenda is simply a jumping-off point to foster broader feminist mobilization. For still others, the ultimate goal is to foster peace or to improve women’s well-being in the world.
With distinct goals in mind, scholars will always evaluate UNSCR 1325 from different points of reference — and it might be more successful in some areas than others. For example, Schulz and Lewis (Reference Schulz and Lewis2025) point to how far the WPS agenda has come in recognizing and working to address the harms that befall women and girls in conflict-affected contexts. Yet they also argue that this approach has been less successful in fostering peace. As Basu (Reference Basu2025) notes, it is important not to lose sight of the original feminist goal of the WPS agenda: bringing about a feminist peace.
This anniversary collection of articles comes at a moment in time when the WPS agenda confronts a political and economic landscape less hospitable to its ends and means than ever before. Authoritarianism and anti-gender movements are on the rise, and anti-gender movements are seemingly strengthened. This year, the United States, originally a strong purveyor of WPS, has begun to dismantle the agenda. The following contributions’ appraisals of UNSCR 1325 are therefore anchored to this moment in time when the WPS is seemingly in decline.
Crucially, scholars in this set of essays describe the sources of apparent decline not as internally generated by WPS or its implementation but as externally driven, stemming from factors related to geopolitics and patriarchy (Hudson Reference Hudson2025; de Jonge Oudraat and Brown Reference De Jonge Oudraat and Brown2025). Rather than indicating endemic weakness or missteps in UNSCR 1325, decline sets the stage for a narrative of resilience against obstacles posed by international systems.
Embracing Critiques
Many feminist scholars and policymakers have wanted more of UNSCR 1325 over the past 25 years and have therefore often been critical of, for example, its implementation (Asante and Shepherd Reference Asante and Shepherd2025), colonial orientations (Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025), lack of breadth (Schulz and Lewis Reference Schulz and Lewis2025), application of gender binaries (Hagen Reference Hagen2025), and diplomatic lip service to its goals (Hudson Reference Hudson2025; de Jonge Oudraat and Brown Reference De Jonge Oudraat and Brown2025). At this moment in time, it seems that these well-founded criticisms and disappointments might fade into the background as scholars lament the disquieting indicators that the “halcyon” days of the WPS agenda are past. Therefore, a challenge we confront today is how to rectify the need to be critical with the felt need to save what we have.
Even while recognizing that WPS has “never been more fragile nor more fraught” (Schulz and Lewis Reference Schulz and Lewis2025), contributors to this Critical Perspectives symposium continue to highlight important areas where UNSCR 1325, and the WPS agenda that it shapes and propagates, have either had negative repercussions or failures. Some of these weaknesses relate to exclusionary aspects — or gaps — in existing policy frameworks. Schulz and Lewis (Reference Schulz and Lewis2025), for instance, highlight how the lack of attention to masculinities in the WPS agenda renders achieving the ultimate goal of peace less attainable. An agenda that thinks about women but not men as gendered subjects fails to harness changing masculinities as an important component of achieving peace. Hagen (Reference Hagen2025) also critiques WPS for its lack of inclusiveness, describing how the exclusion of LGBTQ perspectives limits the transformative potential of WPS. Greater inclusion would harness the unique, experience-based knowledge of multiple, overlapping systems of oppression critical for achieving a feminist peace.
Other points of critique emanate from domestic aspects of implementing the WPS agenda. For example, Basu (Reference Basu2025) describes how the dominant WPS framework empowers some civil society actors over others, due to uneven access to training and support related to UNSCR 1325. This can create divisions and hierarchies across advocacy organizations. Haastrup (Reference Haastrup2025), whose contribution in this symposium focuses on women’s activism in Africa against modern anti-gender movements, highlights how the international nature of the WPS agenda can undermine its domestic legitimacy. Local actors can harness the international character of the WPS agenda to frame women’s rights as an external neocolonial imposition to be countered in the name of remaining grounded in cultural or religious (“truly African”) roots.
More generally, Basu (Reference Basu2025) describes UNSCR 1325 as a document plagued by misuse. Many of the state and local actors who deploy WPS initiatives are driven by goals that are not tied to protecting women and girls in armed conflict, improving women’s lives, or building a feminist peace. As a result, UNSCR 1325 has not lived up to its transformative potential. Largely, I agree with Basu’s (Reference Basu2025) framing. Powerful states support resolutions in the Security Council when they do not think it harms their interests, and it ideally serves them. It is therefore not surprising that states and local actors have “misused” the document for their own interests.
Use, Misuse, and Norms
As a scholar who studies norms, I also wonder if there is a positive way to think about the misuse of UNSCR 1325 and even to lament the retreat or disappearance of the misuse that scholars problematize. In research on international norms, Finnemore and Sikkink (Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998) provide a cascade model to describe how actors — institutions, states, or people — internalize norms after acting in accordance with them, often because of external incentives. In this cascade model, only later do actors internalize those norms and follow them unthinkingly and without incentives. This means that when incentives to drive action among non-supporters of a norm lose force, so does the ability of norm entrepreneurs to shape action of non-supporters, impeding wider internalization of norms.
With this norms framework in mind, the current moment might be one in which the document is less misused — but also less used. As anti-gender movements gain prominence and traditional security frameworks entrench themselves, one dynamic to fear losing is the performative dynamic driving many less-than-genuine supporters of the WPS agenda to consider women’s inclusion, their livelihoods, and their relevance to security and peace.
Yet an environment where norms no longer incentivize actors to disingenuously embrace WPS is not one in which WPS is lost. Hudson (Reference Hudson2025) makes the case in this series that it is the fact that women’s security is inextricably linked to international security, development, and peace that will sustain WPS. The essential nature of WPS to international politics, in other words, renders it undeniable, and the agenda will be even more critical in the future than today as leaders grapple with pressing security issues, lack of population growth, and general instability.
Charting Future Paths
This brings me to the question of how scholars approach the future of UNSCR 1325: where it should go in light of current challenges and opportunities. While not everyone in this symposium addresses each question directly in their essays, their overall tenor suggests that there is support for continuing UNSCR 1325 despite evident misuse and flaws. It is not so defective as to throw it out. Basu (Reference Basu2025) argues that it remains useful to feminist activists. Haastrup (Reference Haastrup2025) describes how the WPS agenda continues to foster activism against global anti-gender backlash movements. While 2025 does not look like 2000, scholars still see a net benefit to UNSCR 1325.
While it will (and should) continue to exist, it is also clear that UNSCR 1325 will not continue to have the same force it once did. De Jonge Oudraat and Brown (Reference De Jonge Oudraat and Brown2025) describe how women activists initiated UNSCR 1325 through the United Nations Security Council because of the geopolitical conditions that made it conducive to the agenda and its goals. Yet they also show that geopolitical conditions have changed such that WPS no longer finds support in this important UN body comprised of great powers. As a result, de Jonge Oudraat and Brown (Reference De Jonge Oudraat and Brown2025) argue that policymakers, advocates for WPS, and feminist activists should begin relying less on this document (and its funding streams) than before. They propose a UN General Assembly treaty to solidify a coalition of willing actors that can work to carry the WPS agenda forward. Such a treaty would rely and focus on actions by genuine supporters of the movement and would focus less on incentivizing behavior among less willing actors.
In line with this vision, perhaps the future of WPS is one of reckoning and re-creation. Activists may seize the opportunity to think more clearly about the goals of the agenda among genuine supporters. Perhaps this is a chance to define what constitutes a feminist peace (Basu Reference Basu2025). Perhaps this is a chance to improve inclusiveness and to address the role of masculinity in war (Schulz and Lewis Reference Schulz and Lewis2025). Perhaps this is the time to forge stronger, more diverse partnerships to advance peace (Hagen Reference Hagen2025). Perhaps this is a moment to move away from the often-siloed and sidelined work of WPS that grew out of UNSCR 1325 initiatives to integrate the issue in various offices (Hudson Reference Hudson2025). With a new beginning, one can start to envision a less compromising policy that must appease fewer opponents but can continue to expand the WPS agenda among supporters, even in the face of strengthened anti-gender movements.
In sum, the future of UNSCR 1325 might be one of presence but not power. But the scholars in this Critical Perspectives also remind us that UNSCR 1325 is not equivalent to the WPS agenda. Hudson (Reference Hudson2025) argues that UNSCR 1325 is but one snapshot in a long running battle that ultimately favors acknowledging WPS — whether through UNSCR 1325 or in other forms. This is because the battle to hear women’s voices and to ensure women’s security and well-being is one that states interested in security and development cannot continue to ignore.
Further Questions
In taking stock of the last 25 years with UNSCR 1325, this set of essays describes achievements and limitations of the Resolution itself, but, critically, not limitations of the agenda it promotes.Footnote
1 While WPS can be differently defined, the future that these scholars envision is one in which WPS faces challenges, but can and will thrive with or without this particular resolution.
At the same time, we must recognize how difficult it is to know the full power of what UNSCR 1325 has accomplished and/or impeded. It is important for scholars to clarify relevant goals and comparisons: What would feminist activism, peace, and security politics look like in a hypothetical world without UNSCR 1325? How does the impact of UNSCR 1325 compare with the impact of Security Council resolutions on goals of different kinds?
Whether writing in commendation or in critique of UNSCR 1325, it is clear that the Resolution holds an unparalleled space in feminist imaginations. It is a source of inspiration for feminist peace. In some ways this is perplexing, because the WPS agenda it prioritizes asks the world to care about women, gender, and inclusion because of their relationship with peace and security rather than caring about women, gender, and inclusion because these issues matter on their own terms. The latter is probably the most ideal form of a feminist peace. But WPS may be the only way to get there — precisely because it demonstrates the alignment of these important issues with the rationalist security incentives that have and will continue to motivate states.
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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.
The contributors in this series of seven essays reflect on three central questions: (1) UNSCR 1325’s successes and failures since implementation, (2) ideal visions for where it should go, and (3) challenges and opportunities for feminists that have been critical and supportive of this key document today. In this introduction, I provide an overview of how the scholars in this series have touched upon these questions, describe important frameworks that emerge from the set of essays when read together, and identify several questions that remain in light of these perspectives.
Recognizing Successes
The contributions highlight numerous successes associated with UNSCR 1325. The Resolution has helped actors coordinate a range of offices and policies, including drafting national action plans (NAPs) to embed and further define the WPS agenda (Asante and Shepherd Reference Asante and Shepherd2025; Hudson Reference Hudson2025). Since its implementation, UNSCR 1325 has served as a critical document for bolstering the mobilization of women activists, creating spaces for feminists to meet, consolidate around a specific agenda, and generate actions to advance women’s participation in peace and security efforts, as well as the protection of women and girls from violence (Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025; Basu Reference Basu2025; Hagen Reference Hagen2025). UNSCR 1325 has generated increased attention to protection of women and girls in armed conflict (Schulz and Lewis Reference Schulz and Lewis2025). It has helped to garner governmental support for WPS objectives — both genuine and self-interested in nature — even while facing substantial backlash (de Jonge Oudraat and Brown Reference De Jonge Oudraat and Brown2025; Basu Reference Basu2025). Indeed, activists use UNSCR 1325 to respond to challenges posed by an increasingly authoritarian world (Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025). Ultimately, UNSCR 1325 made possible what Hudson (Reference Hudson2025) refers to as the “halcyon days” of the WPS. It created space for the WPS agenda to grow even if that space is now increasingly contested.
Yet, success is also difficult to define and depends on the goals in mind. As Asante and Shepherd (Reference Asante and Shepherd2025) argue, state adoption of NAPs, the primary implementation mechanisms of UNSCR 1325, should not be understood as immediate signals of success for UNSCR 1325 or the WPS agenda. Rather, only a subset of NAPs achieves specific and often limited goals. While some NAPs fail, it is also clear that others succeed, serving to advance and broaden the WPS agenda.
Different scholars attend to different goals within the WPS agenda. For some scholars, the focus is on addressing the insecurity of women and girls in conflict. For others, the WPS agenda is simply a jumping-off point to foster broader feminist mobilization. For still others, the ultimate goal is to foster peace or to improve women’s well-being in the world.
With distinct goals in mind, scholars will always evaluate UNSCR 1325 from different points of reference — and it might be more successful in some areas than others. For example, Schulz and Lewis (Reference Schulz and Lewis2025) point to how far the WPS agenda has come in recognizing and working to address the harms that befall women and girls in conflict-affected contexts. Yet they also argue that this approach has been less successful in fostering peace. As Basu (Reference Basu2025) notes, it is important not to lose sight of the original feminist goal of the WPS agenda: bringing about a feminist peace.
This anniversary collection of articles comes at a moment in time when the WPS agenda confronts a political and economic landscape less hospitable to its ends and means than ever before. Authoritarianism and anti-gender movements are on the rise, and anti-gender movements are seemingly strengthened. This year, the United States, originally a strong purveyor of WPS, has begun to dismantle the agenda. The following contributions’ appraisals of UNSCR 1325 are therefore anchored to this moment in time when the WPS is seemingly in decline.
Crucially, scholars in this set of essays describe the sources of apparent decline not as internally generated by WPS or its implementation but as externally driven, stemming from factors related to geopolitics and patriarchy (Hudson Reference Hudson2025; de Jonge Oudraat and Brown Reference De Jonge Oudraat and Brown2025). Rather than indicating endemic weakness or missteps in UNSCR 1325, decline sets the stage for a narrative of resilience against obstacles posed by international systems.
Embracing Critiques
Many feminist scholars and policymakers have wanted more of UNSCR 1325 over the past 25 years and have therefore often been critical of, for example, its implementation (Asante and Shepherd Reference Asante and Shepherd2025), colonial orientations (Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025), lack of breadth (Schulz and Lewis Reference Schulz and Lewis2025), application of gender binaries (Hagen Reference Hagen2025), and diplomatic lip service to its goals (Hudson Reference Hudson2025; de Jonge Oudraat and Brown Reference De Jonge Oudraat and Brown2025). At this moment in time, it seems that these well-founded criticisms and disappointments might fade into the background as scholars lament the disquieting indicators that the “halcyon” days of the WPS agenda are past. Therefore, a challenge we confront today is how to rectify the need to be critical with the felt need to save what we have.
Even while recognizing that WPS has “never been more fragile nor more fraught” (Schulz and Lewis Reference Schulz and Lewis2025), contributors to this Critical Perspectives symposium continue to highlight important areas where UNSCR 1325, and the WPS agenda that it shapes and propagates, have either had negative repercussions or failures. Some of these weaknesses relate to exclusionary aspects — or gaps — in existing policy frameworks. Schulz and Lewis (Reference Schulz and Lewis2025), for instance, highlight how the lack of attention to masculinities in the WPS agenda renders achieving the ultimate goal of peace less attainable. An agenda that thinks about women but not men as gendered subjects fails to harness changing masculinities as an important component of achieving peace. Hagen (Reference Hagen2025) also critiques WPS for its lack of inclusiveness, describing how the exclusion of LGBTQ perspectives limits the transformative potential of WPS. Greater inclusion would harness the unique, experience-based knowledge of multiple, overlapping systems of oppression critical for achieving a feminist peace.
Other points of critique emanate from domestic aspects of implementing the WPS agenda. For example, Basu (Reference Basu2025) describes how the dominant WPS framework empowers some civil society actors over others, due to uneven access to training and support related to UNSCR 1325. This can create divisions and hierarchies across advocacy organizations. Haastrup (Reference Haastrup2025), whose contribution in this symposium focuses on women’s activism in Africa against modern anti-gender movements, highlights how the international nature of the WPS agenda can undermine its domestic legitimacy. Local actors can harness the international character of the WPS agenda to frame women’s rights as an external neocolonial imposition to be countered in the name of remaining grounded in cultural or religious (“truly African”) roots.
More generally, Basu (Reference Basu2025) describes UNSCR 1325 as a document plagued by misuse. Many of the state and local actors who deploy WPS initiatives are driven by goals that are not tied to protecting women and girls in armed conflict, improving women’s lives, or building a feminist peace. As a result, UNSCR 1325 has not lived up to its transformative potential. Largely, I agree with Basu’s (Reference Basu2025) framing. Powerful states support resolutions in the Security Council when they do not think it harms their interests, and it ideally serves them. It is therefore not surprising that states and local actors have “misused” the document for their own interests.
Use, Misuse, and Norms
As a scholar who studies norms, I also wonder if there is a positive way to think about the misuse of UNSCR 1325 and even to lament the retreat or disappearance of the misuse that scholars problematize. In research on international norms, Finnemore and Sikkink (Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998) provide a cascade model to describe how actors — institutions, states, or people — internalize norms after acting in accordance with them, often because of external incentives. In this cascade model, only later do actors internalize those norms and follow them unthinkingly and without incentives. This means that when incentives to drive action among non-supporters of a norm lose force, so does the ability of norm entrepreneurs to shape action of non-supporters, impeding wider internalization of norms.
With this norms framework in mind, the current moment might be one in which the document is less misused — but also less used. As anti-gender movements gain prominence and traditional security frameworks entrench themselves, one dynamic to fear losing is the performative dynamic driving many less-than-genuine supporters of the WPS agenda to consider women’s inclusion, their livelihoods, and their relevance to security and peace.
Yet an environment where norms no longer incentivize actors to disingenuously embrace WPS is not one in which WPS is lost. Hudson (Reference Hudson2025) makes the case in this series that it is the fact that women’s security is inextricably linked to international security, development, and peace that will sustain WPS. The essential nature of WPS to international politics, in other words, renders it undeniable, and the agenda will be even more critical in the future than today as leaders grapple with pressing security issues, lack of population growth, and general instability.
Charting Future Paths
This brings me to the question of how scholars approach the future of UNSCR 1325: where it should go in light of current challenges and opportunities. While not everyone in this symposium addresses each question directly in their essays, their overall tenor suggests that there is support for continuing UNSCR 1325 despite evident misuse and flaws. It is not so defective as to throw it out. Basu (Reference Basu2025) argues that it remains useful to feminist activists. Haastrup (Reference Haastrup2025) describes how the WPS agenda continues to foster activism against global anti-gender backlash movements. While 2025 does not look like 2000, scholars still see a net benefit to UNSCR 1325.
While it will (and should) continue to exist, it is also clear that UNSCR 1325 will not continue to have the same force it once did. De Jonge Oudraat and Brown (Reference De Jonge Oudraat and Brown2025) describe how women activists initiated UNSCR 1325 through the United Nations Security Council because of the geopolitical conditions that made it conducive to the agenda and its goals. Yet they also show that geopolitical conditions have changed such that WPS no longer finds support in this important UN body comprised of great powers. As a result, de Jonge Oudraat and Brown (Reference De Jonge Oudraat and Brown2025) argue that policymakers, advocates for WPS, and feminist activists should begin relying less on this document (and its funding streams) than before. They propose a UN General Assembly treaty to solidify a coalition of willing actors that can work to carry the WPS agenda forward. Such a treaty would rely and focus on actions by genuine supporters of the movement and would focus less on incentivizing behavior among less willing actors.
In line with this vision, perhaps the future of WPS is one of reckoning and re-creation. Activists may seize the opportunity to think more clearly about the goals of the agenda among genuine supporters. Perhaps this is a chance to define what constitutes a feminist peace (Basu Reference Basu2025). Perhaps this is a chance to improve inclusiveness and to address the role of masculinity in war (Schulz and Lewis Reference Schulz and Lewis2025). Perhaps this is the time to forge stronger, more diverse partnerships to advance peace (Hagen Reference Hagen2025). Perhaps this is a moment to move away from the often-siloed and sidelined work of WPS that grew out of UNSCR 1325 initiatives to integrate the issue in various offices (Hudson Reference Hudson2025). With a new beginning, one can start to envision a less compromising policy that must appease fewer opponents but can continue to expand the WPS agenda among supporters, even in the face of strengthened anti-gender movements.
In sum, the future of UNSCR 1325 might be one of presence but not power. But the scholars in this Critical Perspectives also remind us that UNSCR 1325 is not equivalent to the WPS agenda. Hudson (Reference Hudson2025) argues that UNSCR 1325 is but one snapshot in a long running battle that ultimately favors acknowledging WPS — whether through UNSCR 1325 or in other forms. This is because the battle to hear women’s voices and to ensure women’s security and well-being is one that states interested in security and development cannot continue to ignore.
Further Questions
In taking stock of the last 25 years with UNSCR 1325, this set of essays describes achievements and limitations of the Resolution itself, but, critically, not limitations of the agenda it promotes.Footnote 1 While WPS can be differently defined, the future that these scholars envision is one in which WPS faces challenges, but can and will thrive with or without this particular resolution.
At the same time, we must recognize how difficult it is to know the full power of what UNSCR 1325 has accomplished and/or impeded. It is important for scholars to clarify relevant goals and comparisons: What would feminist activism, peace, and security politics look like in a hypothetical world without UNSCR 1325? How does the impact of UNSCR 1325 compare with the impact of Security Council resolutions on goals of different kinds?
Whether writing in commendation or in critique of UNSCR 1325, it is clear that the Resolution holds an unparalleled space in feminist imaginations. It is a source of inspiration for feminist peace. In some ways this is perplexing, because the WPS agenda it prioritizes asks the world to care about women, gender, and inclusion because of their relationship with peace and security rather than caring about women, gender, and inclusion because these issues matter on their own terms. The latter is probably the most ideal form of a feminist peace. But WPS may be the only way to get there — precisely because it demonstrates the alignment of these important issues with the rationalist security incentives that have and will continue to motivate states.