Introduction
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.
Redrawing “the boundaries of international law” (Charlesworth and Chinkin Reference Charlesworth and Chinkin2000), UNSCR 1325 and its nine subsequent WPS sister resolutions represent a monumental step toward redressing the masculinist biases, in the form of male actors and masculine virtues, that have long characterized international peace and security. The ensuing WPS agenda places center stage calls to “do” peace and security differently. It is fundamentally about preventing war, not merely mitigating the worst of its consequences for women and girls (although understanding and redressing gendered harms in wars and armed conflict is critical). The decades since have witnessed the infusion and diffusion of the WPS agenda across a range of institutional and political settings governing international peace and security, creating significant “footholds” for feminist policy and practice across a range of institutional settings (Otto Reference Otto2010).
Conceptually, much of WPS hinges on the concept of “gender” — a political, analytical, and increasingly technical term. While “gender” established a firm presence on international policy and programmatic agendas, it remains the site of significant contestation over the substantive and normative parameters of its meaning (Baden and Goetz Reference Baden and Goetz1997). In recent decades, the meaning of this word has been expanded, retracted, politicized, co-opted and corrupted, re-politicized, and now, in 2025 — “scrubbed.” At their core, these contestations largely center on who and what can — and should — fall within the purview of “gender” and a “gender perspective of armed conflict.” Within these debates, one area of discernible disagreement among scholars, policymakers, activists, and practitioners has long pertained to the place of feminisms’ principal “other”: men and masculinities.
This essay traces the evolving presence-absence of men and masculinities in the WPS agenda. It identifies challenges and opportunities for WPS to encompass a wider set of gendered experiences and identities in war, including more concrete attention to the structural dimensions of masculinities in relation to violence and war. It is vital to consider the often-uncomfortable tensions that arise when trying to determine the apposite place of men and masculinities in feminist places, spaces, and agendas. Yet men and masculinities and women and femininities are part of the same structural puzzle. As such, for the WPS agenda to succeed in facilitating feminist peace, it cannot do so without this key piece of the puzzle.
Sketching a Presence-Absence: Where Are Men and Masculinities in the WPS Agenda?
Without a doubt, and building on the success of decades of feminist organizing and advocacy, UNSCR 1325 and the ensuing WPS resolutions have contributed greatly to integrating women’s perspectives, roles, and lived realities in all aspects of global peace and security efforts (UNDP 2019) — marking important shifts in policy, praxis, and research. To this end, the WPS agenda, and its broader “policy ecosystem” (Kirby and Shepherd Reference Kirby and Shepherd2021), have made important inroads toward promoting women in peacebuilding, ensuring that women have a seat in formal peace processes, and addressing sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) as a global peace and security concern.
Despite these advances, however, the report card for the WPS policy track remains fairly mixed, and several constraints, limitations, and hesitations persist. Several scholars have raised critiques vis-à-vis the agenda, including from postcolonial (Parashar Reference Parashar, Davies and True2018) and queer-feminist (Hagen Reference Hagen2016) perspectives. One of the most persistent shortcomings of the agenda is its restricted engagement with gender, being characterized by an almost exclusive focus on women and girls. Given the pervasive historic and ongoing marginalization of women’s experiences in peace and security, such a focus is understandable, justified, and much needed. At the same time, the conflation of “gender” with “women and girls” frequently manifests in a reluctance to sufficiently engage with men and masculinities (Duriesmith Reference Duriesmith2020; Myrttinen Reference Myrttinen, Davies and True2018; Wright Reference Wright2020), or with persons of diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) (Hagen Reference Hagen2016).
Across the 10 resolutions that make up the WPS agenda — starting with UNSCR 1325 in 2000 through Resolution 2493 in 2019 — men and masculinities are rarely mentioned explicitly (Brown and de Jonge Outdraat Reference Brown, de Jonge Oudraat and Myrttinen2025, 197). Of course, men and male bodies “have always been present in the agenda” (Wright Reference Wright2020, 655) — in the form of diplomats and policymakers signing and adopting resolutions or as heads of states and army commanders targeted by the content of these resolutions. Yet, men’s experiences and roles are typically not considered as gendered (Myrttinen et al. Reference Myrttinen, Lewis, Touquet, Schulz, Yousaf and Laruni2025), and they are usually invisible, unmarked, and absent (Wright Reference Wright2020, 655).
To illustrate this evolving presence-absence more concretely, UNSCR 1325 does not mention “men and boys” or “masculinities” once. This omission may seem somewhat surprising, given that the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a crucial predecessor to UNSCR 1325, did mention the importance of educating men and boys to prevent sexual violence and training them in gender-egalitarian conflict resolution (UN 1995, paragraph 93; see Kirby and Shepherd Reference Kirby and Shepherd2016, 387) — an acknowledgement that is missing in UNSCR 1325. Subsequent resolutions — many of which cement an engagement with conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) as a primary concern of the agenda — similarly do not mention men and boys, despite the fact men are the primary perpetrators of sexual violence in conflict and countless men are also victimized. UNSCR 2106, adopted in 2013, was the first to explicitly mention men and boys in its preambular paragraphs, as potential victims of sexual violence and as allies in preventing violence against women and girls. This relative progress is further cemented through UNSCR 2242, calling for men’s engagement to promote women’s involvement in conflict resolution, and UNSCR 2467, directly emphasizing the importance of “challeng[ing] cultural assumptions about male invulnerability” (UNSC 2019, paragraph 32) in relation to SGBV (see Wright Reference Wright2020, 654).
Outside the realm of the Security Council, the WPS agenda also has a vibrant life. It is actively taken on, developed, and challenged in national political contexts by governments establishing national action plans (NAPs) (Hamilton, Naam, and Shepherd Reference Hamilton, Naam and Shepherd2020), as well as by civil society and nongovernmental organizations (Björkdahl and Selimovic Reference Björkdahl and Selimovic2019). Among civil society actors in particular, there has been some advocacy for the WPS agenda to more comprehensively address masculinities as drivers of violence and conflict (see WILPF 2015), including acknowledging men as victims of sexual violence.
There has, therefore, been some progress in broadening the scope and moving away from treating “gender” as synonymous with “women and girls” across the WPS agenda, toward recognizing men and boys as gendered subjects and actors — mirroring broader developments within international peace and security policy and scholarship (Myrttinen and Schulz Reference Myrttinen and Schulz2023). Throughout the WPS agenda, however, this engagement remains mostly cursory and limited, in scope but also, crucially, in content and depth. In particular, while men and boys as gendered subjects are occasionally mentioned, this is typically in narrow terms. Men are either included in an instrumentalist capacity, as allies to be engaged in fighting and preventing violence against women and girls or, more recently and consistently, as victims of SGBV themselves. Yet, despite this recognition of men and boys as subjects and actors, the concept of masculinity/masculinities as a more structural logic of domination and oppression is not mentioned at all across the resolutions.
These dynamics are restrictive for a number of reasons. For one, this narrow focus on men as allies and potential agents of change (Duriesmith Reference Duriesmith2020) and/or as victims of sexual violence constitutes a violation-centric view, where the focus rests on the violences of men, perpetrated either by or against them. As a result, “men’s roles in and experiences of conflict and peacebuilding that are not defined by violations per se – including as civilians, non-combatants, protestors, activists, humanitarians, translators, policymakers and -shapers, or as conscientious objectors – are […] often absent” (Myrttinen et al. Reference Myrttinen, Lewis, Touquet, Schulz, Yousaf and Laruni2025, 4) from WPS resolutions, as well as from studies, programming, and policymaking related to conflict and peacebuilding more broadly. Such omissions contribute to “essentializing and incomplete understandings of how masculinities navigate and operate in, structure, and are shaped by war and peacebuilding” (Myrttinen et al. Reference Myrttinen, Lewis, Touquet, Schulz, Yousaf and Laruni2025, 4). In light of these dynamics, scholars and activists have issued resounding calls in recent years to more critically engage with masculinities in the realm of the WPS agenda (Wright Reference Wright2020).
Creating New Inroads: Why Men and Masculinities in WPS?
In many ways, it may seem counterintuitive, and perhaps even contradictory, to call attention to men and masculinities within the WPS agenda — a landmark agenda adopted to redress the androcentrism characterizing the world’s paramount security body. Reaching this monumental milestone was achieved following decades of tireless feminist advocacy shining a light on women’s long ignored and silenced experiences of and roles in and after war, propelled by carefully crafted strategic maneuvering within and outside of the Security Council (Goetz Reference Goetz2015; Lewis Reference Lewis2018). To then be critiqued for failing to adequately acknowledge men, one can imagine, must be more than a little jarring. Moreover, efforts to call attention to men and masculinities in WPS are, understandably, often met with concerns that this will pull focus from and turn the tide back toward men — potentially taking over, encroaching on, or worse, perhaps even undoing the hard-won gains of decades of feminist activism. These concerns can play out especially acutely in the context of limited funding and political will to address the needs, rights, and experiences of women and girls (COFEM 2025), which are particularly heightened in this current moment.
Recognizing these potential tensions, and taking them seriously, we nevertheless uphold that sufficiently engaging with masculinities must become an integral concern of the WPS agenda and broader feminist efforts to prevent violence and sustain peace, without diverting attention from women and girls in the process. This is important for various reasons, not least stemming from the underlying linkages between certain types of masculinities with militarism, violence, and war. As pointed out by feminist scholars, processes of militarization and war require the mobilization of certain forms of violent masculinities, while certain manifestations of masculinities in turn require violence and war to sustain themselves (Cockburn Reference Cockburn2007; Enloe Reference Enloe2004). Violent masculinities and their entanglement with patriarchy and gender inequalities are thus among the root causes for violence to occur, persist, and continue. This lens permits inroads toward better understanding — empirically and conceptually — the relationships between gender, masculinities, and mobilization to armed conflict at individual and structural levels (Duriesmith Reference Duriesmith2016; Parashar, Tickner, and True Reference Parashar, Tickner and True2018), as well as men’s own changing ideas, perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors relative to gender equality (Equimundo 2022).
Without a critical, substantive, and political engagement with masculinities and their structural linkages with violence and militarism as drivers of conflict, the WPS agenda risks remaining an exercise in merely seeking to make war safer for women (and, occasionally, men and persons with diverse SOGIESC), rather than working to prevent and end war itself. Viewed in this light, it is the reluctance to engage with masculinities that may, in fact, be counterproductive to feminist projects of preventing violence (including gender-based violence), resolving conflicts, and building sustainable and gender-just peace. Confronted with the omnipresence of violence and militarism around the world, therefore, “intellectual and activist attempts to understand, complicate, critique and ultimately undo the various intersections between gender, masculinities, violence, conflict and peace are essential” (Myrttinen et al. Reference Myrttinen, Lewis, Touquet, Schulz, Yousaf and Laruni2025, 12). As such, critically engaging with masculinities is not outside the realm of, or antithetical to feminism — as some (feminist) voices might suggest (see Myrttinen and Schulz Reference Myrttinen and Schulz2023) — but rather in support of feminist goals to challenge masculine militarism, prevent violence, and facilitate peace and security. Intersectional efforts to address masculinities are, therefore, crucial pieces of the same puzzle of advancing a global WPS agenda.
Ways Forward: Integrating Masculinities in the WPS Agenda
In light of these dynamics, then, WPS policies and frameworks must be more attentive to, inclusive of, and critical toward masculinities, in more systematic and nuanced ways. Caution is required as to how, precisely, this engagement with masculinities within the realm of gender, peace, and security ought to look like. Importantly, it is not sufficient (but rather limiting) to simply “add men and stir” (Hooser Reference Hooser and Myrttinen2025) in parallel to, or in competition with, debates about WPS. Without a doubt, there are tensions involved in addressing men and masculinities in a space that has carefully carved out much needed attention for women and girls. And we must remain attentive to these tensions. Importantly, paying sustained attention to men’s experiences as gendered and to the roles of masculinities in perpetuating violence or shaping conflict and peacebuilding processes must not come at the expense of a continuous and strengthened focus on protecting the rights of women’s and girls’ or responding to their intersectional experiences in settings of conflict and peace.
As such, any engagement with men and masculinities in the realm of the WPS agenda must uphold the importance of integrating women’s perspectives in relation to conflict and peace. It must also situate this ensuing attention to men and masculinities in relation to femininities, heteronormativity, and queerness, as well as within the broader context of unequal and hetero-patriarchal gender orders (Myrttinen and Schulz Reference Myrttinen and Schulz2023). Such a relational approach to gender, which “draws attention to the wider web of social entanglements through which power circulates and is contested” (Aijazi and Baines Reference Aijazi and Baines2017, 468), helps to understand how masculinities are both implicated in and impacted by political violence and armed conflict. This is a fundamental step toward more fully and comprehensively understanding the gendered manifestations of conflict and peace, as well as for ultimately fulfilling the overall goals of the WPS agenda of integrating gender perspectives into conflict resolution, prevention, and recovery measures and of preventing gender-based violence.
As we currently witness the unrestrained hold of state-sanctioned masculinist military might on global politics unfold in real-time, and face unabashed gender backlash around the world, turning our collective attention to understanding and addressing masculinities becomes urgent, if not inevitable. Concentrated efforts to engage with masculinities are important to address the underlying and structural linkages between gender, militarism, and violence and to undo and (re)construct violent manifestations of manhood. In the process, we can offer alternative pathways for and constructions of masculinities, all the while continuing to offer robust support for women and girls.
As noted in the title of this essay, masculinities and WPS are pieces of the same puzzle. The challenges inherent in solving this puzzle are similar to the difficulties in fixing a flowing tap. As a senior advisor from the Office of the Special Representative to the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict explained during a high-level panel hosted by the US Institute of Peace in November 2023, the work of their office often feels akin to mopping the floor with the tap still running. Following the lines of this analogy, it seems clear that to have any chance of stopping the water from running requires understanding the mechanisms behind the tap. Thus, if we are to have any hope of achieving feminist peace, it is imperative that we turn our feminist curiosities (Enloe Reference Enloe2004) to the mechanisms behind masculinities and their relationships to militarism. With that in mind, let’s roll up our sleeves and become better plumbers.
Introduction
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.
Redrawing “the boundaries of international law” (Charlesworth and Chinkin Reference Charlesworth and Chinkin2000), UNSCR 1325 and its nine subsequent WPS sister resolutions represent a monumental step toward redressing the masculinist biases, in the form of male actors and masculine virtues, that have long characterized international peace and security. The ensuing WPS agenda places center stage calls to “do” peace and security differently. It is fundamentally about preventing war, not merely mitigating the worst of its consequences for women and girls (although understanding and redressing gendered harms in wars and armed conflict is critical). The decades since have witnessed the infusion and diffusion of the WPS agenda across a range of institutional and political settings governing international peace and security, creating significant “footholds” for feminist policy and practice across a range of institutional settings (Otto Reference Otto2010).
Conceptually, much of WPS hinges on the concept of “gender” — a political, analytical, and increasingly technical term. While “gender” established a firm presence on international policy and programmatic agendas, it remains the site of significant contestation over the substantive and normative parameters of its meaning (Baden and Goetz Reference Baden and Goetz1997). In recent decades, the meaning of this word has been expanded, retracted, politicized, co-opted and corrupted, re-politicized, and now, in 2025 — “scrubbed.” At their core, these contestations largely center on who and what can — and should — fall within the purview of “gender” and a “gender perspective of armed conflict.” Within these debates, one area of discernible disagreement among scholars, policymakers, activists, and practitioners has long pertained to the place of feminisms’ principal “other”: men and masculinities.
This essay traces the evolving presence-absence of men and masculinities in the WPS agenda. It identifies challenges and opportunities for WPS to encompass a wider set of gendered experiences and identities in war, including more concrete attention to the structural dimensions of masculinities in relation to violence and war. It is vital to consider the often-uncomfortable tensions that arise when trying to determine the apposite place of men and masculinities in feminist places, spaces, and agendas. Yet men and masculinities and women and femininities are part of the same structural puzzle. As such, for the WPS agenda to succeed in facilitating feminist peace, it cannot do so without this key piece of the puzzle.
Sketching a Presence-Absence: Where Are Men and Masculinities in the WPS Agenda?
Without a doubt, and building on the success of decades of feminist organizing and advocacy, UNSCR 1325 and the ensuing WPS resolutions have contributed greatly to integrating women’s perspectives, roles, and lived realities in all aspects of global peace and security efforts (UNDP 2019) — marking important shifts in policy, praxis, and research. To this end, the WPS agenda, and its broader “policy ecosystem” (Kirby and Shepherd Reference Kirby and Shepherd2021), have made important inroads toward promoting women in peacebuilding, ensuring that women have a seat in formal peace processes, and addressing sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) as a global peace and security concern.
Despite these advances, however, the report card for the WPS policy track remains fairly mixed, and several constraints, limitations, and hesitations persist. Several scholars have raised critiques vis-à-vis the agenda, including from postcolonial (Parashar Reference Parashar, Davies and True2018) and queer-feminist (Hagen Reference Hagen2016) perspectives. One of the most persistent shortcomings of the agenda is its restricted engagement with gender, being characterized by an almost exclusive focus on women and girls. Given the pervasive historic and ongoing marginalization of women’s experiences in peace and security, such a focus is understandable, justified, and much needed. At the same time, the conflation of “gender” with “women and girls” frequently manifests in a reluctance to sufficiently engage with men and masculinities (Duriesmith Reference Duriesmith2020; Myrttinen Reference Myrttinen, Davies and True2018; Wright Reference Wright2020), or with persons of diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) (Hagen Reference Hagen2016).
Across the 10 resolutions that make up the WPS agenda — starting with UNSCR 1325 in 2000 through Resolution 2493 in 2019 — men and masculinities are rarely mentioned explicitly (Brown and de Jonge Outdraat Reference Brown, de Jonge Oudraat and Myrttinen2025, 197). Of course, men and male bodies “have always been present in the agenda” (Wright Reference Wright2020, 655) — in the form of diplomats and policymakers signing and adopting resolutions or as heads of states and army commanders targeted by the content of these resolutions. Yet, men’s experiences and roles are typically not considered as gendered (Myrttinen et al. Reference Myrttinen, Lewis, Touquet, Schulz, Yousaf and Laruni2025), and they are usually invisible, unmarked, and absent (Wright Reference Wright2020, 655).
To illustrate this evolving presence-absence more concretely, UNSCR 1325 does not mention “men and boys” or “masculinities” once. This omission may seem somewhat surprising, given that the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a crucial predecessor to UNSCR 1325, did mention the importance of educating men and boys to prevent sexual violence and training them in gender-egalitarian conflict resolution (UN 1995, paragraph 93; see Kirby and Shepherd Reference Kirby and Shepherd2016, 387) — an acknowledgement that is missing in UNSCR 1325. Subsequent resolutions — many of which cement an engagement with conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) as a primary concern of the agenda — similarly do not mention men and boys, despite the fact men are the primary perpetrators of sexual violence in conflict and countless men are also victimized. UNSCR 2106, adopted in 2013, was the first to explicitly mention men and boys in its preambular paragraphs, as potential victims of sexual violence and as allies in preventing violence against women and girls. This relative progress is further cemented through UNSCR 2242, calling for men’s engagement to promote women’s involvement in conflict resolution, and UNSCR 2467, directly emphasizing the importance of “challeng[ing] cultural assumptions about male invulnerability” (UNSC 2019, paragraph 32) in relation to SGBV (see Wright Reference Wright2020, 654).
Outside the realm of the Security Council, the WPS agenda also has a vibrant life. It is actively taken on, developed, and challenged in national political contexts by governments establishing national action plans (NAPs) (Hamilton, Naam, and Shepherd Reference Hamilton, Naam and Shepherd2020), as well as by civil society and nongovernmental organizations (Björkdahl and Selimovic Reference Björkdahl and Selimovic2019). Among civil society actors in particular, there has been some advocacy for the WPS agenda to more comprehensively address masculinities as drivers of violence and conflict (see WILPF 2015), including acknowledging men as victims of sexual violence.
There has, therefore, been some progress in broadening the scope and moving away from treating “gender” as synonymous with “women and girls” across the WPS agenda, toward recognizing men and boys as gendered subjects and actors — mirroring broader developments within international peace and security policy and scholarship (Myrttinen and Schulz Reference Myrttinen and Schulz2023). Throughout the WPS agenda, however, this engagement remains mostly cursory and limited, in scope but also, crucially, in content and depth. In particular, while men and boys as gendered subjects are occasionally mentioned, this is typically in narrow terms. Men are either included in an instrumentalist capacity, as allies to be engaged in fighting and preventing violence against women and girls or, more recently and consistently, as victims of SGBV themselves. Yet, despite this recognition of men and boys as subjects and actors, the concept of masculinity/masculinities as a more structural logic of domination and oppression is not mentioned at all across the resolutions.
These dynamics are restrictive for a number of reasons. For one, this narrow focus on men as allies and potential agents of change (Duriesmith Reference Duriesmith2020) and/or as victims of sexual violence constitutes a violation-centric view, where the focus rests on the violences of men, perpetrated either by or against them. As a result, “men’s roles in and experiences of conflict and peacebuilding that are not defined by violations per se – including as civilians, non-combatants, protestors, activists, humanitarians, translators, policymakers and -shapers, or as conscientious objectors – are […] often absent” (Myrttinen et al. Reference Myrttinen, Lewis, Touquet, Schulz, Yousaf and Laruni2025, 4) from WPS resolutions, as well as from studies, programming, and policymaking related to conflict and peacebuilding more broadly. Such omissions contribute to “essentializing and incomplete understandings of how masculinities navigate and operate in, structure, and are shaped by war and peacebuilding” (Myrttinen et al. Reference Myrttinen, Lewis, Touquet, Schulz, Yousaf and Laruni2025, 4). In light of these dynamics, scholars and activists have issued resounding calls in recent years to more critically engage with masculinities in the realm of the WPS agenda (Wright Reference Wright2020).
Creating New Inroads: Why Men and Masculinities in WPS?
In many ways, it may seem counterintuitive, and perhaps even contradictory, to call attention to men and masculinities within the WPS agenda — a landmark agenda adopted to redress the androcentrism characterizing the world’s paramount security body. Reaching this monumental milestone was achieved following decades of tireless feminist advocacy shining a light on women’s long ignored and silenced experiences of and roles in and after war, propelled by carefully crafted strategic maneuvering within and outside of the Security Council (Goetz Reference Goetz2015; Lewis Reference Lewis2018). To then be critiqued for failing to adequately acknowledge men, one can imagine, must be more than a little jarring. Moreover, efforts to call attention to men and masculinities in WPS are, understandably, often met with concerns that this will pull focus from and turn the tide back toward men — potentially taking over, encroaching on, or worse, perhaps even undoing the hard-won gains of decades of feminist activism. These concerns can play out especially acutely in the context of limited funding and political will to address the needs, rights, and experiences of women and girls (COFEM 2025), which are particularly heightened in this current moment.
Recognizing these potential tensions, and taking them seriously, we nevertheless uphold that sufficiently engaging with masculinities must become an integral concern of the WPS agenda and broader feminist efforts to prevent violence and sustain peace, without diverting attention from women and girls in the process. This is important for various reasons, not least stemming from the underlying linkages between certain types of masculinities with militarism, violence, and war. As pointed out by feminist scholars, processes of militarization and war require the mobilization of certain forms of violent masculinities, while certain manifestations of masculinities in turn require violence and war to sustain themselves (Cockburn Reference Cockburn2007; Enloe Reference Enloe2004). Violent masculinities and their entanglement with patriarchy and gender inequalities are thus among the root causes for violence to occur, persist, and continue. This lens permits inroads toward better understanding — empirically and conceptually — the relationships between gender, masculinities, and mobilization to armed conflict at individual and structural levels (Duriesmith Reference Duriesmith2016; Parashar, Tickner, and True Reference Parashar, Tickner and True2018), as well as men’s own changing ideas, perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors relative to gender equality (Equimundo 2022).
Without a critical, substantive, and political engagement with masculinities and their structural linkages with violence and militarism as drivers of conflict, the WPS agenda risks remaining an exercise in merely seeking to make war safer for women (and, occasionally, men and persons with diverse SOGIESC), rather than working to prevent and end war itself. Viewed in this light, it is the reluctance to engage with masculinities that may, in fact, be counterproductive to feminist projects of preventing violence (including gender-based violence), resolving conflicts, and building sustainable and gender-just peace. Confronted with the omnipresence of violence and militarism around the world, therefore, “intellectual and activist attempts to understand, complicate, critique and ultimately undo the various intersections between gender, masculinities, violence, conflict and peace are essential” (Myrttinen et al. Reference Myrttinen, Lewis, Touquet, Schulz, Yousaf and Laruni2025, 12). As such, critically engaging with masculinities is not outside the realm of, or antithetical to feminism — as some (feminist) voices might suggest (see Myrttinen and Schulz Reference Myrttinen and Schulz2023) — but rather in support of feminist goals to challenge masculine militarism, prevent violence, and facilitate peace and security. Intersectional efforts to address masculinities are, therefore, crucial pieces of the same puzzle of advancing a global WPS agenda.
Ways Forward: Integrating Masculinities in the WPS Agenda
In light of these dynamics, then, WPS policies and frameworks must be more attentive to, inclusive of, and critical toward masculinities, in more systematic and nuanced ways. Caution is required as to how, precisely, this engagement with masculinities within the realm of gender, peace, and security ought to look like. Importantly, it is not sufficient (but rather limiting) to simply “add men and stir” (Hooser Reference Hooser and Myrttinen2025) in parallel to, or in competition with, debates about WPS. Without a doubt, there are tensions involved in addressing men and masculinities in a space that has carefully carved out much needed attention for women and girls. And we must remain attentive to these tensions. Importantly, paying sustained attention to men’s experiences as gendered and to the roles of masculinities in perpetuating violence or shaping conflict and peacebuilding processes must not come at the expense of a continuous and strengthened focus on protecting the rights of women’s and girls’ or responding to their intersectional experiences in settings of conflict and peace.
As such, any engagement with men and masculinities in the realm of the WPS agenda must uphold the importance of integrating women’s perspectives in relation to conflict and peace. It must also situate this ensuing attention to men and masculinities in relation to femininities, heteronormativity, and queerness, as well as within the broader context of unequal and hetero-patriarchal gender orders (Myrttinen and Schulz Reference Myrttinen and Schulz2023). Such a relational approach to gender, which “draws attention to the wider web of social entanglements through which power circulates and is contested” (Aijazi and Baines Reference Aijazi and Baines2017, 468), helps to understand how masculinities are both implicated in and impacted by political violence and armed conflict. This is a fundamental step toward more fully and comprehensively understanding the gendered manifestations of conflict and peace, as well as for ultimately fulfilling the overall goals of the WPS agenda of integrating gender perspectives into conflict resolution, prevention, and recovery measures and of preventing gender-based violence.
As we currently witness the unrestrained hold of state-sanctioned masculinist military might on global politics unfold in real-time, and face unabashed gender backlash around the world, turning our collective attention to understanding and addressing masculinities becomes urgent, if not inevitable. Concentrated efforts to engage with masculinities are important to address the underlying and structural linkages between gender, militarism, and violence and to undo and (re)construct violent manifestations of manhood. In the process, we can offer alternative pathways for and constructions of masculinities, all the while continuing to offer robust support for women and girls.
As noted in the title of this essay, masculinities and WPS are pieces of the same puzzle. The challenges inherent in solving this puzzle are similar to the difficulties in fixing a flowing tap. As a senior advisor from the Office of the Special Representative to the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict explained during a high-level panel hosted by the US Institute of Peace in November 2023, the work of their office often feels akin to mopping the floor with the tap still running. Following the lines of this analogy, it seems clear that to have any chance of stopping the water from running requires understanding the mechanisms behind the tap. Thus, if we are to have any hope of achieving feminist peace, it is imperative that we turn our feminist curiosities (Enloe Reference Enloe2004) to the mechanisms behind masculinities and their relationships to militarism. With that in mind, let’s roll up our sleeves and become better plumbers.