27. Februar 2026
In a global context characterised by escalating conflicts, hybrid warfare, violations of international law, and rising military spending, existing security logics not only fail to prevent violence but actively reproduce an unequal and hierarchical world order. We argue that reclaiming the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda as a transformative feminist peace project is urgently needed to promote peace and security worldwide. When states are modernising nuclear arsenals, eroding arms control regimes, and expanding the military use of emerging technologies, a WPS agenda re-centred on its anti-militarist roots has the potential to challenge dominant militarised logics, prevent escalation risks, and inhibit the underlying dynamics of violence. In this blog article we focus on nuclear weapons, cybersecurity, and autonomous weapons systems, as these areas have received the least attention in the existing WPS frameworks and discussions despite having significant implications for peace and security.
The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, anchored in UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and nine follow-up resolutions, emerged from feminist demands for sustainable peace, conflict prevention, and the acknowledgement of the varied and gendered impacts of conflict. Yet the WPS agenda has never been a unified project. Some interpretations are liberal, mainstream, aligned with existing policy frameworks and security institutions; others are more radical, explicitly anti-militarist and transformative.
Rooted in anti-militarist feminist thought, the more ambitious vision of WPS drew not only on the principles of human security but also of feminist peace, which sought to challenge patriarchal, militarist, capitalist and colonial structures of violence. This understanding framed women’s participation and protection not as ends in themselves but as means of addressing the root causes and structures of insecurity, including militarism itself. Yet since the adoption and institutionalisation of UNSCR 1325 considerations of disarmament-oriented, anti-militarist and abolitionist approaches have been limited or ignored by the mainstream. Liberal interpretations that largely conform to the status quo have come to dominate, while approaches that would require challenging institutional boundaries and power hierarchies have been marginalised. Disarmament and arms control were notably absent from the foundational resolution, marking from the very beginning a critical gap between the agenda’s feminist vision and its institutionalised interpretation. Over time, implementation of the WPS agenda has increasingly shifted away from the transformative potential of addressing structural causes of violence, turning instead toward the management of (in)security within existing militarized systems and logics.
A Disarmament-Oriented Understanding of Prevention
An anti-militarist understanding of the WPS prevention pillar – a cornerstone alongside participation, protection, relief and recovery – links the WPS agenda to universal disarmament and demilitarisation of societies. In its feminist anti-militarist vision, the agenda conceptualised prevention not merely as the mitigation of immediate threats, but as the transformation of the structural conditions that make violence possible and drive persistent insecurity, including militarism, economic injustice, and unequal power relations. As the agenda became institutionalised within the UN Security Council (UNSC), the most militarised body within the UN system, its preventive potential was significantly neglected and diluted. In practice, the understanding of prevention shifted from disarmament and justice-oriented social transformation efforts to managing conflict within existing militarised systems.
Despite clear intersections between the WPS Agenda with disarmament, arms control, and non-proliferation, these links remain marginal in implementation. Currently, only 38 out of 113 WPS National Actions Plans (NAPs) include references to arms control, ammunition management, or disarmament in their monitoring frameworks, and these references predominantly focus on humanitarian arms control or small arms and light weapons (SALW). Other disarmament fields such as nuclear disarmament, cybersecurity governance, or the regulation of autonomous weapon systems are rarely connected to WPS, even as technological militarisation accelerates.
A recent UN report (2025) warns that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), upon which the UN member states have collectively agreed, will not be achieved due to the global rise in military spending that hit a record $2.7 trillion in 2024 and could increase to as much as $6.6 trillion by 2035. At the same time, existing arms control regimes are eroding, with geopolitical rivalries prioritising state security and deterrence over human security and undermining peace and equality. Examples include nuclear weapon states that are modernizing their nuclear arsenals and threatening to renew nuclear test programs, the escalating weaponization of artificial intelligence with subsequent severe human rights violations, as well as the increased use of cyber capabilities above and below the threshold of armed conflict.
These developments underscore that disarmament and arms control have been deprioritised not only within WPS frameworks but in the broader international system, including in the context of nuclear disarmament and emerging technologies. By re-centring the WPS agenda on its transformative and anti-militarist feminist vision through a stronger emphasis on disarmament and structural transformation, WPS can become a powerful tool to challenge the security logics that uphold unequal and violent power relations and undermine the building of sustainable and feminist peace.
Nuclear Weapons
The absence of references to nuclear disarmament and arms control in WPS resolutions reflects entrenched power hierarchies within the UNSC. Only very few NAPs mention nuclear disarmament as part of a states’ WPS vision. However, efforts to connect the WPS agenda and nuclear arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation have emerged outside the UNSC framework, calling for synergies between these fields. At the last meeting of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), a working paper addressed the connections of the WPS agenda and nuclear non-proliferation. While this initiative represents an attempt to integrate gender considerations, it does not advocate for immediate nuclear disarmament or nuclear abolition. The focus remains mainly on women’s participation in nuclear policy and diplomacy and partly acknowledging the gendered impacts of historical radiation exposure.
This mirrors broader trends of a securitised and militarised institutionalisation of the WPS agenda. Even when nuclear arms control and disarmament spaces engage with WPS principles, they are often framed through liberal feminist approaches that prioritise language around women’s inclusion within existing institutional hierarchies rather than challenging the structural foundations of the global nuclear order. These frameworks tend to highlight women either as participants in established security architectures or as vulnerable victims of nuclear violence, but rarely create space to interrogate the root causes of violence or question the legitimisation of weapons of mass destruction within militarised security paradigms. Feminist perspectives advocating for nuclear abolition are largely sidelined by state-centric institutional hierarchies.
In contrast, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) offers a more explicitly anti-militarist and transformative framework. By centring the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, recognising gendered and intersectional harms, and rejecting nuclear deterrence logics, the TPNW provides a concrete site where an anti-militarist understanding of WPS can be put in practice beyond inclusion within nuclear governance structures. Anti-nuclear activists and movements – particularly from communities directly impacted by nuclear violence and injustice – continue to resist and disrupt militarised notions of security, advancing alternative visions of peace and disarmament both within and outside formal institutional spaces. In doing so they implement and (re-)imagine the initial radical vision of the WPS agenda even when not explicitly referencing the agenda.
Cybersecurity
As a relatively new topic of international security, cybersecurity was not part of the original WPS resolutions. Today however, cyberspace not only shapes our daily lives but is a central site of militarisation. State cyber operations increasingly target critical civilian infrastructure and services, such as hospitals and communication networks, while digital technologies are used to surveil, intimidate, or silence activists and human rights defenders, disproportionately affecting women, queer and other marginalized communities. These behaviours reproduce and reinforce existing gendered power relations and insecurities as state centric, militarised, and economically driven understandings of cybersecurity, silencing transformative feminist perspectives in governance processes. Indeed, many of the practices and institutions that arise from these visions can themselves become sources of cyber insecurity.
States have largely failed to connect cybersecurity efforts with the WPS agenda, and only a handful of NAPs explicitly address cyber threats. Malaysia’s NAP, for example, acknowledges the importance of integrating cybersecurity into WPS. At the UN level, the Open‑Ended Working Group on ICTs (OEWG) has made progress in increasing women’s participation and integrating gender language in its reports, yet structural gender dynamics rooted in militarism, androcentrism, harmful gender stereotypes, and unequal access to digital resources remain largely unaddressed. In doing so, they reduce the understanding of gender perspectives in the field of cybersecurity to participation, and in rare cases to protection of “women and girls”.
Linking cybersecurity to the agenda’s initial anti-militarist vision can address these gaps. This approach foregrounds the voices of those most affected, tackling cyber insecurities such as technology-facilitated gender based violence, internet shutdowns, disinformation and attacks on critical infrastructure. It challenges militarised governance models, and centres human-security and gender-sensitive perspectives across policy, including cyber norm implementation. Civil society actors, such as the Association for Progressive Communication illustrate how WPS can be reclaimed to coordinate feminist action and community-led solutions. Looking ahead to the new UN global mechanism on cybersecurity, preserving and defending existing gender-sensitive language against growing anti-feminist sentiments and empowering civil society engagement will be crucial to shift from state-centric, militarist approaches toward feminist informed and human-centred cybersecurity.
Autonomous Weapons Systems
Existing WPS frameworks inadequately address the significant risks posed by autonomous weapons systems (AWS). These include biases within AI systems, the technological divide between the Global North and the Majority World, as well as challenges related to resource exploitation and environmental degradation linked to AWS development. Despite the backing of the UN Secretary-General and a majority of states, the international community has been unable to launch negotiations for a legally binding instrument on AWS. The main reason for this is that a small group of highly militarised states is blocking any progress. After a decade of deliberations within the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), it is time to explore alternative avenues. Doing so would increase the opportunity to address human rights and ethical issues that have been neglected in the CCW to date. Only a few states have raised these concerns, for example, in a working paper on bias in autonomous weapons. Canada stands out as the sole country to explicitly articulate worries within the CCW regarding the potential incompatibility of AWS development with WPS principles.
It is essential for AWS and WPS experts to collaborate more closely in developing the components of a future legal instrument on AWS and to monitor its implementation. This partnership must prioritize human security, meaning that AWS that cannot be used with meaningful human control or which target people autonomously should be strictly prohibited. Additionally, regulations must ensure that all AWS not subject to these prohibitions operate under meaningful human control to safeguard ethical standards and protect civilians.
Conclusion
The missing connections between the WPS frameworks and nuclear weapons as well as emerging technologies demonstrate how the former vision of feminist peace associated with anti-militarist understandings of the WPS agenda has been marginalized in international politics. The narrow focus on women’s participation and protection, while important, does not in itself challenge the power structures and militarised logics that reproduce insecurity.
Recentring the WPS agenda means grounding its implementation in a commitment of universal disarmament, intersectional justice and sustainable peace, addressing the structural root causes of violence embedded in militarism, patriarchy, capitalism, and racialized hierarchies. Within institutional spaces, this means pushing for stronger disarmament and arms control agendas in WPS debates, while simultaneously bringing WPS perspectives into arms control and disarmament forums. However, limiting the practice of WPS to institutional settings alone risks reinforcing the state-centric structures and militarised logics upon which these institutions are built. Although the space for transformation within institutions is limited, sustaining anti-militarist critique and connecting WPS with disarmament frameworks remains essential.
At the same time, WPS must also be practiced beyond institutional boundaries. Feminist movements already do this work by resisting militarisation, building solidarity across peace, climate, and economic justice struggles, and imagining forms of security rooted in care and justice. Strengthening and connecting these anti-militarist feminist movements is essential if WPS is to reclaim its transformative potential and advance alternative visions for international peace and security.
