Whose Peace? Which Security? Decolonizing the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in India

Twenty-five years after the adoption of the United Nations (UN) Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, India continues to present itself as a committed advocate abroad while maintaining silence at home. The image of women in peacekeeping uniforms serves as proof of progress, even as women in India’s conflict affected Kashmir, Manipur, and Chhattisgarh confront militarization, displacement, and loss. Their daily acts of care, resistance, and survival show that India’s engagement with WPS remains merely symbolic and outward looking, while real peacebuilding unfolds far from the state’s gaze.  

Symbolic Commitments, Structural Silences 

India’s WPS narrative is still anchored in a photograph: the all-female Formed Police Unit deployed to Liberia in 2007. Since then, government statements and think-tank panels have repeated familiar themes like “India’s contribution to peacekeeping”, “WPS in peacekeeping operations”, and “More Women in UN Peace Operations”. Meanwhile, the difficult work of realising the WPS pillars of participation, protection, prevention, and relief and recovery are treated as if they were someone else’s problem. 

Indeed, India has never adopted a National Action Plan (NAP) for WPS, citing sovereignty and discretion in “internal matters.” In practice, this shields the state from scrutiny over militarised governance in conflict regions like Kashmir, Manipur, and Chhattisgarh, where the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) grants extraordinary security powers to the armed forces, including the use of lethal force. For women living there, peace is not a policy objective but a daily negotiation between checkpoints, displacement, and loss. 

In civil society, perspectives on WPS remain fragmented. Some observers dismiss the agenda as a Western import, unsuited to South Asia’s realities. Others see WPS as a transnational feminist tool, while a few still push for a National Action Plan. Many grassroots collectives, often unregistered or operating under threat, practise WPS principles without ever naming them: caring for families, mediating local disputes, rebuilding social trust. Meanwhile, the UN enters its 80th year and India’s long-standing bid for a permanent UNSC seat remains on hold. 

This blog article turns to Kashmir, Manipur, and Chhattisgarh – three “disturbed” regions that together expose the many faces of India’s internal conflicts and the limits of the WPS agenda. Each setting shows how women’s everyday peacebuilding operates where the state’s version of “security” is itself a significant source of insecurity. Their experiences reveal how far the WPS framework must travel to speak meaningfully to the ground. 

Kashmir 

Kashmir has long been at the centre of territorial disputes involving India, Pakistan, and China, rooted in the 1947 partition. Decades of militarization, contested sovereignty, and competing nationalisms have produced persistent violence, human rights abuses, and cycles of repression. For women, the conflict is experienced not only as political instability but as everyday militarization shaping family life, community relations, and survival strategies. 

In this context, “security” belongs to the state, while women’s peace begins where state protection ends. Practically, peacebuilding is constrained by the overlapping pressures of entrenched patriarchy, militarized governance, and bureaucratic obstacles. International frameworks such as WPS are often treated as unacceptably foreign or threatening, while restrictive social hierarchies are defended as cultural tradition. Open advocacy for women’s rights carries real risk yet such risks are frequently dismissed as causes for concern. This reveals a fundamental problem: global WPS frameworks assume safe spaces, state cooperation, and formal institutions. In Kashmir, such conditions are largely absent. Thus, many of the assumptions underlying the framework fail to account for survival driven strategies, local norms, or the politics of endurance practiced every day by Kashmiri women. 

Local actors translate WPS principles into culturally intelligible forms. Projects addressing mental health, peace education, and communal harmony, such as those led by the Eqra Foundation, foster dialogue and social cohesion without explicitly invoking formal gender frameworks. Similarly, Yakjah’s Culture and Conflict initiative rebuilds trust between Muslim and Pandit women through shared cultural practices. These efforts demonstrate participation, protection, and prevention in practice, but do so in ways that are invisible to global WPS indicators. 

Patriarchal norms operate as both overt social structures and tacitly enforced morality. Respectability, deference, and cultural pride shape behaviour, producing conformity and the internalization of hierarchies. Men and women alike often equate protection or honour with empowerment, limiting the perceived necessity of formal feminist interventions. Activists must negotiate these norms alongside ethical commitments, community expectations, and state surveillance – a level of subtlety that global WPS scripts rarely recognize. 

Institutional barriers compound these challenges. Bureaucratic permission for community programs is slow to arrive and far from guaranteed. Further, collaboration with state authorities can undermine an actor’s local credibility, while independent action can trigger state surveillance. The dissolution of the Jammu and Kashmir State Commission for Protection of Women and Child Rights in 2025 removed a key avenue for redress, leaving survivors without formal recourse and forcing activists to assume responsibilities once handled by formal institutions. 

In these and other places, trust is fractured. In the public imagination, “peace” has come to refer to the unresolved India–Pakistan conflict, while local actors focus on education, dialogue, and healing trauma. External WPS interventions, framed in global language, risk being seen as politically motivated or out of touch. Initiatives like Eqra Foundation and Yakjah demonstrate a politics of endurance: sustaining dialogue, nurturing trust, and keeping equality alive in ways global frameworks neither anticipate nor measure. 

Manipur 

The state of Manipur is caught in long-standing ethnic conflict, militarization, and structural violence. Tensions between the Meitei and Kuki communities, disputes over land and political representation, and pervasive security force presence under AFSPA create a volatile environment. Women face threats from both armed groups and state authorities. The May 2023 escalation of Kuki-Meitei violence highlighted gendered dimensions of conflict, with women subjected to sexualized attacks intended to terrorize communities. 

Women have historically led resistance in Manipur. The Nupi Lan of 1904 marked early women-led protests defending community rights. Contemporary movements continue this tradition, addressing AFSPA, drug abuse, and inter-ethnic tensions. Women mediate conflict, support victims, and protect communities through informal, localized, and survival-driven strategies. 

Some organizations engage directly with WPS. The Control Arms Foundation of India and the Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network drafted a National Action Plan in 2015–16. This initiative connected local struggles to constitutional and international commitments, demonstrating the potential relevance of WPS. Yet state authorities ignored the plan, leaving grassroots actors to continue survival-focused work without institutional recognition. 

Movements like Meira Paibi, the women torchbearers, embody practical WPS principles in daily life. Originating as an anti-liquor campaign in the 1970s, the group evolved into a social and moral watchdog confronting human rights abuses, trafficking, and inter-community violence. Similarly, the Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network, founded in 2004, supports widows of gun violence, provides trauma healing, and advocates for disarmament and women’s participation in peace processes. These initiatives operate outside formal frameworks yet exemplify the WPS pillars of participation, protection, and prevention. 

Women in Manipur navigate a militarized and patriarchal landscape where state mechanisms often fail to protect civilians. Laws such as AFSPA place armed forces beyond local accountability, leaving communities – and especially women – to manage immediate threats themselves. Grassroots groups including Meira Paibi, the Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network, and Tangkhul Shanao Long fill this gap, organizing night patrols, mass vigils, and nonviolent interventions to prevent violence, mediate between armed actors, and support victims. These initiatives show that women act both as survivors and agents of peace, challenging conventional WPS frameworks that assume institutional support, formal political access, and enforceable legal protections. 

The experiences of Manipuri women reveal that peace and security in such contexts are produced locally through pragmatic, culturally grounded strategies rather than through top-down international frameworks. Decolonizing WPS in Manipur requires recognizing these women-led practices as legitimate forms of peacebuilding, valuing their expertise in negotiation, protection, and community cohesion, and moving away from externally imposed models that fail to reflect the lived realities of conflict-affected populations. 

Chhattisgarh 

In Chhattisgarh, Adivasi women live at the intersection of counterinsurgency, Maoist coercion, and extractive capitalism. Militarized governance and unregulated mining have devastated forests, water, and livelihoods, exacerbating survival and eroding cultural identity. Their resistance is organized around Jal, Jangal, Zameen – water, forest, land – a framework that links ecology with justice and community care. 

Prominent indigenous women activists such as Soni Sori embody both courage and vulnerability. Her experience of custodial sexual violence reflects the personal risks faced by women who challenge state and corporate power. That security discourse criminalizes dissent can be seen in the treatment of other activists, including Hidme Markam and Suneeta Pottam, who were both detained under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). Such repression renders local women’s peace work nearly invisible while claiming to preserve “order.” 

Adivasi activists also navigate structural inequities within the broader civil society sector. Disparities in education, class, and social capital limit access to funding and institutional support, while marginalized activists often find their work undervalued or co-opted by better-resourced allies. For these women, UNSCR 1325 is largely irrelevant, and many have never heard of it. Mobilization is local, oral, and often clandestine. Their peace is defined not by global resolutions but by keeping communities whole, resources protected, and survival ensured. 

Groups such as the Moolvasi Bachao Manch defend land and livelihoods through small dharnas, forest sit ins, and acts of communal care – feeding displaced families, protecting trees, and adopting orphans of conflict. These are not symbolic gestures but daily strategies of survival and repair. For Chhattisgarh, decolonizing WPS begins with recognizing such practices as legitimate peacebuilding, rooted in Indigenous ethics and grounded in endurance rather than compliance. 

Decolonising WPS 

The WPS agenda remains shaped by institutions in the Global North that fund, design, and lead its implementation while positioning countries like India and much of South Asia as sites of intervention. This reproduces colonial hierarchies of knowledge and authority, where “empowerment” is delivered rather than recognised. It also ignores how women in conflict zones already sustain peace through care, survival, and community cohesion. South Asian women transform grief into political agency, confront militarization and patriarchy, and build solidarities linking justice to everyday life, often using frameworks like CEDAW or the Beijing Platform for Action. Yet their expertise remains undervalued while other organizations engage with WPS primarily to access funding – ticking boxes rather than driving meaningful change. 

What would a decolonized WPS in India look like? It would be a form of peacebuilding defined and led by women on the ground, not by global institutions or Delhi-based policymakers. Practically, it would support locally driven strategies, Local Action Plans tailored to specific conflict contexts, that recognise intersectional realities, including the experiences of Dalit (historically marginalized caste), Adivasi, and other marginalised women. Implementation cannot rely on the state, which often perpetuates violence, or on the UN, which cannot reach local realities. Instead, grassroots organisations, civil society networks, and community leaders must take the lead. International actors would provide trust-based funding, legal backing, and technical support, rather than control. Law, funding, and political representation play enabling roles: legal protections must address impunity under militarised regimes like AFSPA, funding should sustain ongoing local initiatives, and political platforms should amplify marginalized voices without co-opting them. 

Author’s note: This analysis draws on field interviews and conversations conducted between December 2023 and August 2025 with women peacebuilders and scholars from Kashmir, Manipur, and Chhattisgarh. Names have been withheld to ensure privacy and security.