Women, Peace, and What is Security?

Oct 4, 2021 | Phoebe Donnelly, Gretchen Baldwin, Masooma Rahmaty, and Phesheya Nxumalo
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The past year has raised many questions for those focused on the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, as well as highlighting issues that feminist activists and scholars have been discussing for decades. Linked to all of them is the question of how to define security within WPS. As a result of some of its early language and the contexts of its earliest applications, the WPS agenda has often centered on ongoing conflict situations, including contexts where UN peacekeeping missions are present.

However, there are security issues beyond conflict that the WPS framework can and should be applied to. Increasingly, traditional framings of security have been challenged by actors within the UN system, beginning with the United Nations Development Programme’s 1994 Human Development Report. The report evoked a new concept of global human security that is universal, people-centered, comprised of interdependent and cross-border factors—such as famine, disease, pollution, terrorism, and ethnic disputes—and is “easier to ensure through prevention than later intervention.”