As conflicts multiply and women remain largely absent from peace negotiations, senior United Nations officials, civil society and Member States today urged the Security Council to move beyond rhetoric and make women’s participation in peace processes funded and non-negotiable, warning that peace built without women is “only a pause in violence”.
“Gender equality and women’s empowerment is among the most powerful approaches to achieving peace,” said Sima Bahous, Executive Director of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN-Women), as she opened day-long debate on the topic. “When women are safe, nations are more peaceful,” she added.
More than two decades after the adoption of Council resolution 1325 (2000) , evidence continues to show that women’s inclusion reduces violence, strengthens peacekeeping, improves accountability and makes peace agreements more likely to last, she explained. Yet, she warned, women remain excluded from diplomacy even as conflicts and crises spread across Afghanistan, Haiti, Myanmar, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan and Ukraine.
“These are conflicts women neither choose nor lead,” she said, but women pay the highest price while being kept out of the negotiations meant to end them. She called on Member States and mediation officials to implement the Secretary-General’s Common Pledge on Women’s Participation in Peace Processes, including by endorsing a minimum one-third target for women’s representation and reporting regularly on women’s direct inclusion in talks.
Move from Promises to Implementation
Leymah Gbowee, Nobel Peace Laureate and Founder and President of the Gbowee Peace Foundation-Africa, drew on Liberia’s national experience to urge the Council to move from promises to implementation. She recalled working in Liberia in 1994 with women refugees from Sierra Leone who gathered every day to plan peace and their eventual return home.
“They were not preparing for the refugee life that they lived, they were preparing for their return to Sierra Leone and planning the ways they would transform their society,” she said. She remembered wondering how women who had suffered rape, abuse and displacement could still carry such hope, before they told her: “The philosophy of peace that we need will only come if we women band together and work for peace in our community”.
Six years later, the Council adopted resolution 1325 (2000), but she said the world has still failed to fully realize its promise. Peace processes remain dominated by men with political power or guns, despite evidence that women’s meaningful participation produces more durable agreements, faster recovery and more resilient societies. Liberia, she said, proves the point: 23 years after its peace agreement, “we have not gone back to war”.
She called on the Council to engage local women from the start, fund them properly, ensure their meaningful participation at peace tables and equip young women and girls with education, leadership opportunities and confidence. “You can’t make war with millions and make peace with peanuts,” she said, warning that national action plans without money and political will remain “a toothless bulldog”.
Council Retreating from Women, Peace and Security Agenda
Kaavya Asoka, Executive Director of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, warned that the Council itself is retreating from the women, peace and security agenda at a dangerous moment. She noted that in 2025, only 46 per cent of Council decisions referred to women, peace and security, the lowest level since 2009, while established norms on gender equality, prevention of gender-based violence, women’s participation and sexual and reproductive rights have been contested, rolled back or removed from Council outcomes.
“Every day, we see international law increasingly undermined in favour of narrow interests,” she said, warning that “the cost of dismantling the norms we have collectively built will be far greater”. She urged the Council to create the conditions necessary for women’s meaningful participation, noting that women cannot participate in public or political life if the conditions for inclusion do not exist. “Empty condemnation of attacks against civilians, while continuing to arm those responsible for violence against them, is unacceptable,” she stated, calling on Member States to commit to halting arms transfers where there is a substantial risk that such weapons may be used to commit serious violations, including gender-based violence.
She called for diverse women – including human rights defenders, peacebuilders and feminist movements – to participate directly at all levels of decision-making, including formal peace processes, with a target of 50 per cent representation. No Member State or UN entity, she said, should endorse, facilitate or participate in peace processes where women are excluded.
Women Shape Recovery after War: National Examples
In the ensuing debate, speakers shared national examples of how women have shaped recovery after war. Minh Vu Nguyen, Viet Nam’s Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, stressed that focusing only on women’s vulnerability in conflict tells “only half the story”, pointing instead to women’s courage, resilience and leadership in peacebuilding and national recovery. Drawing on its own experience after decades of war, he said the country’s rebuilding “could not have been possible without the contributions of millions of Vietnamese women”.
The representative of Mozambique also drew on its own post-conflict experience, saying its UN-supported disarmament, demobilization and reintegration process “taught us something specific”. Women ex-combatants and women in affected communities require targeted socioeconomic support, recognition and meaningful participation in local reconciliation processes. Ensuring that disarmament, demobilization and reintegration is gender-responsive “is not a secondary concern”, he stressed. “It is integral to whether peace holds.”
In the same vein, Liberia’s delegate offered his nation’s own history as evidence that women do not merely wait to be included in peace efforts; they create space for peace when institutions fail. He recalled women crossing battle lines, standing between warring factions and helping silence the guns. A peace built without women is only “a pause in violence”, while a peace built with women becomes a foundation for justice, reconciliation and lasting security, she stressed.
Shama Obaed Islam, State Minister for Foreign Affairs of Bangladesh, recalled that, following the 1971 war of liberation, President Ziaur Rahman “institutionalized women’s empowerment” by establishing a women’s affairs division in the Government. Additionally, former Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia – the first woman to hold this office – following her release after over six years of detention under the previous regime, urged a country rebuilt on love and peace. “This ethos continues to inform our current policy orientation,” she said.
Rosa Yolanda Villavicencio, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Colombia and Council President for June, speaking in her national capacity, said that her country learned a fundamental lesson during its long civil conflict. “Colombia’s [2016] peace agreement set a global precedent […] with over 100 concrete actions, such as no amnesties for sexual violence and the creation of a special forum on gender for peace,” she explained.
Peace Built without Women is Fragile
Pakistan warned that “peace built without women is peace built on fragile ground”, stressing that women do not enter negotiations merely to add another voice, but to bring the concerns of families, communities and future generations into rooms too often dominated by power politics. Denmark’s delegate, in a similar vein, said that when women participate, peace agreements are more likely to last, because they “often have perspectives and constituencies that are otherwise overlooked”.
Brazil’s representative argued that the women, peace and security agenda must not be treated as “ancillary” to the Council’s work. “The participation of women is not just a simple normative imperative, but an essential precondition for conflict prevention, mediation, peacebuilding and post-conflict recovery,” added the representative of Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Educational, Racial Barriers to Women’s Participation
Others focused on the barriers that still prevent women from shaping peace efforts. The representative of the United States warned that women and girls in conflict settings face worsening violence, exclusion from education and jobs, limited social protections and pervasive sexual violence. She underscored the situation in Afghanistan, where “the Taliban have denied young women pathways to receive an education, secure jobs, or receive training”, and also pointed to crises in Sudan and South Sudan, where insecurity and humanitarian collapse disproportionately affect women and girls.
Panama’s delegate stressed that indigenous, Afro-descendant and rural women peacebuilders encounter increased obstacles to participation, as well as higher risks of reprisals.
The Russian Federation’s representative cautioned that women’s participation must be effective in practice, “rather than just exist as something that’s being checked off on paper”. She warned against simplistic approaches, including artificial quotas, and said women in conflict-affected countries need improved economic conditions, education and decent work if they are to participate meaningfully in peace and security processes.
Funding, Political Will Key to Bolstering Women’s Role
Many stressed that implementation will require resources and political will. The European Union, in its capacity as observer, said the bloc “leads by example” by appointing women with strong mediation mandates in regions such as the Horn of Africa and upholding a minimum 33 per cent target for women’s participation in Union-supported peace-process activities. Saudi women contribute to various international programmes and partnerships for women’s empowerment, Saudi Arabia’s delegate added. Stressing the need to ensure the full and meaningful participation of women in mediation and peacebuilding, he highlighted the plight of women suffering under the Israeli occupation.
The United Kingdom’s delegate called on the international community to tackle barriers limiting women’s access to “political power, financing and security”, citing support for women-led organizations in fragile and conflict-affected settings. The representative of China recalled the Beijing World Conference on Women and warned that the annual funding gap for gender equality in developing countries is as high as $420 billion, urging developed countries to fulfil their aid commitments.
For Ukraine, the women, peace and security agenda “is no longer an abstraction” but reflected in women who defend the country in uniform, treat victims of missile strikes and support survivors of conflict, its delegate said. “The women, peace and security agenda is not a side chapter… it is one of the foundations of a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace,” he stressed.
