Women, Peace, and Security

What is Women, Peace, and Security?

Four Pillars of WPS

Prevention

Preventing conflict before it starts is the most desirable outcome. Where gender equality is stronger, conflict is less likely to take hold, therefore, advancing gender equality should be a long term priority for preventing larger-scale conflict. In practice, this could be through culture-changing workshops, prosecuting those who threaten women's safety and gender equality, and strengthening women's rights under federal law. 

Protection

Women and girls face unique risks during conflict, so special measures must be taken to ensure their safety, especially from sexual and gender-based violence. This pillar calls for protecting women and girls in emergency and humanitarian situations, including refugee camps, both in the immediate crisis and in its aftermath. In practice, this could be resources like shelters and hotlines to support women at risk.  

Participation

This pillar calls for the inclusion of women in decision-making and peace processes at every level, from local councils to national, regional, and international institutions. When participation is equal and meaningful, peace and security processes become more inclusive, more legitimate, and durable as a result. Women's involvement in policy and decision-making also makes conflict less likely to arise. 

Relief and Recovery

After conflict, rebuilding requires attention to the specific needs of women and girls. Women-led organizations play a vital role to help ensure safe access to food, water, and hygiene resources to women and their families, so they are often times the primary caretakers of the family and elders. This pillar also calls for recourse, reparations, and resources for victimes and survivors. 

WPS at the Local Level

When state governments fail to adopt WPS policy, such as states that have not written National Action Plans (NAPs), localities often become the primary actors addressing these issues. Grassroots civil society organizations and municipal governments step in through informal advocacy and local ordinances to fill the vacuum. Even where federal WPS policy does exist, it frequently proves insufficient due to underfunding or only being symbolically adopted.

Overarching federal security policies often operate as rigid, generic frameworks that fail to capture the grounded realities of women's daily lives. National Action Plans (NAPs) primarily focus on formal diplomacy, leaving critical gaps in addressing everyday issues affecting women's security such as localized gender-based violence, political inclusion, and resource access. Local-level WPS policies bridge these gaps by bringing peace frameworks directly into municipal and district spaces. Local governments and grassroots groups possess direct insight into their communities, permitting local initiatives, such as Local Action Plans (LAPs) or municipal ordinances, to cater to location-specific needs rather than applying a single, generic policy across an entire state.