After a quarter-century of bipartisan British commitment to the Women Peace and Security agenda, the current Labour government suddenly seems loath to mention or fund it. Toni Haastrup and Jamie J. Hagen make the case for reprioritising the feminist principles of gender equality and inclusion in UK policy.
By Toni Haastrup and Jamie J. Hagen
To date, successive UK governments have committed to the global Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Yet recent cuts in funding to gender equality initiatives globally, as well as the exclusion of the agenda from the most recent Strategic Defence Review and the National Security Strategy, suggest a retrenchment of WPS. We argue here that the UK must continue to prioritise gender equality and inclusion in its international relations, and that the WPS agenda continues to serves as an important entry point for policy programming that reflects these feminist principles.
The WPS agenda is a global policy and normative framework established by United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR). Broadly, it is aimed at increasing women’s participation in peace processes, protecting women’s rights during conflicts, and ensuring gender perspectives are integrated into security policies and practices. The adoption of and progress on the agenda is a result of feminist campaigning.
For 25 years, the WPS agenda has served as an important entry point for bringing gender equality concerns to the fore of global and local politics. As threats against equalities for gender minorities increase at home and abroad, it brings into sharp focus the importance of acknowledging an expansive notion of (in)securities in transnational context. Yet, as far as the UK is concerned, notions of security on the domestic level have mainly been divorced from those understood within the international and thus decoupled from the UK’s international responses to (in)security.
In this article, we consider ways that the UK government can demonstrate leadership as a gender justice champion through a recommitment to the implementation of the WPS agenda with an emphasis on making the links between security at home and abroad as part of a more holistic security agenda.
Bringing the WPS agenda home
Typically, the UK approach to WPS has been on the agenda’s relevance to other sites of insecurity. This has been very useful in accessing much needed funds, particularly in lower income countries, for services and programmes that help women. Yet this approach has obscured the relevance of the WPS agenda in a more local UK context.
The current UK National Action Plan (NAP) already acknowledges that the WPS agenda has domestic relevance. Drawing on different strands of our research on peacebuilding and the WPS agenda – in the context of ongoing conflict in Sudan, and the peace process in Colombia – we suggest that the recovery of the feminist aspirations of the WPS agenda can be important for translating the UK’s WPS approach to an internal context.
To take an example, women in the UK are just as likely to find value in innovative feminist solutions to the crimes of gender-based violence (GBV) that have been pioneered elsewhere and in the context of the UK’s foreign policy. As such, beyond carceral interventions to support survivors of GBV, UK WPS support has gone toward direct support for mental health and psychosocial care. Importantly, domesticating brings these lessons back home so that the same aptitude for addressing root causes of insecurity through means other than the military translates into real action for gender minorities within the UK.
Gender-expansive implementation
Presently, the UK’s 2023-2027 National Action Plan is the main framework for guiding UK WPS action. Its most recent iteration was developed under the previous government and is about halfway through its implementation cycle, with a refresh anticipated under the current Labour government.
However, we would actually encourage a full mid-term review of the UK NAP that would offer opportunities to respond to the increasing attacks on LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) people through international and domestic policy dimensions. Such a review of the current NAP allows decision-makers to transcend the NAP’s current limitations by centring structural transformation, and inclusive accountability. In the current climate of threats against organisations focused on gender, reproductive and LGBTQ rights, these lifesaving organisations face severe cutbacks to their core work due to funding cuts as we’ve seen across many global North countries.
Championing WPS in humanitarian support as foreign policy priority
As the world experiences multiple crises of climate change, pandemics and forced displacements, the humanitarian costs are seemingly innumerable. It is essential, however, that responses are inclusive and do not replicate existing inequalities.
In 2021, and as part of the Generation Equality, a platform to accelerate action on gender equality and women’s rights via feminist action, UN Women launched the Compact on Women, Peace and Security and Humanitarian Action (WPS-HA). With over 235 stakeholders from different constituencies including academia, philanthropy, governments and private businesses. Importantly, the WPS-HA reinforced the importance of WPS outside of immediate conflict contexts, providing a normative anchor that insists on a right-based and inclusive approach to humanitarian action. WPS-HA importantly highlights that most insecurities experienced across the world do not demand a heavy reliance on military solutions despite this direction of travel by many governments, including the UK’s.
Opportunities for UK implementation of the WPS agenda today
Reflecting on the last 25 years of the WPS agenda, there have been some successes but also many disappointments. We offer three ways to promote feminist practices in UK WPS efforts.
First, language matters. It is important that policy-makers move beyond a binary framing of gender that focuses on men and women, especially given the continued targeting of transgender people and LGBTQ communities within the UK and in conflict and humanitarian settings. Without recognising the experiences of transgender, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people, the UK’s WPS approach risks being exclusionary.
Second, improved scrutiny for WPS implementation across government and between Westminster and the devolved administrations is essential to ensure consistency and accountability in how the UK government deploys WPS at home and abroad. This allows the government to address gendered security challenges effectively within and outside the UK. Likewise, it is important to revisit funding decisions on official development assistance (ODA) and social security. Specifically, funding should be prioritised to grassroot organisations, shelter and crisis services delivering to marginalised communities.
Finally, there are many opportunities for actors to engage consistently with the WPS-HA Compact. This includes within UK higher education institutions, like the University of Manchester, which is already a signatory to the Compact. Working through the WPS-HA Compact is a useful mechanism for the UK to embed feminist insights into its humanitarian work with LGBTQ organizations, and especially in the Global South.
This moment calls for a recovery of the feminist aspirations of the WPS agenda to address existing gaps in support for gender initiatives in the face of anti-gender threats domestically and internationally. UK decision-makers are well positioned to take leadership in this area as a penholder on the WPS agenda in the UN Security Council. By leveraging its role within the broader WPS ecosystem, the UK can uphold best practices for prioritising feminist commitments in peace and security work for all.
Toni Haastrup is a professor and Chair in Global Politics at the University of Manchester. Her work situated within a broader feminist international studies, interrogates enduring power hierarchies in global politics. This feminist work bridges scholarly and policy debates on themes in foreign policy, peace and security, and international development.
Jamie J. Hagen is a lecturer in Global Politics at the University of Manchester and works at the intersection of gender, security studies, and queer theory. She brings a queer feminist, anti-racist approach to bridging gaps between academics, policy, and activism.
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: Atlas Illustrations, via Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats.
