The UN’s otherwise transformative Women, Peace and Security agenda has a blind spot for corruption. Twenty-five years on from the UN’s landmark Resolution 1325, Ara Marcen Naval argues for integrating anti-corruption into the WPS agenda as an essential act of justice and protection.
Twenty-five years after the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is one of the most influential policy frameworks ever created. It changed how we think about women in conflict, not as victims, but as leaders and peacebuilders.
Yet one factor continues to corrode every pillar of the WPS framework: corruption.
Corruption in defence and security institutions is not a background governance issue. It fuels the daily insecurity of women and girls, through sexual extortion, trafficking, bribery, and impunity. It denies survivors justice and hollow outs the very institutions meant to protect them.
The blind spot between two agendas
Despite decades of evidence, anti-corruption and WPS remain largely disconnected. WPS frameworks focus on prevention, protection, participation, and recovery, while anti-corruption efforts still treat corruption as a neutral governance problem rather than a gendered one.
The result is a blind spot. Corruption actively drives gender-based violence, but remains invisible in policy design.
In Somalia, Human Rights Watch documented survival sex in camps where aid distribution was captured by corrupt officials. In Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), UN peacekeepers’ sexual abuse was enabled by opaque, corrupt oversight systems. In Nigeria, displaced women were forced into “sex-for-food” arrangements under the protection of complicit security personnel. These are not isolated abuses: they are symptoms of a political economy where power, sex, and money reinforce one another, a system of transactional violence that corrupt institutions sustain and conceal.
Integrity as the missing link
The WPS agenda and anti-corruption movements share a common foundation: accountability, transparency, participation, and the rule of law. Yet, as DCAF’s A Security Sector Governance Approach to Women, Peace and Security brief shows, these principles have rarely been integrated in practice. Good governance in defence means more than technical reform; it means ensuring that the institutions entrusted with protection do not become sites of abuse.
When corruption infiltrates security forces, it erodes trust, undermines justice, and deepens gendered insecurity. As the UN Secretary-General’s 2021 Report on WPS recognised, unchecked defence expenditure, weak civilian oversight, and the under-representation of women in decision-making continue to compromise the WPS agenda’s credibility. Integrating anti-corruption is therefore not an add-on, it is central to restoring the agenda’s transformative intent.
A self-perpetuating loop
When corruption takes root, it weakens institutions and deepens insecurity in mutually reinforcing ways:
- Corruption erodes trust through bribery, diversion of aid, and patronage.
When officials misuse public resources or demand sexual favours in exchange for protection or food, trust in the state collapses, giving space to an economy of coercion sustained by corruption.
- Insecurity grows as armed groups and traffickers are enabled.
Corruption does not merely accompany insecurity; it funds and protects it. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the OECD have shown how bribery, collusion, and document fraud by police, customs, and military officials allow traffickers and armed groups to operate freely. In conflict zones, these networks exploit weak oversight to smuggle weapons, tax humanitarian aid, and traffic women and children. In northeast Nigeria, corrupt soldiers and camp elders took bribes from traffickers, while others turned a blind eye to the trade in displaced women and girls.
- Sexual and gender-based violence proliferates
Once violence becomes profitable and unpunished, sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) spreads, committed by both state and non-state actors. The UN Secretary-General’s annual report on conflict-related sexual violence lists government forces, militias, and extremist groups alike as perpetrators, often in environments where corruption has weakened command accountability. At the same time, those controlling access to aid, security, or justice use sexual favours as currency, a pattern that Transparency International defines as “sexual corruption” or sextortion. In peacekeeping operations, UN reviews found that sexual exploitation and other forms of misconduct frequently occurred alongside bribery and embezzlement, showing that the same systems that enable financial corruption also enable gendered violence.
- Impunity deepens when survivors are silenced and perpetrators protected.
Judicial and political corruption ensure that abuse rarely meets justice. Research on judicial corruption and gender details how bribery, interference, and extortion within courts suppress complaints and deter survivors from reporting. In Somalia, investigators found that peacekeeper abuses were ignored by internal systems that lacked independence; in the DRC and Burundi, security forces used bribes or political protection to evade prosecution. This impunity normalises violence and dissuades others from seeking redress.
- Corruption becomes entrenched, feeding the cycle anew.
As citizens lose trust in state institutions and seek protection from armed or criminal networks, corrupt actors consolidate power. Patronage replaces legitimacy, and both state and non-state forces profit from illicit actions, arms smuggling, trafficking, and the monetisation of protection. The Arms Trade Treaty of 2014 recognised this dynamic by linking arms exports to the risk of gender-based violence in Article 7(4), yet implementation remains weak, particularly where corruption is not explicitly addressed.
Corruption enables violent and predatory actors → those actors perpetrate SGBV and other abuses → justice systems fail due to corruption → insecurity and impunity expand → corruption becomes self-sustaining.
Breaking the loop requires restoring integrity at every level, from how resources are distributed to how survivors are heard. Without accountability and transparency, gender-based violence will continue to be both a symptom and a driver of corruption-fuelled insecurity.
How corruption undermines the four WPS pillars
A recent report by Transparency International, Closing the Blindspot: Confronting Corruption to Advance Women, Peace and Security, analyses how corruption undermines the four WPS pillars:
Prevention: Corruption fuels conflict before it turns violent. In fragile contexts, opaque procurement and arms diversion empower militias and traffickers. As Transparency International Defence and Security notes, the diversion of aid and sexual extortion are not incidental, they are deliberate abuses of entrusted authority that transform protection into exploitation.
Protection: When police and courts can be bribed, legal commitments to protect women become meaningless. In Burundi and the DRC, corrupt law enforcement routinely ignored reports of sexual violence. UN missions found that sexual exploitation by peacekeepers often occurred alongside other financial corruption, a dual failure of integrity and protection. As one UN lessons learned study concluded, misconduct and corruption “occurred in tandem,” undermining both justice and operational credibility.
Participation: Patronage networks inside security institutions reward loyalty over competence, blocking women and marginalised groups from leadership. According to the Saferworld-led WPS Helpdesk’s report Women, Peace and Security in Defence, “simply adding women and stirring” without dismantling entrenched masculine hierarchies risks reinforcing exclusion. Genuine participation requires integrity in recruitment, promotion, and decision-making, dismantling systems where advancement depends on connections or bribes.
Relief & Recovery: Post-conflict reconstruction often creates new opportunities for corruption, particularly when oversight is weak and aid flows are large. In many contexts, male commanders and local elites have diverted demobilisation packages, housing, and aid resources away from women and marginalised groups. In Sierra Leone and Liberia, female ex-combatants were frequently excluded from reintegration schemes that prioritised men or required the surrender of weapons they never had. Others reported having to pay or provide sexual favours to access benefits, a practice that turned relief into coercion.
Corruption also distorts transitional justice and humanitarian aid. In Haiti, reports of peacekeepers involved in sex-for-aid exchanges revealed how opaque procurement and weak accountability perpetuated abuse even after hostilities ended. In South Sudan and Nigeria, investigations have found in some contexts that relief supplies were diverted and displaced women and girls resorted to “survival sex” to obtain food or protection.
Recovery without integrity is fragile: it rebuilds infrastructure but not trust. Embedding anti-corruption measures into reconstruction, humanitarian oversight, and transitional justice processes is essential to ensure survivor-centred recovery. Transparent aid allocation, gender-responsive audits, and independent complaint mechanisms are as critical to peacebuilding as disarmament or reconciliation.
Bridging agendas: from compliance to justice and from principle to practice
The separation between gender and integrity work is institutional, not conceptual. Both ask the same question: who holds power, and who pays the price when it is abused?
A gender-responsive integrity system reframes anti-corruption as a justice issue. Applying a gender lens to corruption exposes abuses that traditional risk assessments miss from sexual extortion in police custody to the gendered effects of illicit financial flows.
Integrating anti-corruption into WPS is a prerequisite for credible implementation.
In practice, this means embedding gender analysis into corruption risk assessments, designing survivor-safe reporting channels, and building partnerships with women-led civil society organisations that can bridge trust between communities and security actors. It also means treating sexual corruption, or “sextortion”, as both an integrity violation and a form of gender-based violence.
Governments, regional organisations, and peace operations can take five practical steps:
- Acknowledge the risk – Name sextortion and “sex-for-aid” as both corruption and gender-based violence.
- Assess with a gender lens – Embed gender-sensitive corruption risk assessments in security-sector reform (SSR) and peacekeeping programmes.
- Embed safeguards – Create survivor-safe reporting and vetting systems in defence and police forces.
- Enable accountability – Strengthen parliaments, human rights institutions, and watchdog NGOs.
- Align international tools – Link WPS with other framworks such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) and the Arms Trade Treaty for a coherent integrity framework.
The evidence gap
There is still no globally agreed definition of sextortion, and few risk assessments are sex-disaggregated. Without data, oversight cannot act; without accountability, impunity thrives. Treating sexual corruption as both an integrity breach and a form of violence would bring long-overdue coherence to global norms and close the conceptual divide that has long undermined implementation.
Conclusion: Integrity as peacebuilding
Peace built on corruption is fragile peace. Integrating anti-corruption into the WPS agenda is not a bureaucratic fix, it is an act of justice. The credibility of WPS in its next 25 years depends on whether we dare to confront the systems of power, political, economic, and gendered, that enable violence in the first place.
Ara Marcen Naval is a human rights specialist and independent consultant. She previously was the Head of Advocacy for Transparency International’s Defence and Security Programme, working towards raising awareness of the nexus of corruption, conflict and insecurity. Prior to that, Marcen Naval was Deputy Director for Global Issues at Amnesty International, where she headed up the organisation’s global research, campaigning and advocacy on issues including the arms trade, torture trade, policing weapons, and the use of inhumane weapons around the world and other disarmament related issues.
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: UN Photo/Sylvain Liechti. A UN Peacekeeper on patrol in Beni territory, North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2014.
