United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 was adopted in October 2000, marking a historic commitment to advancing women’s participation in peace and security governance, preventing gender-based violence, protecting women’s rights and safety, and ensuring their needs are addressed in post-conflict relief and recovery efforts (Cohn, Kinsella, and Gibbings 2004). Four years after adoption of Resolution 1325, the President of the UN Security Council made a statement applauding “the efforts of Member States in implementing Resolution 1325 (2000) at the national level, including the development of national action plans” and encouraging states “to continue to pursue such implementation” (United Nations Security Council 2004, 3). National action plans (NAPs) are domestic policy documents that articulate their commitments to the implementation of the women, peace, and security (WPS) agenda,1 providing insight into the WPS interests and priorities of states.

In an early conversation on the relevance of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, the resolution is described by Carol Cohn as presenting “an important tool to all of us who seek the empowerment of women and sustainable peace, and who believe that the two are interconnected,” and by Sheri Gibbings as a “tool to justify military occupation on behalf of ‘liberating’ women” (Cohn, Kinsella, and Gibbings 2004, 138–9). Both prospects have been borne out in the 25 years of the implementation of, and rhetoric relating to, UNSCR 1325 and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda that emerged from the landmark resolution. There is substantive documentation of, and scholarship on, the implementation of the agenda (see, for example, Coomaraswamy 2015; Davies and True 2019). It is evident from this literature that the realization of feminist peace, which propelled civil society advocacy for the passage of UNSCR 1325, has not been the only driving factor behind this implementation. In practice, the WPS resolutions have been employed by a range of actors for varying purposes.

Nancy Pelosi makes history. She was the first woman elected to a high-ranking position in the US House of Representatives when she became the Democratic Whip in 2001. She made more history as the first female Democratic Leader in 2003, and first woman elected as Speaker of the House in 2007. She made history by remaining the Democratic Leader even after losing the House majority. Pelosi made history yet again when she was again elected Speaker in 2019, joining Sam Rayburn as the only House leader to lose and then regain the Speakership.

Which stories of conflict we hear, and who gets to narrate future visions for peace matters. Nearly a decade ago, I published an article in International Affairs (Hagen 2016) highlighting the need to challenge cisgender and heteronormative assumptions embedded within the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Since then, I have had the opportunity to speak widely about what motivated me to write on the topic: a lack of attention to lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women in what at that time was 15 years of work on WPS. As a queer feminist lesbian I am emotionally and intellectually invested in transnational women’s rights organizing. I was perplexed by the near absence of sexuality as an intersectional dimension of gender justice, despite the prominent role lesbians have always played in the movement globally. This weakness within the women’s peace movement’s coalitional organizing is now under significant strain amid growing anti-trans attacks with governments turning to securitizing responses to moral panic over trans rights (Leigh 2025, Currah 2022). Still, queer and trans organizers like Amani in Tunisia persist in working for their own visions of a peaceful future, taking advantage of opportunities for allyship where possible.

As we mark 25 years since the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), the place of this landmark agenda on the global political stage has never been more fragile, nor more fraught. In the same breath, the importance of paying careful and critical attention to men, masculinities, and their positioning in and relationship to the WPS agenda — and peace and security writ large — has never been more apparent, nor more urgent. By calling attention to women’s diverse roles in and experiences of armed conflict within the world’s paramount security body, the unanimous adoption of UNSCR 1325 by the Security Council was groundbreaking.

Over the first quarter of the 21st century, the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda became established as the most important policy framework linking gender issues to peace and security problems. WPS work has proceeded along two tracks: a nongovernmental track comprised of women’s rights activists and gender scholars; and a policy track directed by national governments and intergovernmental organizations (Brown and de Jonge Oudraat 2025). Both tracks have been instrumental in advancing the WPS agenda, including the adoption by the UN Security Council of ten WPS resolutions—starting with Resolution 1325 in October 2000. The 25th anniversary of UNSCR 1325 is an appropriate occasion to assess WPS accomplishments to date and define WPS priorities for the years ahead.

UNSCR 1325, which in 2000 formally announced the international Women and Peace and Security (WPS) agenda for action, enjoins a battle that can never end, one in which women will always find themselves on the back foot—but one which remains worth fighting. It is the battle to make the ear of man listen to what women know about security and about peace that men might not. It is also the battle to understand that there will be no peace within and between nations until and unless there is peace between men and women. In this essay, penned in May 2025, I reflect on the current situation of the WPS agenda, with an emphasis on the United States, and what the future of that agenda may be.