The WPS Agenda at a Critical Juncture
When Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) was adopted by the Security Council in 2000, African women especially declared a major victory. For women’s rights activists and feminists, UNSCR 1325 represented a groundbreaking international recognition of the unique impact of conflict on women and girls. Importantly, it affirmed that women are not just victims of war but also agents of peace as decision-makers on security issues. UNSCR 1325 highlighted the importance of protection for those affected by sexual and gender-based violence, which was a pressing issue in many African countries. Most significantly, 1325 provided the impetus to integrate its principles into new legal and policy frameworks like the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol) and the Continental Results Framework (CRF). WPS has thus helped to reinforce accountability and advance feminist peace across the continent.
As the WPS agenda marks its 25th anniversary, however, it faces serious challenges. Originally established through UNSCR1325 in 2000, the WPS agenda calls for women’s participation in peace processes, conflict prevention, protection against sexualized violence, and gender equality in post-conflict reconstruction. Some of the challenges in achieving the aims of UNSCR 1325 are foundational, plagued by funding cuts, slow implementation, and roll back on commitments. Thus, despite policy gains and localization efforts across the African continent (UNOAU 2022), globally, the WPS framework now confronts systematic opposition threatening its core principles.
Anti-gender mobilizations are occurring worldwide, and their impact is both significant and growing. They target a range of pro-gender norms, one of which is the WPS agenda. On April 29, 2024, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth terminated the WPS program for his department (Gedeon Reference Gedeon2025), signaling how even long-standing, seemingly institutionalized commitments to gender-inclusive security can be rapidly dismantled. Hegseth justified his vandalism of the WPS agenda as a corrective to feminist advocacy (Hegseth Reference Hegseth2025). Almost a decade ago in Colombia, there were anti-gender mobilizations against the then-proposed peace agreement due to its inclusion of LGBTQ+ protections, resulting in a narrow defeat of the peace agreement. Anti-gender mobilizations are thus a real and direct threat to feminist peace aspirations.
In a recent roundtable of experts marking the 25th anniversary of the WPS agenda, the collective conclusion is that “feminist principles and the WPS Agenda are increasingly attacked, delegitimized, and under threat.” They are facing “systemic backlash against gender equality, orchestrated resistance to inclusive language, and the reassertion of patriarchal and authoritarian politics across global and local levels” (PRIF 2025).This essay examines how this international resistance to progressive gender norms is reshaping possibilities for feminist peace in Africa, and how pan-African feminist movements are developing counter-resistance strategies.
Reactionary Responses to Feminist Inroads in Global Politics
Anti-gender mobilizations represent more than scattered resistance to feminist gains. They constitute a coordinated transnational movement (see Ayoub and Stoeckl Reference Ayoub and Stoeckl2024). Elizabeth Corredor defines anti-gender mobilizations “as palpable transnational countermovements and their use of gender ideology as salient counterstrategies to feminist and LGBTQ+ social movements.” (Reference Corredor2019, 614). In Africa, resistance to so-called gender ideology has been increasingly visible and informed by both endogenous and exogenous forces (Awondo, Bouilly, and N’Diaye Reference Awondo, Bouilly and N’Diaye2022). These movements encompass diverse social and political actors who have constructed “gender” as an ideological threat. Like the broader rise of the far right, anti-gender mobilizations directly challenge accepted norms and practices of gender-responsive human rights and those who advocate for such rights. Often, their messaging finds resonance amongst those who reduce gender to women, due to their investment in excluding other marginalized groups facing gender-based exclusions.
In Africa specifically, religious leaders, media figures, and community authorities strategically use gender and sexuality as propaganda tools to legitimize themselves in public spaces. These actors systematically stigmatize “gender ideology” as a form of Western imperialism, claiming it destroys the social order of African societies, a framing that attracts support beyond religious groups. Adherents exploit colonial-era moral codes and broader and real anxieties about Western imposition in the post-colonial order (see Mama Reference Mama2020). Coined by the Vatican in the 1990s, gender ideology has become a rallying cry for a networked coalition of religious conservatives, far-right populists, and militarized regimes seeking to roll back feminist gains. Anti-gender mobilizations are not isolated campaigns but reflect a deliberate strategy to conflate gender equality with neocolonialism, thereby legitimizing authoritarian governance, particularly in those places with fragile security and in search of peace.
On the African continent the mobilization of anti-gender movements relies on the strategic deployment of cultural and religious narratives to undermine rights. In Uganda, “religious anti-gay movements and beliefs are persistent,” with no major religion expressing “an openly tolerant attitude to homosexuality” (Mulucha Reference Mulucha2022). This cultural/social framing of homosexuality positions it as “fundamentally un-African,” which influences “societal attitudes of homophobia, transphobia, and stigma.” What is significant is that these narratives, despite the strides of WPS agenda, increasingly extend beyond sexuality to undermine women’s rights more broadly. These narratives position gender equality as alien to African contexts with implications for those who promote WPS aspirations.
The WPS agenda and anti-gender mobilizations that leverage cultural nationalism collide in different ways. In Sudan, the post-2019 transitional government faced resistance from Islamist groups framing feminist demands for political inclusion as “un-Islamic,” while Ethiopia’s federal forces have weaponized anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric to suppress dissent in Tigray (Martin de Almagro Iniesta and Benson Reference Martin de Almagro Iniesta and Benson2025). The anti-gender movement thus operates as both a cultural and geopolitical tool, enabling regimes to consolidate power by aligning with global right-wing networks while suppressing domestic dissent. All these have implications for the evolution of the WPS agenda on the African continent.
Corredor conceptualizes anti-gender mobilizations as countermovements as
“a constellation of social actors, networks, and organizations of shared concern that make sustained contrary claims to an opposing social movement’s objectives and involve continuing, dialectical interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities” (Reference Corredor2019, 618).
Across Africa, the WPS agenda is increasingly imperiled by the rise of anti-gender mobilizations that intersect with authoritarianism and militarized state practices. Many governments across the continent are leveraging regressive gender politics to consolidate power and restrict civic space.
The Legalization of Exclusion and Violence
Across several African states, laws have been passed or proposed that criminalize expressions of gender and sexuality deemed deviant or “unnatural.” (see Hemmings, Reference Hemmings2021). In Uganda, the state has weaponized legal frameworks to curtail gender justice and entrench authoritarian rule. Long recognized as one of the most homophobic countries globally, Uganda has institutionalized anti-LGBTQI+ violence through legislation such as the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023. This law has not only sanctioned systemic abuse but also emboldened political leaders to exploit homophobia for electoral gain. By framing LGBTQI+ rights as “un-African” and foreign-imposed, state and religious actors fuel public intolerance while masking state repression.
Meanwhile, a 2024 study reveals state-sponsored sexual violence against women human rights defenders (WHRDs) in Uganda, with perpetrators invoking anti-gender tropes to frame activists as “immoral” threats to development (see Ahikire and Mwiine Reference Ahikire and Mwiine2024). Similarly, Ghana’s proposed Family Values Bill criminalizes LGBTQI+ advocacy, drawing on rhetoric from local actors like the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values, led by a Ghanian lawyer, Moses Foh-Amoaning. The organization ostensibly defends “African morality” against “Western decadence” (Datta Reference Datta2024).
Notably, while Uganda’s 2021–5 National Action Plan on WPS pledges to enhance women’s participation in peacebuilding, the government simultaneously entrenches militarized governance and supports anti-LGBTQI+ laws undermining bodily autonomy (Martin de Almagro Iniesta and Benson Reference Martin de Almagro Iniesta and Benson2025). The use of legal frameworks emboldens state authorities to act contra to the aspirations of the WPS agenda and especially to advancing inclusive peacebuilding agendas.
Militarization and the Hollowing of the WPS Agenda
From Mali to Sudan, the brutal gendered consequences of protracted conflict and the erosion of state capacity reveal themselves. In both contexts, armed groups perpetrate sexual violence without compunction, at the same time that these actors are seen as the path toward peace. The breakdown of justice and security institutions leave women survivors with few avenues for redress. Distrust in public institutions, fear of retaliation, and deep-seated stigma silences survivors, while perpetrators go unpunished. The normalization of such gender-based violence undermines the foundational principles of the WPS agenda, revealing how militarization and impunity intersect to perpetuate cycles of trauma and exclusion.
Despite increased advocacy of feminist peacebuilders, militarism still underpins the meaning of security in a lot of African peace and security systems. Patriarchy sustains militarism by valorizing dominance, aggression, and ultimately violence as legitimate expressions of power to achieve security. In this framing, peace is attained via masculinist protection and control and invariably the marginalization of women’s voices. This normalization of systemic exclusion entrenches militarism as both necessary and inevitable.
Taken together, these various cases underscore a growing trend: anti-gender ideologies in Africa are not isolated social attitudes but are increasingly institutionalized and tied to broader authoritarian and militarist projects. This not only weakens feminist peacebuilding initiatives but also threatens the core objectives of the WPS agenda — namely, inclusive security, justice, and sustainable peace. WHRDs are especially targeted, facing digital surveillance, legal harassment, and escalating violence (Ahikire and Mwiine Reference Ahikire and Mwiine2024).
Shrinking Civic Space for Women Human Rights Defenders
WHRDs remain significant to the promotion and implementation of the WPS agenda. Yet, across sub-Saharan Africa, and despite progressive frameworks like the Maputo Protocol, they face escalating threats within an increasingly restricted civic space. These attacks include “physical violence, sexual harassment and violence, online harassment and intimidation, legal harassment and persecution, and social and economic ostracism” (RFLD 2023). Further undermining gender equality, WHRDs are “frequently targeted for their gender, facing sexual harassment, rape, and other forms of sexual violence” (RFLD 2023).
Targeted violence against WHRDs has now expanded into the digital sphere. They experience greater instances of “cyberbullying, trolling, and doxxing… used to spread misinformation, discredit their work, and inflict emotional distress” (RFLD 2023). The parallel development of anti-gender movements and technology facilitated violence is not lost on feminist scholars working on WPS (Haastrup Reference Haastrup2024). Yet, responses are often unsatisfactory since feminists and WHRDs have found greater opportunities for advocacy in the digital arena. Responding to anti-gender resistance via the blocking of online platforms “further erodes gender justice, minimising the potential for collective action and the amplification of marginalised voices” (Amuku and Marunga Reference Amuku and Murunga2023).
Transnational Solidarities: Feminist Knowledge and Alternative Narratives
African feminist movements are strategically building transnational solidarity networks to counter the well-funded global anti-gender movement (see Hivos 2024). The ability to convene in transnational spaces, often making use of new digital technologies, enables the sharing of strategies and resources while building collective power. Transnational connections highlight how feminist organizing in Africa addresses “the nexus of strategy, voice, and power” (Pereira Reference Pereira2017, 16). These spaces have been instrumental to collectively ensuring how gender is integrated into peace and security frameworks, for example in regional instruments like the Maputo Protocol. Even as anti-gender campaigns increasingly contest these normative frameworks, weakening the political will of states to implement or defend them, feminists continue to push for change together.
The work of feminists in the context of the WPS ecosystem is one whose strength lies in its capacity to account for diverse experiences of violence and exclusion. As such, they work against anti-gender mobilizations that seek to erase this complexity by promoting rigid binaries and “traditional” gender roles, thereby flattening the plural knowledges and strategies necessary for just peace. African feminist action, thus, demands a political reckoning with the forces that seek to instrumentalize gender for repression, and a recommitment to feminist solidarities that transcend borders and resist militarized governance (see Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025a; Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025c).
By creating platforms for amplifying women’s voices in peace processes, feminist networks challenge the patriarchal and militarized framing of security. In the lead up to the 25th anniversary of the WPS agenda, these gatherings have been especially important and take different forms. For example, the annual gathering of feminists and women’s rights advocates on the margins of the African Union Summit via the Gender is my Agenda Campaign (GIMAC) allows for the exchange of ideas around the Summit’s themes but more often than not, also on ongoing insecurities on the continent. Here, women from conflict affected contexts in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Cameroon can explore similarities and differences and meet in solidarity. Spaces like GIMAC demonstrate how transnational feminist solidarity can create protected institutional spaces for developing visions for peace and justice even amid ongoing conflict.
In 2025, Sudan shows the possibilities of feminist resistance in such contexts. Since the most recent conflict in April 2023, Sudanese women have mobilized under extraordinarily difficult conditions to craft a feminist peace agenda (see Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025b). The strength of this sort of active mobilization against anti-gender mobilizations emphasizes the need to address structural inequalities. Transnational feminist platforms provide the space to link local struggles to regional and global networks, where Sudanese feminists can advance alternative paradigms of peacebuilding that challenge militarism and from which others can learn.
Beyond the “doing” of peace, the aspirations of WPS are often intangible with the primary contribution being knowledge-making. African feminist knowledge is plentiful yet often ignored in the formal processes of peace and security. This ignorance, no doubt, has allowed for the foothold that global anti-gender mobilizations have had on the continent. Importantly, these knowledges have established a “challenge to militarism and coloniality as the basis of the structural violence experienced across the continent” (Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025a, 5).
In leaning on pan-Africanist understandings of feminism that is solidaristic and decolonial (Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025a; Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025c), African feminists are constructing alternative knowledge systems to counter anti-gender narratives. Feminist knowledge-making allows for the development of context-specific feminist methodologies, which allow African feminists to reclaim the intellectual terrain of gender, peace, and security discourses. In so doing, when reflecting on WPS and planning for its future in a contested context, the either-or language of progress or failure has no place in the African WPS imaginary.
Conclusion: Beyond Progress or Failure
At every milestone for the WPS agenda, there is a tendency to evaluate where we are with the agenda via implementation metrics of success or failure. Here, I try to position the ongoing struggles of feminists and advocates struggles within a broader context of resistance to authoritarianism and militarization that challenges WPS and feminist gains broadly. The research and testimonials from the lived experiences of African feminists suggests that the African continent is not that unique in terms of the infiltration of anti-gender/feminist resistance. In Africa, though, these forces pose substantive threats to feminist peace, particularly as they are better funded and deploy sophisticated strategies that combine legal, cultural, and religious tactics.
Yet, African feminist movements demonstrate remarkable resilience and innovation. By constructing alternative knowledge systems, strategically localizing the WPS agenda (see Hudson and Højlund Madsen Reference Hudson and Madsen2024), and building transnational solidarity networks, they resist the erosion of hard-won rights while reimagining peace itself. For the WPS agenda to retain its relevance as an entry point for feminist action on peace and security, however, it must directly counter the resurgence of militarism and the existence of systemic inequalities, including those brought on by patriarchy and the rollback of progressive norms. This requires expanding our understanding beyond narrow security frameworks and centering the voices of those most marginalized. It is only this way that the WPS agenda in Africa can be reclaimed — through a liberatory vision of peace and security.
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The WPS Agenda at a Critical Juncture
When Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) was adopted by the Security Council in 2000, African women especially declared a major victory. For women’s rights activists and feminists, UNSCR 1325 represented a groundbreaking international recognition of the unique impact of conflict on women and girls. Importantly, it affirmed that women are not just victims of war but also agents of peace as decision-makers on security issues. UNSCR 1325 highlighted the importance of protection for those affected by sexual and gender-based violence, which was a pressing issue in many African countries. Most significantly, 1325 provided the impetus to integrate its principles into new legal and policy frameworks like the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol) and the Continental Results Framework (CRF). WPS has thus helped to reinforce accountability and advance feminist peace across the continent.
As the WPS agenda marks its 25th anniversary, however, it faces serious challenges. Originally established through UNSCR1325 in 2000, the WPS agenda calls for women’s participation in peace processes, conflict prevention, protection against sexualized violence, and gender equality in post-conflict reconstruction. Some of the challenges in achieving the aims of UNSCR 1325 are foundational, plagued by funding cuts, slow implementation, and roll back on commitments. Thus, despite policy gains and localization efforts across the African continent (UNOAU 2022), globally, the WPS framework now confronts systematic opposition threatening its core principles.
Anti-gender mobilizations are occurring worldwide, and their impact is both significant and growing. They target a range of pro-gender norms, one of which is the WPS agenda. On April 29, 2024, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth terminated the WPS program for his department (Gedeon Reference Gedeon2025), signaling how even long-standing, seemingly institutionalized commitments to gender-inclusive security can be rapidly dismantled. Hegseth justified his vandalism of the WPS agenda as a corrective to feminist advocacy (Hegseth Reference Hegseth2025). Almost a decade ago in Colombia, there were anti-gender mobilizations against the then-proposed peace agreement due to its inclusion of LGBTQ+ protections, resulting in a narrow defeat of the peace agreement. Anti-gender mobilizations are thus a real and direct threat to feminist peace aspirations.
In a recent roundtable of experts marking the 25th anniversary of the WPS agenda, the collective conclusion is that “feminist principles and the WPS Agenda are increasingly attacked, delegitimized, and under threat.” They are facing “systemic backlash against gender equality, orchestrated resistance to inclusive language, and the reassertion of patriarchal and authoritarian politics across global and local levels” (PRIF 2025).This essay examines how this international resistance to progressive gender norms is reshaping possibilities for feminist peace in Africa, and how pan-African feminist movements are developing counter-resistance strategies.
Reactionary Responses to Feminist Inroads in Global Politics
Anti-gender mobilizations represent more than scattered resistance to feminist gains. They constitute a coordinated transnational movement (see Ayoub and Stoeckl Reference Ayoub and Stoeckl2024). Elizabeth Corredor defines anti-gender mobilizations “as palpable transnational countermovements and their use of gender ideology as salient counterstrategies to feminist and LGBTQ+ social movements.” (Reference Corredor2019, 614). In Africa, resistance to so-called gender ideology has been increasingly visible and informed by both endogenous and exogenous forces (Awondo, Bouilly, and N’Diaye Reference Awondo, Bouilly and N’Diaye2022). These movements encompass diverse social and political actors who have constructed “gender” as an ideological threat. Like the broader rise of the far right, anti-gender mobilizations directly challenge accepted norms and practices of gender-responsive human rights and those who advocate for such rights. Often, their messaging finds resonance amongst those who reduce gender to women, due to their investment in excluding other marginalized groups facing gender-based exclusions.
In Africa specifically, religious leaders, media figures, and community authorities strategically use gender and sexuality as propaganda tools to legitimize themselves in public spaces. These actors systematically stigmatize “gender ideology” as a form of Western imperialism, claiming it destroys the social order of African societies, a framing that attracts support beyond religious groups. Adherents exploit colonial-era moral codes and broader and real anxieties about Western imposition in the post-colonial order (see Mama Reference Mama2020). Coined by the Vatican in the 1990s, gender ideology has become a rallying cry for a networked coalition of religious conservatives, far-right populists, and militarized regimes seeking to roll back feminist gains. Anti-gender mobilizations are not isolated campaigns but reflect a deliberate strategy to conflate gender equality with neocolonialism, thereby legitimizing authoritarian governance, particularly in those places with fragile security and in search of peace.
On the African continent the mobilization of anti-gender movements relies on the strategic deployment of cultural and religious narratives to undermine rights. In Uganda, “religious anti-gay movements and beliefs are persistent,” with no major religion expressing “an openly tolerant attitude to homosexuality” (Mulucha Reference Mulucha2022). This cultural/social framing of homosexuality positions it as “fundamentally un-African,” which influences “societal attitudes of homophobia, transphobia, and stigma.” What is significant is that these narratives, despite the strides of WPS agenda, increasingly extend beyond sexuality to undermine women’s rights more broadly. These narratives position gender equality as alien to African contexts with implications for those who promote WPS aspirations.
The WPS agenda and anti-gender mobilizations that leverage cultural nationalism collide in different ways. In Sudan, the post-2019 transitional government faced resistance from Islamist groups framing feminist demands for political inclusion as “un-Islamic,” while Ethiopia’s federal forces have weaponized anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric to suppress dissent in Tigray (Martin de Almagro Iniesta and Benson Reference Martin de Almagro Iniesta and Benson2025). The anti-gender movement thus operates as both a cultural and geopolitical tool, enabling regimes to consolidate power by aligning with global right-wing networks while suppressing domestic dissent. All these have implications for the evolution of the WPS agenda on the African continent.
Corredor conceptualizes anti-gender mobilizations as countermovements as
“a constellation of social actors, networks, and organizations of shared concern that make sustained contrary claims to an opposing social movement’s objectives and involve continuing, dialectical interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities” (Reference Corredor2019, 618).
Across Africa, the WPS agenda is increasingly imperiled by the rise of anti-gender mobilizations that intersect with authoritarianism and militarized state practices. Many governments across the continent are leveraging regressive gender politics to consolidate power and restrict civic space.
The Legalization of Exclusion and Violence
Across several African states, laws have been passed or proposed that criminalize expressions of gender and sexuality deemed deviant or “unnatural.” (see Hemmings, Reference Hemmings2021). In Uganda, the state has weaponized legal frameworks to curtail gender justice and entrench authoritarian rule. Long recognized as one of the most homophobic countries globally, Uganda has institutionalized anti-LGBTQI+ violence through legislation such as the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023. This law has not only sanctioned systemic abuse but also emboldened political leaders to exploit homophobia for electoral gain. By framing LGBTQI+ rights as “un-African” and foreign-imposed, state and religious actors fuel public intolerance while masking state repression.
Meanwhile, a 2024 study reveals state-sponsored sexual violence against women human rights defenders (WHRDs) in Uganda, with perpetrators invoking anti-gender tropes to frame activists as “immoral” threats to development (see Ahikire and Mwiine Reference Ahikire and Mwiine2024). Similarly, Ghana’s proposed Family Values Bill criminalizes LGBTQI+ advocacy, drawing on rhetoric from local actors like the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values, led by a Ghanian lawyer, Moses Foh-Amoaning. The organization ostensibly defends “African morality” against “Western decadence” (Datta Reference Datta2024).
Notably, while Uganda’s 2021–5 National Action Plan on WPS pledges to enhance women’s participation in peacebuilding, the government simultaneously entrenches militarized governance and supports anti-LGBTQI+ laws undermining bodily autonomy (Martin de Almagro Iniesta and Benson Reference Martin de Almagro Iniesta and Benson2025). The use of legal frameworks emboldens state authorities to act contra to the aspirations of the WPS agenda and especially to advancing inclusive peacebuilding agendas.
Militarization and the Hollowing of the WPS Agenda
From Mali to Sudan, the brutal gendered consequences of protracted conflict and the erosion of state capacity reveal themselves. In both contexts, armed groups perpetrate sexual violence without compunction, at the same time that these actors are seen as the path toward peace. The breakdown of justice and security institutions leave women survivors with few avenues for redress. Distrust in public institutions, fear of retaliation, and deep-seated stigma silences survivors, while perpetrators go unpunished. The normalization of such gender-based violence undermines the foundational principles of the WPS agenda, revealing how militarization and impunity intersect to perpetuate cycles of trauma and exclusion.
Despite increased advocacy of feminist peacebuilders, militarism still underpins the meaning of security in a lot of African peace and security systems. Patriarchy sustains militarism by valorizing dominance, aggression, and ultimately violence as legitimate expressions of power to achieve security. In this framing, peace is attained via masculinist protection and control and invariably the marginalization of women’s voices. This normalization of systemic exclusion entrenches militarism as both necessary and inevitable.
Taken together, these various cases underscore a growing trend: anti-gender ideologies in Africa are not isolated social attitudes but are increasingly institutionalized and tied to broader authoritarian and militarist projects. This not only weakens feminist peacebuilding initiatives but also threatens the core objectives of the WPS agenda — namely, inclusive security, justice, and sustainable peace. WHRDs are especially targeted, facing digital surveillance, legal harassment, and escalating violence (Ahikire and Mwiine Reference Ahikire and Mwiine2024).
Shrinking Civic Space for Women Human Rights Defenders
WHRDs remain significant to the promotion and implementation of the WPS agenda. Yet, across sub-Saharan Africa, and despite progressive frameworks like the Maputo Protocol, they face escalating threats within an increasingly restricted civic space. These attacks include “physical violence, sexual harassment and violence, online harassment and intimidation, legal harassment and persecution, and social and economic ostracism” (RFLD 2023). Further undermining gender equality, WHRDs are “frequently targeted for their gender, facing sexual harassment, rape, and other forms of sexual violence” (RFLD 2023).
Targeted violence against WHRDs has now expanded into the digital sphere. They experience greater instances of “cyberbullying, trolling, and doxxing… used to spread misinformation, discredit their work, and inflict emotional distress” (RFLD 2023). The parallel development of anti-gender movements and technology facilitated violence is not lost on feminist scholars working on WPS (Haastrup Reference Haastrup2024). Yet, responses are often unsatisfactory since feminists and WHRDs have found greater opportunities for advocacy in the digital arena. Responding to anti-gender resistance via the blocking of online platforms “further erodes gender justice, minimising the potential for collective action and the amplification of marginalised voices” (Amuku and Marunga Reference Amuku and Murunga2023).
Transnational Solidarities: Feminist Knowledge and Alternative Narratives
African feminist movements are strategically building transnational solidarity networks to counter the well-funded global anti-gender movement (see Hivos 2024). The ability to convene in transnational spaces, often making use of new digital technologies, enables the sharing of strategies and resources while building collective power. Transnational connections highlight how feminist organizing in Africa addresses “the nexus of strategy, voice, and power” (Pereira Reference Pereira2017, 16). These spaces have been instrumental to collectively ensuring how gender is integrated into peace and security frameworks, for example in regional instruments like the Maputo Protocol. Even as anti-gender campaigns increasingly contest these normative frameworks, weakening the political will of states to implement or defend them, feminists continue to push for change together.
The work of feminists in the context of the WPS ecosystem is one whose strength lies in its capacity to account for diverse experiences of violence and exclusion. As such, they work against anti-gender mobilizations that seek to erase this complexity by promoting rigid binaries and “traditional” gender roles, thereby flattening the plural knowledges and strategies necessary for just peace. African feminist action, thus, demands a political reckoning with the forces that seek to instrumentalize gender for repression, and a recommitment to feminist solidarities that transcend borders and resist militarized governance (see Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025a; Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025c).
By creating platforms for amplifying women’s voices in peace processes, feminist networks challenge the patriarchal and militarized framing of security. In the lead up to the 25th anniversary of the WPS agenda, these gatherings have been especially important and take different forms. For example, the annual gathering of feminists and women’s rights advocates on the margins of the African Union Summit via the Gender is my Agenda Campaign (GIMAC) allows for the exchange of ideas around the Summit’s themes but more often than not, also on ongoing insecurities on the continent. Here, women from conflict affected contexts in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Cameroon can explore similarities and differences and meet in solidarity. Spaces like GIMAC demonstrate how transnational feminist solidarity can create protected institutional spaces for developing visions for peace and justice even amid ongoing conflict.
In 2025, Sudan shows the possibilities of feminist resistance in such contexts. Since the most recent conflict in April 2023, Sudanese women have mobilized under extraordinarily difficult conditions to craft a feminist peace agenda (see Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025b). The strength of this sort of active mobilization against anti-gender mobilizations emphasizes the need to address structural inequalities. Transnational feminist platforms provide the space to link local struggles to regional and global networks, where Sudanese feminists can advance alternative paradigms of peacebuilding that challenge militarism and from which others can learn.
Beyond the “doing” of peace, the aspirations of WPS are often intangible with the primary contribution being knowledge-making. African feminist knowledge is plentiful yet often ignored in the formal processes of peace and security. This ignorance, no doubt, has allowed for the foothold that global anti-gender mobilizations have had on the continent. Importantly, these knowledges have established a “challenge to militarism and coloniality as the basis of the structural violence experienced across the continent” (Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025a, 5).
In leaning on pan-Africanist understandings of feminism that is solidaristic and decolonial (Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025a; Haastrup Reference Haastrup2025c), African feminists are constructing alternative knowledge systems to counter anti-gender narratives. Feminist knowledge-making allows for the development of context-specific feminist methodologies, which allow African feminists to reclaim the intellectual terrain of gender, peace, and security discourses. In so doing, when reflecting on WPS and planning for its future in a contested context, the either-or language of progress or failure has no place in the African WPS imaginary.
Conclusion: Beyond Progress or Failure
At every milestone for the WPS agenda, there is a tendency to evaluate where we are with the agenda via implementation metrics of success or failure. Here, I try to position the ongoing struggles of feminists and advocates struggles within a broader context of resistance to authoritarianism and militarization that challenges WPS and feminist gains broadly. The research and testimonials from the lived experiences of African feminists suggests that the African continent is not that unique in terms of the infiltration of anti-gender/feminist resistance. In Africa, though, these forces pose substantive threats to feminist peace, particularly as they are better funded and deploy sophisticated strategies that combine legal, cultural, and religious tactics.
Yet, African feminist movements demonstrate remarkable resilience and innovation. By constructing alternative knowledge systems, strategically localizing the WPS agenda (see Hudson and Højlund Madsen Reference Hudson and Madsen2024), and building transnational solidarity networks, they resist the erosion of hard-won rights while reimagining peace itself. For the WPS agenda to retain its relevance as an entry point for feminist action on peace and security, however, it must directly counter the resurgence of militarism and the existence of systemic inequalities, including those brought on by patriarchy and the rollback of progressive norms. This requires expanding our understanding beyond narrow security frameworks and centering the voices of those most marginalized. It is only this way that the WPS agenda in Africa can be reclaimed — through a liberatory vision of peace and security.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the editors of P&G for giving me the opportunity to sketch out my thinking on emerging challenges to the WPS agenda in a context that centres Africans, African feminisms, and politics.
Funding
Funding from the Independent Social Research Foundation and the Folke Bernadotte Academy is acknowledged.