A. Introduction
For centuries, sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) was largely regarded as an inevitable by-product of armed conflict, tolerated as an unfortunate but incidental consequence of war.Footnote 1 This perception contributed to the systematic marginalization of SGBV within international legal and security frameworks, rendering it largely invisible. From the 1990s onwards, this understanding began to shift. International law progressively recognized SGBV as a serious violation of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL), a development reflected, inter alia, in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which expressly codifies a range of acts of sexual violence as war crimes and crimes against humanity,Footnote 2 as well as persecution on gender grounds.Footnote 3
Parallel to these developments in international criminal law, the international community has expanded the range of instruments aimed at addressing SGBV in situations of armed conflict. One of the most significant advances in this regard has occurred within the framework of the UN Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda. Through a series of thematic resolutions, the UN Security Council (UNSC) has acknowledged that sexual violence may constitute a threat to international peace and security, thereby falling within its mandate under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. This recognition paved the way for the inclusion of SGBV among the grounds upon which the UNSC may adopt measures under Article 41 of the UN Charter, including targeted sanctions.
The use of sanctions to address SGBV must be situated within the broader evolution of the UN sanctions system,Footnote 4 which since the early 1990s has been shaped by a wider process of humanization of international law.Footnote 5 First, sanctions, originally imposed as comprehensive economic embargoes, have progressively evolved into more individualized measuresFootnote 6 —most notably asset freezes and travel bans directed at specific individuals or entities—with the aim of limiting their adverse humanitarian impact.Footnote 7 Second, these instruments have increasingly been used as “human rights and humanitarian law devices,”Footnote 8 insofar as the designation criteria for the imposition of restrictive measures are frequently grounded in violations of IHL and IHRL. This evolution marked a partial shift away from a purely State-centered conception of security, placing greater emphasis on the protection of civilians within UN sanctions practice.Footnote 9
Within this context, targeted sanctions have increasingly been presented as instruments capable of exerting pressure on perpetrators, signaling international condemnation, and shaping behavior in contexts of widespread impunity.Footnote 10 Their preventive character, combined with their expressive and stigmatizing functions,Footnote 11 has contributed to their portrayal as potentially relevant tools for responding to SGBV. As repeatedly emphasized by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict (SRSG-SVC), sanctions are said to cast a spotlight on perpetrators, increasing the political and material costs associated with the use of SGBV and thereby enhancing their deterrent potential.Footnote 12
Yet, as this Article argues, the incorporation of SGBV into UN sanctions practice has functioned less as a comprehensive response to gendered violence than as a selective technology of governance,Footnote 13 an institutional apparatus through which the UNSC determines which forms of harm are rendered visible, sanctionable, and politically recognizable, thereby producing hierarchies of recognition and legitimacy. Indeed, the integration of SGBV into concrete designation criteria and listing practices has been uneven, politically filtered, and shaped by securitized and militarized narratives of threat. The resulting gap between formal recognition and operationalization raises critical questions about which forms of SGBV become legible through the UN sanctions system, which perpetrators are selected for designation, and which harms remain institutionally marginal or altogether excluded—questions that this Article seeks to address.
The analysis is informed by feminist approaches to international law, which foreground the constitutive role of legal language, institutional practices, and power relations in shaping the boundaries of security-relevant harm. From this perspective, sanctions are examined not merely as technical instruments of enforcement, but as sites of governance through which hierarchies of violence, responsibility, and legitimacy are produced and reproduced.
The Article is structured as follows. Section B situates the emergence of SGBV within the UNSC’s WPS Agenda and traces the normative foundations for its inclusion in sanctions regimes. Sections C and D examine the translation of this recognition into UN sanctions practice through an analysis of the sanctions regimes currently in force. Section C focuses on how SGBV is articulated in the designation criteria, highlighting patterns of visibility, omission, and linguistic construction. Section D turns to the operationalization of these criteria, analyzing patterns of selectivity and exclusion in listing practice. Section E develops a program of reform aimed at addressing the temporal, political-institutional, and epistemological gaps that sustain the failures identified in Sections C and D.
B. Gender, Security, and Sanctions under the WPS Agenda: Developments and Structural Constraints
The WPS Agenda reflects the partial institutionalization, within the UNSC, of long-standing feminist demands concerning the gendered impacts of armed conflict and the inclusion of women in peace and security governance.Footnote 14 The adoption of Resolution 1325 (2000),Footnote 15 building on earlier initiatives concerning the protection of civiliansFootnote 16 and childrenFootnote 17 in armed conflict, marked the entry of these claims into the UNSC’s formal agenda, signaling a limited departure from a traditional State-focused security paradigm towards a framework attentive to the human consequences of conflict.Footnote 18 Through the ten resolutions comprising the WPS Agenda, the UNSC, traditionally characterized as “male-dominated and conservative,”Footnote 19 sought to acknowledge both the disproportionate exposure of women to conflict-related harms and their role as agents in peacebuilding processes.Footnote 20
While often celebrated as a normative breakthrough, the WPS Agenda reflects a selective and negotiated incorporation of feminist concerns into an institutional framework that remains structurally shaped by militarized, security-oriented, and political logics.Footnote 21 The resulting ambivalence is central to assessing both the possibilities and the limits of the WPS framework, and how these logics are reproduced in the Council’s use of targeted sanctions to address SGBV.
Before proceeding, a brief clarification of terminology is in order. This Article moves between several partially overlapping concepts—namely gender-based violence (GBV), SGBV, and conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV)—each of which carries a distinct scope and institutional genealogy. GBV is the normative category consolidated in IHRL, referring to violence directed against a person because of their gender or affecting persons of a particular gender disproportionately, encompassing physical, mental, and sexual harm and rooted in structural gender inequalities and power relations.Footnote 22 SGBV, by contrast, is the operational term adopted within UN practice, including by UN sanctions frameworks, in which the explicit addition of “sexual” is intended to signal that sexual violenceFootnote 23 forms part of, but does not exhaust, the broader category of gender-based harm. In practice, however, this formally broad term is applied more narrowly than its normative counterpart: as will be demonstrated, both WPS resolutions and sanctions regimes tend to reduce SGBV to its sexual dimension, with rape functioning as the paradigmatic and often exclusive referent. Finally, CRSV, as developed within the WPS framework and operationalized through the mandate of the SRSG-SVC, designates a subset of sexual violence directly or indirectly linked to conflict.Footnote 24 While these categories partially overlap, they are not interchangeable. Their differences are not merely semantic but shape what forms of harm become visible, reportable, and ultimately sanctionable within UN governance. This Article therefore adopts a differentiated use of these terms, attentive to their specific institutional contexts and to the implications of their selective deployment in sanctions practice.
I. Sexual Violence as a Security Threat: The Emergence of Sanctions within the WPS Agenda
In Resolution 1325 (2000), sanctions were mentioned only indirectly. The UNSC committed, when adopting measures under Article 41 of the UN Charter, to consider their impact on women and girls, with a view to introducing appropriate humanitarian exemptions.Footnote 25 Sanctions were thus framed exclusively as instruments whose adverse effects on women should be mitigated,Footnote 26 rather than as tools capable of addressing gendered harms or responding to perpetrators’ conduct.
A decisive reorientation occurred with Resolution 1820 (2008), through which the UNSC explicitly recognized that sexual violence may constitute a threat to international peace and security.Footnote 27 This qualification marked a turning point in the Council’s security discourse. By framing sexual violence as a matter falling within its peace and security mandate, the UNSC opened the legal space for its inclusion among the designation criteria of sanctions adopted under Article 41 of the UN Charter.Footnote 28 This move, however, entailed a significant narrowing of scope compared to Resolution 1325 (2000), which had consistently referred more broadly to “gender-based violence and all other forms of violence in situations of armed conflict.”Footnote 29
From Resolution 1820 (2008) onwards, sexual violence was progressively detached from the broader framework of GBV and reduced to acts of a sexual nature—most notably rape—“used or commissioned as a tactic of war … or as part of widespread or systematic attacks against civilian populations.”Footnote 30 Only these manifestations of sexual violence were treated as capable of exacerbating armed conflict and, therefore, triggering the Council’s coercive powers.
This securitized framing rests on deeply gendered and militarized assumptions about what constitutes a threat to international security.Footnote 31 Protection from rape is thus constructed as a means of reaffirming the Council’s authority and credibility, reinforcing a narrative in which vulnerable, feminized civilians are safeguarded by a masculinized security apparatus, while other forms of gendered harm and their structural causes remain outside the scope of security governance.Footnote 32
Resolution 1820 (2008)Footnote 33 was also the first WPS resolution to explicitly link sexual violence to the potential use of targeted sanctions. The UNSC declared that, when establishing or renewing State-specific sanctions regimes, it should consider the appropriateness of targeted and graduated measures against parties to armed conflict “who commit rape and other forms of sexual violence against women and girls.”Footnote 34
This approach was reiterated and further specified in later WPS resolutions, which encouraged the introduction of designation criteria pertaining to acts of rape and sexual violenceFootnote 35 and extended the personal scope of sanctions beyond direct perpetrators to include those who order, plan, or direct such crimes.Footnote 36 However, this expansion remained embedded within a highly discretionary framework. Resolution 1960 (2010), for example, merely encouraged the inclusion of the new designation criteria “where appropriate,”Footnote 37 a formulation that preserves the UNSC’s wide margin of political discretion in deciding whether, when, and against whom sanctions should be applied.Footnote 38
II. The Counterterrorism Turn: Resolution 2242 and Beyond
Resolution 2242 (2015) marks a significant moment in the evolution of the WPS Agenda. While its preamble acknowledges a range of new global challenges—including displacement, climate change, and pandemics—the operative provisions focus almost exclusively on terrorism, mirroring the geopolitical context shaped by the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Within this framework, the UNSC explicitly recognized the gendered impact of terrorism on women and girls, particularly in relation to access to education, health, and participation in public life. At the same time, Resolution 2242 reinforced the securitization of SGBV, now framed not only as a tactic of war but also as a tactic of terror. SGBV was described as an integral component of the strategy and ideology of certain terrorist groups, used to assert control, generate fear, facilitate recruitment and financing, and destroy communities.Footnote 39
This reframing had direct implications for sanctions practice. For the first time, the UNSC expressed its intention to consider, when adopting or renewing targeted sanctions, the designation of individuals associated with terrorist groups responsible for violations of IHL and IHRL, including acts of SGBV.Footnote 40 While this language appears to signal a cautious expansion beyond a narrow focus on sexual harms, in practice it remains largely isolated. Indeed, subsequent resolutions quickly reverted to a more restrictive approach.Footnote 41
From an analytical perspective, feminist critiques have highlighted the ambivalence of this counterterrorism turn.Footnote 42 The instrumentalization of women within counterterrorism strategies risks subordinating gender concerns to security-driven objectives, rather than addressing structural gender inequalities or promoting substantive gender justice.Footnote 43 Indeed, the incorporation of the WPS Agenda into the counterterrorism framework has not displaced militarized and exceptionalist security paradigms but has been absorbed into them, limiting the transformative potential of gender norms and reinforcing the selective visibility of certain forms of violence.Footnote 44 This dynamic is particularly evident in sanctions practice, where SGBV-related measures remain contingent, instrumental, and closely tethered to counterterrorism priorities, rather than grounded in a holistic understanding of gendered harm.
III. Limits of the WPS Agenda and Their Implications for Sanctions Practice
While the WPS Agenda has been essential in bringing women’s experience of conflict to the attention of the UNSC, its architecture continues to rely on conceptual framings that constrain how gendered harms are understood, documented, and addressed. Three structural limitations are particularly relevant for sanctions practice, as they shape, and at times distort, which forms of violence, causal dynamics, and subjects become visible and sanctionable within UN governance.
A first limitation concerns the sexualization of violence. The WPS Agenda consistently approaches gendered harm through the prism of sexual violence—often with an almost exclusive focus on rape—thereby reducing the multiplicity of harms suffered by women and gender minorities to a single, hyper-visible form. This narrowing reverberates directly in sanctions practice, as several sanctions regimes replicate the WPS Agenda’s sexualized vocabulary.Footnote 45
A second limitation concerns how violence itself is conceptualized within the WPS Agenda. Sexual violence in conflict is framed as an exceptional disruption of international peace and security, rather than as a continuum of structural inequalities spanning conflict and non-conflict settings.Footnote 46 Such a securitized and militarized conception of violence, grounded in a protection paradigm, reinforces gender stereotypes.Footnote 47 This framing detaches wartime sexual violence from peacetime gendered harms, obscuring the shared social and institutional drivers that sustain impunity across contexts.Footnote 48 It also narrows the UNSC’s field of vision by privileging spectacularized and incident-based forms of violence over systemic patterns rooted in militarism, authoritarian governance, economic precarity, or climate-related insecurity.Footnote 49
A third limitation concerns the subjects in relation to whom gendered harms are recognized. Despite frequent references to “gender perspectives,” the resolutions provide no definition of gender and consistently collapse “gender” into “women.”Footnote 50 This framing marginalizes LGBTQIA+ individuals,Footnote 51 whose experiences remain largely absent, and rarely acknowledges that men and boys may also be victims of SGBV.Footnote 52 This reflects the Agenda’s reliance on a binary and heteronormative conception of gender, one that treats the male/female binary as exhaustive and heterosexuality as the implicit norm, rendering other gender identities and sexual orientations invisible within the framework of international peace and security governance.
Moreover, the WPS Agenda treats women as a monolithic category, failing to move beyond gender and cultural essentialism.Footnote 53 Women’s experiences of conflict are universalized through homogeneous and decontextualized narratives that flatten how intersecting identities—such as displacement, disability, race, socioeconomic status, or motherhood, including in the case of children born of war—shape differentiated forms of insecurity and exposure to violence.Footnote 54 This approach also sustains a dichotomy between “women to be saved,” often racialized and located in non-Western contexts, and women formally included in peace and security decision-making processes.Footnote 55
These structural limitations do not remain confined to the discursive architecture of the WPS Agenda. They are reproduced and, in some respects, amplified in the two dimensions through which the operationalization of SGBV within UN sanctions practice can be assessed. The first concerns the vocabulary of designation criteria: which forms of gendered harm are named, which are omitted, and how linguistic choices construct implicit hierarchies of sanctionable violence. The second concerns the political and operational dynamics of designation practice: which actors are selected for listing, which patterns of SGBV are acted upon, and which are systematically excluded despite documented evidence. The three limitations identified above leave identifiable traces, to varying degrees, in both dimensions, shaping not only what the sanctions system says it will do, but what it demonstrably does. Sections C and D examine each dimension in turn, providing the empirical and analytical foundation for the reform program developed in Section E.
C. The Language of Naming: Visibility and Strategic Silence in UN Sanctions Regimes
The designation criteria of UN sanctions regimes constitute the primary legal instrument through which the UNSC translates its formal commitment to addressing SGBV into operational terms. Designation criteria are the legal conditions set out in sanctions regime resolutions that define the categories of conduct or activity on the basis of which individuals or entities may be listed. Their textual formulation is not merely descriptive; rather, it plays a constitutive role in shaping which forms of gendered harm become legible as threats to international peace and security, and which remain outside the frame of institutional visibility altogether.
This section surveys the fifteen UN sanctions regimes currently in force,Footnote 56 proceeding in three steps. It first examines the sanctions regimes that contain no reference to SGBV, highlighting the political and epistemic implications of these omissions. It then turns to the regimes that include SGBV-related criteria, examining the scope and contours of this recognition. Finally, it analyzes the specific terminology used across regimes, showing how linguistic choices construct implicit hierarchies of harm that help explain the patterns of selective operationalization investigated in Section D.
I. Regimes without SGBV Criteria: Mapping the Gaps
Of the fifteen sanctions regimes currently in force, six contain no reference to SGBV or, more broadly, to violations of IHL or IHRL: the 1518 sanctions regime (Iraq),Footnote 57 Lebanon,Footnote 58 the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK),Footnote 59 Iran,Footnote 60 Guinea-Bissau,Footnote 61 and the 1988 sanctions regime (Afghanistan/Taliban).Footnote 62 In the first five regimes, this absence reflects the fact that these frameworks were not conceived within a protection-oriented or human-rights-based logic, but were instead designed to address distinct forms of international concern, including asset recovery, judicial cooperation, nuclear non-proliferation, or the restoration of constitutional order.
By contrast, the omission of SGBV-related criteria in the Afghanistan/Taliban sanctions regime represents a particularly significant gap. Although the regime, established as a countert-errorism framework, did not initially include IHL- or IHRL-based designation criteria,Footnote 63 it has not been substantively updated since the Taliban became the de facto administration in Afghanistan in 2021. This failure to revise the regime persists despite the profound transformation of the context it is meant to address, as expressly acknowledged by the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team.Footnote 64 This lack of adaptation is particularly striking given the consolidation of Taliban rule through structural policies that amount to systematic human rights violations (including against women and girls), rendering the sanctions regime increasingly obsolete and ill-equipped to respond to contemporary threats to international peace and security.Footnote 65
The scale and systemic nature of gender-based repression are well documented. The 2024 Afghanistan Gender Index reports that eight out of ten women are excluded from education, employment, and training,Footnote 66 prompting several scholars to characterize the situation as a form of gender apartheid.Footnote 67 In response, UN Women and the Informal Expert Group on Women and Peace and Security have emphasized the need to activate the Afghanistan sanctions regime as a tool of pressure, calling for the inclusion of violations of women’s rights and acts of SGBV among the listing criteria and for the integration of gender expertise and gender-sensitive analysis within the Monitoring Team’s work.Footnote 68
The failure to activate sanctions in response to this context thus reflects more than a legal lacuna. It reveals an epistemic failure, understood here as the inability of the institutional framework to recognize certain forms of harm as analytically and normatively relevant. Indeed, the framework lacks the conceptual categories needed to capture these harms, reflecting a narrow understanding of terrorism as a phenomenon concerned exclusively with global security threats, rather than one with profound and far-reaching human rights implications.Footnote 69 It is a manifestation of a broader tendency in the UNSC’s counter-terrorism practice to privilege militarized and State-centric conceptions of security, within which GBV is treated as marginal, secondary, or merely derivative.Footnote 70
A further omission is found in the Sudan sanctions regime, where no explicit criterion relating to SGBV is included. Although Resolution 1591 (2005) allows for the designation of individuals responsible for violations of IHL or IHRLFootnote 71 —criteria under which SGBV could theoretically fall—the absence of an express reference significantly weakens the visibility and political salience of this form of violence. This omission is difficult to justify given the extensive and systematic nature of SGBV in Sudan, repeatedly documented by UN bodies.Footnote 72 The failure to revise the designation criteria underscores the persistent disconnect between empirical reality and normative response.
Taken together, these cases illustrate that the absence of SGBV criteria is not merely the result of outdated mandates or technical oversight but reflects deeper political and epistemic hierarchies shaping which forms of violation the UNSC is willing or unwilling to recognize as relevant to its peace and security mandate.
II. Regimes with SGBV Criteria: Emerging Recognition and Its Limits
Eight sanctions regimes currently include explicit references to SGBV as conduct that may threaten international peace and security and may therefore justify the imposition of targeted sanctions: the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Libya, Haiti, Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia (al-Shabaab), and the 1267 regime on ISIL (Da’esh) and Al-Qaida. In these cases, the links with the thematic resolutions of the WPS Agenda, recalled in the preambles, are evident.
This development has accelerated in recent years: prior to 2018, only four of these regimes—the CAR, DRC, South Sudan, and Somalia sanctions regimes—contained any reference to SGBV. This trend reflects a growing sensitivity within the UNSC to the gendered dimension of insecurity. While individuals responsible for SGBV could, in principle, have been listed under broader IHL- or IHRL-based criteria, the introduction of explicit references marks a meaningful shift. It signals an increased willingness to recognize the structural relevance of SGBV and performs an important expressive functionFootnote 73 by affirming SGBV as an internationally visible and sanctionable harm.
Within these regimes, however, an important distinction emerges between cases in which SGBV is included among a non-exhaustive list of IHL/IHRL violations and those in which it is recognized as a stand-alone designation criterion. The latter approach is significant, as it affirms the autonomous gravity of SGBV. The Haiti sanctions regime, established in 2022, represents the clearest example, explicitly identifying from the outset the planning, direction, or commission of acts involving SGBV as an independent basis for designation.Footnote 74 Comparable developments occurred in the Libya,Footnote 75 CAR,Footnote 76 and South SudanFootnote 77 regimes following their renewal in 2018.
A further limitation concerns the timing of this recognition. Explicit references to SGBV have rarely been incorporated at the time sanctions regimes are established. With few exceptions,Footnote 78 SGBV-related criteria were introduced only ex post, after widespread and systematic patterns of abuse had already been documented. This temporal dynamic reveals a structural tendency to treat SGBV as an episodic violation, rather than as a systemic indicator of armed violence, limiting the preventive and deterrent potential of sanctions. The Somalia sanctions regime is emblematic in this regard: although created in 1992,Footnote 79 a criterion relating to SGBV was introduced only in 2011Footnote 80 and elevated to a stand-alone ground for designation in 2018.Footnote 81
Finally, the 1267 sanctions regime on ISIL and Al-Qaida offers a particularly revealing illustration of both the expansion and the limits of the emerging recognition. With Resolution 2734 (2024), the UNSC declared for the first time that the planning, direction, or commission of acts of SGBV may constitute an autonomous ground for designation.Footnote 82 While this marks an important step in the formal integration of SGBV into the Council’s counter-terrorism framework, recognition remains conditional and narrowly framed. SGBV is sanctionable only insofar as it is characterized as a tactic of terrorism, an approach that is formally consistent with the counter-terrorism mandate of the regime and its non-territorial scope. However, this limitation reveals an epistemic selectivity in the UNSC’s security discourse: SGBV becomes legible exclusively when it can be instrumentalized within dominant narratives of terrorist violence.Footnote 83
This selectivity is compounded by delay. Although Resolution 2242 (2015) had already acknowledged that SGBV may be used as a tactic of terrorism, this insight was translated into binding designation criteria under the 1267 regime only in 2024. This near-decade-long gap, despite well-documented atrocities against Yazidi women since 2014,Footnote 84 underscores that the incorporation of SGBV did not follow a logic of humanitarian urgency or normative coherence, but rather one shaped by shifting political priorities and compromise within the UNSC.Footnote 85
These developments suggest that the formal inclusion of SGBV, though significant, has not translated into consistent practice, limiting the transformative potential of UN sanctions.
III. The Vocabulary of SGBV: Linguistic Choices and Hierarchies of Harm
From a linguistic perspective, the formulations used across sanctions regimes are not fully uniform, even as the majority of regimes now explicitly refer to the broader category of SGBV. This development has the potential to expand the expressive reach of sanctions by acknowledging SGBV as encompassing diverse and intersecting forms of abuse. However, as Hilary Charlesworth has observed, it is necessary to look below the surface to assess whether the adoption of new language has led to concrete differences in practice.Footnote 86
Indeed, important limitations persist. Some regimes continue to rely on narrow formulations centered exclusively on rape and sexual violence, as in the DRC and Yemen regimes.Footnote 87 Moreover, even where SGBV is formally invoked, designation criteria frequently illustrate such violence through repeated references to rape, as in the case of the Haiti and 1267 (ISIL/Al-Qaida) regimes.Footnote 88
This recurrent centering of rape is not merely a drafting choice. By foregrounding rape as the paradigmatic form of SGBV, designation criteria tend to marginalize or render invisible a wide range of other gendered harms, including practices such as forced marriage, gender-based persecution, or other non-sexual components of SGBV recognized under international law.Footnote 89 This linguistic narrowing also reflects a limited conception of gender, whereby SGBV is predominantly constructed as violence against women and girls, with little recognition of other gender identities or of the differentiated experiences of men and boys.
These linguistic choices are not neutral. They reflect an androcentric understanding of violence, in which male experiences and perspectives operate as the implicit norm. Accordingly, only those harms that are highly visible, event-based, or readily securitized are acknowledged. As feminist scholars have long shown, legal and security institutions tend to recognize those violations that fit pre-existing imaginaries of militarized conflict, while overlooking forms of violence that are diffuse, structural, or rooted in gendered power relations.Footnote 90 An implicit hierarchy of harms thus emerges: practices that can be narrated through a security lens are rendered sanctionable, while others, despite being equally pervasive and devastating, remain outside the Council’s frame of recognition.
D. Operational Patterns of Selectivity and Exclusion
The previous analysis establishes what the sanctions system formally claims to see. This section examines what it demonstrably does and, more precisely, what it consistently fails to do despite formal recognition, analyzing how SGBV-related criteria are translated into actual listings.
Across the regimes that include explicit SGBV-related designation criteria, as well as Sudan, whose broad IHL and IHRL designation criteria could theoretically accommodate SGBV-related listings, actual listings referencing acts of SGBV amount to forty out of 501 currently designated individuals or entities: fourteen in the DRC, eight in Haiti, seven in South Sudan, five in the CAR, two in Libya, two in Yemen, and two in Sudan.Footnote 91 This disproportion reflects two compounding dynamics that this section examines in turn: the political blockages that prevent documented evidence from translating into designation decisions, and the structural patterns of selectivity that determine which actors and which forms of SGBV are rendered sanctionable in the first place.
I. Political Dynamics of (Non-)Designation
The limited operationalization of SGBV-related criteria—despite extensive documentation of the systematic commission of SGBV across all contexts examined—underscores that their inclusion does not, in itself, lead to systematic use in sanctions practice. Rather, it reveals a form of symbolic performativity,Footnote 92 whereby the UNSC’s formal commitment to addressing SGBV often remains largely rhetorical.Footnote 93 In this sense, SGBV-related criteria function less as triggers for consistent sanctioning responses than as expressive gestures, projecting an image of institutional responsiveness and normative leadership, while leaving underlying patterns of violence mostly untouched.
UN sanctions regimes are administered by Sanctions Committees established by the UNSC. They are composed of representatives of all UNSC members and are responsible for overseeing the application of sanctions, including the designation of individuals and entities. Their work is often supported by Panels of Experts (PoEs), mandated to monitor compliance, document violations, and provide an evidentiary basis for potential listings.Footnote 94
Although PoEs frequently face constraints related to insecurity, limited access, fear of reprisal against victims, and inadequate resources,Footnote 95 these technical obstacles do not fully explain the minimal use of SGBV-related criteria. The core impediment is political.Footnote 96 In several instances, PoEs have submitted supporting evidence for the listing of individuals or armed groups responsible for SGBV without resulting in actual designations.Footnote 97
Decisions by Sanctions Committees are adopted by consensus, a procedural requirement that amplifies political sensitivities and facilitates blockage where States diverge in their assessments of threat, responsibility, or the strategic implications of listing specific actors. These dynamics are shaped not only by differing views on the appropriateness of sanctions and on the extent to which human rights—particularly women’s rights—should be regarded as falling within the UNSC’s peace and security mandate,Footnote 98 but also by geopolitical alliances, national interests, and concerns about diplomatic repercussions.Footnote 99
These political constraints become particularly visible in specific regimes. In Somalia and Yemen, extensive PoEs documentation of SGBV has failed to generate corresponding designations, despite the identification of both structural patterns of abuse and individual perpetrators.Footnote 100 This gap illustrates how political considerations continue to override evidentiary thresholds in sanctions practice.
Designation thus becomes a site where competing State interests and geopolitical alignments determine which harms are acted upon and which are allowed to recede into institutional silence, reinforcing the selective and uneven visibility of gendered violence within the UN sanctions system.
II. Who and What Gets Listed: Patterns of Selective Recognition
Even in the limited number of cases in which individuals and entities have been designated in connection with SGBV, such acts have never served as the sole basis for listing. This is not, in itself, surprising, as perpetrators of SGBV are often responsible for multiple violations of international law.
The more troubling feature lies elsewhere. Even where the commission of acts of SGBV is explicitly acknowledged in narrative summaries and where an autonomous designation criterion formally exists, listings continue to rely primarily on other legal grounds, most commonly violations of IHL or IHRL.Footnote 101 SGBV is thus recognized yet not operationalized as an independent trigger for sanctions. The resulting need to “accumulate” SGBV with other forms of wrongdoing relegates such violence to a marginal position within the hierarchy of sanctionable harms, constraining the expressive and normative potential of SGBV-related criteria and diluting the promise embedded in the WPS Agenda.Footnote 102
The designation of Sultan Saleh Aida Zabin under the Yemen sanctions regime in 2021 is illustrative. His narrative summary details his prominent role in a policy of intimidation involving systematic arrest, detention, torture, and repeated acts of sexual violence and rape against politically active women.Footnote 103 Yet his listing was not based on the SGBV-specific criterion, but rather on generic references to IHL and IHRL violations.Footnote 104 Similar patterns persist in other regimes, including the CAR, where designations continue to rely on general IHRL and IHL violations even after the introduction of a stand-alone SGBV criterion,Footnote 105 despite clear attribution in narrative summaries of responsibility for the commission or direction of large-scale sexual violence.Footnote 106
By contrast, the Haiti sanctions regime stands out as a comparatively more robust example. Of the nine total designations adopted to date, eight concern individuals or entities responsible for rape or other forms of sexual violence, and in most cases, they were listed inter alia pursuant to paragraph 16(f) of Resolution 2653, the autonomous SGBV criterion.Footnote 107
Selectivity also characterizes who is listed. This pattern resonates with well-documented critiques in international criminal law, where selectivity has long been understood as reflecting underlying geopolitical asymmetries and power relations, shaping which actors are brought within the reach of international accountability and which remain beyond it.Footnote 108 UN sanctions regimes overwhelmingly target non-State actors—members of armed groups, militias, or terrorist organizations—while the designations of State officials remain exceptional, even where responsibility for SGBV is well documented. The DRC illustrates this imbalance: despite repeated documentation by PoEs of mass rapes committed by the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) and the identification of individual perpetrators,Footnote 109 only one government official has ever been listed.Footnote 110 This outcome reflects a combination of political considerations, including concerns about antagonizing governments whose cooperation is essential for peacekeeping operations, reluctance to create precedents that might expose State agents elsewhere to similar scrutiny, and the perception that abuses committed by national armed forces fall primarily within the domestic sphere.Footnote 111
These patterns reveal a structural imbalance within the UN sanctions system. SGBV is more likely to trigger sanctions when committed by actors already positioned at the margins of international legitimacy than when it is perpetrated by State agents operating within formal structures of authority. This externalization of SGBV constructs a narrative in which such harm is associated with disorder, chaos, and deviations from lawful governance, while institutionalized and equally systemic forms of SGBV remain obscured or normalized, thereby reproducing a form of implicit colonial reasoning that frames SGBV as a marker of deviance or backwardness primarily associated with non-Western contexts.Footnote 112 The result is a system of selective recognition in which both who is sanctioned and what is treated as sanctionable reflect and reinforce the political and gendered hierarchies embedded within the UN’s sanctions architecture. The parallels with international criminal law suggest that selectivity in sanctions practice is not incidental but structurally embedded in broader regimes of international accountability.
E. From Recognition to Transformation: A Program for Reform
The preceding analysis has shown the failure of UN sanctions to operationalize SGBV in any consistent or meaningful way. This failure can be traced to three compounding structural conditions that operate at different levels of the UN sanctions system.
The first is a temporal gap: SGBV-related designation criteria are incorporated into sanctions regimes reactively, after widespread patterns of abuse have already been documented. The second is a political-institutional gap: even where criteria exist and evidence is available, the translation from documentation to designation is systematically blocked by political resistance within Sanctions Committees. This problem is further exacerbated by the fragmentation of UN mechanisms that are formally oriented toward the same problem but operate in isolation from one another, as the following analysis will show. The third is an epistemological gap: the categories through which SGBV is recognized within the UN sanctions regimes are shaped by androcentric assumptions that the system has so far lacked the capacity to interrogate or revise. This is the deepest of the three gaps because it operates on the conditions of possibility of the other two: it shapes what evidence is sought, how it is interpreted, and which patterns of harm are rendered analytically visible.
These three gaps are not independent; they operate in a mutually reinforcing manner. A program of reform must therefore intervene at all three levels simultaneously. While a wide range of reform proposals has already been advanced in policy and scholarly debates on UN sanctions,Footnote 113 this Article integrates these strands within a coherent analytical framework, grounded in a systematic assessment of all fifteen sanctions regimes currently in force and informed by a feminist perspective that foregrounds the structural and epistemological conditions of their limited implementation in relation to SGBV. This section develops such a program in three corresponding movements. The first addresses the temporal gap through reforms to the design and application of designation criteria. The second addresses the political-institutional gap through structural coordination between sanctions and the broader UN architecture for monitoring and responding to SGBV. The third addresses the epistemological gap through a gender-responsive transformation of the assumptions, methodologies, and institutional composition that determine what the sanctions system is capable of seeing.Footnote 114
I. Reducing the Temporal Gap: Criteria Design and Operational Application
The temporal gap identified above is the most tractable of the three, in the sense that it is amenable to reform through changes in design practice that do not require a structural overhaul of the sanctions system. Its tractability, however, should not obscure its theoretical significance: the prevailing reactive approach is not the product of oversight but of a conception of SGBV as episodic rather than structural, as a symptom rather than a cause.Footnote 115 Incorporating SGBV criteria at the inception of sanctions regimes would instead acknowledge these violations as structural indicators of insecurity, enabling the UNSC to treat them as early warning signs of escalating violence rather than as secondary consequences of armed conflict.Footnote 116
This temporal limitation also emerges where SGBV occurs in contexts not covered by country-specific sanctions regimes. In such cases, the absence of an appropriate framework delays the activation of sanctions despite the availability of evidence. A thematic sanctions mechanism focused on SGBV, similar to existing proposals concerning grave violations against children in armed conflict,Footnote 117 could provide a standing pathway, reducing the political and procedural delays associated with the creation of new regimes.
Reforming the timing of criteria is, however, insufficient without a corresponding adjustment in their operational use. As Section D.II demonstrates, SGBV-related criteria are routinely subsumed under broader IHL and IHRL grounds, a practice that reproduces, at the level of application, the same hierarchy of harm produced by narrow criteria at the level of design. Treating SGBV as an independent and sufficient ground for designation would give operational content to the formal recognition that the most advanced regimes, such as Haiti, have already achieved. Greater reliance on the principle of command responsibility would further enable the designation of political and military leaders who tolerate, enable, or orchestrate patterns of SGBV, even in the absence of direct perpetration,Footnote 118 aligning designation practice with the collective and hierarchical nature of many SGBV violations.
II. Reducing the Political-Institutional Gap: Coordination across the UN Architecture
The political-institutional gap is structurally more resistant to reform because it is sustained by the distribution of political interests within the UNSC and its bodies. Evidence does not automatically translate into designation; it must pass through a decision-making architecture in which consensus requirements amplify political sensitivities, and the fragmentation of UN mechanisms allows patterns of SGBV to be formally acknowledged without triggering consequences. Reform at this level must therefore focus on institutional arrangements capable of rendering political blockages visible and accountable.
Where consensus within Sanctions Committees cannot be reached despite credible evidence, escalation to the UNSC may offer a procedural option. While veto constraints remain, such escalation shifts responsibility from informal Committee blockages to a forum where political accountability for inaction is more visible. Though exceptional,Footnote 119 this mechanism could help counter the institutional inertia surrounding SGBV-related designations.
Moreover, a significant resource is the CRSV monitoring architecture developed within the WPS Agenda. Centered on the mandate of the SRSG-SVC,Footnote 120 it enables the systematic identification of parties credibly suspected of responsibility for patterns of CRSV,Footnote 121 listed in an annex to the Secretary-General’s reports. While formally designed to support follow-up action, including the consideration of measures under relevant sanctions regimes, this potential remains largely unrealized.Footnote 122 In practice, coordination between the CRSV architecture and UN sanctions regimes is limited,Footnote 123 even in cases involving persistent perpetrators.Footnote 124 This gap reflects not only technical or informational constraints but also political resistance to treating CRSV as a core security concern.Footnote 125
Addressing this gap requires mechanisms that render the political cost of non-designation visible and attributable. Formal referral procedures that bring persistent annex-listed perpetrators to the attention of Sanctions Committees,Footnote 126 together with institutionalized SRSG-SVC briefings to Sanctions Committees that place evidence of continued non-designation on the record,Footnote 127 could help shift the burden of justification from those seeking designation to those blocking it.
A complementary dimension concerns coordination between UN sanctions regimes and ICC proceedings in SGBV cases. The conceptual distinction between peace enforcement and law enforcement, between the preventive, political, and forward-looking logics of sanctions and the judicial logic of individual criminal responsibility,Footnote 128 must be preserved to avoid blurring institutional boundaries or politicizing international criminal justice.Footnote 129 Within this constraint, however, there is space for limited and targeted interaction.
This Article argues that the specific characteristics of SGBV justify a proactive approach to coordination: namely, the heightened risk of continued abuse, the acute vulnerability of victims and witnesses to intimidation, and the persistence of impunity due to evidentiary barriers, stigma, and political obstruction.Footnote 130 In this context, information-sharing in situations simultaneously addressed by the UNSC and investigated by the ICC Prosecutor may play a critical role.Footnote 131 In contexts of systematic underreporting and delayed investigations, early documentation of patterns of SGBV by PoEs may help prevent the loss of evidence and support prosecutorial assessment.Footnote 132 Closer alignment between ICC arrest warrants for SGBV-related crimes and UN targeted sanctions may also be appropriate.Footnote 133 However, full synchronizationFootnote 134 should be rejected,Footnote 135 as it would undermine the UNSC’s discretionary authority and risk transforming sanctions into executive extensions of international criminal justice.Footnote 136 A case-by-case approach following the issuance of an ICC arrest warrant offers a more balanced model.
The potential benefits of such coordination are multiple. From a deterrence perspective, the combined use of criminal accountability and individualized restrictive measures increases both the material and symbolic costs of perpetrating SGBV. In terms of protection, sanctions may constrain the capacity of alleged perpetrators to access resources or move across borders, reducing immediate risks for affected communities. Finally, closer alignment would strengthen the coherence and credibility of international responses to SGBV, countering its persistent marginalization within peace and security governance and reinforcing the normative message that such violence constitutes a matter of collective concern rather than peripheral harm.
III. Reducing the Epistemological Gap: Gender-Responsive Transformation
As Sections C and D demonstrate, the categories of harm, the subjects of violence, and the actors deemed sanctionable within existing regimes are all shaped by an androcentric logic that predetermines the limits of institutional visibility. Reducing the epistemological gap therefore entails transforming the gendered assumptions that structure what the UN sanctions system is capable of recognizing.
This requires expanding both the types of harm that qualify as SGBV and the subjects whose experiences of violence are rendered visible within sanctions practice. A gender-responsive framework should encompass non-sexual forms of gender-based harm, as well as violence targeting LGBTQIA+ persons and men, whose victimization is frequently marginalized within traditional security discourses.Footnote 137 Recognizing these experiences does not dilute the gendered analysis of violence but instead reflects the relational and structural nature of gender as a system of power that shapes patterns of harm across different bodies and identities.Footnote 138
A gender-responsive approach must also engage with the distributive effects of sanctions.Footnote 139 Systematic ex ante and ex post assessments of their gendered impacts, grounded in an intersectional framework,Footnote 140 are necessary to ensure that sanctions do not reproduce the very inequalities they purport to address.Footnote 141 At the institutional level, this requires embedding gender analysis within existing UN mechanisms. In this respect, the Informal Expert Group on Women, Peace and SecurityFootnote 142 could assume a coordinating role, working in close cooperation with PoEs throughout the sanctions cycle.
Finally, the epistemological transformation also depends on changes in the apparatus that produces and interprets the evidence on which designation decisions rest. Prior literature has long framed the underrepresentation of women within UN bodies as an equity concern.Footnote 143 Between 2015 and 2024, men accounted for approximately 67% of PoEs’ members.Footnote 144 This Article approaches this issue as an epistemological condition: without gender expertise embedded in the bodies that generate the evidentiary and analytical foundation for designation decisions, the preconditions for meaningful SGBV designation are structurally absent.
The appointment of at least one dedicated gender expert to each PoE,Footnote 145 the systematic integration of gender-sensitive and survivor-centered methodologies into PoEs’ mandates as core investigative standards,Footnote 146 and collaborative models pairing international gender specialists with locally based women,Footnote 147 would strengthen both the production and interpretation of evidence, enhancing the system’s capacity to identify and act upon patterns of SGBV that might otherwise remain obscured.
These reforms are, however, structurally limited by the material conditions under which expertise is mobilized. Short-term consultancy contracts, limited job security, and inadequate parental protections disproportionately exclude women experts from sustained involvement.Footnote 148 Entrenched resource allocation patterns within the UN sanctions system—with 68.3% of total UN resources directed to counter-terrorism and nuclear non-proliferation regimes in 2024Footnote 149 —further constrain the operational capacity of PoEs in the very contexts where SGBV is most prevalent.Footnote 150 Without sustained investment in gender expertise, secure participation, and adequate resources, the integration of SGBV into sanctions practice risks remaining formally acknowledged yet structurally sidelined, reinforcing the very hierarchies of visibility and credibility that gender-responsive reforms seek to dismantle.
F. Conclusion: Sanctions, Visibility, and the Limits of Gendered Security
The incorporation of SGBV into UN sanctions regimes is not a straightforward expansion of international gender justice. Rather, it reflects a selective process of translation, through which SGBV becomes intelligible to the UNSC only insofar as it conforms to militarized and securitized narratives of threat. Within this framework, certain forms of violence are elevated as paradigmatic, while other gendered harms, subjects, and structural dimensions of violence remain marginal or invisible.
The resulting gap between formal recognition and operationalization is not accidental but constitutive of the sanctions system itself. Sanctions function as a technology of governance that produces hierarchies of harm and responsibility, privileging non-State and already delegitimized actors while rarely confronting State-based or institutionalized forms of GBV. Increased discursive visibility thus coexists with persistent accountability deficits, revealing the limits of the WPS Agenda’s transformative promise when embedded within a security architecture grounded in exceptionalism, discretion, and political selectivity.
At the same time, sanctions are neither designed nor intended to operate as a comprehensive response to SGBV. Within the UN framework, they constitute only one instrument in a broader, fragmented architecture. When recalibrated and coordinated with the other available tools, sanctions may contribute to disrupting impunity and reinforcing international condemnation. Yet such recalibration presupposes both institutional adjustments and a reorientation of the gendered epistemic and normative assumptions that shape sanctions practice. From a feminist and intersectional perspective, however, their potential remains structurally bounded. The challenge is therefore not merely to improve the technical use of sanctions, but to situate them within a broader rethinking of security governance capable of addressing SGBV as a structural, relational, and enduring form of harm.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this Article was presented at the Ljubljana Sanctions Conference, held in Ljubljana on 25 and 26 September 2025. I am grateful to the organizers and participants for their valuable feedback. I am particularly thankful to Larissa van den Herik, who chaired the panel, and Thomas J. Biersteker for their insightful comments. I also wish to thank Micaela Frulli for her guidance and support throughout this research.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Financial Support
This work was supported by the 2025 Research Funding Call of Fondazione Caript.
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