Leave No One Behind in the WPS Agenda

WPS agenda in UN Security Council Resolutions, normative work, and National Action Plans (NAPs) have struggled when it comes to inclusion and intersectionality, with minimal efforts to encourage the full participation of underrepresented women in peace and security.

In the 2015 Global Review of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, it became evident that one of the success factors of NAP WPS is the quality of collaboration with women civil society organizations (CSOs) in the development, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation of the action plans. Looking through various national experiences of implementing NAPs, a determinant of a high impact NAP is an ‘inclusive design process’ where various government agencies, CSOs and vested actors are ideally represented in the creation and implementation of the plan.3 In this process, the collaboration and support extended to grassroots women organizations is essential, especially those targeting women who experience multiple and overlapping forms of discrimination, including on the basis of age, sexual orientation, indigeneity and disability.

Many National Action Plans on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) have scope to enhance the inclusion of women at the margins, including Indigenous Women, women with disabilities (WWD), and women with diverse sexual orientation, gender identity and expression and sex characteristics (SOGIESC). If not addressed, this risks reinforcing their marginalization from conflict prevention, resolution, and post-conflict reconstruction, thereby perpetuating the gendered inequities and discrimination that feed into the roots of conflict, and depriving the most vulnerable segments of society from enjoying the dividends of peace and development.

Session objectives

At the end of the session, it is expected that the audience will have:

• Deeper understanding on the impacts of exclusion of historically marginalized groups of women from the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, particularly in the design and implementation of the NAP WPS
• Clearer appreciation of the unique vulnerabilities and prospects of marginalized groups of women in the WPS discourse, with specific focus on the experiences of indigenous women, women with disability, and young women.
• Identified pathways and entry points how historically excluded women can be better integrated to NAP WPS though Leave No One Behind approach and the means to sustain its integration.