The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda has been pivotal in addressing gendered challenges in conflict and peacebuilding. However, it often neglects the voices and experiences of lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LBTQ) women. This blog post explores the need to ‘queer’ the WPS agenda, a process that questions and reimagines its foundational frameworks to include LGBTQ+ perspectives.
The Women, Peace and Security Agenda
The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda has made significant strides in addressing the unique challenges faced by women in conflict and post-conflict settings. Established in 2000 by the United Nations Security Council’s unanimous adoption of Resolution 1325, the WPS framework is characterised by four pillars:
- women’s participation in peace processes and in peace and security institutions;
- the protection of women and girls in situations of armed conflict;
- the prevention of violence against women and girls;
- the need to ensure that post-conflict recovery efforts take gender into account.
Heteronormativity within the WPS Agenda
Although the WPS Agenda has set a precedent for the consideration of gender perspectives in peace and security, the experiences of LBTQ women are obscured within the framework. Given the use of gender as the only identity marker within the WPS framework women are homogenised into one category. Thus, the impact of sexuality, class, race, nationality and ethnicity on women’s experiences of peace and security initiatives is not taken into account, removing all considerations of intersectionality from the discourse. In particular, the absence of references to sexuality or gender identity across the ten WPS resolutions reflects a significant gap in the WPS agenda as it does not acknowledge the distinct vulnerabilities of LGBTQ+ individuals in times of conflict as evidenced by the systematic violation of LGBTQ+ rights in the conflicts in Colombia and Syria.
Furthermore, the WPS agenda fails to highlight the compounded oppression that LBTQ women face during periods of conflict due to their overlapping marginalisation based on both gender and sexual orientation. For example, LBTQ women are at heightened risk of sexual violence both during and after periods of conflict. In post-apartheid South Africa, “corrective rape” was perpetrated against black lesbian women with the belief that they could be “turned” heterosexual. UN Women research highlights that transgender refugee women are especially vulnerable to abuse in detention centres and refugee camps, especially when they are detained in cisgender male spaces or when access to healthcare or other critical services are denied. Noting these unique vulnerabilities, there are ample calls for an increased focus on the specific needs of LBTQ women within approaches to peace and security and a queering of the WPS agenda.
What is ‘queering’ the Women, Peace and Security Agenda?
Building on Jamie J. Hagen and Emil Edenborg’s approaches to queering WPS, the use of ‘queer’ as a verb instead of a noun indicates a process involving more than the sole inclusion of LGBTQ+ people as a ‘variable’ in analysis. Instead, queering WPS constitutes “troubling, questioning and creatively reimagining” approaches to gender, peace and security. This process challenges the heteronormative and cisnormative assumptions that limit gender analysis within peace and security initiatives and draws attention to the influence of entrenched notions of masculinity and patriarchy that create patterns of violence and prejudice against the LGBTQ+ community.
Queering the WPS Agenda in Practice
The transformative inclusion of LGBTQ+ perspectives in the 2016 Colombian peace process exemplifies how queering the WPS agenda can result in a more sustainable and inclusive peace process in practice. Firstly, the peace process was reimagined to remove barriers to the inclusion of marginalised voices by including victims’ perspectives through delegation visits including 18 representatives of women’s and LGBTQ+ organisations. As a direct result of their continued participation in the Gender Sub-Commission, the Colombian peace accord included over 130 gender and women’s rights provisions, reshaping notions of peace and security in a manner that achieves the aims of Resolution 1325. Furthermore, the final report published by the Commission for Clarification of the Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition marked a historical first in its adoption of an intersectional approach to incorporate queer truths in an entire chapter entitled ‘My body is the truth: experiences of women and LGBTIQ+ people in the armed conflict’. By recognising the patterns of violence perpetrated against LGBTQ+ people in the armed conflict as well as the causes of structural and social violence experienced as a continuum, an expansive queering of transitional justice is reflected.
Conclusions
Questioning, troubling, and reimagining the WPS framework through the process of queering challenges the hetero-cis-normative assumptions that limit gender analysis within peace and security initiatives. Not only does this approach highlights LBTQ women’s experiences of conflict and peacebuilding that are obscured within the WPS agenda but provides the opportunity to expand its gender analysis to include the perspectives of all individuals who identify outside the sex and gender binary. By adopting an intersectional and inclusive approach, queering the WPS agenda will ensure that peace and security initiatives can effectively meet the needs of all marginalised communities.
Policy recommendations:
- Governments should adopt an intersectional approach to the implementation of the WPS agenda and the development of WPS National Action Plans (NAPs) to address the unique needs of women with intersecting identities.
- To ensure that policies accurately reflect LGBTQ+ perspectives in all their diversity, it is crucial to invite queer peacebuilders, particularly those who are women, to meaningfully contribute to the development of peace and security initiatives.
- Partnerships must be developed and maintained between governments and LGBTQ+/feminist civil society organisations to ensure their substantive participation in developing WPS NAPs and briefing the UN Security Council.
- Peace and security practitioners at all levels should receive capacity-strengthening training on LGBTQ+ issues using tools such as the Queering Women, Peace and Security practice-based toolkit to ensure a gender-transformative approach to implementation.
About the Author:
Jessica Gill works in the field of gender equality and women’s rights advocacy. She has a European Master’s in Human Rights and Democratisation from the Global Campus of Human Rights, where her research focused on ‚Queering the Women, Peace and Security Agenda.‘
She has advocated for gender equality at the international level having served as a UN Youth Delegate of Ireland for 2022/23 and as a member of Plan International Ireland’s Youth Advisory Panel.