Women, Peace and Security at 25: Peacebuilding as a Strategic Capability

A quarter of a century after the United Nations adopted its landmark resolution on Women, Peace and Security, the agenda is being reconsidered not as a matter of rights alone but as a genuine strategic capability. The original resolution sought to bring women into peace processes and protect them in conflict. Today, advocates argue, the networks it inspired do something more: they help states see threats that conventional security institutions miss.

From participation to early warning

Resolution 1325, adopted in 2000, aimed to make peace and security more inclusive by promoting women's participation in negotiations, protecting them from conflict-related violence and embedding a gender perspective in humanitarian work. It was not originally designed to reshape military doctrine. Over time, however, the community-level structures it encouraged have taken on functions that look increasingly strategic.

Women working in health centres, local councils and community initiatives are often positioned to notice early signals of trouble, from disrupted livelihoods to unusual behaviour and rising local grievances. These observations amount to a form of early warning, picking up on threats before they escalate into open conflict, precisely in the spaces where formal security institutions have little presence.

Filling the visibility gap

The strategic case rests on the idea of a visibility gap. Many contemporary threats emerge inside communities, below the threshold of armed conflict, where traditional agencies simply cannot see them. Locally rooted networks help fill that gap by enhancing situational awareness, strengthening mechanisms for resolving disputes and building the legitimacy of institutions through inclusive, trusted governance.

From this perspective, initiatives such as community peace structures are not soft add-ons to hard security but complementary infrastructure that makes the whole system more resilient. The recommendation that follows is practical: states should create formal channels to feed this community-based knowledge into national security planning, rather than keeping the agenda walled off as a separate, secondary concern.

Why it matters

Reframing this agenda as a strategic capability shifts it from the margins of policy to the core of how security is done. If the most pressing dangers now surface within communities, then the people best placed to detect them early are an asset no serious security planner can ignore. Recognising women's peacebuilding work as genuine capacity, and building the interfaces to connect it with formal institutions, is both a matter of equality and a matter of effectiveness. Twenty-five years on, the argument is that inclusion is not only just but strategically smart.