JWF CSW70 Panel
TRANSFORMING THE WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY AGENDA FROM RESOLUTION TO REALITY
16 March 2026 | 10:30 AM | Church Center for the UN | New York
The Journalists and Writers Foundation (JWF), in collaboration with SecurityWomen, organized a side event titled “Transforming the Women, Peace and Security Agenda from Resolution to Reality” during the 70th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70). The panel brought together women, peace and security (WPS) experts and policy specialists working across multilateral governance, civil society advocacy, and local security institutions to examine a question that has become increasingly urgent twenty-five years after the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325: Why does the Women, Peace and Security Agenda remain challenging to implement, despite its normative authority and global recognition?
In her Opening Remarks, Cemre Ulker, Representative of the JWF to the UN Department of Global Communications framed the WPS not as a symbolic milestone alone, nor merely as a protective instrument for women in situations of armed conflict, but as a working theme that redefined women as political subjects within peace and security: as actors, negotiators, leaders, and architects of peace. Yet this normative recognition, exists alongside a deeply troubling international landscape. Ms. Ulker noted that 2025 report of the UN Secretary-General on Women, Peace and Security, alarms the global community that more than 676 million women and girls had lived within 50 kilometers of a deadly conflict event during the previous year, the highest such figure recorded since the 1990s. She underscored that this panel session was convened with the mission of exploring implementation actions in a period marked simultaneously by intensifying armed conflict, institutional fragility, geopolitical polarization, and shrinking political space for gender equality itself.
The session was moderated by Chief Celisa Lehew, Chief of Police for the Town of Chapel Hill in North Carolina, and U.S. Director of SecurityWomen. Drawing on her experience in public safety leadership, she emphasized that the movement from endorsement to implementation requires more than public declarations. Change, she argued, does not occur primarily in statements; it occurs in systems. The real test of the WPS agenda lies in whether institutions alter the ways they recruit, promote, resource, protect, and lead. Twenty-five years after the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, the issue is not whether women should be included in policing or security structures. The more difficult and pressing question is whether institutions are willing to undertake the structural work such inclusion requires. This shift from rhetorical affirmation to institutional transformation became one of the central threads of the conversation.
Pablo Castillo Diaz, Policy Specialist on Peace and Security at UN Women began by offering concrete examples of what the absence of political will looks like in practice. He referred first to Sudan, where one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises has unfolded amid widespread atrocities against women and girls, while many diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict have either excluded women entirely or failed to include them in meaningful ways. He then turned to Afghanistan, where the systematic repression of women’s rights continues while international mechanisms have remained hesitant to codify gender apartheid as an international crime. The force of these examples lay not only in their empirical weight, but in what they revealed about selectivity within international governance. The problem, as Mr. Castillo Diaz suggested, is not that the WPS agenda lacks moral clarity. It is that its implementation remains contingent on geopolitical priorities and unequal distributions of power.
His intervention also illuminated the institutional limitations of the United Nations. The Security Council, when major powers are aligned, possesses coercive tools: it can authorize force, establish international accountability mechanisms, and impose sanctions. Much of what appears externally as discursive excess is, in fact, a reflection of structural limitation. The UN depends on Member States not only for financing, but for political support, visas, access, and legitimacy. Security Council decisions and resolutions, Mr. Castillo Diaz argued, matter not only symbolically but operationally. They shape the mandates of peacekeeping missions and special political missions; they influence strategic plans, concepts of operation, staffing tables, and budgetary priorities. Mr. Castollo Diaz noted that actions of the UN Security Council can reorganize institutional priorities on the ground.
Rather than celebrating a quarter century of cumulative progress, Merrite Johnson, Program and Research Manager at the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security noted that much of the advocacy work of the past year had been defensive: an effort to preserve existing WPS language against intensifying attempts by certain member states to dilute or erase it. She observed that in 2025 only 46% of Security Council decisions contained any language related to women, gender, or the WPS agenda, a notable decline from 62% in 2024 and the lowest level since 2009. This quantitative decline, however, was only part of the story. More revealing was her discussion of how apparently minor textual changes can significantly narrow the scope of recognition and accountability. In the case of Haiti sanctions language, for example, the move from “sexual and gender-based violence” to “sexual violence” restricted the range of harms considered relevant to assessments of the situation on the ground. Such narrowing excludes forms of abuse including forced labor, trafficking, recruitment, and violence tied to sexual orientation or gender identity.
Similar concerns arose in relation to the removal of language on sexual and reproductive health and women’s political participation in mandates relating to other country contexts. If gender advisers or women’s protection advisers disappear from a mandate, they become harder to fund, justify, and retain, especially in a period of budget contraction. If women’s participation is removed from operational language, it becomes easier for institutions to treat it as optional or secondary. In this respect, Ms. Johnson and Mr. Castillo Diaz both underscored that implementation is inseparable from institutional text, even if text alone is never sufficient. Both Mr. Castillo Diaz and Ms. Johnson argued that the central problem is not that the agenda is no longer fit for purpose, but that powerful actors have repeatedly failed to implement it seriously. Johnson broadly echoed this assessment, adding concern that broader restructuring proposals, including possible institutional mergers involving UN Women and UNFPA, risk weakening specialized expertise on gender equality and sexual and reproductive health at a moment when both are under sustained political attack.
Maureen McGough, JD, Co-Founder of the 30×30 Initiative, argued that reforms capable of surviving leadership turnover are those embedded in organizational structures rather than attached to charismatic individuals or moments of public attention. Numbers alone, she suggested, do not tell us whether institutions have changed. The recruitment of more women does not automatically produce a different institutional culture unless recruitment is accompanied by changes in the norms that define competence, leadership, authority, and safety within the organization. Her remarks on sexual harassment were especially striking. Drawing on data from women in public safety institutions in the United States, Ms. McGough observed that sexual harassment remains pervasive and that trust in institutional responses remains deeply weak. This is not incidental to reform. An institution that cannot guarantee psychological safety for its own workforce cannot credibly claim to be advancing women’s leadership or building equitable systems.
Meg McGurk, Community Safety Planner for the Town of Chapel Hill, argued that one of the persistent failures of policing institutions has been the tendency to treat women as supplementary to an already established model of institutional competence. Instead, she proposed a different framing: capacities often associated with women, de-escalation, relational intelligence, collaboration, careful communication, should not be treated as soft or peripheral, but as core competencies central to effective public safety practice. This reframing matters because it shifts the issue from symbolic diversity to operational excellence. If institutions genuinely value such competencies, then recruitment messaging, hiring timelines, communication with candidates, evaluation criteria, leadership development, and promotion systems must all be redesigned accordingly.
Ms. McGurk`s emphasis on many obstacles confronting women, she argued, persist not because they are inevitable, but because institutions continue to tolerate them. These include impersonal and opaque hiring systems, recruitment materials in which women do not see themselves represented, unnecessarily prolonged timelines, and background processes shaped by outdated assumptions about linear career trajectories. In her account, serious reform does not begin with broad declarations of support. It begins with institutional choices, many of which require not more resources but more intentionality.
Another important thread running through the event concerned the role of civil society, and particularly women-led civil society organizations, in sustaining the WPS agenda under conditions of institutional retreat. Both the panel and audience interventions emphasized that women’s organizations often carry the agenda forward where formal institutions fail. They brief, document, advocate, organize, and protect, often with minimal resources and under severe risk. Yet they are also among the first to be undermined by funding cuts, political restrictions, shrinking civic space, and exclusion from formal decision-making arenas. Ms. Johnson noted a troubling decline in the number of women civil society briefers appearing before the Security Council, while other participants raised concerns about how humanitarian cuts are disproportionately affecting grassroots women’s groups, especially in the Global South. A recurring point throughout the exchange was that support for women-led civil society is often rhetorically embraced but procedurally obstructed. Funding architectures remain difficult to access. Registration regimes may exclude independent groups entirely. International institutions continue to work through states even in contexts where states themselves are compromised, authoritarian, or directly implicated in violence.
The audience discussion deepened the analytical range of the session. Questions raised from the floor touched on what options remain when both governments and security actors are implicated in abuse; whether new resolutions are necessary to address emerging threats; how to think about the proposed role of a special envoy; the relationship between grassroots activism and policing reform; and the likely effects of artificial intelligence on women, peace, and security work. On AI, Ms. McGough offered one of the most memorable responses. She acknowledged both apprehension and possibility, stressing that AI systems are only as equitable as the data on which they are trained. In their present form, absent deliberate intervention, such systems risk reproducing the very gendered exclusions that WPS advocates seek to dismantle. But she also suggested that procurement standards, accountability frameworks, and intentional design could make AI a site of intervention rather than surrender. Her point was not technological optimism. It was institutional responsibility.
In her closing remarks, Chief Lehew returned to the central theme of alignment. The evidence, framework and leadership exist. What remains uncertain is whether institutions will align their systems with their declared commitments. Strong emphasis of all panelists on alignment captured the most important contribution of the panel. Reflections made visible the layered work required to move from normative recognition to lived institutional change: political will at the multilateral level, vigilance in textual negotiations, protection of specialized expertise, serious resourcing of civil society, reform of internal organizational systems, and a willingness to measure not only participation, but power.
The panel did not present implementation failure as the result of a single cause, nor did it offer a singular remedy. Rather, it showed that the distance between resolution and reality is produced through many intersecting dynamics: geopolitical selectivity, institutional risk aversion, bureaucratic dilution, shrinking civic space, austerity, patriarchal cultures within security institutions, and the persistent tendency to celebrate commitment without restructuring power.
