Once championed by leaders like Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, the WPS framework is now being dismantled—despite its proven value to national defense.
While most of the American populace may not know what Women, Peace and Security (WPS) is, or what it champions, WPS has recently found itself at the center of partisan political crossfire.
The U.S. WPS Act of 2017, a response to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325, mandates agencies of the federal government to understand and facilitate the incorporation of women’s knowledge and skills in the realm of national security. WPS asserts that women should be involved in matters of peace and war, which too often have been the sole preserve of men.
However, in recent months, all four agencies tasked with the implementation of WPS in the U.S. federal government have either partially or completely scaled back their WPS mandates in a stunning reversal:
- The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been eliminated by executive order and virtually all foreign aid contracts ended.
- The Department of State’s (DOS) Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently announced a plan for the reorganization that would disband the Office of Global Women’s Issues (S/GWI), the department’s strongest WPS advocate, effective June 2.
- The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) eliminated their Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which was tasked with WPS implementation within that department.
- The Department of Defense (DOD) Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced on Tuesday April 29 that he had “proudly ENDED” WPS in the DOD, claiming it to be a woke Biden initiative, despite the fact that the WPS Act was signed into law by Donald Trump during his first administration.
Too often, misconceptions about WPS overshadow its true purpose as a framework for national security. Grounded in feminist analysis, WPS acknowledges the structural barriers that hinder women’s meaningful participation in political and security institutions. Through the removal of these barriers, women will be able to contribute more readily, thereby improving the nation’s ability to pursue its goals of peace and security. WPS elevates our military’s ability to mitigate global conflict, our government’s ability to make effective policy, and our nation’s ability to pursue security within its borders.
However, a simple increase in female participation will never be enough to create positive transformative change towards a more peaceful and more prosperous nation. The presence of women does not automatically guarantee that their perspectives, voices and skills will be employed for more well-rounded decision making. This is the danger of the “add women and stir” strategy. It is not enough to simply allow women a place at the table—steps must also be taken to ensure that their presence translates into meaningful participation.
WPS compels us to use new lenses, derived from feminist analysis, that allow us to see much more than we otherwise would; for example, seeing why women might become suicide terrorists, or how lopsided sex ratios might upend national stability. WPS lenses vastly improve our nation’s situational awareness. But WPS goes further, suggesting that women have wisdom and skills in dealing with the security threats they face each day that might improve the operational effectiveness of our country.
In the WPS framework, the idea that women are always peacemakers is understood as simplistic. WPS equally advocates for women’s involvement in peacebuilding and in so-called “hard” security sectors. It acknowledges that women must be at the table for peace and at the table for war, with the set intention of mitigating national risk, making operations more effective and improving situational awareness. Women have played crucial roles in hard security institutions in the past—for example, through initiatives like the DoD’s Lioness initiative two decades ago.
The Lioness Program, employed by the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, yielded critical operational results in an environment where women and men could not interact due to cultural restrictions. Insurgents knew U.S. servicemen could not speak to their women, and used this to weaponize women as weapons smugglers and insurgents. It wasn’t until women in Task Force Lioness and later, the Female Engagement Teams (FETs), came onto the scene that the security gap created by sex-based factors could be structurally bridged.
This is WPS at work: Women are critical to fully seeing and understanding the problem, and women are critical to solving the problem.
It’s also important to know what happens when we fail to use a WPS lens. Vital information is overlooked, hindering the ability to put the most well-informed foot forward in protecting lives and waging peace. Without WPS, pieces of the puzzle never fully come into vision.
For example, failing to employ a gendered lens to analyze the statistical connection between domestic violence in the United States and mass shooting events leads to critical gaps in our ability to deter mass violence within our borders.
When looking at cases of U.S. homicide-suicide perpetrators from 2005 to 2011, between 71 percent and 82 percent had a history of domestic violence. When considering mass shootings from 2014 to 2019, 68.2 percent of these massacres had a perpetrator that killed at least one partner or family member or had a history of domestic violence.
Failing to see the connection within these dots can lead to the eradication of critical programs in the U.S., and this is already happening. If we retire programs aimed at fighting domestic violence, we are actively removing our ability to detect potential incidences of mass violence.
It is this meaningful engagement with sex-attentive lenses that makes WPS such an invaluable tool in the American national security sectors, both in terms of domestic security as well as international security. WPS has earned a place in the institutions that help keep Americans safe at home and abroad, and it has immense potential to not only save human life but to promote peace and stability in conflict zones all around the world.
Failing to recognize WPS’ critical importance works to the detriment of American interests, and to the American people. Many leaders in the new administration, such as Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, Michael Waltz and even President Donald Trump, have championed WPS in the past. It is time for them to rediscover why they did so.
