8.5: War Is Gendered. Peace Is Too.

Conflict, Displacement, Security, and Political Agency

When war appears in textbooks, the cast of characters is often predictable.

Presidents.

Generals.

Militias.

Diplomats.

Soldiers.

Maps.

Women and children tend to appear later under the heading “civilian casualties.” That tells us something about how security has traditionally been studied. It tells us less about how war actually works. Women can be civilians, soldiers, guerrillas, political leaders, organizers, journalists, doctors, humanitarian workers, spies, protesters, displaced people, negotiators, survivors, perpetrators, and peacebuilders. Sometimes several at once. 

War Rearranges Everyday Life

Armed conflict destroys infrastructure, but it also rearranges social roles. When people are killed, conscripted, imprisoned, displaced, or forced to migrate, household responsibilities change. Women may become primary earners, heads of households, community organizers, caregivers, traders, or political actors under conditions they did not choose. Conflict can also intensify existing inequalities. Sexual violence has been used strategically in numerous wars. Displacement can increase exposure to trafficking, exploitation, early marriage, and unsafe work. Health systems collapse. Schools close. Property records disappear. Food systems become unstable. In 2025, UN Women estimated that more than 612 million women and girls were living in conflict-affected areas. Yet focusing only on vulnerability leaves half the story untold.

Resolution 1325: A Different Definition of Security

In 2000, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. The resolution was significant because it did not merely ask governments to protect women during conflict. It recognized that women should participate meaningfully in preventing war, negotiating peace, conducting peacekeeping, rebuilding institutions, and designing post-conflict societies. That sounds obvious now. Historically, it was not. For generations, peace agreements were frequently negotiated almost entirely by men despite the fact that the resulting political arrangements governed everyone. Twenty-five years after Resolution 1325, however, implementation remains deeply incomplete. UN Women reported that in 2024, only about one in ten peace negotiators was a woman, even as global conflict intensified. That produces a rather astonishing contradiction: The international community has spent decades officially declaring women's participation essential to peace. Then it repeatedly negotiates peace without them.

Afghanistan: Education as Political Space

Afghanistan makes the relationship between gender, security, state power, and public life especially visible. Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban has imposed extensive restrictions on women's education, work, mobility, and participation in public life. UNESCO reported in August 2025 that Afghanistan remained the only country in the world where secondary and higher education were prohibited for girls and women, leaving approximately 2.2 million girls and young women excluded from education beyond primary school. Education here is not merely about schooling. It determines who can become a doctor, journalist, civil servant, professor, engineer, political organizer, or business owner.Restricting education today reorganizes society tomorrow. And yet Afghan women have continued teaching through informal networks, documenting restrictions, advocating internationally, operating businesses where possible, producing journalism, and organizing inside and outside the country. They are not footnotes to Afghanistan's political story. They are among its political actors.

Liberia and the Politics of Peace

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Leymah Gbowee and women’s peacebuilding. Liberian peace activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee, whose work with the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace helped demonstrate the political power of women’s grassroots peace activism. ( International Development Law Organization, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Consider a very different case.

During Liberia's civil war, women's peace activism became internationally visible through the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace movement, associated with activist Leymah Gbowee and a broad coalition of Christian and Muslim women. Women organized demonstrations, pressured political leaders, and demanded negotiations. Their actions did not single-handedly end Liberia's war, and romanticizing peace movements would oversimplify a complex conflict. But their participation challenges one of the oldest assumptions in international politics: that security is produced mainly by people with weapons. Sometimes political power looks like a military convoy. Sometimes it looks like thousands of women refusing to leave.