The history of war, conflict, and peace is long and complex. Yet one basic truth that applies across time, geographies, and landscapes is that the exclusion of women persists. Historically, women and girls have been portrayed as victims while their work mitigating and mediating conflicts, responding to crises, and rebuilding societies has been underrepresented and marginalized. In 2026, women and girls in conflict and crisis settings are still overwhelmingly excluded from spaces where decisions about their present and future are made, their bodies are used as an extension of war, and their roles in crafting and sustaining peace remain undervalued.

For the past 25 years, the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda has sought to address this. The global architecture for this work emerges from UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325. At its core, this resolution acknowledges the need for women's meaningful inclusion in peace and security, recognizes the disproportionate impact of conflict on women, and sets a four-pillar frame to translate these commitments into practice: participation, prevention, protection, and relief and recovery.

Since this landmark moment, over 100 states have committed to implementing this work through the development of National Action Plans (NAPs), which translate the aspirations of 1325 and the subsequent 10 UN Security Council resolutions into action. Despite this effort, the realities of implementation reflect the same logic of exclusion: lack of funding, weak accountability, and political deprioritization. As Oxfam noted in the 2025 Beyond the Rhetoric report, "Feminist peace is a political imperative, not an optional extra. Unless governments change course now, the WPS agenda will be remembered as just another broken promise."

The recent US history on WPS

Globally, the United States has been one of the strongest supporters of the WPS agenda. The Obama Administration developed NAPs in 2011 and 2015, increasing the integration of the four pillars across government structures, namely through the Department of State (DoS), the Department of Defense (DoD), and USAID. While institutionalizing global commitments can appear technocratic and cumbersome, this is the work that enables progress to be measured, made visible, and accountability for governments to be maintained over time.

In 2017, the US went a step further with the bipartisan passage of the WPS Act, translating policies into statutory requirements. It was a decisive moment for the US to demonstrate its commitment to the meaningful inclusion of women in preventing, resolving, and recovering from conflict. It also reflected the notion that, for national security issues, the inclusion of women was a strategic imperative. The WPS Act also mandated the executive branch to submit annual progress reports to Congress on the implementation of the WPS agenda.

Following the WPS Act, the Trump administration created a whole-of-government strategy in 2019, setting the pathway for the development of a US Strategy and National Action Plan on WPS. Under this strategy, four agencies (DHS, DoS, DoD, USAID) were responsible for implementation across five lines of effort (LoE) of the WPS agenda. In 2023, the Biden administration developed the second Strategy and NAP on WPS, deepening its commitment to this work through an intersectional, rights-based approach.

Congress also demonstrated alignment with this agenda. In 2020, the bipartisan creation of the WPS Caucus deepened the collective understanding that this agenda is central to positioning the US as a trusted partner on these issues, promoting US national security and prosperity, and furthering US values related to human rights and political participation around the world.

But all of this changed in 2025.

The current situation of WPS in the US

In 2025, President Trump's executive orders to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and attack gender affected the WPS agenda directly, delivering a significant blow to this work globally. These orders set the stage for the dismantling of the USG structure on WPS, including the dismantling of USAID, the elimination of the Office of Global Women's Issues (GWI) at DoS, the decimation of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) at DHS, and the cancellation of the WPS program at DoD. This also meant that hundreds of talented people who led the implementation, development, and global outreach of the National Strategy on WPS were forced out of their work, weakening leadership and institutional expertise.

Evidence unequivocally shows that women's participation and gender analysis make peace agreements last longer, improve the effectiveness of security programs and policies, and create the robustness needed for mitigating and resolving conflicts, including through early warning systems, intelligence, planning, and crisis response. Today, the US is less prepared to face the multiple challenges and threats to its national security as a consequence of disregarding the proven contribution of meaningfully including women in peace and security efforts.

Later that year, the US government failed to produce the legally required report on WPS implementation to Congress. For the first time since the passing of the WPS Act, civil society organizations produced a Shadow Report, drawing on the expertise of former USAID, DoS, and DHS staff — a rare practice in the US, yet very common in countries where governments disregard their legal responsibilities and see accountability as an annoyance, not a responsibility.

The lack of a nuanced understanding of the strategic nature of the WPS agenda has caused the robust, meaningful, bipartisan, and expertise-driven work done for the past decade to become entangled in political polarization and culture wars. The abrupt and haphazard changes to the WPS work are hard felt in the US, but the consequences are felt exponentially in countries where conflict and crises are the daily reality of millions of women, girls, the LGBTQIA+ community, men, and boys. Instead of building on years of progress on this front, this administration has chosen to double down on militarization, exclusion, and violence as an alternative.

Oxfam America believes in the promises of the WPS agenda and its transformative potential. For this reason, we organized last May a visit to Washington, DC for two of our partners: Dejusticia (Colombia) and SEEDS for Legal Initiatives (Lebanon).

Dejusticia is an internationally recognized legal and social studies think-and-do tank, committed to strengthening the rule of law and promoting human rights in Colombia and the Global South. As a research-action center, its objective is to promote social and environmental justice. To this end, it conducts rigorous studies and makes solid public policy proposals, conducts advocacy campaigns in high-impact forums and public interest litigation, designs and delivers educational and training programs, and strengthens the fabric of civil society.

SEEDS is a legal and human rights organization working in Lebanon and across the region to expand access to justice, strengthen legal protection, and advance rights-based legal reform. SEEDS seeks to amplify progress in human rights and equality, and contributes to advancing the WPS agenda by promoting women's political participation, gender justice, inclusive governance, accountability, and legal reform. Its work addresses civic space, freedom of expression, women's rights, anti-corruption, and the rights of the missing and forcibly disappeared from the 1975–1990 Lebanese Civil War.

For a week, the voices and experiences of our partners were heard by people on Capitol Hill and the US Civil Society Working Group (CSWG) on WPS in Washington, DC. Despite efforts to silence the voices of women and deny their titanic efforts to build peace, it is critical to listen carefully to what they have to say.

What this means for women in Colombia and Lebanon

Colombia

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Colombian Peace Agreement, which ended 60 years of civil war between the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government. This agreement marked a historic milestone, embedding over 100 gender provisions, elevating the voices of women and LGBTQI communities, recognizing them as victims of conflict, and, most importantly, as agents who have carried out peacebuilding efforts even amidst violent contexts and against all odds. The Peace Agreement aims to strengthen these roles to bolster Colombian democracy as a whole.

One hallmark of this agreement is comprehensive agrarian reform, a critical component for addressing historic land inequality as a root cause of the conflict. Prioritizing women when allocating land recognizes the role they have played over the last century in agricultural production. It also acknowledges the victimization women suffered during the conflict and their crucial role as defenders of land and the environment in Colombia.

There have been tangible improvements for women in this area, as access to land titles is the first step toward building economic autonomy and creating conditions for women and their families to remain on their land. However, the lack of continuous funding to support sustainable rural development, the rise of extractive industries including mining and palm oil, and the decades-long use of harmful glyphosate to reduce coca growing are deepening women's vulnerability and threatening their health and safety in the country.

For decades, Colombia has been a priority country for the US in the Western Hemisphere. For instance, between 2018 and 2024, the US funded 42% of the foreign aid for implementing the peace agreement, including land reform. The abrupt elimination of USAID's programs threatens the viability of the peace agreement's implementation. In 2024, 68% of all international humanitarian funding was provided by the US. These decisions directly affected people experiencing exclusion and marginalization. In the Colombian case, Indigenous and Afro-Colombian women also represent 37% of the documented cases of conflict-related sexual violence. Additionally, the 3 million Venezuelan migrants (half of them women) who accessed a Temporary Protection Status (TPS) implemented by the Colombian government were partially funded by USAID.

Last year, Colombia issued its first National Action Plan, long-awaited by women's organizations. This constitutes a crucial tool for advocating for the WPS agenda in the country and marks a precedent for continued advocacy. The WPS agenda in action offers a powerful framework through which Colombians can make sense of conflict, peace, human rights, ancestral rights, and gender justice issues, and keep front and center the ethnic and racial diversity of the country, seeking to rectify historical harms while moving forward.

Lebanon

In the past six years, Lebanon has experienced two wars, COVID-19, the 2020 Beirut port explosion, and economic collapse. Today, the country is once again at war. When violence is the daily reality of a society, survival takes precedence over other critical issues. In this case, the conversation about the WPS agenda is less about progress and challenges across the four pillars of the agenda. Its primary focus is on the critical need to stop war. It is about crafting sustainable peace, rooted in sovereignty, accountability, and the protection of civilians. Peace without sovereignty is fragile, and sovereignty without women at the table is incomplete.

A country of 5.8 million people, roughly the size of the New York metro area, faces overlapping and compounding crises.

The current war has internally displaced over 1 million people, putting pressure on those who leave their homes as well as on the receiving communities. This comes in addition to the decade-long presence of Palestinians (estimated by UNRWA at 500,000 people) and the 1.1 million Syrians (UNHCR) living in the country, whose basic rights are highly limited, as Lebanon has not ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention nor the 1954 Convention on Stateless Persons. The current situation for Lebanese women is also constrained by structural inequalities such as the Nationality Law, which denies Lebanese women the right to pass nationality to their children or spouses, and the 15 existing personal status laws that produce substantial inconsistencies in the rights of women depending on religious affiliation in matters such as marriage, divorce, and custody.

While women and women's rights organizations (WROs) have been responding directly to the growing humanitarian needs in the country, they remain largely excluded from decision-making spaces. This situation is one salient point in a broader trend of underrepresentation for women, in a country where only 8 out of 128 parliamentary seats are occupied by women. In addition, there has been a further deterioration of gender-based violence due to the war, creating higher risks to the protection of women and girls in overcrowded and informal shelters. In early 2026, data reported on gender-based violence decreased significantly — a troubling sign, as it indicates limited access for women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ communities to safe reporting mechanisms and needed support.

Conclusion

The drastic changes in the implementation of WPS in the US have significant effects domestically and internationally. The experiences of Colombia and Lebanon shared by our partners offer a window into the complex realities that women face — as a diverse group with different needs and perspectives, as agents of change, as migrants, as refugees, as LGBTQIA+ people, as human rights defenders, as civilians, and as people of faith.

Today, WPS as a global framework with proven effectiveness and strong evidence must be embraced and elevated. The choice of governments to dismantle, defund, and deprioritize this agenda is a strategic and moral failure. The consequences of this choice are not abstract; the price is paid by millions of people who must live with the effects of decisions made by the US government without any chance to hold it accountable for its actions.

The WPS agenda is not a "women's issue." It should be seen as an agenda that concerns us all, as it pertains to peace, security, democracy, and justice. It benefits us all by contributing to the building of better societies grounded in peace.