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Authors: Sonia Chabane, Yasmina Benslimane, Zein Tayyeb, Axana Soltan, Maggie Murphy, Adam C. Levine
Abstract
On the 25th anniversary of Resolution 1325, building the foundations of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda (WPS), this report explores how women-led civil society organisations (CSOs) and feminist activists are reimagining the Agenda “from below” in four South-West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) contexts: Lebanon, Sudan, Syria and Turkey. Rather than focusing on the global backlash against the Agenda, this paper particularly centers on the organizing practices that persist despite shrinking civic space, economic collapse and ongoing violence. Using a relational feminist lens that treats agency as socially embedded, the paper synthesizes up-to-date secondary literature and targeted conversations with grassroots activists to map, in each case, structural barriers to women’s participation in peace and political processes and local strategies that subvert, bypass or transform those barriers, before concluding with their implications for regional and international policies. The report’s findings expose a persistent gap between stated ambitions, such as providing sufficient resources, and the realities faced by diverse women in the SWANA region. Lebanon’s successive National Action Plans demonstrate that, while there is normative uptake of the WPS agenda, sectarian governance structures and the systematic underfunding of both the Agenda itself and women-led CSOs significantly reduce their impact. In Sudan, revolutionary feminist mobilization actively resists militarised patriarchy, particularly amid the deepening state collapse and continued civil war. Syrian women play critical roles in grassroots governance and localized aid delivery yet remain excluded from formal negotiations and increasingly vulnerable amid donor retrenchment. Turkey’s WPS architecture remains shallow and blind to Kurdish and displaced women’s rights and representation in the months following the announcement of the historic ceasefire between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.