Report of the Secretary-General on women and peace and security (S/2023/725) [EN/AR/RU/ZH]

I. Introduction

1. Nearly a quarter of a century after the adoption by the Security Council of its resolution 1325 (2000), women’s full, equal and meaningful participation in building peace should be the norm, not an aspiration or an afterthought, but the data show that this is far from being a reality. In peace processes, negotiating parties continue to regularly exclude women, and impunity for atrocities against women and girls is still prevalent. Women continue to face entrenched barriers to direct participation in peace and political processes, and women’s organizations struggle to find resources, while military spending continues to grow every year. This remains the case even though there is ample evidence that women’s participation contributes to more robust democracies and longer-lasting peace.1

2. A growing share of the world’s population lives under autocratic rule, after many years of democratic backsliding. Misogyny is a common thread in the rise of authoritarianism and in the spread of conflict and violent extremism. The number of people in need of humanitarian aid increased by 25 per cent over the past year, and the world is undergoing the largest global food crisis in modern history. Much of this increase is driven by nearly 200 armed conflicts and situations of organized violence,2 as well as by the climate crisis and the impact of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. In this difficult context, the number of women and girls living in conflictaffected countries3 reached 614 million in 2022, 50 per cent higher than the number in 2017.4 In early 2022, the number of people forced to flee war, violence and persecution surpassed 100 million, and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 117.2 million people will be forcibly displaced or stateless by the end of 2023.

3. As these negative trends turn back the clock on women’s rights, they also turn back the clock of history, setting back both gender equality and global peace. When fighting broke out in the Sudan in April 2023, widespread sexual violence terrorized the women and girls of Darfur and elsewhere in the country,5 mirroring violence witnessed in Darfur two decades ago. In Afghanistan, the Taliban have issued more than 50 edicts6 to suppress women’s and girls’ rights, in a return to the oppression of the 1990s.

4. The goals of the Secretary-General with respect to women and peace and security for the decade leading up to 2030 provide a different path forward for building and sustaining peace. The international community has many opportunities to help implement this vision: from the proliferation of feminist foreign policies and the collective efforts of the Generation Equality campaign, to the explicit commitments on gender equality laid out in Our Common Agenda (A/75/982) and the policy brief on a New Agenda for Peace (A/77/CRP.1/Add.8), to the preparations for the Summit of the Future in 2024 and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the adoption of Security Council resolution 1325 (2000) in 2025. If governments and international organizations follow the lead of the global women’s rights movement, irrepressible and undeterred by either backlash or setbacks, we can remain hopeful of seeing a radical change in direction.

5. The present report is prepared pursuant to the presidential statement dated 26 October 2010 (S/PRST/2010/22), in which the Security Council requested annual reports on the implementation of resolution 1325 (2000); resolution 2122 (2013), in which the Council called for updates on progress across all areas of the women and peace and security agenda, highlighting gaps and challenges; and resolution 2493 (2019), in which the Council called for reinforced measures to fully implement the agenda. It follows up on the Secretary-General’s directives to the United Nations and the five goals for the decade articulated in the reports on women and peace and security from 2019 and 2020, especially the goal of achieving a radical shift and tangible results in women’s meaningful participation in peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. The report is informed by data and analysis provided by entities of the United Nations system, including peace operations and country teams, inputs from Member States, regional organizations and civil society, and analysis from other globally recognized data sources.