October 2025 marked the twenty-five year anniversary of the United Nations’ adoption of the first Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) resolution, United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, a landmark acknowledgement that gender shapes every layer of conflict and peace and that women have a vital role to play as agents of peace. While the agenda has broadly become known for its focus on including women in peace and security decision-making spaces, it has long been understood that this was never only about adding women to existing systems. At its core was a deeper aspiration aimed at transforming how security itself is imagined, moving away from militarized responses to conflict and toward peace built through inclusion, care, and attention towards everyday human relationships. Over the last quarter century, WPS has helped shift who we take seriously as peacebuilders and expanded the kinds of violence recognized by global institutions, with at least 56% of UN member states adopting a WPS National Action Plan (NAP) by October 2024.

Anniversaries also invite us to pause and take stock. What has WPS made possible, and where does it continue to fall short? Much has been written and a deep well of important insights have been shared over the last year as WPS activists, practitioners, and researchers grapple with these questions. I am compelled to add my voice to this chorus because I find myself needing WPS and the hope it once made imaginable now more than ever. At a moment when feminist gains are being rolled back and militarized logics are increasingly offered as common sense, returning to and staying with the WPS agenda offers a way forward for practicing hope and a reminder that this agenda emerged from struggle, imagination, and persistence. In that way, the value of WPS lies not only in what it has achieved, but in the futures it continues to make thinkable.

We know that the story of WPS at twenty-five is not a linear one. Its achievements and its shortcomings sit uneasily alongside one another, shaping an agenda that is simultaneously enabling and limiting. On the one hand, WPS has given international recognition to forms of insecurity that women and queer communities have been naming for generations, has pushed issues like conflict-related sexual violence onto global agendas that once dismissed them as private or peripheral, and has created funding streams, training programs, and NAPs that activists now use as leverage in their own governments. These gains are real, and worth celebrating.

At the same time, one of WPS’s most ambitious goals—transforming militarized approaches to security—remains an on-going and contested project, particularly amid contemporary trends towards remilitarization. The promise of participation often rings hollow when women are invited into peace processes without real decision-making power, or when inclusion coexists with expanding military budgets and deepening reliance on force. Too often, progress has been measured by numbers rather than by whether systems of violence are actually being dismantled. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s (WILPF) recent #MoveTheMoney campaign against expanding military budgets underscores the need to recommit to WPS’s original promise by confronting the political economy of militarism that continues to shape how security is funded and justified, and by grounding security instead in care and the dismantling of violent structures.

Globally, we are witnessing democratic backsliding, rising authoritarianism, shrinking civic space, and, as has become increasingly apparent in the last several weeks, a renewed enthusiasm for militarized solutions. The gap between WPS’s transformative ambitions and present-day realities can sometimes feel too wide. For peace advocates, students, practitioners, and WPS researchers like myself, this moment often brings frustration, grief, and fatigue. This, for me, is where hope shifts from something we feel to something we do and something we return to again and again as political space tightens around us. It’s also what I have found myself increasingly holding onto lately.

I keep a quote from Mariame Kaba written large in the center of the whiteboard in my office: “Hope is a discipline.” I return to it often, especially now. Hope, here, takes shape as a shared practice. It is something we train in together through repetition, through relationship, through the small, daily acts of refusing despair. To teach feminist peacebuilding, and to write about WPS at this moment, is to practice that discipline and to keep imagining alternatives even as militarized responses are once again offered as inevitable and necessary.

The work ahead lies in how we carry the WPS agenda forward, tending to its aspirations with courage and sustained political commitment. To be clear, its limitations are real, and its contradictions demand critique. Our task is to hold open the possibility of what it could still become, and to keep practicing the discipline of hope that makes that becoming possible. I am reminded that WPS itself was born of such practices. Long before it became an agenda or a set of resolutions, it emerged from sustained organizing by women’s movements that insisted on imagining peace differently, even when prevailing security logics made those demands seem unrealistic or untimely. Hope, then, is the condition that made the agenda possible in the first place, and it lives on through the collective labor of persistence and courage that animates feminist peacebuilding worldwide.

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