When women took their demands for a women, peace and security (WPS) agenda to the Security Council in 2000, they were demanding that prevention of war be a key aspect of the Security Council’s agenda along with a recognition of the capacities of half the world’s population to resolve the complex challenges of global peace and security.

Key messages

• The world has lost sight of some of the key demands of the women’s movement while advocating for the adoption of resolution 1325: reducing military expenditures, controlling the availability of armaments, promoting non-violent forms of conflict resolution, and fostering a culture of peace.
• States that have lower levels of gender inequality are less likely to resort to the use of force. Stronger recognition is required of the depth of the influence of gender norms, gender relations and gender inequalities on the potential for the eruption of conflict.

• The women, peace and security agenda is about ending conflict, not about making conflict safer for women.
• Prevention requires both a short-term approach which includes women’s participation and gender based violations within early warning measures, as well as longer term structural approaches to address the root causes of conflict, including inequality, and address new sources of conflict, including the impacts of climate change and natural resources.

Facts and figures

• In 2014, violence had a global cost of 13.4 percent of world GDP — USD$14.3 trillion. In 2014, the world’s global military spending was estimated at USD $1776 billion, some 2.4 percent of global GDP. There was a notably sharp increase in 2014 in the number of States with a military expenditure of more than 4 percent of their GDP.
• The value of the global trade in small arms and light weapons almost doubled between 2001 and 2011, from USD 2.38 billion to USD 4.63 billion
• While global spending on public education amounts to 4.6 percent of global GDP, massive funding gaps remain on broad human security needs and measures, particularly women and girls’ empowerment, reproductive health and rights, health and education.

• In countries with high rates of violence related to arms, the percentage of women killed with arms is higher.
• Recent large-scale research projects show that the security of women is one of the most reliable indicators of the peacefulness of a state.
• An assessment of UNDP’s Peace and Development Advisors, working on crisis prevention in fragile countries, showed that women fill only 6 out of 34 posts.

Key recommendations

• As a part of States Parties’ obligations to implement the Arms Trade Treaty’s provision on gender-based violence, require arms-producing corporations to monitor and report on the use of their arms in violence against women.
• Prioritize the consultation and participation of women in the implementation, monitoring and accountability of the SDGs.
• Adopt gender-responsive budgeting practices as a strategy to address, highlight and mitigate militarized state budgets and their destabilizing impact on international peace and security and women’s rights.
• Include women’s participation and gender-responsive indicators in all early-warning processes, conflict prevention and early-response efforts.

• Work with the private sector to develop and use new technologies which increase women’s physical security and strengthen conflict prevention.
• Work in partnership with affected women and girls when designing, implementing and monitoring climate-change and natural resource-related strategies.
• Provide financial, technical and political support, to strengthen the capacity of women’s civil society to organize and play a greater role in national and community-led election monitoring and electoral violence prevention, dispute resolution and mediation initiatives, and wider preventive diplomacy work.