By: Maryam Rezaeizadeh
This paper critically examines the implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), arguing that dominant narratives in the region emphasizing women’s victimhood obscure their agency and capacity for peacebuilding. Drawing on personal insights, policy reports, and case studies from Afghanistan, Gaza, Iran, and Syria, this analysis examines how the WPS framework can be refined to better reflect the region’s socio-political realities. By incorporating local narratives and contextual examples, the paper proposes strategies for empowering women as active agents of peace, not passive recipients of protection.
25 Years of WPS and a Region in Crisis
Twenty-five years after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, the WPS agenda remains far from fully realized in the MENA region. Conflicts persist in Syria, Gaza, Yemen, and Afghanistan, while systemic repression in Iran and other countries continues to silence women’s voices. Yet amidst these adversities, women have emerged as critical actors in peacebuilding. From organizing underground schools in Afghanistan to leading protests in Iran, they have demonstrated remarkable resilience. However, these contributions are often excluded from formal policymaking and international narratives, reducing women to victims in need of rescue rather than recognizing them as strategic agents of change.
Women’s Agency in Conflict Zones: Case Studies from Afghanistan and Gaza
In Afghanistan, women’s resistance under the Taliban regime is both historic and ongoing. For example, Mahbouba Seraj, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, has operated a women’s shelter and media outlet advocating for women’s health and rights despite Taliban threats. Similarly, the Afghan women’s network has continued to coordinate humanitarian responses and advocacy campaigns even after the regime change in 2021.
In Gaza, women have led grassroots initiatives providing psychological support and food distribution networks in refugee camps. During the escalation of conflict in 2023, the Women’s Affairs Center in Gaza documented numerous women-led responses to internal displacement, underscoring how women sustain communities amid devastation. These narratives, drawn from the Stimson Center report and interviews conducted by Human Rights Watch (2024), exemplify how women in conflict zones sustain community resilience by assuming roles as informal diplomats, educators, and frontline providers of humanitarian aid.
Structural Failures of the WPS Agenda in MENA
The WPS Agenda often fails to advance meaningful participation of women in MENA, as demonstrated by a 2024 policy analysis that critiques the top-down implementation of the WPS initiatives across the MENA region. One example is Libya’s post-2011 peace negotiations, where only two women were included among twenty participants, despite the sustained activism and organizational leadership of Libyan women at the grassroots level. This case reflects a broader regional trend in which superficial numeric inclusion is prioritized over women’s meaningful and substantive participation in peace processes. Furthermore, the Jordanian government adopted a national WPS action plan in 2018, yet grassroots women’s groups report limited access to implementation funds. Their marginalization illustrates how the agenda is often shaped by international donor priorities rather than community needs.
Cultural Adaptation of WPS: Lessons from Tunisia and Morocco
Tunisia’s 2017 law on violence against women addresses economic and political violence in the country. The law was developed with input from both feminist NGOs and Islamic legal scholars, illustrating how Islamic values can align with WPS principles when locally framed. Morocco’s ‘Moudawana’ family law reform of 2004 was another milestone in the legal expansion of women’s agency in MENA. This reform supports women’s rights regarding travel, divorce, and self-guardianship in a patriarchal society, bolstering the third pillar of the WPS framework — Prevention. These examples demonstrate how culturally grounded legal reform can harmonize with global WPS objectives and make the implementation of WPS more effective.
Iran and the Sanctions Paradox: Feminist Resistance in Isolation
Iran provides a distinctive case for WPS analysis. Despite not being a conventional conflict zone, Iranian women live under what can be described as “structural violence”—a system of repression, discrimination, and isolation exacerbated by international sanctions. Since the 2022 death of Mahsa Jina Amini in police custody, the grassroots movement ‘Zan, Zendegi, Azadi’ (Woman, Life, Freedom) has galvanized feminist resistance in Iran and abroad. Women like Narges Mohammadi, winner of the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize, have exposed human rights violations within Iranian prisons while organizing against gender apartheid. According to Human Rights Watch, many women have been detained since the start of the protests, with numerous reports of torture or solitary confinement.
Iranian women in the diaspora have also been influential in documenting abuses and calling for global feminist solidarity, challenging the traditional boundaries of the WPS agenda. The WPS framework often overlooks countries under sanctions, assuming a binary between war and peace. However, Iranian women’s daily struggles under a securitized, patriarchal regime and punitive economic conditions demand broader interpretations of conflict, protection, and participation.
Rethinking the Four Pillars of WPS Through a MENA Lens
The four pillars of the WPS agenda—Participation, Protection, Prevention, and Relief & Recovery—must be reimagined through the lens of the MENA region, where women’s lived experiences in conflict and authoritarian contexts challenge traditional policy frameworks. Participation, for instance, should not be limited to formal peace negotiations but must encompass women’s active engagement in informal governance structures. In Syria, the Mazaya Women’s Center in Idlib exemplifies this broader definition by training women in leadership and trauma support, enabling them to contribute to local governance even in areas controlled by extremist groups. Similarly, the concept of Protection must move beyond narrow interpretations focused solely on gender-based violence to include systemic threats like economic deprivation, displacement, and the collapse of public services. The case of Yemen, where maternal mortality has dramatically increased due to the disintegration of healthcare infrastructure, illustrates the urgent need to expand this pillar’s scope.
Prevention efforts should target the structural roots of violence, including authoritarianism, sectarianism, and institutional corruption. Tunisia’s transitional justice process, which integrated women’s testimonies of repression following the revolution, presents a compelling model for a comprehensive approach to prevention. Relief and Recovery should prioritize trauma-informed approaches, the rebuilding of community trust, and equitable access to education. In Afghanistan, where girls’ schooling has been banned under Taliban rule, underground networks of women educators are sustaining learning environments, often at significant personal risk.
To complement and reinforce these four pillars, a fifth—Political Accountability—should be formally recognized. This pillar would serve to monitor and enforce both state and international actors’ commitments to WPS principles, ensuring that rhetoric is matched by responsibility and action, especially in regions prone to regression and impunity.
Policy Recommendations for Local and International Actors
To advance the WPS agenda meaningfully in the MENA, local and international actors must coordinate transformative and context-specific interventions. Regional governments must prioritize the development and implementation of national WPS action plans that are co-designed with grassroots women’s organizations and backed by dedicated budget lines. One key failure in implementing the WPS agenda has been the exclusion of civil society voices from state-led processes, resulting in superficial and largely symbolic commitments. Legal reforms should also decriminalize dissent and institutionalize protections for women human rights defenders, many of whom face repression under authoritarian regimes, as seen in both Iran and Syria.
International institutions and donors must shift their focus from funding short-term, externally imposed aid projects to investing in long-term feminist organizing and leadership development. This includes reevaluating sanction regimes to ensure exemptions for women-led NGOs and civil society initiatives, especially in countries like Iran, where sanctions have paralyzed civic engagement. Civil society actors across the region must work toward building transnational coalitions—such as the emerging Afghan-Iranian collaborations on refugee education—that pool resources, expertise, and political capital.
In light of growing digital threats and political repression, there is an urgent need to train a new generation of women leaders in conflict journalism, digital safety, and policy advocacy. Recent feminist initiatives have highlighted how digital spaces that were once seen as liberatory are increasingly becoming sites of surveillance and harassment, requiring targeted strategies to secure women’s online presence and participation.
Finally, think tanks and academic institutions have a responsibility to decentralize the WPS dialogue. Hosting regional conferences in cities such as Tunis, Amman, or Beirut can shift the intellectual gravity away from Western capitals, while promoting scholarship in Arabic, Persian, and Kurdish will ensure that knowledge production around peace and security is truly indigenous. These recommendations, if adopted collaboratively, can bridge the persistent gap between global mandates and local realities, revitalizing the WPS agenda across the region.
Conclusion: Reimagining WPS Beyond the West
The WPS agenda must evolve to reflect the voices and visions of those it claims to serve. In the MENA region, women are not merely survivors of violence but architects of peace, resistance, and resilience. Their stories—from Gaza’s aid networks and Afghanistan’s underground schools to Iran’s protest movements and Yemen’s healthcare activism—should inform the future of global peace policy. Civil society actors across the region must work toward building transnational coalitions that pool resources, expertise, and political capital. By embracing these regional solidarities, the WPS agenda can better bridge the persistent gap between global mandates and local realities, ensuring a more just and effective peace policy.
About the Author:
Maryam Rezaeizadeh is a public policy researcher and practitioner specializing in gender, security, and Middle Eastern affairs. She is currently a Faculty Assistant and Mentor for the Persian House at the University of Maryland’s Persian Flagship Program and a contributor to the Middle East Perspectives program at the Stimson Center. Maryam has held research roles at the Stimson Center, Wilson Center, and Center for International Policy (CIP), focusing on women’s political agency, digital activism, and informal peacebuilding in conflict zones. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of international security and social justice, with a particular emphasis on empowering women and marginalized groups in the Middle East. She holds a master’s in public policy from the University of Maryland and has published widely on gender-based resilience under authoritarian regimes.
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