Prior to this project, there was a period of sustained international funding and attention for these issues. However, over the past five years, attention has been dwindling as other significant challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic and global gender backlash emerged. Thus, the dynamics the project calls attention to are even more pronounced given this backlash, resistance, resources shortages, and shift in attention.

In some cases, this backlash has been able to emerge in a context where aid programmes and programmes focusing on gender have been done through a narrow lens where they have inadvertently entrenched patriarchal and militarist norms. In other contexts, women’s rights have been co-opted for ethno-nationalist objectives and political agendas.

International frameworks, such as the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and its National Action Plans (NAPs) are applied through a narrow lens that looks at women as one category without thinking of the many different ways that political, social, economic, and geographic identities map onto peoples’ collective sense of wellbeing and security. There has been a critical shift to thinking intersectionally about gender work, but this has not yet been mainstreamed and there is less programming and policy work with this approach compared to the work that started in 2000 with the adoption of the first WPS Resolution (1325).

The global discourse that has emerged from UNSC 1325 on WPS, and many subsequent global convenings on women’s rights, have been adopted by elites who have internalised these frameworks and see them as effective tools for change in their countries. But insufficient work has been done to diffuse these norms and frameworks at the grassroots level, where many women in rural communities have not even heard of these agendas. These frameworks overlook the structural conditions that need to be met first, meaning they become disconnected from immediate needs of women.

The international communities’ programmes and UN Resolutions have not held up against the rapid backsliding of rights globally, as evidenced by the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in 2021, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Sudan, Israel and Gaza and other global conflicts. These global events and militarised responses have exposed the inability of the international community’s programmes and resolutions designed to advance women’s rights to respond in a meaningful way when there is a backsliding of these rights, and their inability to address and overcome the systems of patriarchy, militarism, imperialism and capitalism that lead to this.

In Colombia, Nepal, Rwanda and Sri Lanka for example, women’s access to power is conditioned by their relationship to relevant political elites or power brokers, during and even prior to the war. This speaks to the temporality and adaptability of structures of domination, oppression and violence in the ways in which women’s power is mediated and excised vis-à-vis their relationship to these structures and those who uphold them.

Many political parties or key political actors connected to the conflicts examined in this project benefit from the extension of political opportunities for women. For example, by including women they gain votes and seats while claiming they are committed to democratic principles and practices and an inclusive politics. Who benefits are not the individual women that are supposedly empowered to advance a feminist agenda, but the parties themselves that have been able to navigate a way of gaining more power.

A lot of efforts to advance women’s rights after war has relied on implicit hierarchies of violence, where global advocacy policymaking discourses on women’s rights are structured to focus on singular facets of conflict rather than looking at the different structural layers and dynamics. These overlooked dynamics are often historical forms of discrimination and marginalisation, environmental violence, and harmful gender norms that have reverberating effects, but are not often integrated into advocacy and policy, or oftentimes are not seen as part of the same systems that led to the conflict. These other systems of violence require similar forms of repair.

All of the required expertise for sustainable peace does not sit with the people making laws or creating rights in international institutions. Rather, it sits with people who experience the fallout of conflict first-hand. These individuals and communities have the expertise and the knowledge over the things that they need to change their situation and to create and build peace.

• Close the gap between the political rhetoric advocating women’s rights after war and the reality of limited implementation and decontextualised solutions experienced by those most directly affected. There is an urgent need to address the widespread disconnects between the energy, resourcing and formality of women’s right reforms, and the actual lived experiences of communities. These communities need to have a meaningful place at the table to help inform and shape the conversations involving policy changes. Even more critically, policymakers need to ensure that grassroots women – those often far removed from elite politics or institutionalised spaces – are driving forces in efforts to build women’s power.

• The process of research matters just as much, if not more, than the products of research. Researchers should be intentional in their research design to avoid the replication of harmful power dynamics between researchers and the communities they work with and learn from. Feminist research praxis invites us to think differently about what questions we ask, how we make decisions throughout the research process, and how we present our “findings.”