“I think one queer woman’s story can change those that come after it.” - Amani, lesbian activist and writer, Tunisia. Human Rights Watch (2023, 1)
Which stories of conflict we hear, and who gets to narrate future visions for peace matters. Nearly a decade ago, I published an article in International Affairs (Hagen Reference Hagen2016) highlighting the need to challenge cisgender and heteronormative assumptions embedded within the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Since then, I have had the opportunity to speak widely about what motivated me to write on the topic: a lack of attention to lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women in what at that time was 15 years of work on WPS. As a queer feminist lesbian I am emotionally and intellectually invested in transnational women’s rights organizing. I was perplexed by the near absence of sexuality as an intersectional dimension of gender justice, despite the prominent role lesbians have always played in the movement globally. This weakness within the women’s peace movement’s coalitional organizing is now under significant strain amid growing anti-trans attacks with governments turning to securitizing responses to moral panic over trans rights (Leigh Reference Leigh2025, Currah Reference Currah2022). Still, queer and trans organizers like Amani in Tunisia persist in working for their own visions of a peaceful future, taking advantage of opportunities for allyship where possible.
My early thinking about addressing the gap in attention to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people in the WPS agenda centered on interrogating how people understand and operationalize the terms women and gender. In interviews for my book Queering Women, Peace and Security (Hagen Reference Hagenforthcoming) I asked participants to reflect on how they use these terms and how their use of the terms may vary in different contexts. I was particularly interested in understanding how individuals conceptualize these terms based on their own education, experiences, collaborations, and commitments. What emerged from these conversations was a complex picture, where practitioners acknowledged the limitations of binary understandings of gender, yet continued to operate within frameworks that assumed heterosexuality. Others recognized the need for more inclusive approaches but struggled with how to implement them, especially when discussing sexuality remained off limits in practice.
As evidenced by these challenges, queering WPS is not only about adding LGBTQ identities to the list of categories of women considered in peace and security efforts. Rather, my understanding of and commitment to queering WPS is two pronged: recognizing queer and trans experience and privileging the unique knowledge people with these experiences have about gender, peace, and security more broadly. Following LGBTQ community-led guidance is best-practice for confronting the challenges practitioners face in queering WPS.
Since 2016, many states have taken an increasingly authoritarian or conservative turn, putting LGBTQ communities in even greater precarity, including a climate of fear in the United States (Human Rights Watch 2025, 9). In this context, research about the language of gender in practice is proving even more important to women’s rights work, including protecting access to abortion, supporting human rights activists, and valuing those who teach gender in the classroom. Yet in these same years, there have also been unprecedented efforts to incorporate sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) into peace and conflict work, including through research and reporting by the SOGI Independent Expert at the UN. As another example, the Colombian LGBT rights organization Colombia Diversa took a leading role as participants in ongoing consultations during the drafting of Colombia’s first WPS NAPFootnote
1 to ensure there were specific measures for supporting lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LBT) women. These measures were informed by workshops organized by Colombia Diversa, gathering LBT women from across the country to determine how best to implement the four pillars of the WPS agenda informed by their own experiences and needs. Often, however, those working to promote LGBTQ rights domestically and internationally are unfamiliar with the WPS agenda.
Between Rhetoric and Reality of Engaging LGBTQ Communities
In feminist WPS spaces where I have been a part of global and local convenings, there is a growing recognition that sexuality is essential to intersectional gender justice work. Yet this recognition sits alongside a continuing lack of engagement with the role of LBT women as leaders and partners in peace organizing. Although attention to queering as a part of peace and security has improved in recent years, opportunities for substantive change for engaging with LGBTQ communities beyond definitions and parenthetical mentions in reports are uneven and still face significant funding challenges.Footnote
2 Often when I speak with WPS practitioners about queering WPS, they tell me they do not feel ready to do this work. Relatedly, both practitioners and scholars (myself included) have called for more queer data (Guyan Reference Guyan2022), as a lack of data is regularly cited as the reasoning behind not including attention to queer lives in feminist peacebuilding initiatives.Footnote
3 Such barriers delay engagement with queer communities and undermine the transformative potential of the WPS agenda.
For feminists who have been both critical and supportive of queering WPS, there are specific challenges and opportunities worth considering. On one hand, some fear that expanding the agenda to explicitly include LGBTQ concerns might dilute its focus on women or provide ammunition to those who already resist gender equality initiatives. These are legitimate concerns in a political climate in which gender equality work faces increasing backlash. On the other hand, queering WPS offers opportunities to strengthen feminist approaches by highlighting the interconnections between multiple systems of oppression. A queering of gender discourse can help break down the gender binary within gender, peace, and security work, confronting the underlying patriarchal powers that marginalize certain gender and sexual minorities. We can develop more comprehensive strategies for transformation by recognizing how heteronormativity reinforces binary gender norms that harm all women, not just those who are queer.
This transformation might begin by foregrounding the work of those combating anti-gender attacks from a position of trans equality such as the Global Action for Trans Equality (GATE). GATE has held observer status at the UN’s Economic and Social Council since 2023 and works to advance justice and equality for trans and gender diverse communities around the world including through events such as the annual UN Trans Advocacy Week which Best Chitsanupong Nithiwana, Human Rights Officer at GATE, argues, “stands out as a vital advocacy program that transforms visability into real influence” (Nithiwana 2025). The organization works through three pillars — human rights, health, and movement building — allowing for a powerful entry point for those looking to strengthen movements (GATE n.d.). Likewise, other membership organizations, such as the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association (ILGA) Asia, do expansive work promoting gender equality and sharing resources about queer and trans justice relevant to those working for peace and security. Queering WPS means citing work by these organizations, inviting members of the network to partner on consultations, and learning from how groups like GATE and ILGA Asia have long responded to marginalization and defunding for their own gender justice work. Although there continues to be a gap in queering WPS, the change in willingness to see the importance of including LGBTQ people in peace and security efforts presents an opening for changing WPS implementation practices.
Creating Spaces for Queer Perspectives in Peacebuilding
There is a constructive ambiguity (Basu Reference Basu2016, 369) in the UN Security Council WPS resolutions that gender advisors and those implementing WPS agendas can leverage to think expansively about a queer-inclusive approach to incorporating gender perspectives in peace and security work. This ambiguity enables actors to give deeper and more diverse meaning to gender in operationalizing WPS.
My experience has shown the powerful impact of creating convening spaces where conversations about queering WPS can occur. For example, at the first “conversation café” in 2023 I cohosted as a side event to the Commission on the Status of Women in New York City, over 50 attendees whose work in academia, civil society and activism focused on supporting women in conflict-related environments or reproductive justice initiatives were able to learn how their work intersects with LGBTQ issues.Footnote
4 These spaces allow practitioners who do not traditionally work on sexuality or LGBTQ politics to understand how their efforts can support a broader community, including LBT women, as part of their gender justice work.
Similarly, youth, peace, and security (YPS) initiatives have often led the way in incorporating SOGI into intersectional understandings of gender justice. These overlapping ecosystems offer important opportunities for cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches. The YPS agenda, which was first institutionalized at the UN with UNSCR 2250 (United Nations Security Council 2015), is a potentially complementary agenda to WPS, though it comes with its own complexities. Helen Berents (Reference Berents2020) writes about the tendency to merge youth and women’s movements in a homogenizing way. Through YPS, efforts to queer WPS can learn how to take LGBTQ voices seriously, as well as what challenges of “institutional compliance” they will face to be positioned as leaders within the peace and security space (Berents and Fosu Reference Berents and Fosu2025, 4–5).
In research conducted with Chitra Nagarajan for Outright International, we found that in contexts experiencing anti-gender backlash, the ability to convene, share strategies, and build networks becomes even more crucial (Outright International 2023a). LGBTQ organizations working in peace and security contexts often operate with minimal resources and considerable security risks. The opportunity to connect with others facing similar challenges provides not only practical support, but also emotional solidarity in difficult circumstances. Strengthening collaborations across feminist and LGBTQ movements is one of the main ways to support lesbian, bisexual and transgender women in peace and security spaces (Hagen, Ranawana, Ramón, Mercier, Beltrán, and Parra Reference Hagen, Ranawana, Ramón, Mercier, Beltrán and Parra2023).
Another persistent challenge in queering the WPS agenda is the issue of institutional memory and expertise turnover. Efforts to take queering seriously almost always depend on one or two individuals who champion the issue. While this is true of gender mainstreaming in general, it is excacerbated when the efforts involve LGBTQ inclusion. Although it is important to be wary of Global North power dynamics in international policy spaces, it is crucial to recognize the significant role that academic institutions can play in advancing queer perspectives within WPS. Academic settings in their ideal form often provide the freedom to explore ideas and challenge norms that may not be available in government or nongovernmental organization (NGO) contexts where funding constraints and political sensitivities can limit discussions of SOGI while providing some stable site of expertise.
Toward a Queerer Future for Peace and Security
Who is responsible for queering the WPS agenda? While LGBTQ organizations and individuals have crucial expertise to contribute, the burden should not fall solely on them. Meaningful queering requires commitment from all WPS stakeholders including governments, international organizations, NGOs, academia, and civil society. All peacebuilding organizations should audit their programming for how they have integrated sexuality as a dimension of their work, including how they are inviting LGBTQ organizations to the table for longer term collaborations. This may require finding creative ways to work with LGBTQ organizations that are facing funding cuts or are affected by policies that block their right to register their organizations (Outright International 2023b; ILGA World Database n.d.).
Beyond questions of inclusion, queering WPS involves rethinking our methods and approaches to peace and security. It challenges us to reconsider who we recognize as peacebuilders and what we understand as peace. Traditional approaches often focus on formal peace processes and state-centered security, overlooking the everyday peacebuilding work done by those on the margins of society, including LGBTQ individuals. LGBTQ people often develop unique strategies for survival and community-building in conflict situations that can offer important insights for comprehensive peacebuilding efforts. These strategies frequently involve working across differences, creating alternative support systems, and challenging binary thinking. These are approaches that align with feminist peace principles but may be overlooked when LGBTQ experiences are excluded from analysis. Moreover, a queer approach (Bennett Reference Bennett2024) to WPS requires us to question the heteronormative assumptions that often underpin conceptions of post-conflict reconstruction, such as the focus on nuclear families and traditional gender roles. It invites us to imagine more inclusive forms of social organization that can accommodate diverse gender identities and family structures.
Looking toward the future of the WPS agenda, my vision for queering involves both practical and conceptual transformations. Practically, it means WPS NAPs that explicitly address the specific security needs of LBT women in conflict situations (Pinheiro Reference Pinheiro2022). It means funding mechanisms that support LGBTQ peacebuilding initiatives and research centering queer experiences of conflict and peace. Conceptually, it means moving beyond mere inclusion to transformation, while questioning the heteronormative and cisnormative foundations of how we think about peace, security, and gender justice. Civil society articulations of gender and women as expansive categories offer the most promising path to more progressive definitions and interpretations. Actors engaged in consultations with states are well-positioned to put pressure on Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women mechanisms to enable more expansive interpretations of gender, including support for LGBTQ women.Footnote
5 States can follow the lead of feminist and queer organizations to address sexual minorities in a way that adopts the perspective of those most impacted by the legal frameworks defining and interpreting gender.
In an era of increasing backlash against both gender equality and LGBTQ rights globally, queering the WPS agenda is not just an academic exercise but a political necessity. As I have heard from so many queer and trans activists organizing for their rights and safety in international forums, their lives are not a luxury to be considered later. Recognizing the long-standing forms of queer resistance in Palestine illustrates the importance of queering even in unstable times (Atshan Reference Atshan2020). Sa’ed Atshan writes, “My vision for the queer Palestinian movement places it at the intersection of queer futurity and utopia” (Atshan Reference Atshan2020, 215). Through building stronger connections between feminist peace work and queer politics, we can create more resilient movements for change that can withstand these challenges. The path forward requires courage, creativity, and commitment from all involved in WPS work.
“I think one queer woman’s story can change those that come after it.” - Amani, lesbian activist and writer, Tunisia. Human Rights Watch (2023, 1)
Which stories of conflict we hear, and who gets to narrate future visions for peace matters. Nearly a decade ago, I published an article in International Affairs (Hagen Reference Hagen2016) highlighting the need to challenge cisgender and heteronormative assumptions embedded within the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Since then, I have had the opportunity to speak widely about what motivated me to write on the topic: a lack of attention to lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women in what at that time was 15 years of work on WPS. As a queer feminist lesbian I am emotionally and intellectually invested in transnational women’s rights organizing. I was perplexed by the near absence of sexuality as an intersectional dimension of gender justice, despite the prominent role lesbians have always played in the movement globally. This weakness within the women’s peace movement’s coalitional organizing is now under significant strain amid growing anti-trans attacks with governments turning to securitizing responses to moral panic over trans rights (Leigh Reference Leigh2025, Currah Reference Currah2022). Still, queer and trans organizers like Amani in Tunisia persist in working for their own visions of a peaceful future, taking advantage of opportunities for allyship where possible.
My early thinking about addressing the gap in attention to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people in the WPS agenda centered on interrogating how people understand and operationalize the terms women and gender. In interviews for my book Queering Women, Peace and Security (Hagen Reference Hagenforthcoming) I asked participants to reflect on how they use these terms and how their use of the terms may vary in different contexts. I was particularly interested in understanding how individuals conceptualize these terms based on their own education, experiences, collaborations, and commitments. What emerged from these conversations was a complex picture, where practitioners acknowledged the limitations of binary understandings of gender, yet continued to operate within frameworks that assumed heterosexuality. Others recognized the need for more inclusive approaches but struggled with how to implement them, especially when discussing sexuality remained off limits in practice.
As evidenced by these challenges, queering WPS is not only about adding LGBTQ identities to the list of categories of women considered in peace and security efforts. Rather, my understanding of and commitment to queering WPS is two pronged: recognizing queer and trans experience and privileging the unique knowledge people with these experiences have about gender, peace, and security more broadly. Following LGBTQ community-led guidance is best-practice for confronting the challenges practitioners face in queering WPS.
Since 2016, many states have taken an increasingly authoritarian or conservative turn, putting LGBTQ communities in even greater precarity, including a climate of fear in the United States (Human Rights Watch 2025, 9). In this context, research about the language of gender in practice is proving even more important to women’s rights work, including protecting access to abortion, supporting human rights activists, and valuing those who teach gender in the classroom. Yet in these same years, there have also been unprecedented efforts to incorporate sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) into peace and conflict work, including through research and reporting by the SOGI Independent Expert at the UN. As another example, the Colombian LGBT rights organization Colombia Diversa took a leading role as participants in ongoing consultations during the drafting of Colombia’s first WPS NAPFootnote 1 to ensure there were specific measures for supporting lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LBT) women. These measures were informed by workshops organized by Colombia Diversa, gathering LBT women from across the country to determine how best to implement the four pillars of the WPS agenda informed by their own experiences and needs. Often, however, those working to promote LGBTQ rights domestically and internationally are unfamiliar with the WPS agenda.
Between Rhetoric and Reality of Engaging LGBTQ Communities
In feminist WPS spaces where I have been a part of global and local convenings, there is a growing recognition that sexuality is essential to intersectional gender justice work. Yet this recognition sits alongside a continuing lack of engagement with the role of LBT women as leaders and partners in peace organizing. Although attention to queering as a part of peace and security has improved in recent years, opportunities for substantive change for engaging with LGBTQ communities beyond definitions and parenthetical mentions in reports are uneven and still face significant funding challenges.Footnote 2 Often when I speak with WPS practitioners about queering WPS, they tell me they do not feel ready to do this work. Relatedly, both practitioners and scholars (myself included) have called for more queer data (Guyan Reference Guyan2022), as a lack of data is regularly cited as the reasoning behind not including attention to queer lives in feminist peacebuilding initiatives.Footnote 3 Such barriers delay engagement with queer communities and undermine the transformative potential of the WPS agenda.
For feminists who have been both critical and supportive of queering WPS, there are specific challenges and opportunities worth considering. On one hand, some fear that expanding the agenda to explicitly include LGBTQ concerns might dilute its focus on women or provide ammunition to those who already resist gender equality initiatives. These are legitimate concerns in a political climate in which gender equality work faces increasing backlash. On the other hand, queering WPS offers opportunities to strengthen feminist approaches by highlighting the interconnections between multiple systems of oppression. A queering of gender discourse can help break down the gender binary within gender, peace, and security work, confronting the underlying patriarchal powers that marginalize certain gender and sexual minorities. We can develop more comprehensive strategies for transformation by recognizing how heteronormativity reinforces binary gender norms that harm all women, not just those who are queer.
This transformation might begin by foregrounding the work of those combating anti-gender attacks from a position of trans equality such as the Global Action for Trans Equality (GATE). GATE has held observer status at the UN’s Economic and Social Council since 2023 and works to advance justice and equality for trans and gender diverse communities around the world including through events such as the annual UN Trans Advocacy Week which Best Chitsanupong Nithiwana, Human Rights Officer at GATE, argues, “stands out as a vital advocacy program that transforms visability into real influence” (Nithiwana 2025). The organization works through three pillars — human rights, health, and movement building — allowing for a powerful entry point for those looking to strengthen movements (GATE n.d.). Likewise, other membership organizations, such as the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association (ILGA) Asia, do expansive work promoting gender equality and sharing resources about queer and trans justice relevant to those working for peace and security. Queering WPS means citing work by these organizations, inviting members of the network to partner on consultations, and learning from how groups like GATE and ILGA Asia have long responded to marginalization and defunding for their own gender justice work. Although there continues to be a gap in queering WPS, the change in willingness to see the importance of including LGBTQ people in peace and security efforts presents an opening for changing WPS implementation practices.
Creating Spaces for Queer Perspectives in Peacebuilding
There is a constructive ambiguity (Basu Reference Basu2016, 369) in the UN Security Council WPS resolutions that gender advisors and those implementing WPS agendas can leverage to think expansively about a queer-inclusive approach to incorporating gender perspectives in peace and security work. This ambiguity enables actors to give deeper and more diverse meaning to gender in operationalizing WPS.
My experience has shown the powerful impact of creating convening spaces where conversations about queering WPS can occur. For example, at the first “conversation café” in 2023 I cohosted as a side event to the Commission on the Status of Women in New York City, over 50 attendees whose work in academia, civil society and activism focused on supporting women in conflict-related environments or reproductive justice initiatives were able to learn how their work intersects with LGBTQ issues.Footnote 4 These spaces allow practitioners who do not traditionally work on sexuality or LGBTQ politics to understand how their efforts can support a broader community, including LBT women, as part of their gender justice work.
Similarly, youth, peace, and security (YPS) initiatives have often led the way in incorporating SOGI into intersectional understandings of gender justice. These overlapping ecosystems offer important opportunities for cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches. The YPS agenda, which was first institutionalized at the UN with UNSCR 2250 (United Nations Security Council 2015), is a potentially complementary agenda to WPS, though it comes with its own complexities. Helen Berents (Reference Berents2020) writes about the tendency to merge youth and women’s movements in a homogenizing way. Through YPS, efforts to queer WPS can learn how to take LGBTQ voices seriously, as well as what challenges of “institutional compliance” they will face to be positioned as leaders within the peace and security space (Berents and Fosu Reference Berents and Fosu2025, 4–5).
In research conducted with Chitra Nagarajan for Outright International, we found that in contexts experiencing anti-gender backlash, the ability to convene, share strategies, and build networks becomes even more crucial (Outright International 2023a). LGBTQ organizations working in peace and security contexts often operate with minimal resources and considerable security risks. The opportunity to connect with others facing similar challenges provides not only practical support, but also emotional solidarity in difficult circumstances. Strengthening collaborations across feminist and LGBTQ movements is one of the main ways to support lesbian, bisexual and transgender women in peace and security spaces (Hagen, Ranawana, Ramón, Mercier, Beltrán, and Parra Reference Hagen, Ranawana, Ramón, Mercier, Beltrán and Parra2023).
Another persistent challenge in queering the WPS agenda is the issue of institutional memory and expertise turnover. Efforts to take queering seriously almost always depend on one or two individuals who champion the issue. While this is true of gender mainstreaming in general, it is excacerbated when the efforts involve LGBTQ inclusion. Although it is important to be wary of Global North power dynamics in international policy spaces, it is crucial to recognize the significant role that academic institutions can play in advancing queer perspectives within WPS. Academic settings in their ideal form often provide the freedom to explore ideas and challenge norms that may not be available in government or nongovernmental organization (NGO) contexts where funding constraints and political sensitivities can limit discussions of SOGI while providing some stable site of expertise.
Toward a Queerer Future for Peace and Security
Who is responsible for queering the WPS agenda? While LGBTQ organizations and individuals have crucial expertise to contribute, the burden should not fall solely on them. Meaningful queering requires commitment from all WPS stakeholders including governments, international organizations, NGOs, academia, and civil society. All peacebuilding organizations should audit their programming for how they have integrated sexuality as a dimension of their work, including how they are inviting LGBTQ organizations to the table for longer term collaborations. This may require finding creative ways to work with LGBTQ organizations that are facing funding cuts or are affected by policies that block their right to register their organizations (Outright International 2023b; ILGA World Database n.d.).
Beyond questions of inclusion, queering WPS involves rethinking our methods and approaches to peace and security. It challenges us to reconsider who we recognize as peacebuilders and what we understand as peace. Traditional approaches often focus on formal peace processes and state-centered security, overlooking the everyday peacebuilding work done by those on the margins of society, including LGBTQ individuals. LGBTQ people often develop unique strategies for survival and community-building in conflict situations that can offer important insights for comprehensive peacebuilding efforts. These strategies frequently involve working across differences, creating alternative support systems, and challenging binary thinking. These are approaches that align with feminist peace principles but may be overlooked when LGBTQ experiences are excluded from analysis. Moreover, a queer approach (Bennett Reference Bennett2024) to WPS requires us to question the heteronormative assumptions that often underpin conceptions of post-conflict reconstruction, such as the focus on nuclear families and traditional gender roles. It invites us to imagine more inclusive forms of social organization that can accommodate diverse gender identities and family structures.
Looking toward the future of the WPS agenda, my vision for queering involves both practical and conceptual transformations. Practically, it means WPS NAPs that explicitly address the specific security needs of LBT women in conflict situations (Pinheiro Reference Pinheiro2022). It means funding mechanisms that support LGBTQ peacebuilding initiatives and research centering queer experiences of conflict and peace. Conceptually, it means moving beyond mere inclusion to transformation, while questioning the heteronormative and cisnormative foundations of how we think about peace, security, and gender justice. Civil society articulations of gender and women as expansive categories offer the most promising path to more progressive definitions and interpretations. Actors engaged in consultations with states are well-positioned to put pressure on Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women mechanisms to enable more expansive interpretations of gender, including support for LGBTQ women.Footnote 5 States can follow the lead of feminist and queer organizations to address sexual minorities in a way that adopts the perspective of those most impacted by the legal frameworks defining and interpreting gender.
In an era of increasing backlash against both gender equality and LGBTQ rights globally, queering the WPS agenda is not just an academic exercise but a political necessity. As I have heard from so many queer and trans activists organizing for their rights and safety in international forums, their lives are not a luxury to be considered later. Recognizing the long-standing forms of queer resistance in Palestine illustrates the importance of queering even in unstable times (Atshan Reference Atshan2020). Sa’ed Atshan writes, “My vision for the queer Palestinian movement places it at the intersection of queer futurity and utopia” (Atshan Reference Atshan2020, 215). Through building stronger connections between feminist peace work and queer politics, we can create more resilient movements for change that can withstand these challenges. The path forward requires courage, creativity, and commitment from all involved in WPS work.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the editors of Politics and Gender for inviting me to reflect on the 25th anniversary of Women, Peace and Security from a queer perspective. I am ever grateful to the many queer and trans advocates and experts who continue to teach me how to imagine a more genderful future.