Securing Women’s Peace - Ford (2025)

This report uses a political economy approach to analyze the structures, interests, relationships, and power dynamics that shape Women, Peace and Security (WPS) implementation, drawing on The Asia Foundation’s Practical Guide to Political Economy Analysis. It finds that formal frameworks — such as ASEAN’s Regional Plan of Action on WPS or the Philippines’ Magna Carta of Women — are necessary but insufficient to understand the existing and future implementation of WPS. Informal norms like social and gender norms, bureaucratic politics, historical narratives of war and peace, and relationships of power between stakeholders all exert influence over what WPS means in practice in each context.

While WPS as a framework must be carefully programmed to avoid confrontation with entrenched power structures that can thwart it from the beginning, it offers strategic footholds for gendered peacebuilding when it is grounded in locally meaningful concepts for communities and governments. The report identifies locally grounded pathways forward to navigate this tension, to strengthen WPS within each country context, and offers some recommendations for the region.