On the 25th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which defined the “WPS Agenda” in 2000 it is worth remembering that the scope and nature of women’s peace activism has always been contested within the movement, writes Rebecca Turkington.
For the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) community, 2025 will be a year of commemoration and stock-taking. The 25th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 offers an important milestone from which to look back at the beginnings of the field and to argue about its future. At the centre of these debates are contestations over the nature of the WPS agenda. Who ‘owns’ the legacy of 1325—is it grassroots feminist peacebuilders, or gender-mainstreaming advisors at NATO? Is WPS a project to end war, or is it necessary to engage with the military? What should the WPS response be to gender apartheid in Afghanistan or war in Ukraine?
It is tempting to look to a longer history of women’s peace activism to adjudicate the “right” version of WPS, but earlier generations provide no easy guidance. In fact, these challenging questions have always been at the heart of WPS work. It is in trying to answer them that the WPS community has advanced valuable conversations and ideas.
Even the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the oldest women’s peace organisation in the world, faced the same tussles within its membership. A closer look at the group’s correspondence and archives from the 1930s reveals many familiar rifts. It was a fraught decade that saw the rise of fascist regimes, revealed the weaknesses of international law, and watched new, terrible attacks on civilians unfold from Ethiopia to China. As they faced growing anxiety about the direction of the world, women of the WILPF argued about how far to compromise their anti-militarist ideals, how closely to work with governments to advance imperfect policies, and how to balance work for peace with other related goals. Their searching disputes have clear echoes today and suggest that the way forward may not mean reaching consensus but finding spaces to engage in productive debate.
In the 1930s, debates with the WILPF campaign crystallized around general disarmament. The group was one actor in a broad coalition of anti-war groups that viewed arms, and the competition they stoked, as the primary cause of war. This peace movement promoted international regulations on the type and quantity of weapons nations could produce or purchase, urging governments to enter into binding arms control agreements that would gradually slow battleship building and artillery stockpiles. The WILPF took one of most radical stances among its peers, calling for total and complete disarmament.
But as the decade wore on, WILPF members challenged the group’s commitment to general disarmament from the perspectives of political palatability, anti-colonialism, and anti-fascism.
Politics and pragmatism
The question of the political viability of disarmament pitted pragmatic WILPF members against their more utopian colleagues. In the US, WILPF Executive Secretary and consummate lobbyist Dorothy Detzer spearheaded much of her national chapter’s organising in favour of disarmament. She was a well-known face in the halls of Congress and wrote to the President daily “as though he were my mother,” urging American politicians and diplomats to take bold action at the series of international disarmament conferences that took place over the 1920s and 30s.
But other American colleagues criticised her for diluting the WILPF’s call for total disarmament by advocating partial reductions rather than wholesale abolition. One such colleague was another US WILPF officer, Hannah Clothier Hull. Her version of pacifism was absolute, and she counselled Detzer to adhere more closely to the WILPF’s ideals. Detzer wrote an exasperated letter to Hull in response, arguing that the WILPF’s hard line was impossible to translate into political change. “I want to be able to talk to the men on Capitol Hill,” she responded, “without having them become irritated immediately by an idea which has no relationship to political reality.” A trade-off no doubt recognizable to many WPS advocates working in unfriendly political climates.
Disarmament in the “oppressed countries”
At the international level, WILPF struggled with internal clashes between national sections whose experiences of armed conflict varied vastly. Almost as soon as the general disarmament campaign moved outside the West, it faced new challenges from WILPF members and allies in colonized countries.
When the WILPF section in Tunisia began soliciting signatures for a global disarmament petition, journalist Mohamed Nomane published an editorial in 1930 critiquing its premise. He argued WILPF had misdiagnosed the causes of war, and that from the vantage point of a colonized country, arms were not the problem. It was colonial powers who pulled their empires unwillingly into global conflict who were to blame. “The only remedy to make war disappear is the dispossession of colonialism,” he concluded.
In 1936, the WILPF’s chapter in Egypt articulated this concern even more forcefully in a letter to the groups’ Geneva headquarters. Disarmament of the great powers was one thing, the group argued, but a country like Egypt, still struggling to throw off the colonial influence of the British, “must arm themselves to the teeth” in order to secure their sovereignty. Despite de jure independence in 1922, British troops still walked the streets of Cairo, and organising against the creation of an Egyptian army meant a tacit acceptance of de facto colonialism.
This did not go over well back in Switzerland. Clara Ragaz, the WILPF international co-chair, wrote to the Egyptian chapter that despite her sympathy for Egypt’s plight, “if you advocate for armaments, you are not in accord with the principles of the League.” But the Egyptians refused to concede. Surely, they replied, “’total and universal disarmament’ does not mean in all cases unilateral disarmament,” given the vast discrepancies between “free and oppressed” countries. They proposed an amendment that would exempt the colonized world from the strictures of the disarmament clause. Though they received little support from other sections, their analysis shows that not all WILPF members agreed about the permissibility of violence in the face of oppression.
Peace, Justice, and Fascism
WILPF’s European chapters also challenged its commitment to disarmament in the face of the growing threat from fascism. WILPF chapters in Germany and France, where far-right nationalists had taken power in 1933 and 1934, pushed the group to ally with the anti-fascist coalitions emerging across Europe, even those which did endorse the use of force. They pointed to the dire consequences of fascism and insisted, in the words of Gertrud Baer, that WILPF “cannot possible stand for a program which claims justice if we do not take a clear position on this question.”
But a formal alliance with other anti-fascist elements meant joining groups like the Communist Party which had already taken up arms. For other WILPF sections, these terms constituted an unacceptable compromise of the group’s moral position on anti-militarism. They argued peace was a method as much as a goal and that an unwavering belief in non-violence was what separated the WILPF from other organisations. In countries like the US, where WILPF members already faced severe personal and political consequences for merely being accused of communism, a formal association with the Party would make their work impossible.
As more WILPF members in Europe and Asia felt the direct consequences of fascism, these questions made continued work for disarmament challenging. For those living with fascism firsthand, it seemed a campaign that no longer fit the circumstances. After Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, a Chinese woman who had thought of starting a national WILPF section in China sent a letter to her European colleagues lamenting that she “now felt unable to do peace work and could only work for justice.”
No easy lessons
In 2025, many of these disagreements continue to resonate as the WPS community faces a new landscape of international crises. They underpin questions over whether to support NATO expansion, how much to compromise with conservative political administrations, and how to respond to mass killing in Gaza and Sudan. Divisions over what feminist peace looks like in practice run deep into the bedrock of the field. Though the WILPF members of the 1930s did not reach a satisfying consensus, they established a tradition of earnest dialogue about what it would take to attain a more peaceful and just world that continues today. As this year’s 25th anniversary commemorations of UNSCR 1325 begin—with an inevitably wide range of views about the agenda’s successes and failures—it is worth remembering that the history of WPS has always been one of contestation and debate rather than a singular vision of feminist peace.
Photo credit: United Nations used with permission CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
