Queering the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: A practice-based toolkit 

About

This toolkit provides a guide for how to queer Women, Peace and Security in practice through three main sections:

1. Queering the four pillars of WPS,
2. Feminist and LGBTQ collaborations, and
3. Queering WPS National Action Plans

Who is this toolkit for? 

This toolkit is for those who are interested in including lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer women in a gender analysis of peace and security and how WPS applies to LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer) communities more broadly. This toolkit is for feminist and LGBTQ+ organisations working on gendered dimensions of peace and security programming.

This toolkit is also relevant to academics and students interested in 1) strengthening their understanding of heteronormative and cisgender assumptions within gender, peace and security and 2) connecting WPS to the everyday through the lens of LGBTQ+ experiences.

The WPS architecture has yet to engage with inclusion of LBTQ women in their programmatic work and conflict interventions. The focus of the toolkit is to highlight the key questions, action points and interventions to address this gap.

We draw on insights from ongoing work by the organization Colombia Diversa, to provide a guide ways forward for queering the implementation of the WPS agenda. Based on their work support LBTQ women’s engagement with the WPS agenda and continued engagement in SOGIESC efforts in Colombia more broadly. Here we need to stress that the focus on the Colombian case is not to name it as a typical context. Instead we look to this work in Colombia to offer key learnings and reflections. We suggest that the ongoing queering WPS work in Colombia be approached as a laboratory to then apply what might be relevant or useful in your own context.

How to use this toolkit:

• Follow the relevant sections (queering the pillars of WPS, feminist and LGBTQ collaborations, queering the National Action Plan) to examine your work on women, peace and security
• You don’t need to read this toolkit from start to finish – use the sections and tools that are useful to you.
• This toolkit is not intended to be comprehensive – it contains information on other available resources.
• We welcome your feedback, including recommendations of additional tools to share to supplement the toolkit.

This toolkit was developed in collaboration with the Queen’s University Belfast Centre for Gender in Politics, Christian Aid UK and Colombia Diversa. This project was funded by a British Academy Innovation fellowship (IF\220115).