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The WPS Agenda has emerged as a landmark international framework to advance gender equity in conflict prevention, resolution, and post-conflict governance. Yet in many of the world’s most militarized conflict zones, women remain systematically excluded from formal peace processes. Despite their exclusion, women continue to demonstrate significant agency in conflict zones. Nevertheless, when women do appear in global narratives, which is unfortunately not a given, they are often depicted solely as victims of war, displaced, silenced, and invisible in policy spaces.
However, when examined against the backdrop of women’s everyday forms of resilience in two of the most complex and protracted conflict zones —Afghanistan under the Taliban and Gaza under Israeli siege — such portrayals reveal themselves for what they truly are: reductive and incomplete. While formal institutions crumble under authoritarian regimes and repeated bombardment, women in these regions perform essential political, economic, and humanitarian functions that reframe the meaning of peace, power, and governance from the ground up.
Afghanistan: Surviving Gender Apartheid
Since the return of the Taliban in August 2021, Afghan women have faced an unparalleled assault on their fundamental rights. The regime has systematically dismantled access to education, employment, and public life, particularly targeting women and girls. Yet, in the face of what many human rights organizations have termed “gender apartheid”, Afghan women have developed forms of subversive resistance and social survival.
In underground schools—operating in private homes and secret shelters—women continue to teach banned curricula to young girls. These initiatives are not merely educational projects but acts of political defiance. They assert women’s presence in the public sphere, even if veiled from view. As documented, these women refuse to let the erasure of their identity become normalized. Through informal women’s councils, legal aid groups, and social media campaigns, Afghan women are not only surviving—they are recalibrating the terms of civic participation under an authoritarian theocracy.
The resilience of Afghan women challenges the assumption that peacebuilding must always flow from the top down. Their actions reveal the limitations of Western donor-led approaches to WPS implementation, which often exclude grassroots actors due to security concerns or bureaucratic inflexibility. These women are peacebuilders, whether or not they are seated at negotiation tables.
Gaza: Resisting Collapse with Collective Care
In Gaza, decades of blockade, recurring wars, and the current unprecedented Israeli military campaign have devastated infrastructure, social services, and economic stability. Yet, even in this landscape of destruction, Gazan women have developed complex survival networks that facilitate food distribution, medical care, and emotional support for entire communities. Their work is not merely humanitarian; it is deeply political. By sustaining communities through collective care, Gazan women resist the logic of militarized destruction and reassert life where death is policy. They organize pop-up health clinics in bombed neighborhoods, maintain communication channels across families and refugee shelters, and document war crimes through grassroots media platforms. This kind of informal leadership redefines security from a human-centered perspective rather than a state one. It also demonstrates how commitments under the WPS Agenda must evolve beyond traditional models of political inclusion to acknowledge and integrate the often-invisible forms of governance that women sustain without formal power.
Bridging the Gap: What the WPS Agenda Misses
The stories of women in Afghanistan and Gaza expose critical blind spots in the current WPS Agenda. Chief among them is the lack of “localized” frameworks that can function when state institutions are absent or hostile. International actors—from NATO to the UN—continue to promote inclusion in peace processes, but often in environments where women’s physical security, freedom of movement, or digital access is virtually nonexistent. Moreover, WPS implementation frequently relies on metrics of formal participation such as seats at the table, quotas, and ministerial positions. These are important but insufficient indicators of women’s agency. They neglect the power of invisible labor, such as caregiving, underground education, and emotional healing, which sustains communities under siege. Without recognizing these forms of contribution, the WPS Agenda risks reproducing the very erasures it seeks to address.
Mechanisms that Bridge Critique and Action
Recent scholarship on Women, Peace, and Security in the Middle East and North Africa underscores that critique must be paired with grounded, actionable practices if the Agenda is to move beyond rhetorical commitment. Translating the resilience highlighted in Afghanistan and Gaza into policy design, therefore, requires spotlighting mechanisms that are already bridging this gap. The U.S.–Afghan Consultative Mechanism, for instance, channels grassroots intelligence directly into U.S. sanctions and education licensing, demonstrating how rotating local leadership can influence external policy. Similarly, through its rapid response grants, FEMENA, an organization which aims to support women human rights defenders (WHRDs), their organizations, and feminist movements in the MENA and Asia regions, demonstrate how modest, flexible funding can transform neighborhood-level care work into transnational advocacy with legal impact. For example, a 2023 emergency grant of just US $4,000 enabled the Gaza-based Al-Nuseirat Women’s Relief Group to purchase encrypted phones and train volunteers to document air-strike damage and civilian casualties. Within six weeks, this digital evidence package—compiled in cooperation with FEMENA’s pro-bono legal team—was submitted to the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and formally cited in the Commission’s December 2023 briefing to the Human Rights Council. In other words, a hyper-local care initiative scaled into internationally recognized legal testimony, demonstrating how rapid-response micro-grants can turn neighborhood-level work into transnational advocacy with concrete accountability impact. Even in ostensibly unrelated settings, such as Iran’s community-run literacy circles for Afghan refugees, local women’s networks have proven capable of scaling informal education into nationally recognized programs when donors create ‘resilience windows’ that bypass restrictive state channels. By identifying these models and examining the reasons behind their effectiveness, we can see how we can move beyond merely diagnosing exclusion to present a locally rooted, bottom-up WPS architecture that international actors can finance, replicate, and safeguard through legal protections. Building on these proven mechanisms, the next step is to distill the principles that can embed such bottom-up practices in a re-imagined WPS framework.
Toward a Gendered Conflict Framework of Peace
To meaningfully engage with women’s experiences in active conflict zones, the international policy community must reconsider its traditional frameworks and adopt more inclusive, localized approaches. This requires expanding the definition of peacebuilding to encompass informal, community-based, and often invisible forms of governance, such as caregiving networks, underground education, and grassroots humanitarian coordination, particularly prevalent in contexts like Gaza and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. It also demands that the WPS initiatives be localized through genuine partnerships with civil society actors operating outside formal state structures, many of whom possess the trust, mobility, and legitimacy to enact change where institutions have collapsed. Furthermore, it is essential to rethink security through a gender-sensitive lens—one that centers social cohesion, collective care, and survival as core tenets of peace, rather than limiting the agenda to disarmament or regime transitions. A gendered perspective on armed conflict challenges militarized models of peace and opens space for more durable and humane approaches to post-conflict reconstruction. Afghan and Gazan women—long excluded from elite negotiations—embody alternative imaginaries of justice, peace, and resilience that deserve not only recognition but integration into global policy design.
Author Bio: Maryam Rezaeizadeh is a policy researcher and practitioner specializing in gender, security, and Middle Eastern affairs. She currently serves as a Faculty Assistant at the University of Maryland’s Persian Flagship Program and contributes to the Middle East Perspectives program at the Stimson Center.
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