Economic Empowerment in the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

This Paper is about the extent to which the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda at the United Nations recognises the need to pay attention to the economic pillar of peacebuilding and women’s economic and social rights. Through documentary analysis of the 7 UN Security Council Resolutions, the 60 National Action Plans and other key policy documents, and examination of the literature on their implementation, it argues that the WPS agenda belatedly brought in more of a focus on women’s economic empowerment during the 2010-2014 period, but that this was too little, too late and too quickly replaced. Moreover, the understanding of women’s economic empowerment found in the WPS agenda is problematic. The Paper draws on feminist economics and international development literature on the concept of economic empowerment to demonstrate that the WPS conceptualisation is relatively thin and impoverished. The paper concludes with reflections on why this matters and what more transformational economic empowerment agenda might look like.