By Katrina Leclerc, PhD
Twenty-five years after the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has become one of the most significant normative frameworks shaping global conversations on gender, conflict, and peacebuilding. Yet despite growing attention to intersectionality within international policy spaces, the WPS agenda remains overwhelmingly structured around binary understandings of gender. Across much of the global WPS architecture, women are still implicitly imagined as cisgender, heterosexual, and politically legible within relatively traditional frameworks of gender and security.
This raises an important question: who remains excluded from the WPS agenda, even as it expands?
Over the past several months, I reviewed 208 National Action Plans (NAPs) on WPS, past and present, to examine whether they included explicit references to LGBTQI+ communities, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or broader gender-diversity frameworks. The findings were striking. Fewer than 10 percent of the documents reviewed contained explicit references to LGBTQI+ communities or broader SOGIESC-inclusive language.1 More than 90 percent contained no explicit references at all. Even among newer-generation NAPs that strongly emphasized inclusion, diversity, or intersectionality, explicit naming of queer, trans, non-binary, or gender-diverse communities remained exceptionally rare.
This absence matters. WPS NAPs are not simply symbolic documents. They shape national priorities, institutional training, funding allocations, participation mechanisms, protection frameworks, and the broader political imagination of who counts within peace and security governance. The continued invisibility of LGBTQI+ communities within most NAPs reflects deeper assumptions about whose experiences of insecurity are recognized as legitimate and whose participation is considered politically relevant.
At the same time, a small but growing number of states are beginning to challenge these binary assumptions more directly.
Canada’s 2023-2029 NAP is among the clearest examples. The document explicitly references “2SLGBTQI+ issues,” “sexually and gender-diverse people,” transgender communities, and critiques binary understandings of gender within the WPS agenda itself. Particularly significant is the inclusion of references to Two-Spirit and gender-diverse Indigenous peoples in discussions on violence and insecurity. Rather than simply adding LGBTQI+ communities into existing frameworks, the Canadian NAP begins to question some of the assumptions underpinning WPS policy architecture.
Similarly, Sweden’s 2024-2028 NAP explicitly states that Sweden will “highlight and support particularly marginalized groups, such as women with disabilities, LGBTI persons, young people and older people.” This is notable not only because it uses explicit “LGBTI” terminology, but because the reference is embedded within the strategic framing of the NAP itself rather than confined to a passing mention or footnote.
Colombia’s first National Action Plan (2024-2034) also stands out as one of the most comprehensive examples of LGBTQI+ inclusion within the WPS agenda. The plan explicitly references sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, lesbian, bisexual and transgender women, non-binary persons, and LGBTIQ+ communities throughout the document. Importantly, Colombia integrates these references into its broader framework on intersectionality, human security, and conflict-related violence, including within discussions on transitional justice and implementation of the 2016 Peace Agreement. Rather than treating LGBTQI+ inclusion as peripheral, the Colombian NAP embeds sexual orientation and gender identity directly into its conceptual understanding of peace and security.
Argentina’s 2022 NAP also stands out for its extensive references to LGBTIQ+ communities, gender-diverse individuals, sexual orientation, gender identity, and “sexual dissidences,” reflecting the influence of broader feminist and gender-diversity movements within Argentine politics. Australia’s 2021-2031 NAP references “people with diverse sexual orientation and gender identities” as well as “sexual and gender minorities.” Norway’s 2023-2030 NAP recognizes that conflict impacts vary depending on “gender and sexual identity,” while South Africa’s 2020-2025 NAP explicitly references “women, girls and gender non-conforming persons” and frames the agenda around “women in all their diversity.”
These examples remain exceptions rather than the norm.
More commonly, newer-generation NAPs adopt broader inclusion language without explicitly naming LGBTQI+ communities. Chile’s 2025-2030 NAP references “women in all their diversity” and includes references to “LGTBIQA+ populations.” Finland’s 2023-2027 NAP discusses “sexual minorities” and “gender diversity” in the context of anti-gender movements and security-sector training. The Philippines’ fourth NAP references “women in all their diverse and intersecting identities” and “greater gender inclusivity,” yet stops short of explicitly naming LGBTQI+ communities or gender identity concerns.
These distinctions are important because wording shapes visibility. Broad references to “diversity” or “inclusion” can create openings for more expansive understandings of gender and security, but they can also avoid politically difficult conversations around sexuality and gender identity. In many contexts, the absence of explicit language reflects ongoing political sensitivities, legal restrictions, or broader societal resistance to LGBTQI+ inclusion. Yet from a policy perspective, ambiguity can also produce erasure. Communities that are never named are often communities that remain absent from implementation frameworks, funding priorities, data collection, protection mechanisms, and participation processes.
This has practical implications across the WPS agenda. LGBTQI+ communities experience conflict, displacement, militarization, and insecurity in distinct ways. Queer and trans people often face heightened risks of targeted violence, exclusion from humanitarian assistance, criminalization, family rejection, and barriers to accessing health care or protection systems. Yet these experiences frequently remain invisible within conflict analysis and peacebuilding frameworks. Even within discussions of gender-based violence, most NAPs continue to frame violence primarily through heterosexual and cisnormative assumptions.
The issue is not whether the WPS agenda should “expand” to include LGBTQI+ communities as an afterthought. Rather, it is whether the agenda can genuinely claim to address the gendered realities of conflict while continuing to rely on narrow and binary understandings of gender itself.
Importantly, explicit references alone are not sufficient. Inclusion can quickly become symbolic if it is not accompanied by meaningful implementation. Naming LGBTQI+ communities in a NAP does not automatically translate into safer participation spaces, better protection mechanisms, dedicated funding, or inclusive peacebuilding processes. At the same time, visibility still matters. The decision to explicitly recognize LGBTQI+ communities within national peace and security frameworks is politically significant, particularly in a global context marked by growing anti-gender movements and backlash against queer and trans rights.
As the WPS agenda enters its next phase, conversations about inclusion cannot remain limited to adding new groups into existing frameworks without interrogating the assumptions those frameworks reproduce. The question is not only who is included in WPS, but also how peace and security themselves are being conceptualized.
If WPS is truly intended to address the lived realities of those affected by conflict and insecurity, then moving beyond binary understandings of gender is not a peripheral issue. It is central to the future relevance, legitimacy, and transformative potential of the agenda itself.
- Throughout this blog, the acronym LGBTQI+ is used as a broad and internationally recognizable umbrella term. However, in the Canadian context, the acronym 2SLGBTQI+ is increasingly used to explicitly recognize Two-Spirit identities and the distinct experiences and histories of Indigenous gender and sexual diversity. ↩︎
The views in this blog are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the WPSN-C or its membership.
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