Feminist Peace Approaches for the Future

Written by Marie Berry, PhD, Professor and Director, Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative (IGLI), Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, University of Denver, and Carly Paul, IGLI Program Manager, Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, University of Denver

At a moment of overlapping crises—expanding wars, democratic erosion, ecological breakdown—it is widely recognized (Kobayashi et al. 2025) that dominant frameworks for building peace and security need transformation. Over the past decades, the Women, Peace, and Security agenda (United Nations Security Council 2000) and related efforts have broadened those frameworks and sparked important reforms but have ultimately been insufficient in the face of contemporary polycrisis (Lawrence et al. 2024). Dynamic and community-based feminist peace approaches, which understand the interwoven dimensions of (in)security, are urgently needed to expand the peacebuilding toolkit for the future.

Feminist peace approaches (Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative and Feminist Peace Initiative 2025) begin by asking who bears the greatest costs of political, economic, or environmental upheaval. Then, these approaches ask what security would look like if it were organized around the needs of these communities—the poor, marginalized, LGBTQIA, and/or racialized people, women, and others. Such approaches define security not as military capacity or state stability but as the conditions that create flourishing communities for all people: freedom from violence, access to care, a clean environment, economic security, and the ability to shape decisions that impact one’s life.

Feminist peace approaches are neither utopian nor impractical. Instead, our work with feminist activists has made clear that, across vastly different contexts, communities on the front lines of violence, disenfranchisement, and environmental suffering are already building feminist peace in practice, largely outside the view of traditional peacebuilding efforts. Drawing on examples from feminist activists in our network, we argue that the peacebuilding field does not need to design something new. Instead, we need to look more broadly at what already exists and is working, connect with it, and resource it at the scale the moment demands.

Feminist Peacebuilding Work Already Underway

The Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative is a transnational network of women activists and community leaders who are organizing movements for more peaceful, democratic, and just futures. Our network spans more than 50 countries and includes over 120 women leaders. The following examples from our network demonstrate that essential feminist peacebuilding work is actively occurring outside the traditional peacebuilding spheres.

In South Sudan, Ma’Mara Sakit Village builds feminist community through storytelling, ancestral knowledge, art, and multimedia, cultivating collective agency in one of the world’s most protracted conflict environments. Working closely with those who grew up during war, they see the reclamation of voice and memory as preconditions for any durable peace.

In a poor neighborhood in Nairobi, a group of survivors of gender-based violence run Mama’s Kitchen—simultaneously a social enterprise, a healing space, and a base for feminist political organizing. It is one of many initiatives launched by Women Collective Kenya, which is also co-designing an eco-village and engaged in extensive survivor accompaniment. Care work and political power are not separated here; they are understood as the same project.

In Jordan, Takatoat was founded in 2020 by young feminist activists responding to structural violence against women. Linking caregiving and maternity support to violence prevention, Takatoat has launched feminist schools, research projects, clubs, and more, all aimed at strengthening and supporting movements in the region.

In the United States, similar efforts are visible in movements advocating for peace, rights, and justice and investing in alternative caring and regenerative economies. For instance, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is supporting grassroots feminist peacebuilders through its Feminist Organizing Schools, and Muslims for Just Futures supports Muslim women-led grassroots organizations working for justice through its Muslim Women’s Organizing Institute.

What Is Required to Scale Feminist Peace Approaches?

These examples are among thousands that bring feminist language and demands to traditional state-centered understandings of “security.” But rarely is this work considered peacebuilding: feminist organizing in Amman is marked as “women’s empowerment” work, while a community kitchen in Nairobi is classified as a social enterprise. Yet each is actively interrupting cycles of violence, healing and repairing the embodied experience of past harms, and building social infrastructure that makes future violence less likely. Until the peacebuilding field categorizes such initiatives as vital peace work, we will miss the chance to deeply engage and learn from them.

The Feminist Peace Playbook, produced by IGLI and the Feminist Peace Initiative, distills some lessons from feminist peace practitioners that can help the peacebuilding field embrace feminist peace approaches and create more equitable systems of safety and security. The Playbook offers four strategies: (1) Educating the public on systems of militarism to divest from them and build alternatives; (2) Redefining security through community safety, dignity, and wellbeing; (3) Bridging divides to build power across movements; and (4) Grounding policymaking in movements.

One core lesson from this work is that, for people across the globe, security is felt not only with the absence of violence but also through access to community safety, dignity, and wellbeing. Another is that movements should not be seen as peripheral to policymaking; instead, policymaking should be grounded in the wisdom and knowledge of movements comprised of people on the receiving end of such policies.

With greater recognition, learning, and integration, feminist peace approaches can help us to look beyond mainstream efforts to what communities on the margins are already doing to forge safety and security on their own terms. These approaches can help us think differently about how to address the current polycrisis and build peace for the future. We have an opportunity to build differently in this moment—to connect, resource, and scale creative and transformative feminist peacebuilding work where it is already thriving.

Works Cited

Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative and Feminist Peace Initiative. 2025. Feminist Peace Playbook. https://feministpeaceinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Feminist-Peace-Playbook.pdf.

Kobayashi, Kazushige, Keith Krause, and Xinyu Yuan. 2025. “(Re)Setting the Boundaries of Peacebuilding in a Changing Global Order.” Contemporary Security Policy 46 (2): 226–252. https://doi.org/10.1080/13523260.2025.2466287.

Lawrence, Michael, Scott Janzwood, and Thomas Homer-Dixon. 2024. “Global Polycrisis: The Causal Mechanisms of Crisis Entanglement.” Global Sustainability 7: e6. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.1.

United Nations Security Council. 2000. Resolution 1325 (2000) on Women, Peace and Security. S/RES/1325. October 31. https://undocs.org/S/RES/1325(2000).