Our Year of Advocacy and Monitoring

Throughout 2020, our advocacy continued to push for a fundamental shift in the Security Council’s implementation of the WPS Agenda -- a shift which should center conflict prevention, disarmament, human rights, full and meaningful participation, and addressing the root causes of conflict and gendered violence.

Throughout the year, we continually advocated for the holistic implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda at the UNSC, bringing the perspectives of women peace activists into this space. We monitored regular meetings of the UNSC, as well as select other UN bodies, on key focus countries (primarily Afghanistan, Colombia, the DRC, Libya, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen) and themes. We wrote about the Security Council’s work on Yemen, the Arria-Formula Meeting on Women and the Afghan Peace Process, and MONUSCO (DRC), as well as thematic issues including the annual open debate on women, peace and security, the open debate on sexual violence in conflict, the increasingly topical theme of climate change and security, protection of civilians, gender equality at the shortened CSW64 and a high-level meeting on Beijing+25, and 2020 High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development. We also published this year’s edition of the Security Council Scorecard, which contains data from 2019 on the Permanent Five members of the Council.