Gender & equality, explained.
Ola al-Aghbary, a Yemeni peacebuilder and founder of the Sheba Youth Foundation for Development, and finalist in the SDG Action Awards 2026 (Heba Naji/UN Photo)
As military spending surges and women’s rights retreat, Australia has an opportunity to redefine what security means.
Subscribe to The Informer for monthly expert analysis, and to Events for advance notice of visiting world leaders and distinguished guests.
You may unsubscribe from Lowy Institute newsletters at any time. For information on our privacy practices and how to unsubscribe, see our Privacy Policy.
Rearming the world is squeezing out women’s safetyRearming the world is squeezing out women’s safety
The world is spending more on weapons while investing less in peace and women’s rights. This is not just a contradiction. It is a warning about the direction of global security. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), global military expenditure reached US$2.9 trillion in 2025 (Opens in new window), increasing by 41% over the past decade. Meanwhile, bilateral aid targeting gender equality fell by 13% between 2023 and 2024 (Opens in new window).
The latest UN Women Gender Snapshot (Opens in new window) paints an equally troubling picture. Not a single UN Sustainable Development Goals gender equality target (Opens in new window) is on track for 2030. One in three national institutions responsible for advancing gender equality has experienced an erosion of its authority over the past two years. Some 316 million women experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner in the past year alone.
These developments expose a growing imbalance: states are expanding their capacity to wage war while weakening institutions that protect human security. For the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, established by UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000, the stakes could hardly be higher.
Across the Indo-Pacific and beyond, militarisation is converging with exclusionary nationalism, authoritarianism and attacks on women’s rights (Opens in new window). Yet understanding these developments requires distinguishing between backlash and regression.
Women are not merely victims requiring protection. They are political actors defending democratic freedoms and imagining alternative futures.
Backlash describes organised resistance to actual or perceived advances in gender equality. It includes anti-gender political mobilisation, attacks on feminist organisations and efforts to delegitimise women’s rights as foreign or threatening to traditional values. Regression is different. It means the actual deterioration of women’s freedoms, rights and security. The distinction matters because backlash does not inevitably produce regression. Opposition to gender equality can coexist with expanding women’s representation and stronger institutions, as in some democratic societies.
In Afghanistan and Myanmar, however, the challenge is more profound. Women’s rights have been systematically dismantled through the consolidation of patriarchal authoritarian rule (Opens in new window). Since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, Afghan women and girls have been excluded from secondary and higher education and progressively restricted from employment and public life. In Myanmar, the military coup of February 2021 destroyed democratic institutions and unleashed widespread violence and repression.
These are not simply reactions against feminist progress. They are attempts to construct political orders in which controlling women is integral to controlling society. Data from the V-Dem Institute show dramatic declines in women’s civil liberties (Opens in new window) in both countries, reflecting the relationship between autocratisation and the erosion of gender equality.
Yet repression has not silenced women’s political leadership. In Myanmar, women protesters famously hung htamein, (Opens in new window) traditional women’s sarongs, across streets to obstruct soldiers who believed passing beneath them would diminish their masculine power. Feminine symbols became instruments of political resistance (Opens in new window). In Afghanistan, women continue to organise (Opens in new window), document abuses, sustain underground education and mobilise internationally despite extraordinary personal risks. As one Afghan activist explained in our research, simply refusing to wear the full burqa while walking in public can constitute resistance. These examples reveal something frequently overlooked in conventional security debates: Women are not merely victims requiring protection. They are political actors defending democratic freedoms and imagining alternative futures.
Women’s leadership often emerges precisely when established political institutions collapse. But sustaining that leadership requires resources, networks, protection and international solidarity. This is where the WPS agenda must move beyond counting women at negotiating tables towards supporting women’s collective political agency and confronting the current sidelining of women in global peacemaking (Opens in new window).
The Security Council Chamber during a meeting on women and peace and security, 2024 (Manuel Elías/UN Photo)
Australia’s campaign (Opens in new window) for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for 2029–30 presents a test. Australia has identified conflict prevention, climate and ocean security, and international cooperation as priorities. The WPS agenda should be central to these commitments, not an optional addition. Three practical shifts would demonstrate leadership.
First, put prevention before militarisation. Military capabilities may be necessary for deterrence and defence, but they cannot substitute for investments in diplomacy, social protection, climate resilience and the institutions that sustain peaceful societies including women’s safety. (Opens in new window)
Second, support women’s movements, not only governments. Where authoritarian regimes exclude women, diplomacy must engage independent civil society, including women organising in exile. Supporting women’s political leadership requires sustained funding, protection and access to international decision-making.
Third, build coalitions that defend international norms. When Security Council divisions obstruct action, states can work through regional partnerships, human rights mechanisms and alternative accountability processes. Initiatives addressing Afghanistan through international legal mechanisms, (Opens in new window) and Australia’s efforts to strengthen protection for humanitarian personnel (Opens in new window), demonstrate possibilities for collective action. None of these approaches requires abandoning the WPS agenda. They require taking its transformative ambitions seriously.
The greatest threat to WPS is not simply that governments reject gender equality. It is that militarised and exclusionary visions of security become normalised, leaving women’s rights, democratic participation and human security expendable. Australia’s Security Council campaign offers an opportunity to challenge this trajectory.
Feminist analysis reveals that militarisation does not simply divert resources from peace to war. It creates gendered circuits of violence and capital (Opens in new window) in which military expansion depends upon the largely invisible labour of sustaining households, communities and societies, while simultaneously depleting the care and social infrastructures on which human security depends. Rearmament may strengthen military capabilities while weakening the very foundations of resilient and peaceful societies. (Opens in new window) For Australia, taking the Women, Peace and Security agenda seriously means recognising that security cannot be measured by military expenditure alone. It must also be measured by the capacity of societies to sustain life, protect rights and prevent violence in the first place.
The question is not whether the world can afford to invest in women’s security and peacemaking. It is whether the world can afford not to.
About the author
Jacqui True
Jacqui True is Professor of International Relations at Monash University and Director, Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
The most-pressing world events explained by Lowy Institute experts and global contributors, in your inbox, every Thursday.
You may unsubscribe from The Interpreter at any time. For information on our privacy practices and how to unsubscribe, see our Privacy Policy.
