Building Women’s Coalitions for Peace and Security: Strategies, Tactics, and Lessons Learned
The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF) launched a new report, “Building Women’s Coalitions for Peace and Security: Strategies, Tactics, and Lessons Learned.” At a moment of escalating conflict, shrinking civic space, and increasing strain on global peace and humanitarian systems, the findings underscore that investing in women’s coalitions is essential for building sustainable peace.
Summary
Women’s coalitions are central to the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda, an effort rooted in the understanding that women are critical to all aspects of building lasting peace and security. These coalitions, or collectives of women and women’s organizations working to advance shared agendas, take on diverse forms, but at their core, they link women together to strategically build alliances and advocate for shared priorities. Women collectively push for peace while conflict is ongoing, before negotiations begin, during moments of political opening, and long after peace agreements are signed.
They connect grassroots insights and legitimacy to formal decision-making, translate women’s lived experiences of conflict into political priorities, and carry forward crucial activities to support peace and security when institutions falter or collapse.
Despite their critical contributions to durable peace, women’s coalitions face persistent and structural barriers to their full participation in peace processes. Too often, they are supported hastily by external actors in moments of crisis or engaged in tokenistic ways shaped by top-down or donor-driven priorities. Efforts to build and sustain women’s coalitions remain chronically underfunded and under-recognized, even as these groups play central roles in mediating conflict, delivering lifesaving assistance, and advancing security, relief, and recovery.
Based on original interview research and consultations with policymakers, civil society, and practitioners in two conflict-affected settings—the Philippines and Sudan—this report explores how women’s coalitions operate in practice to drive important gains despite systematic barriers, and draws lessons and best practices on the key strategies, tactics, and factors that enable them to exert influence.
Report Launch at CSW70
GIWPS will host a high-level launch of the report today during the 70th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70), the UN’s second largest convening after the General Assembly, dedicated to assessing the lived experiences of women and girls globally and advancing gender equality policy.
The event will bring together policymakers, researchers, practitioners, and the diplomatic community to amplify the evidence-based case for supporting women-led civil society organizations in coalition building, as well as strategies to inform policy and practice that enable women to contribute fully and strategically to peace processes.
Featuring
Ambassador Melanne Verveer
GIWPS Executive Director
Sofia Calltorp
Chief of Humanitarian Action at UN Women
Maho Nakayama
Director and Senior Program Officer of the Peacebuilding Program at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation
Kazutaka Kawahara
Minister of Social Affairs at the Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations
Dr. Hitomi Takemura
Professor of the Graduate School of Law at Hitotsubashi University, Japan
Hala Al-Karib
Regional Director of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA)
Sophia Dianne C. Garcia
Program Coordinator for Asia and the Pacific at the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders
Dr. Rachel George
GIWPS Research Fellow & Project Leader
Recommendations
Building on these core findings, this study develops a framework for understanding coalitions and identifies a number of recommendations for funders, civil society actors, and practitioners seeking to strengthen women’s coalitions as a core pillar of peace and security.
Funders
- Support organic organizing: Meet women’s movements where they are by investing in locally driven approaches to building and sustaining networks, rather than imposing externally defined coalitions and donor-driven priorities.
- Enable flexible and informal structures: Use adaptive funding modalities that can reach unregistered groups, groups with diffuse leadership and membership, groups with limited digital access, issue-based social movements, and those operating outside capital cities.
- Fund work to identify shared priorities: Support coalitions in organizing around a small number of shared, high-impact priorities rather than requiring comprehensive consensus platforms.
- Recognize temporary coalitions: Value short-term or issue-specific coalitions as legitimate and strategic, alongside longer-term network building.
- Bridge sectors and levels: Fund cross-sectoral convenings (e.g., spanning peace, humanitarian work, development, governance) and leaders who can operate across national and grassroots spaces.
- Rethink success metrics: Measure impact not only through policy outcomes but also through sustained relationships, trust-building, and coalition-formation processes.
- Invest beyond crisis moments: Maximize coalition effectiveness by committing to sustained resources before, during, and after conflict, including support for coalition-building in low-conflict settings, regular convening, and intergenerational knowledge transfer.
- Support documentation and memory: Fund efforts to document coalition histories and lessons in local languages, including the role of diaspora networks in moments of crisis.
Civil Society Organizations and Women’s Coalitions
- Build from what already exists: Anchor coalition-building in trusted networks, including those not explicitly labeled as “WPS” or “feminist” but engaged in peace and security-relevant work.
- Leverage informal coordination: Use flexible mechanisms—such as secure digital chat groups, rotating leadership, or community-based meeting spaces to sustain engagement beyond capital cities and in safe environments (e.g., women-only spaces when preferred by members).
- Balance formality and autonomy: Weigh the benefits of formal registration (access, recognition, funding) against risks of political exposure, constraint, or co-optation.
- Make space for difference: Acknowledge diversity among women’s groups, including differences in political views and goals, and prioritize alignment on specific shared priorities rather than full agreement across all issues.
- Strengthen grassroots feedback loops: Use federated or networked models that ensure local priorities meaningfully inform collective positions and decisions.
- Engage across sectors: Organize through multiple entry points—including health, livelihoods, education, or humanitarian work—where peace and security concerns are embedded.
Policy and Development Practitioners
- Map existing women’s networks: Identify and engage women’s groups already contributing to peace and security outcomes to avoid duplication of efforts and maximize input from existing constellations of local actors rather than relying on ad hoc or one-off consultations.
- Enable direct engagement: Reduce reliance on intermediaries and create pathways for grassroots women to engage directly with policy processes.
- Institutionalize participation: Build structured, sustained mechanisms for coalition input into policy design and programming, avoiding reactive or symbolic inclusion.
- Bridge policy silos: Develop strategies that link humanitarian, development, and security agendas, including through aligned budgeting and programming frameworks, to avoid women’s coalitions having to spend the majority of their time administering small sums of funding from a range of funding streams. Consider the use of pooled funds.
- Support sustained partnerships: Move beyond crisis-driven consultations toward longer-term relationships that strengthen trust and influence over time.
Global Women’s Networks
- Foster informal transnational networks: Support spaces for informal dialogue, peer exchange, and rapid lesson sharing among women leaders from conflict-affected settings.
- Support cross-national learning: Facilitate exchanges, conferences, and training that center grassroots leadership and practice-based learning.
- Amplify diaspora engagement: Document and share lessons on how diaspora women’s movements can effectively support domestic coalitions during moments of crisis.
- Strengthen connective infrastructure: Act as bridges across regions, sectors, and levels to support alignment, solidarity, and collective power
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