A quarter of a century in the making, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on "Women, Peace and Security" (WPS) faces a legitimacy crisis amid the rise of authoritarianism, erosion of multilateral norms, shrinking civic space, and aid budget cuts (Achilleos-Sarll et al., 2025). Nevertheless, the Resolution continues to grow in complexity (Kirby & Shepherd, 2021), with the number of countries implementing WPS National Action Plans (NAPs) increasing each year (WILPF, 2024). Why is it that feminist practitioners, states, and international organisations continue to engage with it across various scales? How is it mobilised by different actors and to what end? Using the feminist dialectical method (Johnston & Meger, 2025), this article analyses the practices of the feminist movement in wartime Ukraine as a level of abstraction constitutive of patriarchy, understood as systemic and comprising an international order.
The feminist movement in Ukraine has undergone a mobilisation, shifting from participating in an in-state revolution in 2013 to responding to international security threats in 2014, and increasingly so in 2022. With Ukraine adopting its first WPS NAP (2016-2020) during localised conflict in the east of the country and updating its second WPS NAP (2021-2025) while resisting Russia’s full-scale invasion, it serves as a unique case study to observe the WPS Agenda as both a process and an outcome of a struggle to rescale security’s spaces and practices from the national level to new spatial and political arenas and accompanying politics of inclusion and exclusion. This struggle, while singled out for the purposes of this research, is part of broader socio-political changes within state institutions and activities (Jones & Hameiri, 2021), in which non-state actors, such as social movements, are increasingly playing a significant role.
