About Us

The year 2020 marked the 20th anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, the first in several resolutions that make up the UN Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda. 

WPS’s mandate is to better account for gendered violence and women’s experiences and security needs in war and armed conflict, with the aim of engendering state-driven and international policy planning and initiatives that address these issues. 

Security operations globally are increasingly taking on a decentralized form in which private military and security companies (PMSCs) play a significant role and are active in many conflicts around the globe. Despite this, the WPS agenda continues to focus on state actors and non-government organizations in its policy initiatives of gender mainstreaming and national action plans.  

A substantial body of scholarship and policy initiatives has demonstrated that PMSCs are highly gendered organisations, and without proper policies and frameworks, have often contributed to gender inequalities and gender-based violence in conflict and post-conflict settings. Consequently, there is an urgent need to bring into conversation WPS with PMSC scholars and practitioners, if policies on post-conflict are to adequately reflect realities and experiences of armed conflict and to overcome gender inequalities in the provision of security. 

The aim of the Women Peace and Private Security Research Network is to build a multiple stakeholder group of policy, commercial and academic experts equipped to address this emerging policy issue. 

We do this through: 

1. regular knowledge exchange, including virtual platforms that enable a cross sharing of emerging research and initiatives across sectors and disciplinary knowledge sets. 
2. developing policy and academic research in outputs such as policy papers, research articles, pod and video casts as well as various roundtable events.  
3. engaging in collaborations with members and non-members, to realise policy- and research-oriented projects as well as knowledge products relevant to the collaborating organisations.  

We have institutional membership from the University of Copenhagen, the School of Security Studies, King’s College London, the Canadian Government and DCAF – Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance. We are further supported by Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Austrian Institute for International Affairs (Oiip) and the Canadian Embassy in Vienna.