Peace, Power, and Persistence: 25 Years of UNSCR 1325 in North Macedonia

Reclaiming the Feminist Spirit of the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda in an Age of Normalized Violence

In October 2000 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) after decades of organization by feminist peace activists from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Liberia. For the first time, the Council recognized the gendered nature of peace and security; that wars are not gender-neutral; and that excluding women from decision-making is a form of structural violence.

The resolution was never meant to be symbolic. It was born from demand and defiance: a feminist insistence that peace cannot exist without justice, and that the everyday violence women face in peacetime is as political as the violence of war.

Twenty-five years later, the question is no longer whether women should be included in peace processes, but what kind of peace is being built, and by whom? In North Macedonia—a country often described as “post-conflict” but still defined by inequality, patriarchy, and political exclusion—the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda has become both a possibility and a paradox. As a feminist scholar and activist, I have often asked myself: How is this global agenda truly connected to the everyday struggles and activism that define our feminist work?

This question comes from experience—from contributing, as part of civil society, to the development of North Macedonia’s WPS agenda in discussions organized by the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Although I was a young representative at the time, my voice should have mattered. Yet during those meetings, women’s contributions as civil society actors were treated as minor check-boxes, acknowledged briefly, and even ridiculed, as if our presence were a token procedural requirement of “consultation.” The experience revealed something fundamental: that for us, the WPS agenda felt like a foreign concept, disconnected from the realities we faced every day. As a Bosnian–Macedonian feminist, however, once I began to read the feminist scholarship that surrounded this agenda, I understood that WPS can be a powerful tool, and is one of the few frameworks that has managed to push questions of gender equality and women’s agency into political spaces from which they had long been excluded. Now I have both feelings at once: confusion at how abstract and bureaucratic this framework can be, and recognition of its transformative potential. The real challenge is how to move from margins to meaning—to take agendas like WPS beyond procedures and policy documents, and make them real, tangible, and rooted in lived feminist struggles. This tension captures much of our post-conflict reality, and our ongoing attempt to turn rhetoric into feminist transformation.

From Post-Conflict Rhetoric to Feminist Realities

North Macedonia’s relationship to UNSCR 1325 is shaped by the country’s uneasy peace. The 2001 conflict produced the Ohrid Framework Agreement, which was hailed as a model of inter-ethnic compromise, but remained silent on gender. Women’s participation, protection, and prevention never entered the core of the state’s peacebuilding narrative. When the first National Action Plan for UNSCR 1325 (NAP 1325) was adopted nearly a decade later, it reflected a global trend that feminist scholars now critique as “add women and stir.” Women were invited into decision-making spaces as symbols of progress, not as actors who could reshape the system. The plan lacked budgets, timelines, and accountability; it was bureaucratic inclusion without structural transformation. Macedonia’s first NAP lacked an intersectional approach and failed to address the heterogeneity and multiplicity of women’s experiences. Although the plan’s focus was gender it excluded intersecting variables, such as ethnicity, religion, age, sexual orientation and disability. It treated women as a homogeneous group, and failed to address categories of women who are differently impacted by conflict, insecurity, and peacebuilding.^[1] This mirrors what feminist analysts call WPS’ technocratic turn: its shift from a radical, movement-driven agenda to an institutional one. In ministries and donor frameworks, UNSCR 1325 became an administrative box to tick rather than a feminist challenge to power. And yet, while institutions turned the agenda into policy jargon, feminist and survivor-led organizations in North Macedonia were already practicing the resolution’s core demands. From Akcija Zdruzenska to the Stella Network and Coalition MARGINS, women were building peace in the most practical sense: through care, solidarity, legal aid, and collective organization.^[2] Without romanticizing the issue, and certainly without pretending it is ever easy, the feminist movement in North Macedonia has always been about building peace in small, deliberate ways—often quietly, and often against the odds. It happens in the choices we make every day: how we speak to one another, how we share responsibility, and how we refuse to let exhaustion or cynicism define our politics. Peace, in that sense, is not an outcome we arrive at through institutions or resolutions; it is a practice that is constantly negotiated, repaired, and re-imagined.

The Stella Network is one of the country’s rare feminist spaces that emerged from this understanding. Co-founded by women from minority backgrounds, it grew out of the recognition that our struggles are interconnected—that patriarchy, poverty, and exclusion manifest differently in our lives, but their roots are shared. What began as an act of collective frustration became a deliberate experiment in solidarity, which created mentorship spaces for young women, built bridges across ethnic and social divides, and held space for care as a political act.

There is nothing romantic about this work. It is slow, fragile, and constantly challenged by institutional neglect, funding precarity, and the fatigue that comes with always being on the defensive. And yet, it is here—in these everyday acts of coordination, disagreement, and persistence—that the idea of peace becomes tangible, not as the absence of conflict, but as the capacity to keep advocating for one another.

Gender-Based Violence and Institutional Betrayal

Every act of femicide, every uninvestigated case of domestic abuse, and every survivor silenced by bureaucracy reveals a state failing at its most basic obligation: to protect and prevent. In the last few years alone, women have been murdered by partners they had already reported. Social workers have been dismissed or overburdened; shelters have remained underfunded; and survivors have been re-traumatized by the systems meant to keep them safe.

The WPS agenda was supposed to redefine peace beyond the absence of war—to link safety with justice, and participation with transformation. Yet, in North Macedonia, “peace” often means stability without justice: order is prioritized over accountability, and silence over change. A de-colonial feminist lens makes this contradiction more visible. The Balkan states, shaped by histories of occupation, transition, and donor-driven “stabilization,” have inherited international frameworks that often reproduce the hierarchies they claim to challenge. The language of peace and security arrives coded by Euro-Atlantic policy agendas, while the lived experience of women—including Roma, Albanian, queer, and rural women—remains peripheral to security. In this sense, the WPS framework risks becoming another imported architecture of peace: implemented through reports, monitored through indicators, but detached from the embodied, everyday struggles that define survival in our region. This is where feminist critique in the Balkans cuts deepest. If the WPS framework counts how many women sit in government or security structures, but fails to address structural violence and institutional neglect, it protects the state from critique more than it protects women from harm. De-colonial feminism insists that our understanding of peace must begin not in ministries or missions, but in the messy, local, intersectional realities of women’s lives—where the political is felt most intimately, and where the fight for dignity is a form of resistance.

This gap is reflected in the key challenges to NAP 1325’s implementation: political obstruction from conservative forces; chronic under-funding; weak monitoring and reporting mechanisms; and the limited gender sensitivity of state institutions. The absence of disaggregated data and contextual analyses continues to make invisible those most affected, thereby reinforcing the distance between institutional peacebuilding and the feminist work of everyday survival.

Anti-Gender Backlash: The New Battlefield of WPS

Across Europe, the WPS agenda faces a coordinated backlash—an anti-gender movement that frames feminism, LGBTQI+ rights, and equality itself as existential threats to “national values.” In North Macedonia, this backlash has already penetrated legal and political discourse. The removal of gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity protections from the education law in 2024 marked not only a legislative defeat, but a symbolic capitulation to forces that openly reject equality as part of the country’s democratic identity. What we are witnessing is not an isolated cultural struggle, but part of a broader geopolitical strategy. The anti-gender movement in the Balkans is amplified by foreign influence networks—such as illiberal regimes and transnational extremist groups—that aim to destabilize democratic institutions by exploiting moral panic and identity politics. Through disinformation campaigns, media infiltration, and social media echo chambers, they present gender equality as a Western imposition, a colonial threat to “tradition,” and thus a justification for authoritarian consolidation. This ideological import operates like soft power, undermining democratic resilience from within. North Macedonia’s current political landscape reflects this fragility. Anti-gender actors have become institutionalized. They occupy key government and parliamentary positions, steer public policy, and shape national narratives through state-funded platforms. Their agenda merges pro-natalist and nationalist rhetoric to glorify motherhood as a patriotic duty, and define “good citizens” through hetero-normative, reproductive terms. This discursive shift has transformed demographic anxiety into a moral project, in which women’s bodies have become instruments of the nation, and feminism the enemy of survival. Such narratives directly threaten not only gender equality, but social cohesion itself. The normalization of hate speech and misinformation has given rise to radicalized youth communities online, whose social media profiles circulate violent, misogynistic, and homophobic content under the guise of patriotism and “protecting tradition.” These digital ecosystems deepen polarization, legitimize aggression, and erode the fragile trust that sustains plural societies. They turn public debate into an ideological battleground, where compassion is mocked and solidarity is framed as betrayal. North Macedonia stands on fragile ground—politically, socially, and symbolically—where the line between democratic discourse and authoritarian revival is thin. In this environment, the securitization of gender has become a strategic tool to re-frame gender equality as a security threat, and “protecting the family” a matter of national defense. This mirrors global feminist critiques of the WPS agenda: the same institutions that claim to guarantee protection are often those complicit in reproducing violence, by using the language of security to silence dissent.

The irony could not be clearer. The resolution that once gave feminists the language to hold states accountable is now weaponized by some governments to justify control and censorship. Yet, despite this, queer, feminist and women’s movements continue to resist. They document digital violence, protest every femicide, build mentorship networks, and nurture forms of solidarity that refuse despair. In doing so, they return UNSCR 1325 to where it truly belongs—the streets, the shelters, the collectives, and the classrooms, not the conference tables. It is here, in these precarious but brave spaces, that the feminist meaning of security lives.

Intersectional Peace

One of the strongest feminist critiques of WPS is its essentialism—the idea that “women” are a unified category of victims or peacemakers. This view erases difference, privilege, and intersection, and ignores the fact that in North Macedonia, peace and security mean different things for different people:

• For Roma women, it means protection from systemic racism and police harassment;
• For Albanian women, it means equal access to opportunities, not only to participate, but to lead and to have their voices recognized in the shaping of decisions and futures within a multi-ethnic society;
• For trans women, it means the right to exist without fear—to access healthcare, employment, and safety without being erased or criminalized;
• For queer people, it means freedom from online and offline persecution;
• For rural and poor women, it means access to healthcare, education, and justice that is not dependent on geography or income;
• For women with disabilities, it means visibility, autonomy, and true accessibility in public life.

The current WPS frameworks in the region rarely name these realities. By failing to apply an intersectional lens, they risk reproducing inequality instead of dismantling it.

This year’s 16 Days of Activism may speak the language of digital gender-based violence, but the struggle runs deeper than hashtags or campaigns. It is about power: who names violence, who defines security, and whose suffering is allowed to fade into the margins of history. As we respond to new forms of online harassment, including doxxing, and algorithmic hate, we cannot forget those who were violated in the wars that made this region what it is. There are still women—survivors of wartime sexual violence—who live in silence, who have never seen justice, and who were told to forgive so their countries could “move on.” Their bodies became the ground on which peace was declared. 

That peace was not feminist; it was conditional, and negotiated between men with guns and men in suits. It was colonial in its logic, built as it was on the expectation that women would carry their shame quietly, so the state could claim stability. Now, decades later, the same logic reappears, this time digitized, neoliberal, and privatized. Violence travels through screens, platforms, and public discourse, colonizing the emotional lives of women and queer people. It is packaged as trolling, free speech, and “debate,” but in reality it is the same old domination rebranded for the age of surveillance capitalism. For feminists in the Balkans, the task is not to treat these as separate epochs of suffering, but as a continuum of control—from war rape to digital harassment, and from peace accords to algorithmic misogyny. De-colonial feminism teaches us that our liberation cannot depend on frameworks imported from Geneva, or Brussels, or donors who measure gender equality through checklists. Our power lies in collective memory, in refusing amnesia, and in connecting the violence of the past to that unfolding in real time. To do this, we need to practice what I call political care—a care that does not sanitize, but exposes; a care that does not reconcile, but confronts. Care as refusal, as resistance, as radical continuity. Through this kind of care, we refuse to let survivors of sexual violence be forgotten while we design digital safety manuals; we insist that feminist peace must be built not on the ruins of trauma but through the knowledge it carries. Our movements are not perfect—they are messy, contradictory, and tired—but they endure, and that endurance is itself revolutionary because every act of remembering and every attempt to connect these struggles is a refusal of the colonial fantasy that peace can ever be neutral. Feminist peace in the Balkans will not come from polite dialogues or procedural reforms. It will come from rage transformed into strategy, from solidarity rooted in discomfort, and from care that refuses erasure. That is how we can reclaim UNSCR 1325—not as an institutional resolution, but as an ongoing act of feminist insubordination.

From Bureaucracy to Belonging

The most powerful feminist critique of the WPS agenda is not that it failed, but that it was domesticated. What began as an act of rebellion—a demand forged in the fires of women’s resistance—has been gradually absorbed, diluted, and bureaucratized by the institutions it once sought to hold accountable. The radical has been rewritten into the procedural; the political has been replaced by the technical.

But feminists know that co-optation is never the end of the story. It is an invitation to reclaim what was ours before it was institutionalized into silence. To reclaim UNSCR 1325 in North Macedonia means to tear it away from ministries and memoranda and return it to the bodies, voices, and communities that first gave it meaning. It means:

• Placing survivors, not statistics at the center, and describing violence as it is—systemic, political, and continuous;
• Seeing care as infrastructure, not charity—the architecture that keeps movements alive when institutions fail;
• Protecting activists, not placing them under surveillance, because the safety of those who dissent is the real measure of peace;
• Demanding accountability, not partnership without power, because equality cannot be negotiated on unequal terms; and
• Connecting the local with the transnational, because feminist peace is a global current, not a border-bound policy.

If the state continues to treat UNSCR 1325 as a bureaucratic checkbox, feminists will continue to practice it as a living ethic—not in conference halls, but in shelters, collectives, networks, and classrooms. In a region where institutions still confuse peace with silence, to name violence, to organize, and to care are acts of resistance.

Feminist Peace as Unfinished Praxis

Twenty-five years after its adoption, UNSCR 1325 is one of the most cited and least lived resolutions in UN history. It was never about inserting women into broken systems—it was about breaking those systems open, and redefining peace, not decorating patriarchy. In North Macedonia, that struggle is still unfolding—in courtrooms that ignore survivors, classrooms that erase gender, digital networks in which hate masquerades as free speech, and communities that continue to build safety from below. Each time a woman refuses silence, a queer person insists on existing, or an activist refuses to burn out quietly, the resolution lives again.

As anti-gender movements tighten their grip and authoritarianism dresses itself in national colors, the feminist meaning of UNSCR 1325 becomes sharper and more urgent. It was meant to destabilize not stabilize the patriarchy. It was about peace as disobedience not compliance; peace as disruption; and peace as care practiced collectively and dangerously. Because peace is not the absence of conflict—it is the presence of justice, memory, and collective power. That remains our unfinished resolution, not written in the UN’s language, but in the lives of those who continue to resist, rebuild, and remember.