UN Security Council Resolution 2242 on Women, Peace and Security
UNSCR 2242 is the WPS agenda's most contested resolution — the first to explicitly link women's participation and protection to counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism, a shift many feminist scholars argue securitised the agenda.
By 2015, the global security landscape had shifted dramatically since 1325. The rise of violent extremist groups — Boko Haram in West Africa, Al-Shabaab in the Horn, ISIS in the Middle East — posed new challenges for the WPS agenda. Women were both targets of extremist violence and, in some contexts, participants in extremist movements.
UNSCR 2242 was designed to address these new realities by linking the WPS agenda to counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism. It also established the Informal Experts Group on WPS to provide systematic Council oversight of WPS implementation.
UNSCR 2242 broke with the WPS tradition of focusing solely on conflict settings by explicitly engaging with counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism — an entirely new terrain for the agenda. This was the first WPS resolution to discuss radicalisation, violent extremism, and the role of women in preventing both.
The Informal Experts Group was an institutional innovation designed to give the Council a standing mechanism for WPS oversight — a dedicated space where Council members, UN entities, and civil society could discuss WPS implementation systematically rather than through ad hoc briefings.