When members of parliament in The Gambia sought to repeal the country’s ban on female genital mutilation (FGM), the debate was framed in familiar terms: religion, culture and sovereignty. Yet beneath these narratives lies a more fundamental question: What does women’s security actually mean in practice?
The adoption United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 in 2000 - the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda – has since shaped how governments and international bodies think about gender and conflict. The core promise of the Resolution is straightforward: women should be protected from violence, included in peace processes and recognised as active agents of security, not just its victims.
Across the continent, from legal debates over harmful practices to sexual violence in conflict and everyday spaces, women’s bodies continue to serve as arenas where struggles over power, authority and social order are fought. These dynamics expose a critical limitation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. While the WPS agenda has made important strides in advancing women’s participation in formal security structures, progress in addressing the everyday violence that shape women’s lived realities has been rather underwhelming.
In The Gambia, the attempted rollback of the 2015 FGM ban reveals the fragility of legal protections for women and girls. The country’s National Action Plan on UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2021–2025) commits to strengthening responses to gender-based violence, improving access to justice and enhancing protection mechanisms. On paper, this aligns with the core pillars of the WPS agenda.
Yet the political push to repeal protections against FGM exposes a deeper contradiction. FGM is the partial or total removal of female genitalia for non-medical reasons and is internationally recognised as a severe form of gender-based violence with lasting physical and psychological consequences. When a practice that has been widely recognised as a form of gender-based violence can be reframed as a matter of religious or cultural legitimacy, then the state’s commitment to protecting women becomes conditional on when it is convenient, not foundational.
FGM is not only a health issue or a cultural practice, it is a violation of bodily integrity and a form of structural violence. When its prohibition is contested, women’s bodies are transformed into sites where competing claims over morality, identity and authority are negotiated. In such contexts, legal frameworks alone are insufficient; they must be backed by sustained political will and social accountability.
A broader look at Nigeria reveals that threats to women’s security extend far beyond formal legal debates. Nigeria has adopted and renewed its own National Action Plan on UNSCR 1325, acknowledging the gendered impacts of conflict and committing to prevention and protection. Yet violence against women persists across multiple contexts.
In the northeast, insurgent groups such as Boko Haram have used abduction, forced marriage and sexual violence as tactics of control. These forms of violence are widely recognised within WPS frameworks because they occur in the context of armed conflict.
However, focusing only on conflict obscures other, less visible forms of insecurity. In rural areas and forested spaces where state presence is limited, women face risks of assault from criminal networks and armed groups. More recently, public concern surrounding events such as the Ozoro Alue-Do festival in Delta State has drawn attention to the vulnerability of women in communal spaces where harassment or assault may occur and accountability mechanisms are weak.
These contexts differ in scale and visibility, but they point to the same underlying issue: women’s safety is not consistently treated as a core security priority.
The WPS agenda has achieved significant progress in promoting women’s participation in peacebuilding, governance, and security institutions. Across Africa, efforts to increase women’s representation in the military, police and peacekeeping missions are often highlighted as key indicators of success.
Participation matters. Representation matters.
But participation without protection is incomplete.
A growing emphasis on militarised and institutional inclusion has, in many cases, narrowed the scope of what counts as “security.” Under this approach, insurgent violence is recognised as a security threat, while practices such as FGM or harassment in community spaces are treated as social or cultural issues, separate from security policy.
This distinction is misleading. It creates a hierarchy of violence in which some harms are prioritised while others are normalised and unprioritized.
The cases of The Gambia and Nigeria illustrate this clearly. Women may be included in security institutions and peace processes, yet remain unsafe in their homes, communities and public spaces. The result is a WPS agenda that is procedurally successful but substantively limited.
The invocation of religion in debates around FGM highlights another dimension of this challenge. Religious interpretations are diverse, but political actors often mobilise selective readings to reinforce patriarchal authority.
Framing harmful practices as religious obligations serves multiple purposes:
* it legitimises control over women’s bodies,
* casts gender equality as external interference,
* and positions resistance to reform as a defence of cultural identity.
In this way, women’s bodies become symbolic terrain for negotiating broader questions of sovereignty and belonging. The issue is no longer simply about a practice, but about who has the authority to define morality and social order.
Human security offers a way to move beyond these limitations. It shifts the focus from the state to the individual, emphasising safety, dignity, and freedom from violence in all aspects of life.
From this perspective, the cases discussed here are not separate issues. They are interconnected expressions of the same structural problem: the persistent failure to treat women’s bodily integrity as foundational to peace and security.
* Legal debates that seek to normalise FGM
* Sexual violence in conflict settings
* Harassment and assault in everyday environments
All reflect gaps in protection that undermine both individual wellbeing and broader social stability.
The experiences of women in The Gambia and Nigeria challenge us to rethink what meaningful implementation of the WPS agenda requires. Yet, these two case studies are only indicative of the nature, and not the scale or the diversity of the challenge.
Peace cannot be measured solely by the absence of war or by the number of women included in security institutions. As long as women’s bodies remain sites of control, contestation and violence – whether in legislative chambers, conflict zones or communal festivals, the promise of Women, Peace and Security will remain incomplete.
How then can WPS be meaningfully implemented? In practice, it would mean National Action Plans that treat harmful practices like FGM with the same urgency as conflict-related violence. It would mean accountability measures that extend beyond formal institutions into community spaces. And it would mean that progress is not measured only by the inclusion of women in security structures but by their safety in their daily lives.
Recentring bodily integrity within security policy is not an add-on. It is foundational. Without it, commitments to women’s participation and empowerment risk becoming symbolic rather than transformative.