Towards a decolonial WPS in the Levant: On Jordan and the possibility of peace from below

Grounded in UN Security Council Resolution 1325, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda has become a cornerstone of global peacebuilding discourse. However, its practical translation into local contexts often reproduces those very hierarchies it seeks to dismantle – privileging donor logics, elite participation, and technical metrics over lived experiences and local epistemologies. Positioned as both a model of stability and a space of protracted displacement for several ethnic groups – Palestinians, Syrians, Sudanese, among others – the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan constitutes a revealing vantage point to rethink the agenda through a decolonial lens, in an attempt to deconstruct the hegemonic meaning it inherently carries and create the conditions for traditionally marginalized voices to be included.

Since its first adoption in 2018, Jordan's engagement with WPS reflected an intricate entanglement of humanitarian response urgency – given the weight of the refugee question in the country – security issues – with the role Jordan occupies in the so-called "War on terror" and preventing violent extremism (PVE) since early 2000 – and gender mainstreaming – attempting at positioning itself as a reliable, complying partner within the global arena (Pratt, 2020).

In consideration of these characteristics, decolonizing the WPS starting from the Jordanian case requires shifting the analytical focus from its institutional implementation to the everyday practices of women and men who sustain social cohesion, care, and resilience amid historically established, structural inequalities and crises conditions. These practices, emerging particularly in refugee camps, rural areas, and marginalized communities, unveil a different grammar of peace – one that is relational, embodied, and rooted in histories of displacement and resistance. By foregrounding these practices, a decolonial reading of the WPS should thus be built around 1) overcoming the pillars of mere participation and protection, 2) privileging a perspective of reciprocity, repair, and epistemic justice; 3) reconceiving the very ideas of peace and conflict through the lens of Global South historical dynamics and the enduring colonial impact that has shaped the modern histories of Syria, Sudan, Palestine, and others.       

The WPS in Jordan – From coloniality of peace to peace from below

In Jordan, the institutionalization of the WPS agenda, culminated in two Jordanian National Action Plan, the JONAP I 2018-2021 and JONAP II 2022-2025, has largely unfolded through donor-led approaches and international partnerships that align gender equality with national security plans and priorities to help sustain the country's reputation on the international stage. Although significant results have been achieved, this approach partially falls into a broader coloniality of peace perspective (Azarmandi, 2024) in which women's participation is measured through their visibility in formal institutions, counter-terrorism capacity building programs, security departments, NATO's bureaus or armed forces, underlying a specific focus on quantity rather than quality – as the staggering 8.83% of women in the Jordanian Armed Force (JAF) in 2020 shows (Banfi, 2024). Conversely, localized understandings of peace efforts from the ground by civil society organizations (CSOs), women-led civil based organizations (WLCBOs), marginalized individuals and communities remain often undervalued and underfunded, despite proactive engagement experiences like that of the organizations gathered around the first Jordanian National NGO Forum (JONAF). Established by the Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD) in 2016, the JONAF seek to provide a platform for dialogue, shared thinking, and sustainable solutions for a more localized and decentralized implementation of the WPS in the country. The JONAP I and II – generally praised as regional models – illustrate these criticalities very well. Their emphasis on training and representation reflects more the need to comply with international standards than the capacity to build a long-lasting strategy around local realities, often translating women's struggles and needs into mere technical indicators.

Within this framework, women refugees, vulnerable or displaced, and those engaged in informal economies occupy a role of "beneficiaries" rather than active agents of peace. Yet, these same women – as well as men and youth – perform daily acts of negotiation, care, and solidarity that counter structural violence and social fragmentation in a less institutionalized, but effective way. Common everyday relational practices like building neighborhood support and mutual-aid networks, artistic and educational experiences, preservation and transmission of cultural heritage – especially among displaced groups – or inter-community dialogue opportunities to overcome shared challenges practically support social cohesion between refugees and host communities (ARDD 2024) or different ethnic groups, embodying alternative forms of peace and security from below that resist both militarized and humanitarian logics.

Recognizing the political potential behind affection (Ahmed, 2014) and care practices means reclaiming the WPS from its mostly depoliticized, top-down-driven regional implementation. It would more importantly mean opening new spaces for a decolonial reimagining of peace grounded in relationality, care, and shared cultural praxis, eventually overcoming a humanitarian rational deeply rooted in top-down strategies and hierarchical structures of welfarism.

Narrative security as a decolonial act

Besides contributing to social cohesion and promoting internal stability, practices of peace from below are also essential for the creation of a narrative security, namely the capacity for women to actively and autonomously produce imaginaries and representations from a self-determined perspective rather than being forced into tailor-made, top-down accounts from Global North regimes of representation. Interestingly, while the WPS often emphasizes the pillars of protection and participation (Kirby & Shepherd, 2016), it rarely addresses the narration structures that determine whose voices are heard or excluded, whose experiences are made visible or invisible.

Activists, artists, community leaders, elders and heritage keepers from marginalized settings, refugee camps, or non-urban areas, produce different forms of narrative security through their use of oral history, storytelling, artistic and cultural memory, indigenous and intergenerational knowledges transmission that can reframe vulnerability as resistance and belonging as feminist agency. Their experiences and works, often dismissed as "therapeutic" or "decorative" within aid narratives, in fact constitute a form of resistance, affection, and decolonial care.

Through these experiences, post-conflict, migration, or statelessness trauma and pain are not erased but healed by being made narratable and collectively meaningful. Reimagining WPS through the lens of this narrative security thus entails shifting from protection and participation of women and their bodies to prominence of their narratives and the worlds they build through them, a shift from mere inclusion policies to epistemic self-defense. In parallel, by actively engaging in their own self-narration, women constantly produce counter-narratives and counter-archives in the face of erasure, displacement, and marginalization, challenging the systemic silencing embedded in humanitarian and securitarian discourses.

Conclusions: an infrastructure of peace

Together, experiences of peace from below and narrative security can expose the coloniality embedded in the WPS agenda as of now, inviting for a redefinition of security as relational, embodied, and grounded in the lived geographies of post-conflict displacement and resilience, with the case of Jordan working as a revealing testing ground in this sense.

Similarly, these highlight the need "to critically interrogate care and its practice as a condition of success in the realm of the WPS" (Hamilton, Mundkur, and Shepherd, 2021). As Ahmed shows (2004, 2017, 2021), emotions and stories are indeed not private but political: by reclaiming the right to speak, remember, and imagine otherwise, women and grassroots movements of civil society have the potential to transform cultural and social forms of expression into an infrastructure of peace, tracing the boundaries of belonging, resistance, and identity. Accordingly, sustaining a more relational, localized, and community-based implementation of the WPS also through narrative security opportunities becomes a crucial yet overlooked dimension of peace that goes beyond juxtaposition of women with either victims, beneficiaries, or symbols of resilience. It potentially allows for a reconfiguration of traditional hierarchies to include those who have been strategically and historically marginalized.

In conclusion, looking at such relational practices appears fundamental to "destabilize" the coloniality of peace (Azarmandi and Pauls 2024) traditionally embedded in the agenda, having the potential to formally decolonize the scaffolding of the WPS as conceived over two decades ago and to formally return the agency to the people by promoting the affective dimension of their engagement.