#10 DECEMBER 2020 The Women, Peace and Security Agenda: 20 years after Cheryl Hendricks Over the past two decades and with the historical UN Resolution 1325, women’s roles as victims and actors in conflict received much scholarly, policymaking and practitioner attention. However, despite advances in terms of framework, structures and training, women remain marginal to formal peace and security processes and are continuously subjected to the scourge of sexual and gender-based violence in conflict and non-conflict situations. There is an urgent need to push the envelope so that we can become more innovative The Women, Peace and Security(WPS) agenda emerged in a context in which the meaning of, and approaches to, peace and security were being redefined. The 1990s saw a marked shift from the interstate conflicts of the Cold War era to the intra-state conflicts that engulfed many countries in Eastern Europe and Africa. Realist interpretations for managing conflicts – through the projection of power and a balance of power – no longer held validity. A Human Security perspective, which drew on Peace Studies, Critical Security Studies, and Feminist International Relations, gained traction in the UN. Security became redefined as“freedom from fear and freedom from want”(UNDP, 1994). The security of the individual and people became as important as the security of the state(the two were seen as intrinsically linked), and the identification of security issues and actors was broadened to take account of the many sources of insecurity. This conceptualisation of security presented a key moment in which sexual and gender-based violence could be conceived of as a peace and security issue, and in which women could be repositioned as peace and security actors. Women`s struggles in a changing conflict environment A key characteristic of the intra-state conflicts was the disregard for the rules of war. Many civilians, including women and children, were directly targeted and displaced during these conflicts. Although war and the violation of women’s bodies have always co-existed, the concept of‘rape as a weapon of war’ was coined to articulate the strategic ways in which sexual violence was being perpetrated to further the 1