Assessing the Impact of Women, Peace and Security Initiatives in Lao PDR: A Baseline Study

In Southeast Asia and within the Greater Mekong insecurity results from both conflict and nontraditional sources, including land dispossession, migration, trafficking, gender-based violence (GBV), drug economies, and climate-related disasters. The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, a normative framework established by UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and subsequent resolutions, recognizes that men and women experience this insecurity differently, and that women’s meaningful participation in preventing and responding to insecurity is vital to sustainable peace. ASEAN member states have committed to WPS principles through the ASEAN Regional Plan of Action on WPS (2022). However, this regional policy framework has yet to be implemented in community-level practice.

In the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), women sustain everyday security through mediation, caregiving, community mobilization, and informal monitoring. Women continue to face barriers to meaningful participation in formal security and decision-making processes. This flagship research study, conducted alongside The Amplifying Women’s Peace Actions in ASEAN (AMPLIFY) program, provides community-level empirical evidence of how this exclusion operates across four provinces vulnerable to nontraditional security challenges. The report analyses what the marginalization of women in security decision-making means for efforts to establish and sustain more inclusive peace.