ASEAN’s Regional Plan of Action on Women, Peace, and Security (RPA WPS): Incorporated or Ignored?
By: Isabella Aung, Queen’s University & Emily Annis, Queen’s University
Introduction
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) implemented a regional plan of action on Women, Peace, and Security (RPA WPS) in November 2022, with the recognition that it is essential to achieving sustainable peace and prosperity in member states. The RPA WPS features five matrices of priority actions, four of which cover key pillars of the WPS agenda. These include, for instance, protection, participation, prevention, and relief and recovery. The fifth matrix is dedicated to implementation, coordination, reporting, monitoring, and evaluation. The RPA WPS aims to ensure that implementation of the WPS agenda is integrated into all efforts and initiatives that promote peace and security within the ASEAN region.
Eighteen months after the implementation of the RPA WPS, are the member states intentionally integrating the WPS agenda on a regional scale as promised? To study whether important stakeholders from each ASEAN member state are working toward this common goal, we conducted a content analysis of speeches and statements by high-level government and military officials involved in the decision-making process as well as civil society leaders in ASEAN countries. Our analysis aims to explore if WPS has actually been prioritized in the ASEAN region, almost two years after the implementation of the RPA WPS. We studied twenty-one speeches and statements from 2022 to the present from seven ASEAN countries. All the speeches in our sample mention WPS directly or explicitly address women’s rights.
Findings and Analysis
All ASEAN countries have ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). However, only five out of the twenty-one speeches examined mention CEDAW, and only five explicitly reference WPS or Resolution 1325. We find that the countries that acknowledge CEDAW and WPS do not overlap, as the speeches that acknowledge CEDAW are from Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Singapore, while WPS is only mentioned by stakeholders from Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
A worrisome trend among the speeches and statements analyzed is that women and girls are often patriarchally referred to as victims and subjects in need of support, rather than individuals with their own social and political agency. Many speakers tend to outline a need to protect and empower women, rather than recognizing them as autonomous agents of change. Only five out of twenty-one speeches (approximately 25% percent), including one from Myanmar, one from Singapore, one from Indonesia, and two from the Philippines (one by Vice President Sara Duterte and one by Senator Risa Hontiveros), specifically discuss women’s leadership potential, highlighting a concerning gap in gender and security discourse among ASEAN member states. This adds further complexity to this concerning pattern, in that while Indonesia and the Philippines call for women to play a central role in conflict resolution and peace processes, speeches from Myanmar and Singapore address women’s leadership potential in the context of further advancing the economic interests of the states as a whole.
A significant majority of the speeches and statements analyzed include references to sexual violence, domestic violence, or ongoing barriers to women’s education in their respective countries. While these topics are important to discuss, they have the potential to eclipse other women’s issues that are equally in need of attention such as women’s inclusion in leadership, women’s workplace protection, and childcare support. Consequently, Southeast Asian women only receive government and civil society attention and support if their hardships fall into one of these three categories. This leaves many women and girls vulnerable.
The implementation of RPA-WPS needs to be inclusive of all women by adopting an intersectional approach to reach its full potential, as not all women’s experiences are the same. However, our analysis shows that government officials, military personnel, and civil society leaders in the ASEAN region rarely acknowledge women’s potential, let alone outline specific plans and courses of action on how to incorporate the WPS agenda in policymaking. The speakers only talk about supporting women in very broad terms, such as women’s empowerment and providing women with more opportunities.
Adding to this issue is the lack of consideration for diverse women in ASEAN member states. Despite the ASEAN region having vast ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity, only two out of the twenty-one speeches analyzed acknowledged the existence of minority women. One speech from Myanmar drew attention to the plight of ethnic minority girls and women in Myanmar during wartime. Another speech from the Philippines pointed out that Muslim women have been traditionally marginalized and underrepresented in the country.
While all examined speeches mention gendered areas of concern in their respective states, only nine of the twenty-one outline specific action that will be taken to address such issues. Providing a positive example of planning to address women’s issues, Cambodia offers a speech that states the intention to build women’s dormitories to improve local women’s access to education. However, this action seems innocuous when compared to the more pressing and violent gender-based issues in the region. Illustrating a more productive action, one speech from Malaysia vocalizses their intent to deploy women to conflict zones in hopes of building confidence in at-risk communities, specifically for women and children. One Indonesian speech calls for the immediate deliberation of their Sexual Violence Crime Bill to strengthen the legal protection of Indonesian women.
Of all ASEAN member states, Singapore is certainly the most advanced in terms of referencing specific commitments to improve the security of women and girls. For example, one Singaporean speech outlines a commitment to launching The Women Space: a ‘one- stop shop’ for women’s career, wellness, and legal needs, in hopes of establishing permanent supports for women’s development across domestic and professional spaces in Singapore. However, such commitments seldomly address security-related issues, leading to divergence from the parameters of the WPS agenda. Further, little evidence exists to prove the fruition of such commitments, exposing the performative nature of Singapore’s commitments to women’s advancement.
Conclusion
From the findings and analysis, we can see that not a lot of significant efforts have been made by leaders in the ASEAN region to ensure that the WPS agenda is integrated into their discourse and policymaking surrounding women. When it comes to tangible implementation of the RPA WPS, many member states have consistently been all talk and no action. The graphic above is a word-frequency visualization of all speeches analyzed, and it clearly demonstrates the vagueness of the content discussed by the speakers, thereby highlighting the limited influence the RPA WPS has on ASEAN leaders’ policymaking processes. It has been almost two years since the RPA WPS came into existence. And yet, ASEAN leaders have still not actualized the full integration of the WPS agenda into regional peace and security efforts and initiatives. Stakeholders from the government, military, and civil society alike must take urgent action to ensure that the RPA WPS is more than just an empty promise.
Appendix: ASEAN Speeches Analyzed
