Beyond national action plans: Uncovering the local sources of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda in Turkey

This article aims to rethink the practices of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda beyond its formal policy mechanisms and state actors. Scholarship has largely emphasized National Action Plans (NAPs) as the main benchmark for WPS adoption, yet this focus obscures the practices of non-state actors who advance the WPS principles in contexts where no NAPs exists. Also, the focus on the NAPs reinforces a taken-for-granted understanding of peace and security. Using Turkey as a case study, the article examines three mothers’ movements, namely Saturday Mothers, Peace Mothers, and Diyarbakır Mothers to show how they conceptualize peace and security, and how their maternal activism contributes to everyday peacebuilding and the gendering peace and security understanding in Turkey. Although these groups do not explicitly align with feminist agendas or invoke the WPS framework, their activism embodies its core principles by demanding accountability, advocating for justice, challenging militarized security discourses, and women’s participation in peacebuilding. By highlighting these practices, the article argues that local women’s movements even if they are not explicity identified themselves as feminists are crucial yet overlooked actors in advancing the WPS agenda in their local realities, expanding our understanding of its practice beyond state-led processes and different practices of the WPS agenda based on contextual peace and security understandings of the actors.