What is the primary focus of the ICPSGGGS conference?

The conference focuses on peace, security, global governance, and gender studies, aiming to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on these interconnected themes.

International Conference on Peace, Security, Global Governance, and Gender Studies (ICPSGGGS)

Name: International Conference on Peace, Security, Global Governance, and Gender Studies (ICPSGGGS)
Start: 2026-08-18T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-08-18T00:00:00Z
Location: Kigali

Aug 18, 2026Kigali, RwandaIn-person

Starts in 10 daysRegistration open

The International Conference on Peace, Security, Global Governance, and Gender Studies (ICPSGGGS) is an academic event held in Kigali, Rwanda. This conference serves as a platform for researchers, academics, and practitioners to present and discuss advancements in the interconnected fields of peace, security, global governance, and gender studies. Its location in Rwanda provides a unique regional context for these discussions. The event focuses on fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and knowledge exchange. Participants will engage with current challenges and explore innovative solutions related to conflict resolution, international relations, the role of international institutions, and the critical impact of gender dynamics on global stability and development.

Committees & topics

Topics
Gender and Security: Theoretical Perspectives · Human Rights and Gender Equality in Conflict Zones · Peacebuilding and Gender: Strategies for Inclusion · Global Governance and Gender Justice · Gendered Dimensions of Humanitarianism · International Relations and Gender: New Paradigms · Conflict Prevention and Gender: Innovative Approaches · Security Governance and Gender Dynamics

Why it matters

This conference is significant because it addresses critical global issues through an interdisciplinary lens. Peace and security are fundamental to human development, and understanding the nuances of global governance is essential for effective international cooperation. By integrating gender studies, the conference highlights the often-overlooked but crucial role of gender in shaping conflict, peacebuilding, and governance structures.

The discussions at ICPSGGGS can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of complex global challenges. For instance, exploring the impact of gender on peace processes can lead to more inclusive and sustainable solutions. The insights generated from this gathering can inform policy-making, academic research, and practical interventions aimed at fostering a more peaceful and equitable world. The focus on these themes in a city like Kigali, RWA, which has its own history of peace and reconciliation efforts, adds a layer of practical relevance to the theoretical discussions.

How to prepare

To prepare for the International Conference on Peace, Security, Global Governance, and Gender Studies, participants should engage with current literature and research in all four thematic areas. A strong understanding of international relations theories, conflict resolution frameworks, and the principles of global governance will be beneficial. Additionally, a thorough review of contemporary issues in gender studies, particularly as they intersect with peace and security, is crucial.

For those presenting research, it is advisable to frame contributions within the broader context of global challenges and potential solutions. Consider how your work contributes to the ongoing dialogue on effective governance mechanisms and the promotion of gender equality in conflict-affected or post-conflict settings. Engaging with the historical and contemporary context of the host city, Kigali, RWA, could also enrich presentations and discussions, offering a localized perspective on global themes.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 6 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Rwanda

Host nation with significant experience in post-conflict reconstruction and gender-inclusive governance.

Role in topic

RWA provides a compelling backdrop for discussions on peace, security, and gender studies, given its history of conflict and subsequent efforts in reconciliation, nation-building, and promoting women's participation in governance. Its experiences offer practical case studies for exploring the themes of the conference.

United States

Major global actor in peace, security, and international development, with varying approaches to gender integration.

Role in topic

The USA plays a significant role in global security architecture and international development initiatives. Its foreign policy and aid programs often influence peace processes and governance structures worldwide, making its perspective on gender mainstreaming and security sector reform relevant.

United Kingdom

Influential nation in international diplomacy and security, with a focus on multilateralism and gender equality in foreign policy.

Role in topic

The GBR is a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a key contributor to international peacekeeping and development efforts. Its approach to global governance and its commitment to integrating gender perspectives into peace and security agendas are important for conference discussions.

Canada

Advocate for multilateralism, human rights, and feminist foreign policy.

Role in topic

CAN has been a vocal proponent of feminist foreign policy and has actively promoted gender equality and women's empowerment in its international engagements. Its experiences in integrating gender perspectives into peace and security initiatives offer valuable insights.

Sweden

Pioneer of feminist foreign policy and strong advocate for gender equality in peace and security.

Role in topic

SWE has been at the forefront of implementing a feminist foreign policy, explicitly prioritizing gender equality across all aspects of its international relations, including peace and security. Its experiences provide a leading example for discussions on gender studies and global governance.

Norway

Key mediator in peace processes and strong supporter of women's participation.

Role in topic

NOR has a long history of engaging in peace mediation and conflict resolution efforts globally. It has consistently emphasized the importance of including women in peace processes and has supported initiatives aimed at strengthening gender perspectives in security.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Gender and Security: Theoretical Perspectives

The study of gender and security emerged as a distinct field in the late 1980s and 1990s, when feminist scholars including Cynthia Enloe, J. Ann Tickner, and Carol Cohn challenged the realist orthodoxy of international relations by asking where women were in global politics and how masculinised assumptions shaped definitions of security. Their work argued that traditional state-centric security paradigms, focused on military threats and territorial integrity, obscured the lived insecurities of civilians, particularly women, and naturalised a gendered division between protectors and protected. The 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action institutionalised the call to mainstream gender across peace and security policy, and the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 marked a watershed by formally linking women, peace, and security on the Council's agenda. Subsequent resolutions (1820, 1888, 1960, 2242) expanded the framework to address conflict-related sexual violence and women's participation in conflict resolution. Theoretical debate has since broadened beyond liberal-feminist inclusion arguments to encompass postcolonial, intersectional, queer, and masculinities perspectives. Today, the field grapples with the gap between normative commitments and operational practice, contested concepts such as 'human security' versus state security, and growing backlash against 'gender ideology' in several capitals. Debates also focus on whether the WPS agenda has been co-opted by militarised institutions, and how emerging issues — climate insecurity, autonomous weapons, and digital harms — reshape gendered analyses of threat.

Key players

Human Rights and Gender Equality in Conflict Zones

Armed conflict produces distinctly gendered patterns of human rights violation. International humanitarian law, codified in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols, prohibits sexual violence and outrages on personal dignity, but enforcement historically lagged. The conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and the resulting jurisprudence of the ICTY, ICTR, and the Rome Statute of 1998, established rape and sexual slavery as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and constitutive acts of genocide. UN Security Council Resolutions 1820 (2008) and 1888 (2009) recognised conflict-related sexual violence as a threat to international peace and security and created the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Yet contemporary conflicts — Sudan, Ukraine, the Tigray war, Myanmar, Gaza, the DRC — have generated extensive documentation of sexual violence, forced displacement disproportionately affecting women and children, loss of access to maternal health and education, and targeted violence against LGBTQ+ persons. Men and boys also face under-reported sexual violence and forced recruitment. Current debates centre on accountability gaps, survivor-centred reparations, the politicisation of sexual and reproductive health services in humanitarian response, and how to maintain gender protections amid donor fatigue and restrictions on civil society in conflict-affected states.

Key players

Peacebuilding and Gender: Strategies for Inclusion

Empirical research, including studies by the Council on Foreign Relations and UN Women, has consistently shown that peace agreements are more durable when women participate meaningfully in negotiations and implementation. Despite this, women remained roughly 16 percent of negotiators, mediators, and signatories in major peace processes tracked between 1992 and 2019, and the share has stagnated or declined in several recent processes. The Women, Peace and Security agenda, anchored by UNSCR 1325 and operationalised through more than 100 National Action Plans, seeks to embed gender across prevention, participation, protection, and relief and recovery. Key institutional vehicles include the UN Peacebuilding Commission, the Peacebuilding Fund's Gender and Youth Promotion Initiative (which earmarks a minimum share of funds for gender-responsive projects), and regional mechanisms such as the African Union's Continental Results Framework on WPS and FemWise-Africa network of women mediators. Case studies from Colombia, Northern Ireland, Liberia, and the Philippines illustrate how civil society coalitions can shape gender-sensitive provisions on security sector reform, land rights, and transitional justice. Contemporary debates focus on moving beyond tokenistic participation toward structural inclusion, addressing the security risks faced by women peacebuilders, financing local women's organisations directly, and integrating intersectional considerations of disability, indigeneity, and sexual orientation into peacebuilding design.

Key players

Global Governance and Gender Justice

Global governance institutions have incorporated gender equality unevenly since the 1975 Mexico City World Conference on Women launched the UN Decade for Women. The 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, and the creation of UN Women in 2010 consolidated a normative architecture, while Sustainable Development Goal 5 established gender equality as a stand-alone development priority within the 2030 Agenda. Gender mainstreaming is now formally embedded in the UN system, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, and major regional bodies. Nevertheless, implementation gaps persist. CEDAW has more reservations than almost any other human rights treaty, and several major powers — including the United States — have not ratified it. Trade, investment, and macroeconomic governance frequently exclude gender impact analysis, and global tax and debt architectures have been criticised for disproportionately harming women in the Global South. A growing transnational pushback, sometimes coordinated across conservative governments and non-state actors, contests gender-related language in UN documents and the Sustainable Development Goals. Current flashpoints include the Pact for the Future negotiations, reform of international financial institutions, regulation of digital platforms with gendered harms, and the place of sexual and reproductive health and rights in multilateral consensus.

Key players

Gendered Dimensions of Humanitarianism

Humanitarian crises affect women, men, girls, boys, and gender-diverse people in distinct ways. Displacement, food insecurity, and collapse of health systems raise risks of gender-based violence, child and forced marriage, and maternal mortality, while also disrupting livelihoods and protective social networks. The Inter-Agency Standing Committee's Gender Handbook and the GBV Guidelines, alongside the Minimum Initial Service Package for Sexual and Reproductive Health in crises, are the principal operational frameworks guiding gender-responsive humanitarian action. The Call to Action on Protection from Gender-Based Violence in Emergencies, launched in 2013 and now joined by more than 90 states and organisations, has driven greater attention and funding, yet GBV programming remains chronically underfunded relative to assessed needs in OCHA appeals. The 2018 sexual exploitation and abuse scandals involving major NGOs prompted reforms to safeguarding standards across the sector, and the Grand Bargain commitments emphasise localisation, including support to women-led organisations. Ongoing debates concern the politicisation of reproductive health assistance, restrictions imposed by parties to conflict (including the Taliban's bans on women aid workers in Afghanistan), the safety of female humanitarians, and how to integrate cash assistance, climate adaptation, and protection in ways that do not reinforce gendered vulnerabilities.

Key players

International Relations and Gender: New Paradigms

Feminist international relations theory, which gained traction with the 'third debate' in IR during the late 1980s, has matured into a diverse field encompassing liberal, constructivist, postcolonial, and poststructural strands. Scholars such as Cynthia Enloe, J. Ann Tickner, Christine Sylvester, and Laura Sjoberg have shown how gender shapes statecraft, diplomacy, war, political economy, and the practices of everyday international politics. The launch of Sweden's Feminist Foreign Policy in 2014 translated some of this scholarship into state practice, and was followed by Canada, France, Mexico, Spain, Germany, and others adopting variants of feminist development, diplomacy, or trade policy. This policy turn has been contested. Sweden formally abandoned the label in 2022 following a change of government, and several adopters face criticism for inconsistencies between feminist rhetoric and arms exports, border policies, or alliance commitments. Newer paradigms emphasise decolonial and intersectional approaches, querying whose feminism is exported and whose insecurities are centred, and examining how Global South states, indigenous movements, and queer scholarship reshape the field. Emerging questions concern feminist approaches to great-power competition, AI and digital diplomacy, climate negotiations, and the rise of 'anti-gender' movements as a transnational political force shaping foreign policy.

Key players

Conflict Prevention and Gender: Innovative Approaches

Conflict prevention has moved up the multilateral agenda since the 2018 UN–World Bank 'Pathways for Peace' report and the Secretary-General's Sustaining Peace agenda. Gender analysis is central to early warning, because indicators such as rising rates of domestic violence, restrictions on women's mobility, and recruitment patterns into armed groups frequently precede broader political violence. Research from organisations such as the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security shows strong correlations between gender inequality and state propensity for both internal and inter-state conflict. Operational innovations include the integration of gender indicators in early warning systems run by ECOWAS, IGAD, and the OSCE; women mediator networks (FemWise-Africa, the Nordic Women Mediators, the Mediterranean Women Mediators Network, and the Commonwealth Women Mediators Network); and community-level prevention programming linking women's economic empowerment, social cohesion, and countering violent extremism. The UN Peacebuilding Fund's Gender Promotion Initiative is one of the largest dedicated financing windows. Current debates focus on how to prevent backlash and reprisals against women human rights defenders, address the gendered drivers of radicalisation without instrumentalising women, integrate climate-security-gender analysis, and ensure that prevention efforts engage men and boys and address harmful masculinities.

Key players

Security Governance and Gender Dynamics

Security governance encompasses the institutions, norms, and practices through which states and international organisations provide security, including armed forces, police, intelligence services, border agencies, and oversight bodies. Security sector reform (SSR), as articulated in the 2008 Secretary-General's report and Security Council Resolution 2151 (2014), explicitly recognises gender mainstreaming as integral to effective, accountable, and human-rights-compliant security institutions. DCAF, UN Women, and regional organisations have developed extensive toolkits on gender-responsive SSR. Progress includes higher female representation in some national militaries and UN peace operations — though women still comprise only around 6–8 percent of military and roughly 17 percent of police personnel deployed in UN missions — codes of conduct addressing sexual exploitation and abuse, and integration of gender advisors in NATO, AU, and EU operations. Yet structural challenges remain: harassment within security institutions, exclusion of women from senior command, and the limits of 'add women and stir' approaches that leave underlying institutional cultures unchanged. Contemporary debates address conscription policy, the gendered impact of private military and security companies, surveillance technologies that disproportionately target women and LGBTQ+ activists, and the role of security governance reform in democratic backsliding contexts where gender equality is increasingly framed as a security threat.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for International Conference on Peace, Security, Global Governance, and Gender Studies (ICPSGGGS).

Recent reporting to ground your prep

India's 131st Amendment Bill

Actor Vijay's Political Move

Supreme Court's Voting Rights Impact on 2026

Trump's Federal Election Strategy

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

Engagement Strategies

Hidden Stakeholders

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Conflict Resolution

Media & Press Relations

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Rwanda August 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

International Conference on Peace, Security, Global Governance, and Gender Studies (ICPSGGGS)

Aug 18, 2026Kigali, RwandaIn-person

Starts in 10 daysRegistration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Gender and Security: Theoretical Perspectives · Human Rights and Gender Equality in Conflict Zones · Peacebuilding and Gender: Strategies for Inclusion · Global Governance and Gender Justice · Gendered Dimensions of Humanitarianism · International Relations and Gender: New Paradigms · Conflict Prevention and Gender: Innovative Approaches · Security Governance and Gender Dynamics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 6 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Rwanda

Host nation with significant experience in post-conflict reconstruction and gender-inclusive governance.

Role in topic

United States

Major global actor in peace, security, and international development, with varying approaches to gender integration.

Role in topic

United Kingdom

Influential nation in international diplomacy and security, with a focus on multilateralism and gender equality in foreign policy.

Role in topic

Canada

Advocate for multilateralism, human rights, and feminist foreign policy.

Role in topic

Sweden

Pioneer of feminist foreign policy and strong advocate for gender equality in peace and security.

Role in topic

Norway

Key mediator in peace processes and strong supporter of women's participation.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Gender and Security: Theoretical Perspectives

Key players

Human Rights and Gender Equality in Conflict Zones

Key players

Peacebuilding and Gender: Strategies for Inclusion

Key players

Global Governance and Gender Justice

Key players

Gendered Dimensions of Humanitarianism

Key players

International Relations and Gender: New Paradigms

Key players

Conflict Prevention and Gender: Innovative Approaches

Key players

Security Governance and Gender Dynamics

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for International Conference on Peace, Security, Global Governance, and Gender Studies (ICPSGGGS).

Recent reporting to ground your prep

India's 131st Amendment Bill

Actor Vijay's Political Move

Supreme Court's Voting Rights Impact on 2026

Trump's Federal Election Strategy

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

Engagement Strategies

Hidden Stakeholders

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Conflict Resolution

Media & Press Relations

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Rwanda August 2026

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

National Security Symposium 2026

5th TELLS Conference on Future Education 2026

International Conference on Political History and Institutional Development (ICPHIDT)

International Conference on Inclusive Insurance 2026

International Conference on Children, Youth, and Migration Studies (ICCYMS) 2026

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Frequently asked questions