On Thursday, January 29^th the All-Party Parliamentary Group organized an event in collaboration with the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on International Law, Justice and Accountability Globally on the topic of ‘Gendering Atrocity Prevention.’

Baroness Fiona Hodgson CBE chaired the event and opened with remarks about the rise in conflicts around the world and the importance of the WPS agenda in addressing this. The event highlighted how a gender and intersectional analysis is critical to understanding and preventing atrocity crimes. This lens allows us to see how and why perpetrators commit certain crimes against certain peoples and groups, which can enable policymakers to prevent these crimes from happening in the first place.

Christine Chinkin, Founder of the LSE’s Centre for WPS, spoke about the findings of her New Lines Institute report A Gendered Analysis of Aggression and International Law. While not all atrocities take place during conflict, many atrocities that are perpetrated during conflict stem from the initial crime of aggression. She explained how the conduct, circumstances, and consequences of aggression are gendered; that aggression is the manifestation of gendered, militarized nationalism and militarism heightens the risk of violence. She argued that a gender analysis illuminates why and how mass atrocities take place. For example, how men and boys are initially targeting for mass killing because of their gendered identities as potential future threats in a conflict. She reflected that preventing mass atrocities is not as complex as states would have us believe. In fact, it is conflict itself which is much more complex to respond to. Dismantling gender norms and belief systems is necessary to prevent aggression.

Emily Prey, Director of the Gender Policy portfolio and the Mass Atrocities & International Law portfolio, discussed her policy brief How Understanding Gender Can Improve Atrocity Prevention and Response. She demonstrated how a gender and intersectional analysis is a necessary tool to predict, prevent, and respond to atrocity crimes. Understanding how peoples’ different identities interact, and seeing which groups of people may be more at risk for persecution or discrimination based on their overlapping identities is crucial to predicting, preventing, and responding to atrocity crimes. She shared research from Valerie Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad Emmett that shows that women’s security is connected to state security and explained how the continuum of violence leads to greater instability for states. She used the Kurds in northeast Syria as a positive example of preventing atrocities and pushing back against authoritarianism. The governance of Rojava is based on jineology: the philosophy that a country cannot be free until the women are free. She closed by reminding the audience that as long as women and gender minorities are sidelined and considered secondary to national security, states will continue to struggle with how to swiftly and effectively prevention atrocity crimes.

Paul Kirby, Reader in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London, discussed the Prevention pillar of the WPS agenda. He noted that the WPS agenda is the most comprehensive framework for gender equality in the world. He explained how the Prevention pillar has two phases. The first phase is preventing violence in conflict and that conflict-related sexual violence is most often referred to in this context. The second phase is the prevention of war itself. It is not about making war safe for women, but about making the world safe from war. He emphasised that when WPS Prevention is looked at through a CRSV lens, military and security actors dominate these conversations. By contrast, when it is looked at through a conflict prevention lens, civil society and peacebuilders are much more involved. He delved into what Prevention as a part of the WPS agenda looks like in the UK, with a much diminished capacity due to aid cuts and the Foreign Office reshuffle. He highlighted that conflict prevention made up only 1% of the UK’s foreign aid before the cuts in 2025. The UK is the second country, after the US, with the deepest and most sustained foreign aid cuts, which negatively impacts its atrocity prevention capabilities. He spoke about how WPS has been deprioritized in both the UK National Security Strategy and in the Strategic Defence Review. He concluded that the shift in UK foreign policy towards funding the military and emphasising ‘hard’ security is not a positive move with respect to atrocity prevention.

Homira May Rezai, a Hazara rights activist, offered the experience of the Hazara community in Afghanistan as a failed example of atrocity prevention. All aspects of Hazara identity are under attack in the Taliban’s Afghanistan. This kind of identity-based targeting signals future atrocities may take place. She cited the New Lines Institute legal analysis which concluded that Afghanistan bears state responsibility for breaches of the Genocide Convention against the Hazaras. She paid particular attention to the intersectional persecution that Hazara women face as they are targeted on the basis of their three intersecting identities as women, Shia Muslims, and as ethnic Hazaras. She shared testimony from a Hazara girl who was kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, and raped for 28 days: Every single day, I was beaten with cables and whips across my back, my legs, my whole body — until my skin split open and bled, until dark bruises formed so deep that even breathing became painful. The blows kept coming, day after day, until my body began to shut down. They filmed me screaming. They filmed me on the floor. They even filmed the rapes, the gang rapes — moments so painful that speaking of them now hurts. With cold indifference, they recorded the sexual violence and humiliation. I was raped over and over again, to the point of passing out. I was threatened again and again, subjected to the most nauseating, degrading acts imaginable. Homira explained how Hazara women are not only suffering under the Taliban’s system of gender apartheid but are also suffering from genocidal targeting by various actors including the Taliban and IS-KP. She concluded that is we do not integrate gender and minority persecution into our atrocity prevention frameworks, we will always intervene too late. Gender persecution is a precursor for mass atrocities so states must track things like girls being removed from schools, communities being ethnically cleansed from their lands, and violence against women all as forms of atrocity prevention.

The event highlighted the ongoing challenges to effectively predicting and preventing atrocities, but the speakers provided recommendations for policymakers and states to engage in gendered approaches to prevention.