The Missing Half of Security

Security is usually measured by what a state can defend.

Less often, it is measured by what a society can survive.

That distinction matters now because governments around the world are rearming, expanding defense budgets, and redefining national priorities around military preparedness. In many places, the reasons are real: war in Europe, instability in the Middle East, rising geopolitical competition, cyber threats, authoritarian aggression, and a weakening international order.

But military defense is only one stage of security. It becomes most visible when threats have already escalated — when prevention, diplomacy, deterrence, governance, and social resilience have not been enough to keep violence contained.

And even then, defense alone cannot carry a society through crisis.

A country may be able to defend its borders and still fail its people if hospitals collapse, children lose education, families are left without support, survivors of violence have nowhere to turn, and communities emerge from war too fractured to rebuild.

Security is not only the capacity to fight.

It is also the capacity to endure.

And much of that endurance is carried by women — through paid work, unpaid care, local leadership, humanitarian response, peacebuilding, economic survival, and the daily labor that keeps societies functioning when formal systems are under pressure.

Yet this work is still too often treated as “soft” investment: social spending, development assistance, gender programming, humanitarian support.

In practice, it is part of the infrastructure of security.

That is the missing half of the conversation.

The world is spending more on defense

Global military spending has risen sharply.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, world military expenditure reached $2.887 trillion in 2025, an increase of 2.9 percent in real terms from 2024. SIPRI said this marked the 11th consecutive year of growth, with global spending up 41 percent over the decade from 2016 to 2025.

The increase reflects a real change in the global security environment.

Europe is rearming after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Middle East remains unstable. Asian powers are expanding military capabilities amid growing strategic competition. Governments are investing in cyber capabilities, drones, missiles, intelligence, border control, and new technologies that increasingly shape modern conflict.

The contrast is especially visible in the United States. A White House fiscal year 2027 budget fact sheet says the budget builds on a $1 trillion overall defense topline for fiscal year 2026 and proposes $1.5 trillion in total defense resources for fiscal year 2027, including $1.15 trillion in discretionary funding and $350 billion in mandatory funding.

This is not only an American budget story. It is a global signal. Governments are preparing for a harder security era.

This is not an argument that defense does not matter.

It does.

States have a responsibility to protect their populations. In a world of invasion, coercion, terrorism, mass atrocities, and authoritarian aggression, military preparedness can be a matter of survival.

But defense spending cannot be the only measure of security.

A country can increase its military budget and still be insecure if the social systems that keep people alive begin to collapse.

It can defend territory and still lose a generation of children to interrupted education.

It can buy weapons and still leave survivors of violence without services.

It can speak of resilience while defunding the people and organizations that make resilience possible.

That is where the security conversation becomes too narrow.

The missing half of security

There is a part of security that appears in budgets, summits, weapons contracts, defense strategies, and military plans.

There is another part that appears when a society is under strain: when a family still eats, a child still learns, a clinic still opens, a survivor still finds help, a local market still operates, a displaced community still has someone it trusts, and a peace process includes the people who will have to live with its consequences.

The first part is usually called defense.

The second is often called social support.

That distinction is increasingly dangerous.

Because in war, crisis, and recovery, the work often dismissed as “soft” becomes the difference between a society that survives and one that fractures.

Women are central to that second kind of security.

They sustain households, care systems, schools, health services, local economies, humanitarian networks, community trust, survivor services, and peacebuilding efforts. They also serve, lead, negotiate, document abuses, support survivors, run institutions, operate businesses, and rebuild communities.

In conflict and post-conflict societies, women are not only victims of war.

They are part of the operating system that allows life to continue.

And yet, the funding systems that support this workq are often treated as optional.

That is the contradiction.

Governments increasingly recognize that the world is dangerous. But too many still define security mainly through the tools of force, while underinvesting in the systems that help people survive the consequences of force.

Where UN Women fits

This is where the work of UN Women belongs in the security conversation.

UN Women is often understood as the United Nations entity for gender equality and women’s empowerment. But much of its work sits directly inside the missing half of security: women’s participation in peace and political processes, support for women-led organizations, prevention of violence against women and girls, humanitarian response, economic resilience, and the recognition that care, leadership, and local trust are not peripheral to stability.

UN Women describes itself as the UN organization delivering programmes, policies, and standards that uphold women’s human rights and ensure that every woman and girl can live up to her full potential.

But in practice, that mandate reaches into questions that are central to peace and security.

Who is included in peace talks?

Who receives aid during crisis?

Who is protected from violence?

Who has access to justice?

Who keeps families and communities functioning when formal systems break?

Who is funded to rebuild after conflict?

Who is missing when governments design recovery?

These are not symbolic questions.

They determine whether peace holds, whether communities trust institutions, whether survivors receive support, and whether recovery reaches the people most affected by crisis.

UN Women is not working outside security.

It is working on the systems that help societies survive when security breaks down.

And yet, those systems are increasingly vulnerable.

The part of security being treated as optional

The imbalance is stark.

Military spending is measured in trillions.

The latest complete annual figures show UN Women received $594.4 million in total contributions in 2024, up 5.6 percent from 2023. Its regular, flexible/core resources were $153.2 million in 2024. UN Women’s open data, updated in May 2026, had not yet published complete actual 2025 contribution figures.

Those numbers should not be compared as if UN Women and national militaries have the same mandate. They do not.

But the contrast still matters because it reveals scale.

The world can mobilize vast sums for military systems. Yet the institutions and organizations supporting women in crisis often operate with a fraction of what is needed — and with funding that is far more vulnerable to political shifts.

This matters because the work is not abstract.

When funding moves away from women-led organizations, gender equality institutions, care systems, survivor services, and local peacebuilding, the result is not simply a smaller line item in an international budget.

It means fewer shelters.

Fewer legal services.

Fewer psychosocial support programs.

Fewer trusted community organizations.

Fewer women able to access protection.

Fewer local leaders able to participate in peacebuilding.

Fewer people watching for early signs of violence.

Fewer services for women and girls in the places official systems often miss.

That is the practical meaning of divestment.

It does not remain on paper. It reaches people.

Women-led organizations are warning that they may not survive

The funding pressure is already visible.

A March 2025 UN Women rapid survey of 411 women-led and women’s rights organizations across 44 humanitarian and crisis settings found that 90 percent had been financially affected by foreign aid reductions, while 47 percent warned they could shut down within six months if funding conditions continued. UN Women’s report also found that organizations had already lost staff, scaled back services, and closed programmes even as demand for support grew. As of May 2026, UN Women has not published a comparable public follow-up count confirming how many of those organizations ultimately closed, but later reporting shows the funding pressure has continued in crisis settings.

That should stop the conversation.

Nearly half of surveyed women-led and women’s rights organizations in crisis settings expected they might have to close within six months.

Translated into real life, this means a woman fleeing violence may find that the organization she would have called no longer exists.

A survivor may lose access to legal help.

A displaced girl may lose a safe space.

A community may lose the local group it trusts most.

A women peacebuilder may lose the funding needed to attend coordination meetings or continue mediation work.

A crisis response system may lose the people who understand which women are excluded, which risks are rising, and which services are failing.

These organizations are often closest to the ground. They understand the local language, the social networks, the informal power structures, the families at risk, and the women and girls who may never reach an official office, police station, or international compound.

When they close, the loss is not only institutional.

It is human.

It is also strategic.

Because when trusted local organizations disappear, crisis response becomes weaker. Prevention becomes weaker. Recovery becomes weaker. Peacebuilding becomes weaker.

That is why divesting from women is not a soft cut.

It has hard consequences.

Women’s work is misclassified

Part of the problem is not only that women’s work is underfunded.

It is that it is misclassified.

Defense spending is treated as security.

Investment in women is often treated as social policy, development assistance, humanitarian programming, or soft power.

But in war and crisis, that distinction collapses.

The teacher keeping children learning through displacement is not outside security.

The nurse keeping a clinic open is not outside security.

The caregiver holding a family together is not outside security.

The local women’s organization helping survivors access shelter and legal support is not outside security.

The women peacebuilder trying to keep communities from returning to violence is not outside security.

The woman running a market stall, managing food, sustaining a household, or rebuilding a livelihood is not outside security.

This is not sentimental.

It is structural.

Societies do not survive conflict only because armies fight. They survive because people continue to live, care, organize, teach, heal, feed, protect, and rebuild.

Much of that work is carried by women.

And when the systems supporting them are cut, the consequences move through families, communities, economies, and peace processes.

Women are still missing from peace decisions

The same imbalance appears in diplomacy. The UN Secretary-General’s 2025 reporting on women, peace and security found that women’s representation as negotiators, mediators, and signatories in major peace processes remained far below agreed targets as of June 2025. The most commonly cited UN figures show that in 2023, women made up only 9.6 percent of negotiators, 13.7 percent of mediators, and 26.6 percent of signatories in peace and ceasefire processes tracked by the UN.

This matters because peace agreements do not only stop fighting.

They shape what comes next.

They influence security arrangements, justice mechanisms, reconstruction priorities, political participation, demobilization, the return of displaced people, accountability, and the rebuilding of institutions.

If women are absent from those rooms, peace may fail to reflect the needs, risks, and knowledge of half the population.

And if women-led organizations are defunded at the same time, the connection between local realities and formal peace processes becomes even weaker.

A peace process that excludes women is not only less representative.

It may also be less durable.

The taxpayer question

There is also a public accountability question.

Government budgets are built from public money — from income taxes, corporate taxes, duties, consumption taxes, and other revenues collected from people’s daily lives. Citizens do not always see how those resources are translated into international priorities, but those choices are still made in their name.

So voters have a right to ask what kind of security their governments are funding.

Are they funding only the capacity to fight, or also the capacity to survive, care, rebuild, and prevent the next crisis? Are they treating military preparedness as essential while treating the support systems around women as optional? Are they investing in the people and organizations that keep families, communities, economies, and peace processes functioning when violence breaks through?

These questions should not lead to helplessness.

The systems already exist. UN Women exists. Women-led organizations exist. Local peacebuilders, survivor services, care networks, humanitarian responders, educators, health workers, and community leaders already do this work every day, often with far less funding and recognition than their contribution deserves.

The task is not to reinvent the wheel.

It is to stop pretending the wheel turns by itself.

If governments are spending record sums in the name of security, citizens have the right to demand that they fund the full architecture of security — not only the half that carries weapons, but also the half that keeps societies alive.

The full architecture of security

The world is entering a period of harder security choices.

Governments will continue to spend on defense. In many places, they will argue that they have no choice.

But a security strategy that funds military power while divesting from women is incomplete.

It prepares for conflict without fully funding survival.

It invests in the battlefield while weakening the systems that help people live through what the battlefield destroys.

It asks women to hold families, communities, and economies together — but too often fails to fund the organizations and institutions that support them.

The good news is that the missing half of security is not imaginary.

It already has people, institutions, knowledge, networks, and evidence behind it. UN Women and women-led organizations are part of that architecture. Their work shows that societies are not protected by force alone. They are also protected by care, trust, participation, services, leadership, and the ability to rebuild.

When those systems are underfunded, everyone becomes less secure.

But when they are sustained, societies become more resilient, more inclusive, and better able to recover from crisis.

Investment in women is not charity.

It is not a public relations exercise.

It is not a soft add-on to “real” security.

It is part of how societies survive war, recover from crisis, and build peace that lasts.

The question is no longer whether these systems matter.

They do.

The question is whether governments — and the citizens whose money they spend — will treat them as essential.

We do not need to reinvent security. We need to fund the full version of it.