At the 2025 Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, the Blue Pacific was declared an Ocean of Peace. This vision promises calm seas amid turbulent times, an aspiration linking cultural values, climate justice and regional agency.

But for some, this rhetoric coincides with growing great-power competition, new defence partnerships, and rising militarisation that complicates the promise of a demilitarised Pacific. Read through feminist and masculinities scholarship, the declaration’s language of guardianship and sovereignty looks less like a radical reimagining of security and more like a familiar masculine shorthand: protection, control and state stewardship that legitimise coercive government activities rather than dismantling them.

The urgent question, then, is whether the Ocean of Peace will be realised as a lived, decolonial, relational security approach or remain as state-centred guardianship that perpetuates masculine power?

The promise of peace

The Blue Pacific Ocean of Peace Declaration proclaims regional unity, the Pacific Way, respect for sovereignty, and commitments to climate action, human rights, and affirms the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as the legal basis for maritime order.

It situates peace within the 2050 Strategy and past regional instruments, and explicitly names the inclusion of women, youth, persons with disabilities and civil society as essential to the vision. These aspirations give Pacific leaders a normative platform to assert agency in multilateral settings and demand Pacific-led international support.

When the language of peace moves from declaration to policy, it is typically absorbed into existing institutional logics: peace becomes understood as governance and control, rather than demilitarisation, restorative justice, or Indigenous relational practice. The Declaration’s institutional embedding within state and regional architectures risks turning the ocean into a bureaucratic object of stewardship rather than a living commons governed through decolonial, community-led practices.

In this framing, peace becomes a function of bureaucratic order rather than relational repair, a distinction that matters when institutional ‘guardianship’ replaces shared responsibility.

Peace as protection: reading the masculinised subtext

The Declaration’s verbs – ‘safeguard’, ‘protect’, and ‘strengthen’ are not neutral. Feminist theory and international relations scholars show these verbs are based in assumptions of protection that authorise paternalistic leadership and concentrate coercive capacities in male-led institutions such as the police force and the military.

Behind the promise of protection lies a quiet trade-off: greater state control in place of the harder work of demilitarisation, accountability, and repair.

In claiming to safeguard their nations, governments often consolidate authority and recast peace as obedience, a move that secures order but leaves the deeper causes of insecurity untouched.

Scholars in the fields of masculinities and women, peace, and security (WPS) add that policy tracks dominated by national security actors frequently sideline the root causes of conflict – masculinities, militarism and patriarchal relations – in favour of measures that shore up sovereignty and deterrence. Militarised masculinity researchers similarly underline how militaries and security institutions are producers of masculinity, legitimising force as the appropriate mode of ordering international life.

Collectively, this body of work suggests the Ocean of Peace risks becoming a ‘peace of guardians’, where the principal currency is territorial stewardship and state control rather than relational justice and care.

The silences: what the Declaration doesn’t say

Conspicuous silences in the Declaration matter.

There is no explicit language committing to demilitarisation, curbs on foreign bases, or restrictions on defence agreements reshaping the Pacific’s strategic landscape. These omissions leave space open for external military entrenchment under the banner of Pacific security.

Feminist critiques of WPS show how official documents often include women and civil society as partners but stop short of ceding agenda-setting power; this ‘additive inclusion’ leaves masculinist structures intact unless policy addresses masculinities as structural drivers of armament and violence. In Bougainville, grassroots Male Advocacy work demonstrates a different pathway. There, community-based, pro-feminist programming has reframed ideas and strategies of masculinities to tackle the root causes of violence. But in other parts of the Pacific, such initiatives remain peripheral to state security architectures and their logic.

Attempts to integrate masculinities into WPS policies are frequently domesticated by policymakers who find anti-militarist framings neutralising their transformative potential.

In short, naming civil society without redistributing power keeps the declaration’s commitments ineffective and confined to paper.

The irony of the ocean

The ocean as a metaphor evokes fluidity, kinship, shared livelihoods and ecological reciprocity – a way of knowing central to many Indigenous Pacific cultures.

Ironically, the Declaration’s reliance on state sovereignty, legal regimes, and rules-based order recasts the ocean as a territorial jurisdiction rather than as relational and rooted in Indigenous law and communal care.

Decolonial scholars point out that colonial and militarised governance has historically resulted in oppressive hierarchies that marginalise women’s roles. And yet we know from Pacific grassroots experience that transforming masculinities locally produces new forms of authority based on equality and care, which is precisely the relational peace the ocean metaphor should signal.

The question is whether the declaration will protect a bounded Blue Pacific or enable community and Indigenous-led transformations that demilitarise governance and prioritise reparative justice.

Practical implications and a way forward

If the Ocean of Peace is to become more than diplomatic rhetoric, policy must move beyond symbolic inclusion and towards three interrelated shifts.

First, demilitarisation must be named and pursued. There should be limits on basing, transparency about defence pacts, and regional mechanisms for conflict prevention that do not default to militarised deterrence.

Second, masculinities must be treated as structural – integrating anti-militarist, intersectional masculinities analysis into national action plans and regional strategies. This means going beyond requirements to ‘engage men’ and transforming privilege-bearing security institutions.

Third, centre Indigenous and feminist ways of working by funding and empowering grassroots peacemaking, reparations for nuclear and militarised harms, and community healing initiatives that have shown impact across the Pacific. These steps require political bravery from Pacific leaders and external partners willing to cede space and resources to locally-led decolonial security practices.

The Blue Pacific’s Ocean of Peace must be more than a slogan; otherwise, the ocean will remain a bounded territory to be defended – calm in appearance but carrying strong masculine currents beneath the surface.

Romitesh Kant is a researcher specialising in gender, political masculinities, and democratic governance in the Pacific.

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This blog is part of a special series marking the 25th anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security.

Views expressed via the Pacific Wayfinder blog are not necessarily those of the Pacific Security College.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Read our publishing policy.

In a global security environment marked by deepening conflict, peace was at the top of the agenda at two recent events important for our Pacific region.

The first is the 25^th anniversary of the United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 that adopted the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda, and the second is the Pacific Islands Forum’s declaration of an Ocean of Peace.

But despite the coincidental timing, a 25-year stock take of UNSCR1325 implementation is not “mission accomplished”, according to several advocates who believe the WPS agenda is being sidelined by hard security priorities and hostile politics.

“When we talk about peace, we mean demilitarised, decolonised and denuclearised peace,” says Sharon Bhagwan-Rolls, a long-time Pacific UNSCR1325 champion and key feminist civil society voice.

“Gender justice and gender equality is what brings peace.”

Civil society and community groups often play the main role in Pacific peacemaking, as seen in women’s post-conflict peacebuilding roles in Bougainville, Solomon Islands and Fiji. But Bhagwan-Rolls says civil society is often absent from formal processes, “which is why we are redesigning the table”.

Calls to localise and reimagine the WPS agenda in an Ocean of Peace context prompt the question: what could this look like?

WPS and wellbeing

Wellbeing is a good place to start reimagining and localising WPS. The 2023 global Women, Peace and Security Index report reminds us that the wellbeing of women and the wellbeing of nations go hand in hand.

Wellbeing is increasingly brought into policy rhetoric but holds different meanings for different audiences.

For example, UN SDG 3 rates physical wellbeing through quality access to health services at all ages, while the Happy Planet Index (HPI) measures wellbeing in relation to a sustainable environmental footprint. In the Pacific region, the Melanesian wellbeing indicators look at the relationship between wellbeing, free access to natural resources, traditional knowledge and active participation in cultural practices, and community vitality. New Zealand’s first wellbeing budget, passed under prime minister Jacinda Ardern in 2019, looked at individual and collective wellbeing to measure progress, and also considered future wellbeing.

A localised, reimagined WPS agenda must therefore consider how the breadth of wellbeing definitions can be usefully applied to Pacific women’s peace and security.

The WPS Index is a helpful starting point for the Pacific.

In 2023, for the first time, the Index included Samoa, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu (see table). Despite leading the region in some indicators, Pacific Island countries rank in the lowest 70^th percentile overall. The Index considers wellbeing as the aggregate outcome when women’s inclusion, justice and security is achieved.

 

Growing up, I never imagined working in national security. Peace and security were concepts I read about in textbooks or heard mentioned in news reports – policies and agreements decided by leaders but disconnected from the reality of ordinary people.

I’ve since come to realise that peace and security are not abstract ideas; they are lived experiences that shape every community. They affect whether a community feels safe, whether people can live without fear, and whether nations can trust each other and work together to create a better the future.

Security was never my first career choice. But during my final year of university in Taiwan in 2023, I was invited to give a presentation on US militarism in Palau from a youth perspective. That was when I learned about the newly established Palau National Security Coordination Office. Curious about its purpose, I decided to intern there.

It’s been almost two years since then and I am still with the organisation. As a policy analyst, I’ve come to understand just how critical security is. It is not only about safeguarding our nation, but also about finding ways to address challenges within our borders and across the region.

Of course, being young and a woman in this space has not been without challenges. National security is a male-dominated field. There are moments when people look at me and see only my age and my gender, not my potential. Sometimes they assume I lack the experience or seriousness to contribute.

While these moments can be discouraging, they have also motivated me to learn more, to listen carefully, and to grow into the responsibilities I have been trusted with. It has been a journey of learning, resilience and proving myself. Each challenge has been an opportunity to prove that young women belong in this space. Our voices matter.

Women’s inclusion in peace and security is essential. The Women, Peace and Security agenda reminds us that peace cannot be achieved if women are excluded. We bring perspectives shaped by lived experiences, empathy, and community connection. Young women in particular bring innovation and resilience; qualities urgently needed to navigate today’s challenges.

If we truly want lasting peace, young women must not only be at the table, but actively shaping the solutions. When young women are part of the solution, peace looks different: more inclusive, more innovative, and more sustainable.

I truly believe that the next step for our leaders, policymakers and community representatives is including young people in regional security discussions.

In Palau we say, “A rengeleked a oba klukuk rkid,” meaning “Our children will lead our tomorrow.” These kinds of conversations must involve the voices of young people – because we are not just the leaders of tomorrow, we are also the partners of today. I speak not just for myself, but for many young people across the Pacific who are eager to learn, to contribute, and to be part of shaping a secure and resilient future. We want to be involved in imagining and building the kind of future that reflects our hopes, values, and responsibilities.

From climate change to geopolitical tensions, security touches nearly every aspect of our lives. These issues extend beyond national boundaries, which is why frameworks such as the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent and the Boe Declaration on Regional Security are so important in guiding Pacific nations, including Palau, toward resilience and peace.

It is essential to include the voices of young women in the work of imagining and building a future we can be proud of. If we are serious about preparing for 2050, we must involve the very people who will inherit and continue the work we do today.

With the collective strength of our Pacific community – and the energy and innovation of our youth – we may not have to wait until 2050. Together, we can start turning our shared vision into reality much sooner.

Ayanna Ramarui is a policy analyst within Palau’s National Security Coordination Office, and a founding member of Reng Collective, a youth-led organisation focused on empowering young people in Palau through civic engagement and sustainable development.

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This blog is part of a special series marking the 25th anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security.

Views expressed via the Pacific Wayfinder blog are not necessarily those of the Pacific Security College.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Read our publishing policy.