Women, Peace, and Security as an Expression of America’s Founding Idea

By Margaret Miller

America turns 250 this year. Not a birthday in any ordinary sense, but the anniversary of a wager few thought would pay off. If we are serious about the inheritance we’ve received, that milestone deserves a clear-eyed reckoning with what the Founders actually built, and what they asked of everyone who came after them. 

What they built was not a finished republic. They said so themselves. What they built was a framework. It was an unsentimental argument drawn from hard study of every republic history had produced, that durable political order requires legitimacy. And legitimacy must be earned, continuously, by including those who will bear its cost and consequences in the work of peace and governance. 

That argument is as alive in 2026 as it was in 1776. It is the argument behind the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Act of 2017. At America’s 250th, WPS stands as one of the founding tradition’s most faithful present-day expressions. 

The Declaration of Independence is not primarily a document about rights. It is a theory of government failure. Its logic is that governments are instituted to secure certain conditions for human flourishing, and when they fail that purpose, they forfeit legitimacy. When they forfeit legitimacy, they become unstable. The list of grievances that follows is not an emotional appeal, but a diagnosis and legal documentation of the monarchy's failure to recognize the fact that “all men are created equal.”  

James Madison was the least sentimental of the founding Fathers. He carried that generation’s diagnostic logic farthest. Distrusting human nature, Madison designed systems to compensate for its weaknesses. His core insight, developed across the Federalist Papers, was that republics fail when powerful factions capture the process and exclude others. This is not only because exclusion is unjust, but because it is structurally destabilizing. Excluded groups lose their investment in the system’s success. They become, at best, passive, and at worst, active sources of the very instability the republic was designed to prevent. 

Madison did not arrive at this insight by intuition. He arrived at it by autopsy, studying exactly how past republics had collapsed: factions seizing control, broad swaths of the population shut out of governance, legitimacy hollowing out until the structure could no longer hold its own weight. 

Two and a half centuries later, the pattern persists. Across dozens of post-conflict contexts, the evidence is consistent: peace processes that draw from too narrow a cross-section of society tend to produce agreements that lack the legitimacy and local ownership needed to hold. The communities that will live under a peace agreement---and who will carry it forward, monitor its implementation, and resist its erosion--must have a hand in building it. This is a whole-of-society argument and a whole-of-government approach. Stability cannot be negotiated at the elite level and handed down. It must be built from the full depth of a society, because those are the people whose investment determines whether an agreement endures or unravels. 

Historically the segment of society most consistently excluded from peace negotiations is the same segment most directly present in the communities where conflict is lived and where peace must eventually take root. Women are rarely at the tables where ceasefires are signed or security agreements made. They are present in the markets, clinics, schools, and neighborhoods where those arrangements either succeed or fail. That gap was formally recognized in the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017 and the UN Security Council resolution that preceded it. 

The WPS Act codified what decades of stabilization experience had demonstrated: that whole-of-society participation is not a courtesy extended to the excluded but a precondition for durable peace. The Founders would have recognized the logic immediately as, at its core, their logic. 

Relatively few Americans are aware of the WPS Act.  It is implemented in US military commands and State Department projects around the world. This lack of public engagement has not helped its durability. Begun as a bipartisan law, it risks becoming a fringe idea or an unfinished proposal if its constituency does not “buy in” to its logic and promised gains. If WPS is to do the work it was built to do, and if it is to survive the kind of political turnover that threatens any standing law, more Americans need to understand how it strengthens our national security. 

There is a temptation, in commemorative moments, toward either uncritical celebration or reflexive critique. Neither serves us well. The Founders were neither saints nor hypocrites. They were pragmatists who understood that they were constructing something fragile and consequential and who hoped, with considerable anxiety I would presume, that future generations would have the wisdom to extend and repair what they had begun. They bequeathed us not a finished answer but a living question: what are the actual conditions under which political order holds? 

The question surfaces in every negotiation, every post-conflict reconstruction, every attempt to build something durable from the ruins of conflict. And the answer, refined by experience across two and a half centuries, remains what Madison suspected: legitimacy, participation, and a genuine stake in the outcome for all who will bear its costs. 

A great republic is not measured by how close it gets to a finished state. It is measured by whether it keeps finding new and better applications of the principles it was founded on. WPS is one such application. The law is proof that the founding logic still works when people are willing to do the work of applying it. 

America at 250 is an occasion for grounded hope: the kind that takes seriously both what the Founders wagered and what we still owe that wager. The WPS Act lives in that tradition. It does not ask us to depart from those principles but to apply them with the same unsentimental rigor the Founders brought to their own work and the conflicts and negotiations of our time. 

Margaret “Mags” Miller is a seasoned documentary showrunner, director, and producer with 20+ years of experience, she has led complex productions in 30+ countries, interviewing everyone from heads of state and scientists to gold miners, and coastal fishers. Her work is grounded in clarity, creativity, and a deep respect for the people whose stories she tells. Alongside her production work, Mags is pursuing her M.A. in Statecraft and National Security at The Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC. She serves as a Strategic Communications Consultant for the Diplomatic Studies Foundation (DSF), supporting efforts to strengthen U.S. diplomatic training and global engagement.