Big Thinking Podcast · Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

As global tensions intensify, can Canada maintain its Women, Peace, and Security commitments?

·29 min·1 clip

Military actors ask whether Women, Peace and Security makes them “more lethal,” which she calls almost nonsensical.

Karine Marais opens with the pressure global conflicts are putting on Canada’s defense priorities. She frames the main question directly: can Women, Peace, and Security hold up in a more demanding security environment? Stephanie Von Latke joins in to unpack that tension from the angle of gender, security, and the armed forces. The discussion starts with her path into the field and the book she published in 2022, Deploying Feminism. From there, it turns to the shifting political climate since that book first appeared. Von Latke describes how debates around sovereignty, military intervention, and alliance politics have made the challenge sharper. She notes that Women, Peace, and Security has become more politically contested, including in the United States. The episode then widens to NATO’s operational reality. Von Latke points to case studies in the Baltics, Kosovo, and Iraq. Those examples help show how military actors put Women, Peace, and Security into practice on the ground. The conversation makes clear that policy language and operational action do not always move at the same pace. It also shows how institutional resilience can matter when political rhetoric shifts. NATO’s size and consensus-based structure come up as part of that resilience. The discussion suggests that the alliance can absorb pressure and keep moving. Military-to-military ties are treated as especially durable. That durability matters because it can outlast sharper political contestation at higher levels. The episode treats WPS as part of the real machinery of defense planning and alliance coordination. The result is a careful look at how commitments are maintained, adjusted, or strained in practice. The close returns to the idea that hope remains possible if member states keep championing the policy. The whole exchange stays measured and focused on public-interest questions.

As heard by us

A measured look at how Women, Peace, and Security commitments hold under changing defense politics.

The piece follows a timely and practical question: how Canada can keep its Women, Peace, and Security commitments steady while the defense landscape keeps shifting.

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Why you'd press play

You want a calm map of WPS under pressure from defense politics.

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