Three Things the 2025 WPS Index Tells Us About South Asia (And One Thing It Doesn’t)

• South Asia is deeply unequal for women. Some countries perform moderately well, while others are among the worst in the world, showing that women’s safety and rights depend heavily on national politics, conflict, and social norms.
• Women-led peace work is underfunded. Feminist organisations in the region rarely get long-term, flexible funding, making it hard to create real, lasting change.
• Women are increasingly unsafe in public life. Protesting, speaking online, or being visible in public spaces has become risky, turning everyday participation into a constant safety calculation.

The Women, Peace and Security Index 2025 ranked 181 countries on women’s inclusion, justice, and security. Scores run from 0 to 1. South Asia got a 0.581. That puts the region 5th out of 8 globally in the lower-middle tier.

Here’s what the ranking tells us.

The gap between best and worst is staggering

Sri Lanka and the Maldives rank 77 and 78, holding middle-tier positions. Afghanistan sits at 181, the lowest-ranked country in the world. India ranks 131 with a score of 0.607, barely above the regional average. Pakistan ranks 169.

Bangladesh presents a stark case. Women’s proximity to conflict jumped from 28% to 86% between the 2023/24 and 2025/26 indices. The 2024 protests that ousted Sheikh Hasina’s government turned violent, and because these demonstrations happened in major cities, they exposed large numbers of women to conflict.

The gap between 77 and 181 shows that South Asia is not experiencing a uniform path on women’s peace and security. Countries sharing similar colonial histories, religious demographics, and social challenges are producing vastly different realities for women. We are seeing how specific national contexts allow or limit women’s participation through the interaction of legal frameworks, social norms, religious interpretation, and state capacity. Where women’s movements have built long-term power and created shifts in public discourse, we see relatively better results. Where religious authority has been used against women’s rights or where conflict has undone existing gains, the decline is rapid and extreme.

Funding isn’t reaching the people doing the peacebuilding work

The WPS Survey gathered responses from 2,744 women peacebuilders across 121 countries. South Asia scored particularly low on getting long-term, flexible funding for women-led organisations, falling well below the global average.

This funding gap has direct results. Feminist peacebuilders working to address systemic barriers cannot continue their efforts beyond short grant cycles. Structural change requires long-term investment, and the region is not getting it.

Women’s insecurity increasingly plays out in public life

The index shows rising exposure of women to conflict in South Asia. Women face threats and violence not only in conflict zones, but while protesting, organising, or simply being visible in public and online spaces. Civic participation has become a site of risk. For many women, insecurity is not a single event but a constant calculation. Whether to attend a protest, speak online, travel alone, or stay visible at all.

The thing the Index doesn’t tell you.

The WPS Index captures where countries land at a moment in time. What it cannot show is how quickly conditions can change for women or how it feels to live inside that uncertainty.

In South Asia, inequality is enabled not only through laws or institutions, but through stories, beliefs, and moral authority that shape daily life. These decide who can move freely, who gets to speak, and who is seen as legitimate in public space. When these rules harden, progress can get undone fast, often before it shows up in rankings.

This is why policy reform, while essential, is often not enough. Alongside legal advocacy, some feminist work focuses on how gender norms are justified and strengthened, especially through cultural and religious narratives that give exclusion its authority. This includes supporting women’s own interpretations, building connections across communities, and challenging ideas that frame women’s visibility as a threat.

Work of this kind is long-term and difficult to measure, but it addresses the religious frameworks that give inequality its staying power. Without engaging these, progress in South Asia remains weak, however strong the policy gains may look like.