The Center for Indo-Pacific Affairs (CIPA) has been awarded a two-year, $159,456 grant from the Japan Foundation Global Partnership program to support a new project that will launch with a two-day workshop in Honolulu in October 2025 and conclude with a workshop in Tokyo in October 2026. This timely initiative will explore how the Quad countries—Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—can better incorporate women’s perspectives and gender considerations into their diplomatic frameworks, security partnerships, and regional development strategies. Through a series of international workshops, academic publications, and public engagement efforts, the project will build a diverse network of scholars and practitioners to assess how the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda can be more effectively implemented as a core component of regional cooperation.

Despite the Quad’s commitment to including women’s and girls’ perspectives in diplomacy and regional programs, the integration of gender remains insufficiently examined and operationalized. This gap represents both a problem and an opportunity: to critically assess how gender and women’s participation influence Quad governance, policy priorities, and program outcomes, and to provide actionable insights that strengthen these efforts across member states and regional partners.

To address these issues, the Center for Indo-Pacific Affairs’ project will establish a diverse network of experts to examine the question posed above. This network will become a resource for the Quad, its member states, and partners in the region to incorporate WPS in the Quad’s inputs and outputs—governance of the organization itself, negotiation among partners, and its policies and programs on the ground. The project will bring together scholars and practitioners from, working in, or with expertise on Quad countries with the goal of analyzing how women, women’s perspectives, and gender: 1) are extant in the Quad as an institution as formal and informal institutional rules and representation, 2) inform the Quad’s policy priorities and programmatic decisions, and 3) are implicated in Quad deliverables. This effort will be the first comprehensive analysis of gender and women’s participation on both ends of the process—those creating, negotiating, and implementing policies and programs in Quad member states and the participating states in the region where the deliverables are directed.

This project reflects CIPA’s deepening commitment to interdisciplinary, inclusive, and policy-relevant research that addresses the complex challenges facing the Indo-Pacific region. CIPA’s collaboration with the Institute for Gender Studies at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo will strengthen UH Mānoa’s ties with innovative programs at Japanese universities.