In a remote Fijian village, a woman switches on femTALK 89FM, a local radio station run by women, for women. The broadcast is filled with local voices discussing disaster preparedness, gender equality, and community security. But this is more than a media platform; it’s an example of how women in the Pacific have carved out a space for feminist resistance and digital empowerment.
This is critical because digital tools provide an avenue and opportunity to develop female peacebuilders, in the Pacific. The networks that are created by these women demonstrate how, despite facing intense gendered digital harm, they are determined to offer locally rooted models that provide an opportunity to reshape understandings of peace and security. Using the Pacific Islands as a case study, I will show why feminist digital resilience ideally should be central to the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and how.
femTALK 89FM’s suitcase radio empowers Fijian women to share their voices and lead community dialogue through grassroots feminist media.
Image credit: femLINKpacific (2025).
This shift in perspective is important as female peacebuilders’ efforts, according to UNDIR, remain chronically undervalued and women remain under-represented in global peacebuilding and cybersecurity conversations globally. Pacific women are showing us that this issue should be addressed, and the first step is to embed digital resilience into their work as a matter of collective responsibility.
The WPS agenda, first articulated 25 years ago in UN Security Council Resolution 1325, recognises the disproportionate impact of conflict on women, as well as the vital role they play in peacebuilding. Women in the Pacific face intersecting historical, technological, and gendered barriers for recognition as peacebuilders, particularly in digital spaces.
It is important to distinguish between cybersecurity and digital tools in this context. UN Women & UNU defines cybersecurity as not just the state of being secure but encompasses “a set of practices undertaken by individuals and organisations to protect systems and networks so they can support and create a foundation for the expression and exercise of human rights.”
This definition aligns with a human-centric cybersecurity model, which moves beyond techno-centric paradigms by highlighting the safety, agency, and rights of the people who interact with digital systems.
Digital tools, on the other hand, are the platforms and technologies, such as social media, encrypted messaging apps, and radio broadcasting software, that enable communication, advocacy, knowledge-sharing, and organising. These tools offer the opportunity to empower women to participate and lead in civic life and peacebuilding processes. However, without effective cybersecurity practices, these same tools can become passageways to harm, subject to surveillance, misinformation, hacking, or gendered harassment.
The relationship between cybersecurity and digital tools is therefore not merely functional, but strategic and political. This has real implications for Women, Peace and Security (WPS) efforts: if women cannot safely access and use digital spaces, their participation in peacebuilding and governance is directly undermined.
This includes both structural and social exclusion, often reinforced by digital harm that have chilling impact on women’s voices and constrain their participation in public life.
Access to the internet remains unequal in many contexts, including the pacific, particularly in rural and outer island areas, limiting women’s ability to participate in online civic life. To add to this laundry list of barriers, when women are online, they are not safe.
As the Stimson Centre research shows, cyberbullying, gendered disinformation, online
harassment, and surveillance threaten to silence women and girls’ voices. EIDG supports this, highlighting how this behaviour has a chilling impact on efforts of activism, undermines their leadership, discourages participation in public discourse and can sometimes bleed into real-world personal security threats.
For feminist resilience in the cyber world and beyond to be sustainable, digital tools must be intentionally cybersecurity-embedded, not as an afterthought but as a prerequisite for equitable access and engagement.
This is particularly important in vulnerable areas like the Pacific or conflict-affected regions, where digital activism has the potential to be a necessity and a risk.
The work Pacific women are doing illustrates that cybersecurity is not only about avoiding harm, but also about fostering digital confidence, dignity, and leadership among women. The danger lies that when these women step into the public eye, which is a necessary risk to achieve, they are met with some of the negative behaviours mentioned previously. The work they are doing is exceptional and deserves to be acknowledged, not suppressed.
Members of the Emerging Leaders Forum Alumni (ELFA) participating in a leadership and coalition-building initiative as part of the “Revitalising the ‘A’ in ELFA” project, supported by Women’s Fund Fiji (2023–2024).
Image credit: Women’s Fund Fiji (2023).
For example, in Fiji, the Emerging Leaders Forum Alumni (ELFA), a network of young feminist activists, have used social media to campaign against street harassment, challenge discriminatory leadership rhetoric, and promote menstrual health education. Their “Take Back the Streets” campaign mobilised online testimony and direct political pressure, prompting policy review and institutional training for public transport providers. By combining digital activism with community organising, ELFA shows how feminist digital resilience can reshape both public discourse and policy from the ground up.
In Tonga, digital literacy workshops for women and youth combine practical skills like using Canva and Facebook with community leadership development. All of these programs go support women in becoming digital citizens equipped to advocate, organise, and lead. As Sharon Bhagwan Rolls of femLINKpacific has noted, “Digital security is not only about safety, it is about agency. When women control the means to communicate, they shift the power to shape peace.”
Participants of the Tonga Women in ICT (TWICT) digital literacy and leadership training engage in hands-on sessions at the TWICT Hub, enhancing their skills in digital tools and entrepreneurship.
Image credit: Pacific Partnership, 2025.
So, what can the wider community do to maintain momentum in the right direction and protect the women forging a path in the WPS agenda and global peacebuilding?
Firstly, donors can use this approach similar to The Pacific Feminist Fund (PFF), launched with support from Australia and New Zealand, which embodies a model that channels flexible, responsive funding directly to Pacific women’s and gender-diverse organisations. This ensures that resources reach those best positioned to drive change in their communities, as opposed to traditional donor frameworks often overlook small, grassroots organisations due to rigid eligibility criteria and short-term funding cycles.
Secondly, tech companies can collaborate with Pacific civil society to develop safety tools and content moderation mechanisms that are culturally relevant and grounded in local contexts. UN Women’s initiatives in the Solomon Islands, for example, have involved capacity-building workshops that not only equip women with digital security skills but also empower them to contribute to policy discussions on digital security.
The marginalisation of Pacific women’s experiences in digital peacebuilding is not an isolated oversight but part of a larger trend in which Pacific knowledge and leadership are consistently undervalued in global policy and development discourse. Just as Pacific expertise is often left out of global climate strategies or economic planning, so too are Pacific women overlooked in cybersecurity and peacebuilding frameworks. Recognising this pattern is crucial — it underscores why elevating Pacific feminist digital resilience is not simply a matter of inclusion, but of redressing a broader structural ignorance that undermines global learning.
The continued exclusion of Pacific women from digital security and peacebuilding frameworks is not a gap, it’s a structural flaw.
When those on the frontlines of digital harm are excluded from decision-making, we erode the legitimacy and effectiveness of the very systems meant to protect them. Embedding Pacific Women’s expertise and models alike into policy, funding, and design is not just the right thing to do, it’s the only way forward if we are serious about just and effective digital peacebuilding.
Image Reference:
Divedi, I. (2022) How feminist artivism and social media inspires change in gender norms. ALIGN. Available at: https://www.alignplatform.org/resources/blog/how-feminist-artivism-and-social-media-inspires-gender-norm-change (Accessed: 22 May 2025).
femLINKpacific, 2025. Programs. [online] Available at: https://www.femlinkpacific.org.fj/programs [Accessed 27 May 2025].
Women’s Fund Fiji, 2023. Emerging Leaders Forum Alumni (ELFA): Revitalising the “A” in ELFA. [online] Available at: https://womensfundfiji.org/grants/grantees/emerging-leaders-forum-alumni-elfa/ [Accessed 27 May 2025].
