Since its inception in the 1940s, the United Nations (UN) has been a prolific norm entrepreneur on women’s rights, gender equality and gender mainstreaming through its Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). Nevertheless, October 2000 constituted a revolution: the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), one of the last bastions of masculine power in the UN, produced the first resolution –Resolution 1325 – of its women, peace and security (WPS) agenda. The resolution contains a set of norms that seeks to address women’s concerns in post-conflict settings by highlighting the need to increase female participation in security governance and post-conflict processes, prevent sexual and gender-based violence, and protect women from conflict and post-conflict violence. The agenda is now formed by eight resolutions and has to date been adopted by 67 countries through national action plans, as well as by different organs, programmes and funds of the UN such as the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission. The conceptual apparatus of the agenda regulates the norms it seeks to promote, as well as the actors and institutions in charge of their promotion. Understanding how this conceptual apparatus is deployed and interpreted, how and under which circumstances it is resisted or reinforced, and what the implications of its reiteration and/or resistance might be, is therefore essential in order to grasp the impact that international norms on gender, peace and security have on the daily lives of ordinary citizens.