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This article challenges the UN Security Council’s approach to women, peace and security through a detailed analysis of participation initiatives in the eight resolutions on women, peace and security, alongside study of the recent shift to include counter terrorism and violent extremism provisions in resolution 2242. Through review of a range of feminist approaches that remain “outside” the strategies leading institutional gender perspectives, I scrutinise the shifts across the resolutions on women, peace and security. In particular, this article analyses how Security Council resolution 2242, produced after the high-level report studying the 15 years after resolution 1325, includes important developments in the articulation of participation. However, the risk of progressing work on women, peace and security within global structures without attention to the diversity of women’s needs, lives and experiences drawn from a feminist commitment to anti-militarism and politically responsible listening is likely to produce a series of regressive outcomes that perpetuate victim feminisms and which fail to dislodge the intersection of gender with colonial and racial power structures within global institutions.