It is International Women’s Day. In Iran, over a 100 schoolgirls lie dead, killed by US and Israeli attacks. As we write, the bombing rages on. In Gaza, women have been pulling their children and their families from rubble for over two years, day after day, in a war with no end in sight. The bombs will kill thousands more and devastate women’s lives in ways that will take generations to count. In Ukraine, in Sudan, in Myanmar, in Yemen, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it is the same. Men make war after war after war. And somewhere in a conference room, other men cite women’s pain, invoke their suffering, and use it as one of the justifications for the next war. No one believes women’s liberation, or anyone’s liberation, is the real reason.
This is some of the most cynical political manoeuvring of our day. Women’s rights have been conscripted into the justification for war. Iran must be confronted, we are told, in part because of how it treats women. The suffering of women is invoked, selectively and instrumentally, to lend moral weight to military and geopolitical agendas that have nothing to do with women’s liberation and everything to do with power, resources, and dominance.
The contrast with what happens to women’s lives in these conflict zones is stark. Women in Gaza cannot produce milk for their newborns because they are too malnourished to breastfeed. They are raising those newborns in rubble, with no clean water, no food. Across these conflict zones, women manage their bodies without privacy, without dignity. They have been raped as a weapon of war. They have lost husbands, brothers, sons, and are now alone with no income and no shelter. They are packing what remains of a life, again and again. The livelihoods, the futures they had built have been erased.
But alongside our grief for our sisters, and our rage, there is another story, one that rarely makes the headlines: the case for women as peacebuilders. The evidence has been building for decades and it is substantial. Let us look at it.
According to UN Women, in three quarters of cases studied globally, women’s groups were actively involved in grassroots peacebuilding. In Mali and Niger, women’s participation in conflict prevention rose from 5 to 25 per cent between 2020 and 2022, helping resolve more than 100 conflicts over local natural resources. In Yemen, women negotiated civilian access to water. In Ethiopia, Liberia and Kenya, women peacebuilders influenced peace processes at local, regional and national levels. In Côte d’Ivoire, women mediator platforms de-escalated inter-community conflict, leading to a local peace agreement with women named, for the first time, as guarantors of its implementation. A United Nations-cited study published in the journal International Interactions found that the probability of no renewed fighting after twenty years is approximately 70 per cent when women sign a peace agreement, compared to just 25 per cent when they do not. Peace agreements with women signatories have a median implementation rate of 89 per cent, against 77 per cent for those without. Including women in peace processes and funding the work they do is a matter of strategic necessity for global stability.
This is not because women are inherently peaceful. That framing, however well-intentioned, is its own form of condescension. Women are not peacebuilders because of some biological softness. Research points to something more structural: women negotiators build and maintain linkages between formal peace processes and grassroots civil society networks, bringing local knowledge to the table and sustaining advocacy for implementation long after the agreements are signed. They have learned, often from positions of structural exclusion, to work across lines of difference and to prioritise the survival of communities over the performance of victory. They have, in many cases, simply had less invested in the continuation of war.
Global military expenditure has reached a record 2.7 trillion dollars. Meanwhile, bilateral aid to women-led organisations in conflict-affected contexts stands at 0.4 per cent. Women represented just 7 per cent of negotiators in formal peace processes in 2024. These are not gaps. They are decisions. And they are decisions that refuse to recognise women’s agency. Women are active agents in peace and security. Recognising that agency, and resourcing it, is critical to any serious effort at lasting peace.
The policy implications are straightforward. Sustained investment in women-led peacebuilding organisations. Guaranteed inclusion of women in formal peace negotiations as a structural requirement, not a gesture of representation. Direct funding for the grassroots work women are already doing across conflict zones worldwide, with minimal resources and no international attention. It is not supplementary to the peace process. It is the peace process.
But that is the floor, not the ceiling. Investing in women cannot mean only funding peacebuilders after the bombs have fallen, supporting survivors once the damage is done. To genuinely care about women’s liberation, and to invest in women’s lives, is to guarantee safety from violence, security of income and land and livelihood, justice that is accessible and enforceable, and prosperity that is not contingent on the absence of war. These are not the conditions women need after conflict ends. They are the conditions that make conflict less likely to begin.
The schoolgirls of Minab should have lived to see a world changed by decades of women’s struggle for peace, rights and recognition. They did not live to see another Women’s Day. Neither will countless others who will die in wars they had no part in starting. What women need, regardless of where they were born, what they believe, or which side of a border they stand on, is an end to wars they did not start, and the full conditions for lives lived in safety, justice and dignity.
Women’s liberation has never been delivered by missile.
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