UN Women’s new report “Women's Participation in Local Mediation: Lessons from Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen” sheds light on the diverse mediation roles women have played to resolve conflict and restore social cohesion in their communities.

This report on the proceedings of the global conference “Gender-inclusive peace processes: Strengthening women’s meaningful participation through constituency building” explores current challenges, best practices, and recommendations on how best to leverage the practice of constituency building to further gender-inclusive peace.

The paper considers the under-representation of women in high-level mediation and peacemaking positions. Set in the context of successive normative commitments to increase the representation of women in high-level mediation, the paper considers why peace process mediation appears to be an outlier in the general trend towards gender parity in UN senior posts in particular.

This report on the proceedings of the 2018 conference “Women’s meaningful participation in peace processes: Modalities and strategies across tracks”, explores innovations, trends, and challenges in the interplay between official, high-level processes and unofficial processes in which civil society plays a leadership role.

This brief addresses the importance of women’s full, equal, and meaningful participation to an effective pandemic response and to peacemaking efforts, and how the women, peace and security agenda can provide a critical framework for inclusive decision-making and sustainable solutions. It also provides preliminary analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on women’s participation in ceasefires and peace processes and offers a series of recommendations, including on “building back better”.

This brief provides a set of recommendations to take stock of health, economic and social aspects of this unprecedented crisis to develop an exit strategy and to take advantage of this exceptional period to upgrade the mechanisms and structure in Tunisia. It also makes recommendations to adopt a gender approach in government post-COVID-19 strategy.

This brief suggests that domestic violence has increased in Palestine due to the conditions created by the COVID 19 pandemic, which in most cases resulted in a lockdown of survivors of violence with their abusers. With families in lockdown, helplines are seeing a surge of cases requesting a multitude of services.

This brief highlights emerging evidence of the impact of the recent global pandemic of COVID-19 on violence against women and girls. It makes recommendations to be considered by all sectors of society, from governments to international organizations and to civil society organizations, in order to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls, at the onset, during, and after the public health crisis, with examples of actions already taken.

Around the world, young women are working to prevent violent conflict, recover from crises, and build peaceful, tolerant communities, yet most peace and security interventions are blind to the needs and contributions of young women. This paper examines the diverse roles that young women play in these contexts and offers recommendations for ensuring their meaningful inclusion and participation in building and sustaining peace.