Armed conflict has surged to the highest levels in modern history — a trend now underscored by the eruption of a new war in the Middle East. Conflict- and disaster-related humanitarian needs are staggering yet under-resourced. Climate change is creating greater insecurity. Democratic safeguards and other checks on rising conflict and autocracy are, for many countries, in tatters. Yet, when officials and others plan for security, too often half the story is missing. The experiences and roles of women are indelibly linked to national and global stability and prosperity, yet they are commonly overlooked in forecasting and response.
Given the scale of today’s crises, involving women and taking them into account is a security imperative. Their omission from data and prediction is persistent, yet women’s criticality to security is evident when it comes to the analysis and action required to understand conflict dynamics and trajectory, identify early warning signs of insecurity, and respond accordingly, including in negotiations for peace and in rebuilding in the aftermath.
Women’s Erasure from Data
Women’s exclusion from security planning at all levels is both the result of — and reinforces — a critical data gap. In national databases globally, only 50 percent of indicators — such as those tracking education, health, and economic outcomes — have sex-disaggregated data, while 32 percent lack any data from the past decade. This omission extends to public discourse as well: less than 2 percent of news stories address gender-based violence or challenge gender stereotypes, representing the lowest levels in 30 years of monitoring. Women comprise just 26 percent of news sources quoted in media coverage, and on high-profile topics like economics and politics, men’s voices dominate women’s by ratios as high as 31 to 1.
These discrepancies reflect women’s underrepresentation in leadership positions and scholarship related to security. For instance, women comprised just 13 percent of defense ministers, according to a 2024 United Nations report. Women also make up just 35 percent of academics in security studies globally, with even lower rates of representation when considering publication in top security journals.
This problem is self-perpetuating. Funding shortfalls not only lead to reduced global data-gathering and reporting but also eliminate resources to track backsliding and hold institutions accountable for these gaps. Recent aid cuts have devastated civil society and research organizations that capture insights on gender-related experiences of conflict. Women-led organizations — often the only ones able to reach and account for the most vulnerable women and girls — are particularly exposed to resource scarcity. Just 0.4 percent of bilateral aid from donor countries worldwide went to feminist organizations led by women in 2022-2023, a figure that likely has shrunk even more following aid cuts.
Amid these pressures, research, data, and investigative reporting that focuses on women and girls is likely to further dwindle. Meanwhile, women journalists, researchers, and community leaders face unprecedented attacks, including physical and digital violence — in 2025, 75 percent of women journalists surveyed reported experiencing online violence. When those documenting women’s experiences are silenced, the erasure deepens and blind spots in conflict analysis and forecasting grow.
Insight Into Armed Groups and Conflict Trajectory
Violence against women, including conflict-related sexual violence, is a key dimension for understanding and anticipating changes in the security landscape. Sexual and gender-based violence by armed actors is an early warning indicator of conflict escalation. Increases in sexual violence during inactive conflict years can predict a return to active fighting, as it suggests rebel groups — which often use sexual violence as a socialization mechanism — are recruiting, maintaining, and mobilizing combatants.
Fluctuations in patterns of sexual and gender-based violence can also illuminate armed groups’ behavior and strategy. Spikes in conflict-related sexual violence have been associated with armed groups seeking to expand and strengthen territorial control and can signal the arrival and movements of fighters in an area. High rates of sexual violence can also imply larger numbers of foreign fighters within rebel groups, significant reliance on child soldiers, and greater strength of rebel groups compared with pro-government militias. Abuses against women and girls are also an important driver of recruitment into armed groups as communities pick up arms to defend or avenge their loved ones and as women and girls seek to protect themselves from assault.
Over the longer term, sexual violence during conflict is a significant driver of refugee migration among both women and men. Additionally, such violations undermine local trust and can stoke lingering resentment, impeding peacekeeping efforts, undermining peace deals, and imperiling long-term economic investment in these settings. Sexual and gender-based violence, which predominantly impacts women and girls, thus remains a key facet to accurately assessing and anticipating armed conflict dynamics and outcomes. Ensuring recognition of women and girls’ wartime experiences is therefore not a benevolence — it is strategic.
Early Warning of Insecurity, Even in Seemingly Stable Democracies
Women’s status and safety are powerful, consistent predictors of a country’s peacefulness and security, even in countries not currently experiencing armed conflict. Misogyny and violence against women routinely precedes broader security threats, including political and extremist violence. Analysis across more than 155 countries finds that women’s subordination is linked to greater willingness among men and boys to commit acts of political terror and violence. This can be observed at the individual level; nearly all mass shooters in the United States have a record of intimate partner violence, stalking, sexual assault, or online harassment and misogyny. Research in Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Libya revealed that sexist beliefs and tolerance for violence against women are the most powerful predictors of support for violent extremism, more so than other factors like religiosity, age, education, and employment. In Nigeria, local tracking of women’s presence in common public areas was found to be a useful indicator for understanding perceived and relative security in communities. Rising attacks on women can thus forewarn of looming instability. Yet, indicators related to women’s status are rarely integrated into standard threat assessment frameworks, despite their recognized value.
Online and physical attacks targeting women are also often the first sign of democratic backsliding — a key risk factor for conflict at home and abroad. Suppression of women’s political involvement has also been identified as a mechanism for autocratic consolidation and populist mobilization, meaning anti-democratic forces are incentivized to undermine women’s secure participation and weaken gender equality. Recognizing these symptoms — including attacks on women leaders, female candidates dropping out of races, or rollbacks of women’s rights — can provide further early alert of democratic erosion.
Women Impact the Stability of Peace Negotiations and Deals
By adopting a gender-neutral approach, conflict analysis often misses opportunities or weaknesses in peace negotiations and agreements related to women’s participation. Research conclusively demonstrates that women’s inclusion in peace processes promotes more successful negotiations and strengthens the durability and performance of resulting agreements. For instance, collaboration and information-sharing between women’s groups and women delegates has been shown to result in agreements that have more political reform provisions and are more likely to be implemented. Women’s greater participation in post-conflict society is also linked to a lower likelihood that civil war will resume, a finding that suggests agreements that create pathways for women’s greater involvement in public life may enhance the durability of peace. Yet, women’s absence often goes unnoticed and is rarely identified as a potential weakness in a peace process.
The current conflict landscape reflects this oversight. Talks to end brutal fighting in Sudan have relegated women to the sidelines. Despite holding high-level political positions and having extensive relevant experience, women are not formally included in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. And strikingly, no Israeli or Palestinian women have been included in the U.S.-led Board of Peace, including on its Gaza Executive Board, which will direct the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG). One woman has been appointed to the 12-member NCAG. Across these contexts, women’s absence is often unremarked upon or is treated as a special interest separate from security concerns, rather than being weighed as a potential liability. This risks hindering the pursuit of any sustainable peace and rebuilding.
Conclusion
Women’s exclusion from conflict analysis is not an outlier, but a systemic failure in how policymakers understand, predict, and respond to crises. Looking forward, implementing and resourcing efforts to gather gender-disaggregated data and overcome data gaps is crucial to gaining an accurate picture of the conflict and security landscape. Integrating indicators related to women’s status, violence against women, and women’s participation can help also strengthen understandings of conflict dynamics and develop more accurate risk assessments and predictions.
To meet this urgent need, the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security undertook an extensive analysis of potential security crises in the coming year, focusing on women and girls. This report, Women, Peace and Security: Conflicts and Trends to Watch in 2026, complements existing predictive tools for crisis and conflict that remain largely gender-blind. Its insights build upon the WPS Conflict Tracker’s monthly monitoring and analysis of security threats in 27 conflict-affected settings. Findings underscore the importance of recognizing women’s experiences and agency in conflict zones to ensure truly representative and more accurate forecasting.
The relevance of women to conflict, democratic resilience, and peacebuilding is clear and evidence-based. To more effectively confront the challenges that lie ahead in 2026, women must be counted. Security demands nothing less.
– Ambassador Melanne Verveer and Jessica Anania, Published courtesy of Just Security.
