Architects of a More Just and Peaceful World

March 9, 2026

The flowers and posts from yesterday’s International Women’s Day are still fresh, and Women’s History Month asks us to keep this energy alive. We must reckon honestly with how far women have brought this world, how much further there is to go, and what is ours to do next. 

The rights of women — hard-won over generations of organizing and sacrifice — are now under coordinated attack. Reproductive autonomy is being legislated away. Gender-based violence remains pandemic in scale. Economic inequality persists with stubborn consistency. And the institutions designed to protect human rights are weakening at precisely the moment they are needed most. 

History is consistent on this point: where women’s rights contract, instability grows. This and the unraveling of peace are not separate crises. They move together. 

We are living through a time of extraordinary global conflict. The number of active wars has grown year over year, and 2026 is on pace to be the most violent year in recent memory. As we see the war in Iran expand across the region, adding to the crises of Ukraine, Sudan, and others, we rightly wonder: how do we build peace? New technologies make conflict more precise and, paradoxically, more remote — distancing decision-makers from the human cost of what they unleash. We have centuries of history showing us the steps that lead here. And yet, we repeat them with devastating outcomes. 

That is why conflict and peacebuilding — and the women who have always been at the center of both — deserve our focus. Far from bystanders, these women have often shouldered the costs of conflict and led the work of rebuilding. 

While men die in disproportionate numbers on the front lines — a loss that hollows out families and communities in ways that reverberate for generations — women face a different and targeted brutality. Sexual violence is frequently deployed as a deliberate strategy, a weapon of terror and destabilization. The women of Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Ukraine, Sudan, and so many other places know this reality intimately. They are often the ones left to hold everything together when the fighting moves on: raising children alone, rebuilding economic life, tending to the traumatized and the grieving. The burden of survival falls heavily on their backs. 

And still: they build. 

Women have always been at the center of rebuilding what violence destroys. Not because they are peripheral to power, but because they have so often been excluded from the rooms where war begins, they have built different rooms entirely. Rooms where the conversation is about what people actually need: food, safety, education, healthcare, a future worth building together. Increasingly, women also serve in uniform as soldiers and as a growing presence in international peacekeeping forces. Research consistently shows their participation improves outcomes for civilian populations. And their work does not begin when the guns go quiet. Peacebuilding is prevention as much as repair. It is tending the conditions that allow communities to survive and, eventually, to thrive. 

In 1977, a Kenyan woman named Wangari Muta Maathai started planting trees. She had watched poverty and ecological destruction erode her community and recognized them as the kind of instability from which conflict grows. She started by teaching women to plant and care for trees, one at a time. This Green Belt Movement grew into a force that restored land, created livelihoods, and helped women build confidence and civic voice. Desertification that had left communities destitute began to reverse. The movement spread across the continent and demonstrated that peacebuilding does not always begin at a negotiating table. Sometimes it starts with a seed and a woman who believes a better future is possible.

This Women’s History Month calls us not only to celebrate what women have built, but to protect the rights that make that work possible. Women have always been among the most powerful architects of a more just and peaceful world — in movements that span continents and in the church groups, book clubs, and community organizations that sustain connection and belonging when the world feels like it is pulling apart. Understanding this history is not an act of nostalgia. It is how we find our footing, recognize what is ours to do, and build the kind of future we know is possible.