International Women’s Day 2025
Women's resilience and leadership amid conflict and crisis.
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Welcome to IWPR’s Frontline Update, your go-to source to hear from journalists and local voices at the front lines of conflict.
THE BIG PICTURE
As we mark International Women’s Day 2025, we reflect on the incredible strides women around the world have made in advocating for peace, justice and equality – amid increasingly challenging circumstances.
VOICES FROM THE FRONTLINE
“Instability, crises and democratic decay have created the perfect storm of a major backlash against women’s rights,” writes Middle East and North Africa country director Nadia Samet-Warren in an op-ed this week, emphasising that gender equality was an integral feature of stable societies that protect civil liberties and freedoms.
She added, “Countries that are stable and democratic are ones that uphold basic freedoms including equality and the right of association and assembly, and in which women are an integral part of political and civic life.”
Violence against women remains a threat both in the real world and online. A series of investigations IWPR supported in Mexico, a country with one of the world’s worst rates of femicide, revealed how the vast majority of killers walk free.
In Turkey, where gender equality has been increasingly under threat since Ankara’s withdrawal from a landmark UN treaty on women’s rights, women who live alone feel pressure to remain constantly vigilant.
And in Georgia, an IWPR-supported investigation revealed how a network of pro-Russian Telegram channels amplified anti-feminist rhetoric ahead of last year’s key elections.
WHY IT MATTERS
It is crucial to not only recognise not only the challenges women face in countries experiencing conflict and crisis, but also their remarkable resilience and leadership.
The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is Accelerate Action, and IWPR is proud to amplify the voices of women who have become active agents of change, ensuring their stories of courage, resistance and hope are heard globally.
In Ukraine, we highlight how women prosecutors are at the frontlines of seeking justice for survivors of sexual violence, and we are inspired by stories such as the female entrepreneurs rebuilding their lives after being forcefully displaced from Nagorny Karabakh.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Through investigative reporting and amplifying brave voices collaborative research, we continue to push for the voices of women to be heard and actively shape the solutions to the crises they face.
“When women and men share leadership and decision-making responsibilities,” wrote Samet-Warren, “the positive impact extends across communities, countries and the wider international system.”
