The November 4 incident has ignited a national debate in Mexico on harassment laws and the wider epidemic of violence against women. Sheinbaum’s response was pointed: she will press charges and push to criminalize sexual harassment nationwide. The symbolism is painful but clarifying: women are present in the arena; but the arena must be built around their right to participate, to appear and to speak without fear.
That was one of the undertones at the Paris Peace Forum at the end of October. The most closely watched exchanges did not ask whether women should be “included” in peace processes. They asked who holds the pen, who signs the checks, and who chairs the sub-groups that decide whether ceasefire clauses survive first contact with reality. The difference between visibility and authority ran through the rooms like current.
One of the Forum’s most arresting voice belonged to a young Sudanese participant, Mayada Adil El Sayed, who introduced herself as an HEC Paris Imagine Fellow and then refused any distance between biography and geopolitics. “Imagine a young girl in 2019 who used her passion for fashion to promote a revolution and help topple a dictator,” she said, then moved to the present tense without ceremony: “My country is at war; Darfur is facing genocide right now. Two days ago, more than a thousand people were murdered. Of these, three hundred women were killed or raped. Thousands of women have been raped (in this conflict).” Her conclusion was the opposite of abstract: “We cannot talk about peace without the people who make it: the youth… Peace has to come with accountability.” The room fell into the particular silence that comes when statistics have a face, in this case one shining with tears.
Trisha Shetty, a human-rights lawyer and president of the annual event’s steering committee, addressed the issue the only way that felt honest. “The world has failed you; what can we do to fix this?” Adil without theatrics: “Love and peace were never popular movements,” she replied, paraphrasing a famous 1970 quote from author James Baldwin.. “Change the narrative: Sudan is not the forgotten war. Talk about Sudan. Hold your governments to account so they put pressure on those causing this genocide.” If you listened closely, you could hear a program taking shape: attention, pressure, law.
After the Forum workshop, Shetty refused the old etiquette that asks women to be “graceful” when the cost of politics is humiliation or worse. “We are being political,” she told me. “How can you stand for equality without fighting pervasive inequality? The attacks that keep women out of politics are multifold: there isn’t enough funding; there are death threats; there is sexual and online harassment in ways men just aren’t subjected to.” She paused, swallowed hard, and the temperature dropped. “I know one too many women in jail in one too many countries.” “I know one too many women in jail in one too many countries. Anytime I'm in these spaces, it reminds me that there are people on the front lines who are being killed, who are being jailed, who are doing the work that we claim to be doing within these talks.” The prescription that followed was unromantic: fund protection, lawyers, secure devices; refuse to let lies stand; build party machines that defend their own women candidates.
Attending the two days of the conference, law professor Julia Emtseva underlined the persistent glass ceiling women face: “It’s over two decades since the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325,” she noted, “which recognized women’s vital role in peace and conflict resolution. And yet we still don’t see any meaningful change in the peacemaking field.”
The academic’s research probes ways international law might be reimagined to advance more inclusive and socially transformative outcomes. Emtseva admits that there are several initiatives which promote women’s participation. “But their presence alone is not enough and has never been enough. True transformation requires looking beyond just gender. It should also focus on the qualities and intersectional experiences negotiators bring to the table." The author of International Crimes of Western Colonialism insists peacebuilding must embrace more than questions around gender: “It must also include class, ethnicity, and geography, and ensure that inclusion is about capability and perspective, not mere representation. Representation is important, but without reflecting on the quality of representation, the number of women sitting at the negotiation table is pure performance.”
Two key panels pushed that same logic into the multilateral frame. Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern. Taking time off her fellowship at Harvard University to join a Forum panel on governing adversarial use of AI, she described herself as “an optimist by nature,” but insisted on pragmatism: leader-level limits on technologies that corrode democratic life; frank talk on existential risks that “is not in the interest of China or the United States either” to ignore; and “guardrails coming all the way down through the system.” Michelle Bachelet, drawing on the memory of her tenure as president of Chile, said the UN does not need poetry so much as results. She called on the reorganization that the public can feel, fewer but more purposeful summits, and enforcement that shows multilateralism can still move the needle. The two leaders’ subtext seemed to indicate that legitimacy is fragile when citizens watch the strong walk away from rules and women are punished for stepping into the public square.
What distinguished this Forum from past editions was a willingness to translate sentiment into action. In workshops on women’s decision-making, the plainest recipe sounded almost radical: give women control of budget lines; put the pen in their hand when texts are drafted; hand them the gavel in agenda-setting sub-groups. In finance sessions, donors were told to stop counting “women reached” and start funding women with decision rights. Time itself emerged as a budget line: in large parts of Africa and Asia, women still spend punishing hours each week fetching water or fuel. A peace plan that fails to buy back that time, via basic investments in water, energy and transport. The latter keep participation rhetorical and politics male – a far cry from UN Resolution 1375.
The numbers, when they came, were a foil rather than comfort. Women remain a small share of official negotiators in peace processes and still hold well under half of parliamentary seats worldwide. Fresh UN figures were stark: 676 million women now live within 50 kilometers of deadly conflict—the highest level since the 1990s—while reported conflict-related sexual violence has surged over the past two years. The point was not to drown readers in percentages but to mark the terrain on which the Forum’s practical proposals will be tested.
If there was a through-line from Mayada Adil to Trisha Shetty to Bachelet and Ardern, it was a refusal of consolation. In Paris, nobody with credibility argued that adding more women to photo-ops would fix anything. The argument, instead, was managerial: change the wiring (who writes, who allocates, who presides) and the text begins to read differently. Ceasefires are more likely to include corridors that function and services that keep women alive; reconstruction budgets are more likely to reflect the hours women lose to basic survival; platform governance is more likely to anticipate the moments when harassment is used to tip the scale of a vote or a negotiation.
All this may sound distant from a woman president being assaulted on a pavement in Mexico City. It is not. The same logic links them. If the public square can’t keep a head of state safe from a man’s entitlement, imagine the message it sends to a municipal councillor, a journalist, or a student leader in a country at war. Sheinbaum’s decision to press charges and to argue for national criminalization of harassment is a reminder that law is a signal to police officers, prosecutors, media and citizens about whose presence is expected and protected. The outrage in Mexico this week is not just about one crime; it is about whether a country can look women in the eye and say: “We will not make you pay a price for showing up”.
In past years, global gatherings like the Peace Forum could feel like a marketplace of competing causes, each with its own vocabulary and tote-bag. This time, the lines blurred. The people who used to be ushered onto stages to colour a communiqué - women mayors, youth organizers, civil-society lawyers - were not asking to be heard; they were asserting ownership. When a young Sudanese woman reminded a room full of dignitaries that a peace process is as much a supply chain as a speech, it rang true across issues as diverse as women’s hygiene in war zones and digital prejudice silencing women at precisely the moments when their voices shape outcomes.
Technology’s harms, climate insecurity, and the wars that dominate our feeds have made one thing obvious: there is no sustainable peace if the people who hold communities together are merely “consulted.” They will either be authors or exit. If Mexico’s horror this week helps fix that truth in our minds, some good may yet come of a very public crime.
Note: In full transparency, I have to declare that I was reporting from this eighth Paris Peace Forum in my capacity as head of research communications at the HEC Paris business school – not as a freelance reporter. However, I don’t believe this has impacted this article in a ostentatious way.