As women journalists are threatened, we risk missing stories from the most vulnerable on the ground.

Hola, I’m Nuria Tesón, the Fuller Project’s new conflict editor. It’s a dream job that feels tailor-made for someone who has landed at Fuller after 16 years of reporting from places where wars, crises, and disasters unfold.

When I began my work, I quickly learned that in any conflict, the most vulnerable are always the most affected. Often, that is women and girls. Yet, in media coverage of conflict, women’s voices are often systematically sidelined. “Who cares about women managing their periods in conflicts?” I remember one editor asking me. The millions of people who experience “menstrual abnormalities” during “acute conflict” from Gaza to Ukraine and Lebanon – that’s who cares. And so should anyone interested in telling the human stories of conflict.

This year has been marked not just by the continued sidelining of women and gender-diverse people’s experiences in conflicts but also by consistent, disproportionate and unprecedented attacks on women journalists, documented by NGOs and other international organizations. With local journalists a target and foreign journalists banned in places like Gaza, and parts of Sudan, I have feared this year that women’s voices might fade completely from the agenda. If there is something that 2025 has made painfully clear, it’s that one of the most powerful weapons in modern conflict is silence.

Entire wars have unfolded behind sealed borders, broken phone lines, social media platform filtering, and disinformation, with governments determined to control the world’s gaze. Our gaze. Despite growing impunity and efforts to discredit institutions like the International Criminal Court and sanction its officials, perpetrators still want no witnesses for their crimes.

Earlier this year, I interviewed a woman from Sudan, Istiak. She still calls me once in a while. Her name isn’t real, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that while she waited to register in the UN’s refugee agency system, after arriving in Egypt from Darfur, she wanted to tell her story. One of loss, rape, and survival. I listened in silence while she described the facts, checking every so often that others couldn't hear her: “They killed my husband, and did everything to me. Now I have been kicked out of the flat I was renting because I am pregnant. Why is nobody talking about what they are doing to us?”

I wished I had a satisfactory answer for her.

Still, I have hope that we can change things. Afterall, as South Korean philosopher Byung Chul Han writes: “Hope is the only thing that makes us move forward”. I know that journalists like myself, who report from conflict zones, provide context and bear witness to devastation that spurs action. A small but significant ray of hope from this year was the news that more women are becoming journalists in Afghanistan: “We document the current history of the Afghan women. One day, these stories will make sense for the world outside this prison called Afghanistan,” said a journalist from the region.

This echoes what philosopher Hannah Arendt describes in her book Men in Dark Times: “We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it, we learn to be human.”

May we be more human in 2026.

• 🇵🇸 The Gaza ceasefire agreement helped women survive. Even though the killing of civilians continues in Gaza, the October ceasefire has alleviated some of the most pressing issues, like reproductive health services and access to gender-based violence caseworkers. It proved that even minimal access can immediately save women’s lives.

• 🇸🇩 The International Criminal Court (ICC) delivered its first Darfur conviction, recognizing rape and gender-based persecution as war crimes. In October 2025, the ICC convicted former Janjaweed commander Ali Abd el Rahma of 27 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including rape, sexual violence, and gender-based persecution during the Darfur massacres in the early 2000s. This set a precedent for recognizing sexual violence as strategic, organized, and prosecutable – not incidental.

• 🇱🇾 Libya is closer to getting a law to prevent and combat violence against women. A draft of the law, which was first introduced two years ago, moved forward in November and is now awaiting parliamentary approval. This marks an important step forward. If adopted, the law would align Libya with international standards criminalizing multiple forms of abuse and creating mechanisms for protection and redress.

Watch: Imagine being trapped in the middle of nowhere after your family has been killed. Imagine you ask for help and wait for hours. That’s the struggle reflected in The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025), a film by Kaouther Ben Hania. It dramatizes the real story of Hind Rajab, a young Palestinian girl killed in Gaza — using the real audio of her final plea for help.

Read: Would you choose flooding or drought? What if you had to deal with both – one after the other? What if your livelihood disappeared as your country sank into conflict over the remaining resources? Climate stress increasingly fuels violence, instability, and conflict across many regions. With an engaging journalistic narrative, The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence, by Peter Schwartzstein, offers deep context and relatable human stories.

Listen: When the war began in Sudan two years ago, it was striking to witness how the artists who fled the country portrayed it, and used their art to communicate what the country was like before the conflict. Afikra is a pioneering global media and educational platform that evolved from a grassroots movement into a leading resource. Their brilliant podcasts fuel cultural understanding of the Arab world, and promote Sudanese culture, history, and artists.

It can feel overwhelming to witness the number of conflicts in the world at this time, and how many people are stuck in a limbo, with peace a distant prospect (despite US President Donald Trump’s bragging). That’s why in 2026 I will be keeping an eye on:

• Connecting the dots across conflicts. Conflict is multilayered. It expands beyond borders and across continents. The war in Sudan is just one example – involving Russia, Libya, and the United Arab Emirates. It’s important that we unearth the patterns.

• Documenting climate-driven conflicts. From the Sahel to Pakistan, extreme weather is reshaping conflict while placing disproportionate burdens on women. For example, climate change in Benin correlates with maternal and neonatal health issues.

• Digital warfare and gendered misinformation. In modern conflict, women are increasingly targeted through new forms of violence. Technology is being used to enable gender-based attacks, including the targeting of journalists in countries such as Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, and Kenya.