For two intensive days, 17 peace activists from 10 Asian countries explored the different roles that women play in peacebuilding. For the participants, the meeting in the Philippine capital Manila was a rare “time out” to reflect on their work, gain new perspectives and strengthen solidarity across borders. We also discussed what added value our Feminists Connecting for Peace network can offer in order to gain insights for further networking and advocacy activities.

With our Feminist Peace Initiatives (FPI), we support local and feminist peace initiatives and projects of our network members. The aim is to promote innovative ideas for feminist peace work quickly, in a straightforward manner and for a limited period of time. In this way, we enable network members to try out new ideas that correspond to their own priorities and those of their communities.

In the magazine Fem*Fém, our colleagues Liv Halperin and Camille Bernheim write about promoting creative agency, maintaining peacebuilding and leveraging political opportunities as crucial factors for creating a peaceful society after armed conflict in their article “Sustaining peacebuilding efforts in post-armed conflict settings”. The multilingual magazine Fem*Fém is published by the Association for Feminist Science in Switzerland FemWiss.

In this special edition of our newsletter, you can find out which stages peace processes go through and where and how women exert influence in order to drive peace processes and prevent setbacks. We have added an extra, detachable double page so that you can use the graphic illustration of peace processes and the accompanying text yourself. You will also find out how our partner in Nepal is helping to ensure that the generations affected by war are heard and recognised as victims of war violence through intergenerational Women's Peace Tables. The meeting with peace activists from our Feminists Connecting for Peace network, which took place in Bern at the beginning of the year, is another focus of our newsletter.

In this issue of our newsletter, our Ukrainian partners report on the changes they have noticed over the last two years in the participants of our meetings with war-affected women from Ukraine. In another article, you will find out which topics were at the centre of discussions for 17 peace activists from 10 Asian countries at the network meeting in Manila. You can also find out what was on the programme during the visit of Sudanese peace activist Rabab Baldo and Colombian human rights lawyer Luz Marina Monzón Cifuentes in Bern.