With President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's win in Sunday's Argentine's election all but assured and a woman leading the largest country in Latin America, it might appear that the political glass ceiling in the hemisphere has finally been cracked. But from Buenos Aires to Washington, D.C., women still have a long way to go to achieve parity in politics, according to recently completed gender studies and political analysts.

The changing role of women in war was the topic for discussion in a forum that attracted politically-minded members of the College of William and Mary community to the Commonwealth Auditorium Monday. “Women, War and Peace” is a five-part series on PBS that chronicles women's experiences during and after wartime, aiming to tell stories that often go untold.

Maya Jribi, the only woman in a leadership job at one of Tunisia's main political parties, says it's been an uphill battle to persuade other women to run as candidates in the Oct. 23 elections.

Libyan exile Shahrazad Kablan was teaching school in Cincinnati when the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi began in her hometown, Benghazi. She put her house on the market and within weeks had moved to Qatar, where she hosted a taboo-busting show on the pro-rebel Libya TV.

On Wednesday night she was in Manhattan, drumming up support among women's rights activists for the long slog ahead as Libya rebuilds.

"My experience reporting military sexual assault was worse than the actual assault," says Jessica (a pseudonym for her protection), a former marine officer and Iraq veteran who left the military because of her command's poor handling of her assault charges. "The command has so much power over a victim of sexual assault. They are your judge, jury, executioner and mayor: they own the law.

Since 2008, the government has not met a legal obligation to issue an annual report on gender equality, MP Damira Niyazaliyeva, chairwoman of the parliamentary committee on social policy, health care, labour and migration, said at a hearing on “The woman in contemporary Kyrgyz society: problems and achievements.”

while working as a gender-based violence consultant for my first UN peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I was surrounded by victims of violence. I thought constantly about their plight and what was missing in the response by the international community.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday welcomed Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize winner Tawakkul Karman, and underscored the worsening economic and humanitarian situation in her country.

I went for a walk in Liberia two years ago. It started "upcountry" where the forest is thick and the air still, on the border with Sierra Leone, the West African country twinned with Liberia through common turbulent recent history. And it finished a month or so later on a giddying day when the jungle lifted and I stepped on to buttermilk sands rinsed by the horizon-less Atlantic.

I went for a walk in Liberia two years ago. It started "upcountry" where the forest is thick and the air still, on the border with Sierra Leone, the West African country twinned with Liberia through common turbulent recent history. And it finished a month or so later on a giddying day when the jungle lifted and I stepped on to buttermilk sands rinsed by the horizon-less Atlantic.