. . DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION . .
An article by Michelle E. Anderson from the World Peace Foundation
This April, WPF launched its newest research program on the future of peace. In part one this essay begins with a preliminary global mapping of contemporary peace-focused work and some of the different approaches and patterns that emerged across contexts. Part two turns to futures-oriented thinking and explores how WPF’s approach seeks to bring these conversations into dialogue.
Current ways of engaging the future
In order to think beyond stakeholders who identify with peace-related work, this mapping also explored who was engaging with questions of the future more broadly, and in what ways. This included the field of futures studies, which encompasses methods such as forecasting, foresight, and scenario-building, as well as other domains that work in the business of long-term change but in less explicit ways. These preliminary observations reveal a range of ways of understanding the future itself, and the different assumptions that shape how it is approached.
There is a group of actors that look at the future as something to anticipate and plan for- these are often multilateral institutions or governments, or groups that support them. In these contexts, foresight is integrated into governance processes, often through scenario-building and risk analysis. For example, the United Nations Futures Lab is a strategic foresight unit that describes itself as “dedicated to future-proofing the UN and multilateral system.” The OECD Strategic Foresight Unit is more outward looking, partnering with governments in member states on the basis that strategic foresight “helps policy makers improve the effectiveness of governments by identifying opportunities, challenges, risks and disruptions that may arise over the coming years.”
Other work focuses less on anticipating the future and more on reshaping the systems that will produce it. Institutions such as the Stockholm Resilience Centre or the New Economics Foundation, for example, engage with the future with “transformation” in mind, pursued through collaborative efforts between local changemakers, researchers, and policy advocates to redesign economic, ecological, and governance structures. While not typically framed in terms of peace, their work is among a set of future-oriented efforts that address many of the underlying challenges– such as climate and economics– that shape its possibility.
A smaller and more diffuse but informative strand of work approaches the future as something to be reimagined and contested. Drawing on speculative, decolonial, feminist, and abolitionist traditions, among others, these types of efforts emphasize imagination, narrative, and the role of alternative epistemologies in shaping what futures become thinkable. Within this, the future is not simply something to be predicted or designed, but something that is actively constructed through political and cultural processes. Recent work on reproductive justice futures and futurisms offers a useful example of this orientation. Emerging from a black feminist tradition that links bodily autonomy (the goal) to social, economic, and environmental justice (the conditions through which that goal can be realized), it treats the future as something to be collectively defined through questions of care, experimentation, governance, and access to resources. Abolitionist approaches similarly emphasize that transformative futures are not simply distant ideals, but are built through present-day practices and experimentation, including community care networks, participatory defense initiatives, mutual aid, and other efforts that attempt to prefigure alternative social arrangements. Within these approaches, the future is both expansive and immediate: not something deferred until ideal conditions emerge, but something actively constructed through political, social, and cultural practice.
Another area of work that helps to expand this picture is that related to climate futures. In contrast to more clearly defined and explicitly-named “futures” strands such as reproductive justice futures, “climate futures” spans a wide range of modes of working, from forecasting and risk management to frameworks that rely on justice and imaginaries. Some efforts, such as the Climate Futures Initiative at Princeton, attempt to bridge scientific, normative, and policy-oriented approaches by examining questions related to climate justice, international equity, environmental values, and the political mechanisms through which scientific knowledge shapes decision-making. Others, such as the Undisciplined Environments platform for scholars and activists, approach climate futures through more critical and experimental lenses that foreground environmental humanities, alternative imaginaries, and the cultural dimensions of ecological crisis. Still others have written about using climate imaginaries as tools for justice-centered policy evaluation, highlighting another possibility for combining deep theoretical work with practical outcomes. Work under the umbrella of “climate futures” illustrates how different orientations toward the future can coexist within a single domain, and possibly in support of one another.
Many transformative futures-oriented approaches can be traced to concepts of political imagination and imaginaries. While a wide range of understandings of “political imagination” exist, broadly speaking, it is concerned with how visions of the future take shape, whose perspectives gain traction, and how dominant ways of organizing social and political life are reproduced or contested. Much of this literature still also emphasizes the limits of imagination, which is not neutral and can be constrained, co-opted, or detached from the institutional and material conditions that shape what can be realized in practice. Increasingly, however, these ideas are not only the subject of analysis but are being taken up as part of practice. One strand of this includes participatory, artistic, or narrative-based approaches that treat imagination as part of processes of social and political change. Initiatives such as University of Southern California’s Civic Imagination Project, which uses workshops, storytelling, and collaborative worldbuilding exercises to help communities imagine and identify actions toward alternative social and political futures, or Adelaide University’s future-focused interactive museum exhibit on practicing alternative futures, illustrate how imagination can function as both a method and a site of intervention, offering space not only for new futures to be envisioned, but also for collective reflection on how they might be pursued in practice.
Across these different orientations toward the future, peace is rarely the central organizing concept, yet the domains of focus are precisely those that shape how peace is constituted in practice. As a result, many of the most consequential questions about the future of peace are being taken up indirectly, across fields that do not name them as such. This points to a more diffuse landscape of work that does not sit neatly within either “peace” or “futures” as defined fields, but nonetheless grapples with many of the same underlying questions. Rather than forming a clearly bounded field, these efforts are dispersed across domains, practices, and vocabularies, often without being recognized as part of a shared conversation.
Bringing peace and futures into conversation
This initial mapping points not to a simple divide between or within peace work, futures work, and adjacent approaches, but to a complex landscape shaped by different assumptions about the future and how it can be engaged. These assumptions, in turn, shape how questions of peace are framed, where they are located, whether they are made explicit or remain implicit, and what becomes visible or obscured when it is not named as such.
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Question related to this article:
How can we develop the institutional framework for a culture of peace?
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One pattern that this mapping endeavor made clear is that institutions explicitly identifying with peace or peacebuilding tend to work in present- or near-term timelines, and most often through governance, security, or post-conflict recovery frameworks. While this does not mean that questions of the future are entirely absent, they are not often treated as a sustained or central area of inquiry. Some policy and multilateral institutions have held dialogues or produced reports that incorporate elements of foresight such as scenario-building, risk analysis, or the identification of emerging trends. These modes inherently attend to how existing systems might be strengthened, adapted, or made more resilient in the face of shifting geopolitical, technological, or environmental conditions, but without fundamentally challenging the underlying assumptions or institutional logics in which they operate. For example, a 2025 report from the Stimson Center on the Future of International Cooperation argues for the need to strengthen global governance through measures such as expanding the jurisdiction of international courts, reinforcing human rights compliance mechanisms, establishing new coordinating bodies such as a United Nations Climate Change Council, and improving regional capacity and financing structures. These recommendations reflect a focus on reforming and strengthening existing institutions rather than rethinking the systems within which they operate.
Other efforts have gone somewhat further in attempting to rethink the assumptions, relationships, and practices through which peacebuilding is carried out. For example, Humanity United’s 2025 report, A Pathway to Peace, grounds its rationale in the many challenges facing peacebuilding today, including the limited adaptability of multilateral institutions and shrinking financial support for peace and humanitarian efforts. Drawing on input from peacebuilders around the world, it proposes an “engagement framework” centered on more inclusive, locally grounded, and adaptive approaches. However, this framework- perhaps necessarily in its effort to provide practical guidance for the current moment- remains largely oriented toward improving how peace efforts are carried out in relation to existing funding structures and institutional arrangements. Interestingly, the report acknowledges that their proposals may still challenge established assumptions about expertise, neutrality, and power, and may be met with resistance, highlighting a tension between efforts to rethink practice and the institutional contexts in which they are situated. It may also be a nod to Humanity United’s listed topical focus on “innovative pathways for peace,” suggesting that these efforts are part of an emerging area of work oriented toward linking imagination, innovation, and action.
There have been some efforts by explicitly peace-focused actors to take up questions of the future that argue for a more transformative approach, though these also mostly remain episodic. For example, the Re-thinking Peace and Conflict Studies in a Postcolonial World conference held in Tunis in 2025 brought together scholars from multiple regions and disciplinary backgrounds to reflect on how the field itself might be reoriented. Discussions emphasized the need to move beyond dominant frameworks and rethink how knowledge is produced and whose perspectives are centered. This was reflected not only in the themes of the conference but in how it was organized, with one participant describing it as “a plurivocal ecology of knowledge,” a collaborative way of working that privileges neither centre nor periphery. While such efforts suggest a growing recognition of the need to think beyond existing models, they do not yet cohere into a sustained area of work across organizations.
Beyond individual reports or convenings, there are some early attempts to build more sustained platforms for this kind of exchange. For example, the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s “Future of Peace and Security” project seeks to bring together practitioners, policymakers, and researchers to examine how emerging trends, including shifts in technology, geopolitics, and governance, may shape the conditions for peace and conflict. In doing so, it creates space for forward-looking reflection within established networks.
Even so, what emerges from this mapping is a fundamental disjunction between those engaged in more imaginative or visioning work and those operating within policy and institutional frameworks. At a moment when dominant systems are fracturing, this divide is not just analytical but consequential. This suggests that the broader imperative is not simply to introduce future-oriented thinking into peace work, but to create spaces where different ways of engaging the future– whether anticipatory, structural, or imaginative– can be brought into conversation with different understandings of peace, and where long-term connections between them can and should take shape.
Implications for the Future of Peace
This dispersed landscape of conceptualizations and approaches relevant to the future of peace presents both opportunity and challenge. How can these different modes of thinking be brought into conversation without collapsing one into the other? How can they be used as building blocks for something new, rather than being forced into existing frames or reduced only to familiar forms such as policy forecasting or abstract scenario-building?
The Future of Peace program is an effort to explore synergies between approaches that are often kept entirely separate. It takes seriously the need for grounded analysis while also creating space for more expansive and exploratory thinking about what peace could be, and how those possibilities take shape in practice. The aim is not only to bridge existing efforts, but to open up novel ways of working across them.
Rather than centering a single framework, we aim to bring into conversation a range of people, modes of working, and schools of thought that are rethinking peace in different ways. This includes perspectives that have long challenged dominant assumptions about order, governance, and coexistence, alongside work grounded in policy and practice, without being limited to either.
In these early stages, the program is being shaped through a set of evolving guiding questions. Among them are the following: How is peace being reimagined in the current moment, and by whom, particularly in ways that look to longer-term futures or alternative possibilities? What would it mean to take these reimaginings seriously as starting points for inquiry and even guidance, rather than treating them as peripheral to policy or practice?
As the Future of Peace program develops, this work will continue through further mapping, engagement with different bodies of work and practice, and the cultivation of conversations that bring these perspectives into closer relation. The aim is not only to identify what exists, but to better understand how different approaches to peace and the future can inform one another, and where new connections or directions may be needed, helping to build a foundation for the program’s ongoing work.
At a moment marked by uncertainty, polarization, and rapid transformation, revisiting the question of peace is both necessary and fraught. The aim of the Future of Peace program is not to resolve these tensions, but to work within them, opening space for new ways of thinking about what peace is, how it is shaped, and what it might yet become.
We see this as an ongoing conversation, and an invitation to think together about the future of peace. This mapping is necessarily partial, and this essay even more so. We welcome hearing from those whose work is represented here, as well as those we may not have captured but who are engaging related questions and challenges. We look forward to connections, reflections, and suggestions as this work continues to take shape.
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