. . 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. This two-part 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.

Across policy, research, and practice, peace is often approached as something to be built, stabilized, or measured. Whether framed through the language of peacebuilding, security, or even strategic foresight, much of this work is concerned with how existing systems can be made more responsive to emerging challenges. Meanwhile, today’s immediate crises– including wars in Iran, Lebanon, Sudan, and Ukraine– alongside the erosion of multilateralism and the limits of liberal peace frameworks, underscore the difficulty of translating existing models for peace into durable outcomes.

Alongside this, a different set of conversations is unfolding across various movements, intellectual traditions, and future-oriented fields of inquiry. Here, the language is less about mitigation and stability and instead about transformation, alternative futures, imagination, and the reorganization of social and political life. Much of this work is deeply grounded in lived realities and ongoing struggles over justice, governance, care, and survival, even as it often remains fragmented across organizations, movements, and institutional settings. These efforts are also not often framed explicitly in terms of peace, despite engaging many of the underlying conditions that shape its possibility.

It is clear that a wide range of people and institutions are grappling with how societies might move toward less violent, more just, and more sustainable futures. However, the disconnect between these conversations, ways of thinking, and practical action raises broader questions not only about how peace is pursued, but about how it is understood and imagined. What does it mean to bring imagination into conversations about the future of peace while remaining grounded in political and practical realities? More fundamentally, who gets to imagine the future of peace, and under what conditions do certain futures become thinkable and actionable?

WPF’s new Future of Peace program emerges from a long lineage of peace studies and movements, from pragmatic and policy-oriented traditions to more critical and speculative lines of thought. We are not the first to ask what peace might look like beyond current frameworks, nor the first to question whether existing models and practices are adequate for the challenges we face. What matters, then, is not simply posing the question again, but considering what it means to ask it in the current moment. What can be learned from past efforts, and where do they fall short in addressing contemporary forms of violence, power, and uncertainty?

Approach & limits

As a first step in developing the program, we conducted an initial landscape mapping to better understand how different actors, including research and policy centers, think tanks, and related organizations, are currently engaging with the concept of the future of peace, whether explicitly or implicitly. First, though, it is important to note that the concept of ‘peace’ itself is not defined or resolved in this essay. Even within peace studies, there is no single agreed-upon meaning, with divergent and sometimes competing understandings. These range from conceptual distinctions such as negative and positive peace, to frameworks such as liberal peace and its critiques, to lenses such as everyday peace, among many others. This essay therefore treats peace as an open and contested term, which will be taken up more directly in future work within the program. This also shapes how work is identified and categorized in the mapping that follows.

This mapping focused in part on identifiable institutions and organizations as entry points, while recognizing that this offers only a partial view of a broader and more diffuse set of practices and ways of engaging these questions, particularly those not organized through formal institutional structures. This included actors who identify with peacebuilding or conflict-related work, those utilizing futures-oriented thinking, as well as those working in adjacent areas who do not use either label but are asking related questions. This initial mapping surfaces a wide range of work across policy, practice, research, and more exploratory or imaginative spaces. It points to a field that is active and evolving, but also uneven in how these conversations connect, or in the underlying assumptions of what ‘peace’ or ‘the future’ entails.

This preliminary mapping is unavoidably partial and shaped by the terms and methods used. These limitations include the use of English-language search terms, and the choices made about which terms to prioritize. For example, in looking just at peace related work, after some testing, we searched for “academic peace institutes” paired with different regional groupings. These choices helped make the landscape more legible, but also shaped what was made visible through this process. As a result, this approach risks overlooking work communicated through different vocabularies, in other languages, outside of formal institutional structures, or without a strong digital footprint. However, while the mapping initially sought to focus on academic and adjacent institutions, many results were for NGOs, think tanks, and practitioner networks, which is in itself revealing, and therefore included below. The regional groupings presented here are also provisional, reflecting just one possible way of describing an uneven landscape based on early patterns that surfaced in these searches.

Even with these limitations, this mapping points to several distinct areas of work that are relevant to the questions at hand. The sections that follow move across three of these. First, we look at actors who explicitly identify with peace or peacebuilding as their primary area of work, and the ways this field is currently structured across contexts. In part 2 of this essay, we turn to forms of futures-oriented thinking, examining how different actors approach the future itself, and what this might reveal about the conditions shaping peace. Finally, we consider efforts to bring these strands into conversation, looking at where questions of peace and the future begin to intersect and what this might suggest for future directions of the field.

The current landscape of peace work

An exploration of peace-focused institutions across the globe suggests important regional variation in how peace is framed, organized, and pursued, though these observations remain preliminary. These differences are not only conceptual, but institutional. That said, the regional distinctions outlined below should be understood as broad tendencies rather than fixed categories, with significant overlap, variation, and exceptions across contexts. While this phase of the mapping effort was not specific to the future of peace but rather peace related institutions more broadly, these initial findings offer insight into where and how more transformative or future-oriented conversations may already be taking shape. The regional groupings presented here are not based on a single predefined framework, but instead reflect patterns that surfaced through the mapping process, as well as an effort to attend to contexts where the organization and institutionalization of peace-related work appeared to differ in meaningful ways. Irrespective of region, explicit conceptual engagement with “peace” was uneven. While some institutions and initiatives treat peace itself as an object of critical inquiry, in many cases it functions more as an assumed or loosely defined outcome of ending or managing conflict.

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How can we develop the institutional framework for a culture of peace?

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In North America and Europe, peace-related scholarship is often embedded in dense networks of academic, policy, and practitioner institutions, and tends to focus on governance and institutional responses to conflict. However, these regions are not internally uniform; separating the United States and Canada would likely reveal further variation (particularly in how questions of reconciliation, indigenous sovereignty, and settler colonial histories are incorporated), as would looking more closely at subregions within Europe, given that many of the institutions that surfaced through this mapping are concentrated in the United Kingdom and Nordic countries. Alongside university-based peace and conflict studies centers and academic networks such as the UK’s Oxford Network of Peace Studies, independent Nordic research institutes such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) or the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) are looked to as thought leaders, producing data-driven analysis on conflict, arms transfers, and security. Accordingly, dominant narratives from both North America and Europe reflect an orientation toward analyzing, managing, and responding to conflict through institutional and policy frameworks, with “peace” positioned as an outcome of effective governance and security arrangements.

In Latin America and Africa, institutionalized peace work is more frequently connected to questions of social transformation, inequality, and justice. In both regions, peace is often treated not only as a matter of governance or conflict management, but as part of broader struggles over social and political order. In Latin America, there is a recurring emphasis on peace not simply as the absence of conflict, but as a lived, relational process shaped by social and political transformation. This is reflected in initiatives such as FLACSO Ecuador’s Acción No Violenta program, which situates peace as nonviolence within historically and politically specific contexts, and the CALAS Visions of Peace research program, which explicitly examines the ambiguities and “gray zones” between violence and peace rather than treating transitions as linear or complete. At the same time, institutions such as the United Nations-mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica reflect a more internationally oriented institutionalization of peace studies, connecting peace and conflict education to sustainable development, environmental issues, and human rights.

In Africa, similar themes around justice, inequality, and social transformation are present, though the landscape appears more institutionally networked and practice-oriented than conceptually unified. Considerable regional variation likely exists, including across linguistic, political, and conflict contexts, but the search surfaced a particularly dense ecosystem of university programs, mediation institutes, training centers, and regionally embedded peacebuilding organizations operating within a broadly recognizable peacebuilding sphere.  Organizations such as the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP) work across mediation, early warning, governance  and community-based peacebuilding, while institutions such as the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes  (ACCORD) combine conflict analysis, mediation support, policy engagement, and practitioner training through partnerships with regional and continental actors, including the African Union.These efforts reflect a field that includes- and sometimes bridges- institutional, regional, and locally embedded forms of peace practice.

In Oceania, the mapping suggests that there is a mix of globally oriented academic and policy approaches alongside initiatives more explicitly grounded in local and cultural understandings of conflict and coexistence. Academic institutions such as the University of Otago’s National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies  in New Zealand and similar programs at Australian universities tend to align with traditional peace studies approaches, often focusing on governance, security, and policy-relevant analysis, though there is some incorporation of critical and Indigenous-informed perspectives. In contrast, network-based and practitioner-oriented initiatives place greater emphasis on relational, nonviolent, and dialogue-based conflict transformation, and peace is understood through context-specific and relational understandings of social, ecological, and political life. For example, Transcend Oceania  describes its work as “building on local knowledge systems, skills and approaches of Oceania.” While not necessarily framed as a critique of dominant models of peace, these initiatives certainly reflect different assumptions about social order, responsibility, and coexistence, particularly where they draw on Indigenous knowledge systems and locally embedded practices.

In the Middle East, relatively few academic institutions explicitly identifying as peace-focused were identified. Instead, relevant work appears to be more often embedded within NGOs, policy organizations, or broader governance and security agendas.  For example, the Arab Forum for Alternatives  in Lebanon does not claim to do peace work, but hosts regional network building, research, training, and activism with the aim of advancing justice and equality through political transformation. Palestinian professor and peace activist Mohammed Dajani Daoudi points out  that, “Despite the state of crisis that evolved in a violent conflict which the Middle East has been undergoing, not a single university in the Arab region offers a Ph.D. program on peace, moderation, interfaith dialogue, and reconciliation studies to promote a culture of peace, tolerance, and coexistence.” While Professor Daoudi puts forth a compelling argument for why such a program is needed and how it would support critical thinking, dialogue, and innovation toward addressing the complexities of social transformation, the gap may reflect differences in how the field is institutionalized, what is seen as valuable or relevant, or the political conditions under which such work can take place.

Asia presents one of the most internally uneven and institutionally diverse landscapes identified through this mapping, with significant variation across subregions in how peace is framed, institutionalized, and practiced. In some places, these efforts rely on philosophical traditions (e.g., Gandhian, humanistic), while others use governance and security frameworks, and still others can be better characterized by applied peacebuilding ecosystems. In East and Northeast Asia, ‘peace’ is often institutionalized within universities and research centers, such as the Toda Peace Institute in Japan, frequently with an emphasis on topics such as security, diplomacy, and historical reconciliation. In Southeast Asia, mapping surfaced a developed ecosystem of training institutes, regional networks, and hybrid academic-practitioner initiatives centered on  capacity-building for applied peacebuilding. For example, the Mindanao Peacebuilding Institute  in the Philippines describes itself as “a resource for peacebuilders: providing skills, conducting research and building solidarity within the Asia-Pacific Region.” In South Asia, by contrast, the landscape appears more fragmented, spanning policy-oriented think tanks, smaller institutes, and advocacy networks focused on security, diplomacy, and cross-border cooperation. Across these contexts, peace is framed through multiple and sometimes competing lenses.

Regional differences are evident not only in how peace is framed, but by the variation in the institutional forms and mandates across these examples. These divergences likely reflect not only political, economic, historical, and cultural contexts, but underlying conditions including funding structures and opportunities, institutional mandates, and political constraints. While these patterns do not explicitly or immediately point us toward who is similarly engaging with the ideas or ‘big rethinking’ efforts underlying the Future of Peace project, they might still suggest where alternative ways of conceptualizing and pursuing peace are already underway.

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