Overview
On January 11th - 14th, join the Alliance for Peacebuilding—in partnership with George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution and Notre Dame University’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Keough School of Global Affairs—for the 13th annual conference, PeaceCon 2027: Reimagining and Transforming the Future of Peace and Security Together. PeaceCon 2027 will kick-off on Monday, January 11th with a keynote address, high-level panel, and reception hosted at the Keough School’s office in Washington, DC. On Tuesday, January 12th and Wednesday, January 13th, PeaceCon will take place in-person at the Carter School in Arlington, VA for two days of immersive, interactive sessions. And on Thursday, January 14th, PeaceCon sessions will shift exclusively online to ensure global participation.
At PeaceCon 2027, participants will work together to think boldly on how we can leverage current crises as an opportunity to reenvision and mobilize support for a peace-centered policy and assistance architecture in the United States and globally. Participants will also explore how we can accelerate collective action and innovation to change social norms and behaviors that support peacebuilding and prevention, while also building stronger institutions, partnerships, and movements at all levels of society.
At a time of record-breaking global violent conflict, and the deterioration of global peacefulness for the 12th consecutive year, instability is significantly outpacing peacebuilding. Conflict prevention and peacebuilding are needed more than ever, yet have never been sufficiently prioritized, understood, or demanded. While it is easy to be cynical right now, prevention and peacebuilding work is being done all over the world and in neighborhoods just down the street. However, this work must be scaled with robust public support. Amidst compounding crises and declining resources to address them, we cannot waste the current opportunity to transform and shape much-needed changes to outdated systems and institutions. Join us to tackle one of the most challenging issues of our time: increasing global violent conflict.
PeaceCon 2027 Themes:
1. Reimagining: Developing New Structures
The structures for preventing violent conflict and sustaining peace—international and national institutions, laws, policies, frameworks, funding mechanisms, and agendas—were largely designed in response to the conflicts of the 20th century and are no longer fit-for-purpose to address today's challenges: protracted and networked violence, shifting geopolitical power and increasing multipolarity, democratic backsliding and shrinking civil space, destabilizing technologies, environmental degradation, gender backlash, and the persistent marginalization of local communities in decision-making. PeaceCon 2027 seeks to answer not the question of “how do we rebuild;” rather, we are asking, “what new structures do we need to prevent and resolve conflict and how do we operationalize them?” Session proposals should move beyond diagnosis and into design—putting forward, testing, or critically examining concrete structural alternatives to the current architecture. We invite sessions that explore what is needed to grapple with the myriad challenges of the moment, such as through new laws and legal frameworks; policy innovation; institutional design; funding and agenda-setting; technology and information governance frameworks; and inclusion of and partnership with local stakeholders closest to conflict.
2. Transforming: Leveraging Innovative Methodologies, Technologies, and Research to Advance Scalable Approaches
This theme focuses on moving from the “what” of the reimagining theme, to the practical “how” to implement and scale innovative and evidence-based structures, laws, policies, programs, and funding models to prevent violent conflict and build sustainable peace. Session proposals should go beyond showcasing a new tool or idea, and instead grapple with operationalizing transformative approaches to change government institutions, priorities, and social norms and behaviors to help center peacebuilding and prevention in foreign policy, assistance, and partnerships. We invite submissions that explore new methodologies, practices, and technologies to support more effective approaches to conflict analysis and integration, mediation, dialogue, and program design and evaluation; identify research gaps that if filled can inform greater standards for the field and promote uptake of best practices; and build bridges between research findings and actionable policy recommendations with practicality and scale.
3. Collaborating Together: Creating a Movement by Building Resilience, Strengthening Communities and Partnerships, and Changing Social Norms and Behaviors
No single government, sector, organization, or community can prevent violent conflict or build peace alone. Lasting change happens when communities are strong enough to absorb shocks, relationships and understanding bridge the lines that conflict and polarization harden, sectors that rarely work together find ways to act as one, and everyday people see themselves as active agents of peace. This theme will explore how peace is made through collaboration and movement-building. Session proposals should examine how communities are strengthened, resilience and connections are built, genuine cross-sectoral collaboration is achieved, and norms and behaviors shift—and how each of these lines of effort reinforces the others to prevent and resolve conflict. We are seeking session proposals that offer models for collaboration at every level, not just a case for why it matters. We encourage submissions that enhance participants capacities to build social cohesion and trust across lines of division at the community level; strengthen resilience so communities withstand shocks and stressors without recourse to violence; improve cross-sector collaboration; build and activate new champions of peacebuilding at every level of society, and operationalize strategies to create and mobilize a wider movement in support of peacebuilding and prevention.