PeaceCon 2023:
New Peacebuilding Architectures for today and the futurE
On May 3-5, 2023, the Alliance for Peacebuilding held its 11th annual conference, PeaceCon 2023: Beyond Fragile Ground: New Peacebuilding Architectures for Today and the Future, in hybrid format. Thank you to all who helped make PeaceCon 2023 a success!
The peacebuilding field has grown significantly in the last two decades, seeing substantial wins, including the adoption of the Global Fragility Act (GFA), the United Nations (UN) Sustaining Peace Agenda, and the World Bank Group Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence. Yet many challenges remain.
PeaceCon 2023 convened at a time of extraordinary global turbulence. The number of compounding crises facing the field is unprecedented.
Even before Russia launched its unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine, the world was already experiencing a 30-year high in violent conflict.
Recent reports have found a disconcerting increase in the total number of fragile contexts worldwide, with 1.9 billion people—24% of the world’s population and 73% of the world’s extreme poor—living in environments rife with chronic instability, conflict or violence.
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was not just a health crisis but also fueled global insecurity that has impacted prevention and containment of COVID-19 with long-term social, political, and economic consequences.
Globally, climate change, food and energy insecurity, and rising dis/misinformation are all compounding and compounded by violent conflict while our greatest tool of resiliency—democracy—is backsliding as strategic competition among the world’s most powerful nations accelerates.
To move forward in the face of such complexity and uncertainty, the peacebuilding field and its partners must ensure that recent wins are robustly resourced and implemented and provide a firm foundation on which to build more effective, sustainable solutions to increasing fragility and conflict. But will this be enough? Unprecedented times often call for unprecedented measures. How the field evolves to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow will determine future success.
PeaceCon 2023 brought together senior officials, thought leaders, policymakers, and practitioners to explore how the field must evolve, with strategic foresight and innovation, to strengthen existing instruments of peacebuilding and create new strategic approaches and peacebuilding architectures to manage conflict and prevent violence during these times of tectonic geopolitical shifts.
Throughout the conference, we collectively explored what is working, how to build on these successes, and how we can develop and demand practical and interconnected new peacebuilding strategies and tools for the future to shape a more effective and inclusive peacebuilding sector.
For questions, please visit our FAQ page or email us at peacecon@allianceforpeacebuilding.org.
Meet Our High-Level Speakers
