GENEVA PEACE WEEK

www.genevapeaceweek.ch
www.gpplatform.ch

Youtube (USA)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYztHTLHd63vty_zRUxvcyg

Aventri.com (USA)
https://eu.eventscloud.com/website/3030/

Cisco Webex (USA) video conferencing

2 NOV
10:00 – 10:50 CET
Reimagining education for peace: a dialogue with young people on education, learning and conflict in a post-pandemic world
Building a Culture of Peace | Virtual | Matilda Flemming, Saumya Aggarwal, Indira Banga, Khushbakht Hojiev
This session is organized by UNICEF and Search for Common Ground.

Education is a basic right and indispensable pathway for societies to build and sustain peace. When equitable, inclusive and conflict sensitive, education can help societies and communities bridge divides and address grievances at the root of conflicts. Yet, education systems are not delivering on their promise: inequalities are widening and many are being left behind.
It is now estimated that by 2030, 825 million children, adolescents and youth will not be on track to acquire basic secondary-level skills. In conflict settings but also beyond, COVID-19 has accelerated these trends and sparked new cries: accentuating the differences between those with access to education systems, widening the digital divide, heightening mistrust and straining the social fabric.
For young people the stakes are particularly high. Even as many see education as a site of exclusion and frustration, they continue to see it as a site of hope and aspiration, especially in light of the current crisis. Many have also been at the forefront of reimagining and transforming the role of education for promoting more inclusive and peaceful futures.
What can we do to begin to respond to these crises? Is access to education enough? What skills will societies and young people need to tackle the needs ahead, particularly in conflict-affected settings? This event will bring together young people, global peacebuilding organizations and UN representatives to explore how the meaning of learning can be reimagined to build back more peaceful and resilient societies.

11:00 – 12:15 CET
Learning to Live Together – How educators can create safe, inclusive and empowering learning environments that foster social cohesion, a sense of belonging to a larger community and interconnectedness among learners
Building a Culture of Peace | Virtual | Maria Lucia Uribe Torres, Mary Kangethe, Mark Manns, Suchith Abeyewickreme, Vera Leal
This session is being organized by Arigatou International, UNESCO National Commission for Kenya and UNESCO Bangkok.

In this online interactive workshop, participants will be invited to reflect on the existing social divides and how they are at times interwoven with COVID-19 pandemic dynamics, whereby minority groups are being targeted and discriminated through hate speech and misinformation. Fears over the virus have added on to the existing aversions towards the ‘other’ who is seen as different.
Participants will explore how the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the interconnectedness of the world and its impact at both the global and local levels. They will reflect on how we deal with the visible social inequalities and how we relate to one another and nature. Through these reflections, participants will discuss the role of education in fostering social cohesion, a sense of belonging and interconnectedness; and will identify the elements of a transformative pedagogy that can foster children’s socio-emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
Participants will get familiar with several tools, including the Learning to Live Together Programme, the Happy Schools Framework for Learner Well-Being, as well as policies that are necessary and critical to support social cohesion through education. They will identify the positive role education should play in supporting children’s wellbeing, creating safe spaces for children from diverse backgrounds, cultivating interconnectedness, empathy and solidarity in children, providing meaningful opportunities to participate and collaborate, and creating spaces for children to put their agency into practice.
This interactive workshop will be customized to allow participants to engage in a dialogue about ethical considerations in situations that demand survival and affect our most basic needs -very similar to the contextual situations of the current pandemic during the disruption caused particularly to the education sector.
The workshop is designed following the ethics education pedagogical approach of Arigatou International, and will provide participants with first-hand experience of the transformative pedagogy as well as concrete tools to implement in formal and non-formal educational settings.

14:00 – 14:50 CET
Supporting peace through collaborative structures: Modelling mutual accountability to utilise Country Platforms for peacebuilding
 What Works in Peacebuilding | Virtual | Mareike Schomerus, Jonathan Papoulidis, Sharmarke Farah, Gideon Too, Teddy Atim
This session is organized by Busara Center and World Vision.

How can we use behavioural science to understand issues of trust and collaboration in fragile settings? This session seeks to answer this question by using a behavioural perspective to unpack different ways of understanding these challenges. Building on the accompanying podcast, which highlights the insights we can gain from thinking about international engagement in fragile settings using concepts from behavioural science, this session takes an interactive approach.
Through dialogue and audience engagement we seek to understand what mechanisms could support better collaborations for peacebuilding through Country Platforms. Utilising the experience of Country Platforms and drawing out the many collaborative challenges these both offer and help overcome, the session invites you to hands-on experimental work and practical knowledge sharing. Approaching trust and collaboration from many different angles will help foster exchange with the peacebuilding community on how Country Platforms can become vehicles for peacebuilding and how utilising behavioural science might help unpack some of the obstacles to making such collaborative approaches work.

15:00 – 17:00 CET
Geneva Peace Week Opening Ceremony
Special & Public Sessions | Virtual | Opening Remarks Tatiana Valovaya, Sami Kanaan, Claudia Seymour, Danson Gichini, Achim Wennmann, Jürg Lauber, Leoluca Orlando, Maria Luisa Silva, Marie-Laure Salles, Paolo Petralia Camassa, Pierre Hazan

This public session is organized by the Geneva Peace Week Consortium and will be streamed live, on the GPW homepage: www.genevapeaceweek.ch
The Geneva Peace Week Opening Ceremony will focus on this year’s theme: Rebuilding trust after disruption: Pathways to reset international cooperation. GPW20 aims to galvanize leadership, build trust and contribute to transforming international cooperation in the wake of covid-19. This session formally opens GPW20 and launches the reflection of this exciting week with key-note speeches, discussions, video contributions, and attendee participation and engagement. Stay tuned for the announcement on our dynamic lineup of speakers.

17:00 – 18:15 CET
Successful Implemention of the Global Fragility Act: Opportunities, Challenges and the Way Forward
 What Works in Peacebuilding | Virtual | Liz Hume, Richmond Blake, Corinne Graff, Tankel Stephen
This session is organized by Alliance for Peacebuilding, United States Institute of Peace.
The U.S. Global Fragility Act is a historic and long sought-after victory for the peacebuilding field and creates the first-ever comprehensive US government strategy to tackle and prevent global conflict. However, it must be successfully implemented.
This session will address peacebuilding and conflict prevention goals and objectives that are critical to the GFA and are directly related to the theme of GPW20 of “Rebuilding trust after disruption: Pathways to reset international cooperation,” including:
– How to safeguard conflict prevention and peacebuilding are effectively integrated into an overall multi sectoral development strategy?
– What are local stakeholders’ perceptions of the USG and other donors’ ability to effectively engage with local communities in planning and implementing these efforts and how do we ensure local stakeholders are effectively integrated into the design and implementation programming?
– How to ensure evidence-based and adaptive strategies for design monitoring and evaluation of programs are a priority?
– What concrete opportunities exist in countries in the Sahel and East Africa to deepen international coordination, scale conflict-sensitive investments and conflict prevention as part of the global response to COVID, and ensure integration?
The GFA offers an important opportunity to reenergize international cooperation around conflict prevention and peacebuilding in key fragile states. The principles embedded in the GFA –deeper consultations with international and local partners on the ground, and nimble policy and programs that are adaptive, locally led, and evidence-based– have gained wide acceptance across the international community but putting them into practice has proven difficult. With the help of expert panelists, this session will explore these questions and more around the GFA and its successful implementation.

18:30 – 19:45 CET
Improving prospects, social cohesion and peaceful coexistence for forcibly displaced persons and host communities
 What Works in Peacebuilding | Virtual
This session is organized by ILO, UNHCR, UNICEF, IFC, World Bank and the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

PROSPECTS is a program aiming to join the partners’ efforts to develop a new paradigm in responding to forced displacement crises through the involvement of development actors. Partners include The Netherlands, International Finance Corporation (IFC), ILO, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), UNICEF, and the World Bank (WB). The project is being implemented in 8 countries: Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Irak and Sudan. For refugees, the opportunity to access decent work is fundamental to their protection and well-being, to restore refugees’ dignity and life purpose. Being able to access employment, maintain and expand their skills and find a decent job prevent long gaps in education and economic activity. The opportunity to access decent work is integral to the restoration of human dignity, strengthening resilience. Further, working allows for more interaction between refugees and host communities and helps thereby foster a climate of trust and peaceful coexistence.
The objectives of the panel is 1) to introduce the innovative PROSPECTS approach focusing on conflict-sensitive durable solutions for social cohesion backed by more dignified, inclusive and comprehensive programmes for refugees and the communities that host them, and 2) to introduce partners (ILO, UNHCR. World Bank, IFC and UNICEF) country level initiatives contributing to inclusive development, social cohesion and peaceful coexistence. The Panel will be moderated by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

3 NOV
09:00 – 09:50 CET
“Failing is not Failure” – Learning from the Pandemic
 Building a Culture of Peace | Virtual | Takhmina Nasimova, Alistair Davison, Mark Clark, Talha Keskin, Mariyam Shahida Mohamed
The session is organized by Direct Democracy Global.

This session is focused on education programs in challenging environments post-COVID19. Education programs can fail due to insufficient adaptation of the program to the culture and environment of the vulnerable regions. However, Education for Peace and/or general education programs for people in crisis regions are ten times more likely to fail due to events such as global pandemics, natural disasters, and wars. It is important to address the challenges that children and youth face during these crises and rebuild the trust in the education system.

 

10:00 – 10:50 CET

PeaceTech – Governance for Peace in the Digital Age

Horizon Scan for Cyber Peace | Virtual | Evelyne Tauchnitz, Peter Kirchschlaeger, Anne Gloor, Jean-Yves Art, Lucas Kello, Luigi Narbone

This session is organized by Institute for Social Ethics, University of Lucerne; Centre for Technology and Global Affairs, University of Oxford; Graduate Institute (Alumni).

While it is undisputed that the digital revolution holds many opportunities, at the same time there are many risks that need to be taken into account. In a peaceful context and with a peaceful mindset, technological innovations may well help us to overcome the remaining challenges of humanity such as poverty, socio-economic inequalities and the degradation of environmental resources. In a violent context, however, where people live in insecurity and have to fight for scarce resources on a daily basis, new technologies are in danger to be used by the powerful to suppress the peoples’ demands for more justice, freedom and access to basic services and goods such as education, health, food and shelter. Since our world is not always and everywhere peaceful and people continue to fight and kill each other for reasons that range from existential threats to financial profit making, digital technologies have become in many cases a tool of violence and war.

12:30 – 13:45 CET
The essential role of fact-checking and media literacy for building resilience to mis/disinformation and to enhance trust
How to Build Peace | Virtual | Guillherme Canela De Souza Godoi, Libya Idris, Cédric Kalonji, Olivia Sohr
This session is organized by UNESCO, BBC Media Action, Fondation Hirondelle, The Graduate Press.

Numerous recent electoral processes worldwide and the Covid-19 pandemic have shown how mis/disinformation can undermine trust, spread divisive narratives, endanger democracy, undermine public health and enflame conflict dynamics. Populations of conflict-affected/prone contexts are especially vulnerable to the spread of mis/disinformation. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that conflict and prolonged unrest often leave countries ill-prepared to deal with public health emergencies, as populations have low trust in official information coming from their national authorities and are often exposed to flows of mis/disinformation coming from unverified sources. In these contexts, the lack of resilience of population to mis/disinformation can further fuel conflicts and jeopardize peace-building efforts.
The session aims to address these issues by learning from concrete lessons of projects implemented in conflict prone environments to increase resilience of populations to the mis/disinformation on Covid-19. To address this challenge, these projects aim to ensure that news media are perceived as a reliable and trustworthy source of information, provide fact-checked content, support the role of local fact-checking organisations to debunk false information and rumours circulating on social media platforms and promote media literacy among audiences.

15:00 – 16:30 CET
Prevention and sustaining peace: human rights in action
Virtual | Ilze Brands Kehris, Jürg Lauber, Tatiana Carayannis, Marcel Akpovo
This session is co-organized by the Quaker United Nations Office – Geneva (QUNO), the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation (DHF) and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Despite the centrality of human rights in the UN’s work to prevent the outbreak, escalation, continuation and recurrence of crisis and conflict has been increasingly acknowledged in recent years, policymakers and practitioners frequently still operate in silos and there is continued fragmentation in the UN system which impedes effective joint action and engagement on prevention, peacebuilding and sustaining peace. Exacerbating this, funding remains bifurcated, undermining cooperative and integrated programming approaches between human rights, justice and peacebuilding programming.
The side event jointly organized by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation (DHF) and Quaker United Nations Office – Geneva (QUNO) in cooperation with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is intended to highlight the intersections between human rights and peacebuilding; and how human rights can contribute to preventing the outbreak, escalation, continuation and recurrence of crisis and conflict – making the case for greater coherence across the UN’s three pillars.
Drawing on experiences from country level, the discussion is intended to demonstrate the value and impact of utilizing human rights tools in a range of sustaining peace efforts. The discussion should also identify opportunities for more effective and joined-up policy and operational approaches and action, and creative approaches to overcome identified challenges, including through utilizing entry points presented by ongoing policy and intergovernmental processes and fora in New York and Geneva.
Introductory remarks will be given by the Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights. A range of speakers will introduce the topic – followed by an interactive and candid discussion with participants under Chatham House Rules. Prior to the event, we encourage participants to read the background reading that can be found here.

17:00 – 18:15 CET
Building a Culture of Peace through Education: Youth Voices from five continents
 Building a Culture of Peace | Virtual | Phill Gittins, Patrick Kumi, Sparsh Ahuja, Stefan Radivojevic, Alan Yip, Anniela Carracedo, Amardeep Kainth, Sibylle Rupprecht, Alison Sutherland

This session is organized by World BEYOND War; the Rotary Action Group for Peace; the Swiss/Liechtenstein Rotarian Action Group for Peace; and Kainth Consulting.
There is no sustainable approach to peace and development that does not take into account the role of education and young people. Regarding the former, “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men …[and women]… than defences of peace must be constructed” (Constitution of UNESCO, 1945), educating toward a culture of peace is a core challenge for every nation and every citizen in every nation. Improving the meaningful inclusion of youth in building a culture of peace has become a global priority. Examples of this can be found in scholarly interventions, public debates, and policy documents, such as the SDG 16 (Promote just, peaceful and inclusive societies), Security Council resolutions 2250 (2015), 2419 (2018) and 2535 (2020) on Youth, Peace and Security (YPS).
This session is designed to bring new insights, thoughts, and key messages on building a culture of peace, from the perspectives of young people, from five continents (Africa, Oceania, Europe, Asia, and the Americas). Young people will tell us in their own words what they believe are the main barriers and opportunities for building a culture of peace where they live, and the role that education and young people can play in such efforts. In the process, young people will discuss a range of different education and peacebuilding projects that they are currently engaged in, with a particular focus on the Rotary Peace Projects Incubator (PPI). The objective of the PPI is to convene traditional and non-traditional peacebuilding actors to design actionable projects on the intersection of education, youth, and peacebuilding. This session is also designed to be a place for sharing, learning, and envisioning new possibilities. This will be done via a facilitated Q & A.
This session builds on another digital product, created for Geneva Peace Week: Pathways for Preventing War and Promoting Peace: A conversation with young people from five continents.

18:30 – 19:45 CET
Building peace in the world of big data, satellites, tweets and bots
Horizon Scan for Cyber Peace | Virtual | Paige Arthur, Branka Panic, Kate Keator, Emmanuel Letouzé, Yared Lemma Hurisa
This session is organized by The Center on International Cooperation at New York University.

Big data, satellites, tweets, and bots have already developed a track record for application in global development and humanitarian response. This session will explore their potential to become utilized by civil society, governments, private sector, and academia in peacebuilding field, for preventing conflict and sustaining peace.
Our hosts will introduce insights from a newly published paper on “Data for Peacebuilding and Prevention”, published by the NYU Center on International Cooperation. Our panelists will share their experiences as practitioners in peace and security who have sought to expand their toolkits to take advantage of the revolution in information gathering, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Along with the presentation of some of the cutting edge technologies and their current applications in peacebuilding and main actors, we will present a set of suggestions to further develop the capacities of existing actors, attract new ones, and build and advance the entire community of practice.

4 NOV
09:00 – 09:50 CET
Building Peace from the Middle: The Innovative Model of Country Brain Trusts
 A New Vision for Peacemaking | Virtual | Martha Maya, Dhana Jiménez, Phil Clark
This session is organized by Institute for Integrated Transitions, SOAS University London.

Research shows that ‘middle-tier’ leaders play a crucial role in bridging national and community-level peace processes. They do so at three levels: as educators, bridging agents and ethical exemplars. Yet, their role is often overlooked and under-appreciated, both domestically and internationally.
Against this backdrop, IFIT has pioneered an approach that creatively leverages the unique strengths of this special category of peace-builder: country brain trusts. A country brain trust consists of a diverse group of 15-18 multidisciplinary, middle-tier leaders from a particular country, chosen for their policy expertise, personal integrity, influential local networks and capacity to connect elites and ordinary citizens. Once the brain trust is in place, IFIT staff and thematic practice group experts offer different forms of technical and policy support, based on an evolving set of local priorities tied to an overall strategic aim (such as facilitating a political settlement or peace deal).
This session, comprised of a panel discussion followed by questions and answers, will present the brain trust model as a critical peace-building innovation tool by 1) discussing the overlooked but evermore important role of mid-level leaders in peace-building and 2) describing how pooling mid-level leaders in a purpose-built platform can add deep value and impact to a wide range of peace-building challenges.

10:00 – 10:50 CET
Taking Armed Non-State Actors Into Account: An Assessment of their Humanitarian Commitments
 Virtual | Anne de Riedmatten, Annyssa Bellal, Pascal Bongard, Ezequiel Heffes
This session is organized by Geneva Call, and the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.
That compliance with international law in armed conflict faces challenges from different quarters is not new. Enforcement and compliance are indeed the Achilles heel of this legal regime. Considering these difficulties, the international community has called for a more sustained engagement of armed non-State actors (ANSAs) on pressing humanitarian issues. Yet while it is undisputed that these entities are bound by IHL, how they understand, interpret or are able to implement these rules has not yet been systematically explored. ANSAs’ views and practices, indeed, have generally been neglected in the development of tools to actually engage them. Interestingly, during peace or cease-fire negotiations, ANSAs may be more open to discuss about humanitarian issues. This can be explained by analyzing a variety of issues, such as the goals of the actor at that given time.

11:00 – 12:15 CET
Collaboration, adaptation and innovation for better peacebuilding: using lessons from the Smart Peace experience to inform wider peacebuilding efforts
 A New Vision for Peacemaking | Virtual | Laura Aumeer, Saadgi Rajani, Kennedy Tumutegyereize, Chloé Chambraud
This session is organized by Conciliation Resources, Chatham House, and the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue.

If collaboration, adaptation and innovation are the key to better peacebuilding in these changing times, what are the challenges we face in being collaborative, adaptive and innovative and how can we overcome these? During this interactive session we will explore these challenges and lessons, and ask audience members to bring their own experiences of what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to innovative peacebuilding. The panellists bring varied experiences of peacebuilding across Myanmar, Nigeria and Central African Republic (CAR), and together represent both practitioner and evaluation perspectives on peacebuilding, from organisations Conciliation Resources, Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD) and the Behavioural Insights Team, all consortium members on Smart Peace. Panellists will share key lessons, including from adaptation to COVID-19, and discuss how these can be used to implement peace strategies with greater confidence, inform future funding decisions and further strengthen international cooperation.
Smart Peace is a collaboration of organisations with global expertise in conflict analysis and research, peacebuilding and mediation programming, and behavioural science and evaluation, working to address the changing complexities of peacebuilding. This live session will present emerging evidence from the Smart Peace programme on how to foster collaboration, innovation and adaptation in peacebuilding programming, including steps taken during the Covid-19 pandemic.

12:30 – 13:45 CET
Building Bridges: Integrating Arms Control and Conflict Prevention
 A New Vision for Peacemaking | Virtual | Simon Yazgi, Allegra Maria del Pilar Baiocchi, Frederic Ngoga Gateretse, Georgette Gagnon, Kenneth Gluck
This session is organized by United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research; Permanent Mission of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the United Nations Office and to the other international organizations in Geneva; Permanent Mission of Switzerland to the United Nations Office and to the other international organizations in Geneva.

The UN Secretary-General has called for renewed engagement on preventing conflict and advancing sustainable development. Central to this is a “comprehensive conflict prevention strategy that includes early warning, preventive deployment, mediation, peacekeeping, non-proliferation, accountability measures as well as post-conflict peacebuilding”. Moreover, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustaining Peace Agenda propose to create synergies between the development, peace and security and disarmament agendas, and, in his Agenda for Disarmament, the Secretary-General has called for better integration of conventional arms control in conflict prevention.
In response, UNIDIR is conducting research on Integrating Conventional Arms Control into Conflict Prevention and Management to increase the understanding of how conventional arms control measures can contribute to conflict prevention and peacebuilding processes. This session has three related objectives:
(i) enhance dialogue among the peace, security and development communities on the linkages between conventional arms control, conflict prevention and development;
(ii) generate ideas on how to better integrate arms control into development, prevention and peacebuilding strategies and activities;
(iii) promote awareness of UNIDIR’s research efforts and preliminary findings on this subject and generate new ideas for this.

14:00 – 14:50 CET
People Power, Peace Processes and Democratization
 A New Vision for Peacemaking | Virtual | Jonathan Pinckney, Veronique Dudouet, Mohammed Farouk Salman
This session is organized by United States Institute of Peace, and the Berghof Foundation.

Grassroots pressure and participation are crucial tools for ensuring the sustainability of peacebuilding processes and the long-term development of the representative, democratic political institutions that can prevent conflict recurrence. People power, applied through nonviolent action by grassroots actors using tools such as protests, strikes, and boycotts can ensure accountability for conflict parties during negotiations, address deep underlying grievances, and demand substantive political changes. Yet how to incorporate such nonviolent action with peacebuilding processes for sustained democratic change is still poorly understood by many. In this session we will present the results of cutting-edge research into the intersection of people power, peace processes, and democratization, providing lessons learned for peacebuilders and activists in how to leverage the power-shifting potential of nonviolent action with traditional peacebuilding tools of dialogue, negotiation, and mediation. The research results will serve as an initial frame for an interactive facilitated discussion where session participants can share their own reactions on how to incorporate people power for democratic change in their peacebuilding work.
The panel will begin with a brief presentation introducing participants to core concepts of people power and their potential points of integration with peacebuilding practices, as well as the specific findings on how people power and peacebuilding tools facilitate democratic change, using broad cross-national research and commentary from a leader in Sudan’s recent nonviolent revolution. Discussion with the audience will focus on common themes of how to apply the findings in peacebuilding more broadly, identifying potential points of collaboration across peacebuilding organizations and between peacebuilding organizations and local grassroots movements.

15:00 – 16:45 CET
GPW Global Town Hall Meeting: A New Vision for Peacemaking
 A New Vision for Peacemaking | Virtual | Achim Wennmann, Claudia Seymour
This session is organized by the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform.

The challenges of effective peace mediation and peacemaking in today’s complex geopolitical context are increasing. The realities of contemporary conflict include the fragmentation of conflict actors, the increase of proxy wars, and a new digital dimension of warfighting. All these realities are shaping many gray zones between the state-and non-state dimensions of conflict, and blurred lines between the licit and illicit. Formerly espoused assumptions about the rules of war and peace are more difficult to hold up, and the securitization of political agendas and the politicization of international law have made the field of peacemaking especially fraught.
In the face of this changing strategic landscape for peacemaking, this Global Town Hall Meeting asks

• What are the peacemaking competences the world needs most right now?
• How – if at all – does peacemaking practice need to adapt to changing global, regional or local orders?
• What moral guidance do mediators and peacemakers need to do their job well?
• How can we inspire and support the next generation of peacemakers?

The GPW Global Town Hall Meeting is also an opportunity to reflect on key insights half-way through Geneva Peace Week 2020.
The meeting aims to gather the elements for potential further conveings on this topic in 2021. The GPW Global Town Hall Meeting is moderated by Dr Achim Wennmann and Dr Claudia Seymour of the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform. It will also feature several interactive features for mediation practitioners in conflict contexts to contribute to the conversation.

18:30 – 19:45 CET
Insider Mediation: Building Peace from the Inside
 Virtual | Samuel Rizk, Tatien Nkeshimana, Dzikamai Bere, Aram Ahmed, Malam Souley
This session is organized by Search for Common Ground, Berghof Foundation, Interpeace and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Please join our participative panel discussion on Building Peace from the Inside, where we will be discussing new possibilities and successful pathways to lasting peace. Three local expert practitioners will join us in this live session from Burundi, Zimbabwe, and Yemen to share and reflect on their experiences in finding solutions, preventing emerging conflict, and seizing unique opportunities for new forms of collaboration in an age of turbulence.
Moderated by Samuel Rizk from UNDP, this session will discuss the work of Insider Mediators who bring influence, legitimacy, courage and unique skills to trigger the changes in attitudes and behaviours required for meaningful conflict transformation. Because of their own networks and on the ground expertise, Insider Mediators can work at various levels, including as part of high-level mediation processes. In fact, Insider Mediators are a powerful example of the innate abilities of a society to imagine new possibilities and successful, collaborative pathways to sustainable development and lasting peace.
Tune in and find out more about the role of Insider Mediators in peace processes. This session will take place in both English and French.
Cette session est organisée par Search for Common Ground, la Fondation Berghof, Interpeace et le Programme des Nations Unies pour le développement (PNUD).
Participez à notre panel de discussion participative sur le thème “Construire la paix de l’intérieur”, où nous aborderons les nouvelles possibilités et voies à explorer pour une paix durable. Trois experts locaux du Burundi, du Zimbabwe et du Yémen se joindront à cette session en direct pour partager et approfondir leurs expériences dans la recherche de solutions, la prévention des conflits émergents et la saisie d’opportunités uniques pour de nouvelles formes de collaboration dans une ère de bouleversements.
Modérée par Samuel Rizk du PNUD, cette session abordera le travail des médiateurs internes qui, par leur influence, leur légitimité, leur courage et leurs compétences uniques, contribuent à changer les attitudes et les comportements nécessaires à une transformation significative des conflits. En raison de leurs propres réseaux et de leur expertise sur le terrain, les médiateurs internes peuvent travailler à différents niveaux, y compris dans des processus de médiation de haut niveau. En effet, les médiateurs internes sont un excellent exemple de la capacité innée d’une société à envisager de nouvelles opportunités et des voies de collaboration pertinentes pour une paix durable.
Connectez-vous et apprenez-en plus sur le rôle des médiateurs internes dans les processus de paix. Cette session se déroulera en anglais et en français.

5 NOV
11:00 – 12:15 CET
Value-based Peace Education for Children & Youth: applying Montessori 150 years on
 Virtual | Alain Tschudin, Hombakazi Siguntu, Luyanda Xoko, Fay Hendriksen
This session is organized by WITS School of Governance and Assocation Montessori Internationale AMI)/Educateurs Dans Frontieres (ESF).

31 August 2020 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Dr Maria Montessori, Italian physician, pioneering scientist, front-running feminist and pedagogue extraordinaire. This session at GPW2020 is intended to explore the value of Montessori’s methodological approach to child development and youth formation to contemporary young lives in the 21st century.
The session builds on a session co-hosted at GPW last year, which saw Ela Gandhi and a panel discuss her grandparents’ life practice of non-violence and its transformative impact for peace during their 150th anniversary year. Maria Montessori and the Mahatma Gandhi corresponded and met, and her sojourn in India greatly impacted upon her work, as is evident in Education for Peace and her several nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. Although she was never awarded the prize, her legacy is recognition enough of the value of her life’s work to promote peace. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, himself a Nobel laureate for literature, remarks, “I do not believe there is a method better than Montessori for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life.”
The peacebuilding aims of the workshop are to promote the notion of a non-violent, value-based educational formation for children and youth by promoting the pedagogy of Maria Montessori in communities that may be vulnerable or at risk. Young people are viewed as proactive change agents in their broader family, community, societal and ecological circles.
The workshop itself seeks to unpack gains made in implementing a Montessori ECD programme in the rural Eastern Cape, South Africa and discusses the challenges encountered by educators and related team members in dialogue with representatives of Educateurs sans frontieres (ESF)/Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) and related child-development partners.

14:00 – 14:50 CET
Horizontal Trust: Supporting people-to-people peacebuilding amid disruption
 Virtual | Mai Tarig Amir Taha, Gerard Mc Hugh, Abdalla Elsafi, Elizabeth Wright
This session is organized by Conflict Dynamics International and Life & Peace Institute.

In 2018, 2019, and 2020, mass demonstrations broke out across the globe; the result of despair and lack of trust between people in crisis and their political representatives.
Civilian distrust in government leadership has led to the development of stronger horizontal social contracts (person-to-person) in an attempt to address the crises that vertical engagement (person-to-political representative) was incapable of resolving. These disruptive events have been powerful, in many cases bringing real long-term change; Sudan, Lebanon, and the United States are stark examples of mobilizations that are in the process of bringing about seismic shifts to their political systems. In this context, how can peace practitioners effectively encourage horizontal trust and person-to-person peacebuilding to bring positive change? What do these different orientations mean for how peace practitioners can engage and support people in conflict contexts?
This session will focus on exploring how peacebuilders identify actionable moments during public disruption, in order to build horizontal trust and strengthen bonds to be more functional, sustainable, and lead to long-term, positive change. Lessons from Sudan on supporting actions for peace at the local community level will be used to guide an open discussion on supporting local and national efforts around ‘people to people’ peacebuilding.

15:00 – 16:45 CET
GPW Global Town Hall Meeting – Harnessing the economy for peace: Elements for a new policy agenda
Virtual | Achim Wennmann
This session draws together the discussions of four briefings held prior to GPW in a ‘town-all’ style digital event with a forward looking forward to gathering the elements for a prospective policy agenda and ideas for a collaborative exchange in 2021.

The confluence of COVID19 with multiple other man-made or natural disasters are fostering ever deeper economic crises in ever more countries. At the same time, geo-strategic shifts are shaping competitive dynamics between market systems not seen since the Cold War. In the face of these rapid transformations, the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform convenes a discussion about harnessing market forces for peace and asks if and how corporations should step up their game to ensure for-profit investments also play a bigger role in generating social benefits and inclusive economic growth.
These reflections stand on the foundations of research and policy work that has grown in various constituencies over the last three decades. These include, for instance, international policy work and local activities in the fields of business and human rights, business and peace, trade for peace, or peace entrepreneurship as well as corporate practice in crises management, peacebuilding and community dialogue. At the same time, some investors will no longer place their money into firms that pollute the environment, produce arms or fail to have broader social impact. Yet when looking at these foundations, a landscape of sectoral specializations and professional silos emerges that appears to be ‘unfit’ for purpose to address the economic challenges in an era of great transformation.
GPP initiates a cross-cutting exchange on “Harnessing the economy for peace” in order to encourage the research and policy community in Geneva and beyond to step out of their silos and explore new policy connections across institutions and sectors. The exchanges build on ten event submissions to GPW20 on economic issues that could not be processed as individual events but are taken forward as a joint conversation.
The GPW Global Town Hall Meeting is moderated by Dr Achim Wennmann of the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform.

18:30 – 19:45 CET
Cultivating Nonviolent Action and Peacebuilding Skills and Strategies
 How to Build Peace | Virtual | Sabrine Laribi, Nick Zaremba, Liz Hume
This session is organized by the Alliance for Peacebuilding and the United States Institute of Peace.

Boycotts or negotiations? Pressure or engagement? Which approaches, and in what sequence, are most effective for building a just and sustainable peace?
Building just, inclusive, and peaceful societies requires people who are willing and able to use a wide variety of approaches, including direct action, relationship building, dialogue, and negotiation. However, these activities are sometimes seen as separate or incompatible. Grassroots activists may know how to engage in protests and other forms of nonviolent direct action, but they may have less experience facilitating a delicate meeting featuring diverse groups and opinions. Peacebuilders may excel at dialogue or negotiation, but they may get stuck when one group has more power than another, making it difficult to reach a just resolution.
This practical workshop will draw upon lessons from USIP’s Synergizing Nonviolent Action and Peacebuilding (SNAP) global training program to illustrate how the most strategic and effective methods from both fields can reinforce one another to advance justice, promote human rights, and build sustainable peace. Specifically, the presenters will share how training activists and grassroots peacebuilders in conflict and power analysis, strategic planning, methods of nonviolent resistance, and dialogue and negotiation skills can contribute to movement building and conflict transformation.
Participants of this short workshop will be exposed to the SNAP curriculum, workshop methodology, and select workshop exercises; discuss contextualization of nonviolent action and peacebuilding workshops and how workshop participants apply skills and relationships built from the workshops in their work in Latin America, Tunisia, and Sudan; hear lessons in workshop participant network curation and relationship building; and learn about the SNAP program’s impact evaluation process as well as best practices for co-designing monitoring and evaluation with workshop participants. 

6 NOV
10:15 – 11:15 CET
Monthly Environment, Climate, Conflict, and Peace (ECCP) Meeting
Environment, Climate, Conflict and Peacebuilding | Virtual | Annika Erickson-Pearson
This session is organized by the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform, and is a monthly meeting of the Geneva Dialogue on Environment, Climate, Conflict, and Peace, open to the public.

As part of its mandate on community management, the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform aims to strengthen networking and community building in different topics within the peacebuilding sector. The Geneva Dialogue on Environment, Climate, Conflict, and Peace aims to improve and expand the reach of both peacebuilding projects towards environmental and climate sensitivity, and also environmental and climate projects towards peacebuilding sensitivity by fostering inter-institutional collaboration and dialogue, promoting learning and innovation, and mainstreaming these topics across the board.

12:45 – 13:45 CET
Conservation and peacebuilding: Towards greater collaboration
 Environment, Climate, Conflict and Peacebuilding | Virtual | Hesta Groenewald, Dr. Juha Siikamäki, Lydia Cardona, Josephine Ekiru, Dr. Julia Gorricho
This session is organized by PeaceNexus Foundation, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Conservation International.

The world is facing a double environmental and health crisis that is deepening divisions and inequality, and accelerating dynamics towards more conflict and less cooperation. Yet there are also opportunities to pool knowledge and develop comprehensive responses to this crisis by bringing together those who work to protect the environment with those working for peace and social justice. These two constituencies tend to work in parallel, with little awareness of how their work could be mutually supportive. Some peacebuilding work considers the links between conflict and the use of particular natural resources such as water or land – but do not typically engage with conservation or environment-focused organisations on addressing these issues. Some conservation work considers conflict risks and promotes peacebuilding approaches such as peace parks – but do not consistently draw on peacebuilding tools or maximise the peacebuilding potential of their conservation tools. This session aims to provide insights into how the conservation and peacebuilding communities could work together more closely and better learn from each other to address both conservation and peacebuilding challenges. By bringing the voices of the conservation actors into GPW, the session will add perspectives and insights that would not otherwise be heard and will offer unique networking and interaction opportunities between conservation and peacebuilding actors.

14:00 – 15:15 CET
Peace and climate action: challenges and opportunities from Latin America
Environment, Climate, Conflict and Peacebuilding | Virtual | Karen Chica Gómez, Astrid Puentes, Yolanda Kakabadse, José Francisco Calí Tzay
This session is organised by the Latin American Network Initiative, the Environmental Committee (GISA), the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO) and PeaceNexus Foundation.

The event will explore local, national and international perceptions and practices in relation to climate action, with a regional focus on Latin America. We will consider how differing positions, including the Indigenous People’s, the legal expert and the policy maker, can affect the perception, definition and in turn the experience of climate action in influencing conflict or peacebuilding. Panelists will share personal experiences, followed by breakout groups with the audience.
The event aims are threefold: to increase understanding of the policy and practice options for conflict-sensitive, rights-based climate action; to provide an opportunity for participants from different disciplines and backgrounds to share their knowledge and experience on conflict-sensitive, rights-based climate action; and finally, to create a space for creative thinking and networking among practitioners, researchers, students, and other stakeholders.

15:30 – 17:00 CET
Geneva Peace Week Closing Ceremony
 Virtual | Carl Bruch, Inger Andersen, Nazhat Shameem Khan, Hani Abbas, Irene Ojuok, Darlene Sanderson, Nadim Farajalla, Vadim Sokolov, Alvaro Umaña, Achim Wennmann, Claudia Seymour, Annika Erickson-Pearson, Juan Mayr Maldonado, Lea Perekrests, Johanna Lissinger Peitz
This session is organized by the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform and will be streamed live, on the GPW homepage: www.genevapeaceweek.ch

The final day of Geneva Peace Week 2020, held on the International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict, will be devoted to innovations, conversations, and solutions in environmental peacebuilding. A combined 45 institutions will host, curate, and facilitate conversations and sessions both live and in contributions to our pre-recorded Geneva Peace Week 2020 digital series. The day will culminate in a closing ceremony, held online in the afternoon (CET) on 6 November.
A major stop on the Environmental Peacebuilding Association’s Road to Geneva, an international series of events leading up to the Second International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding, the 6th of November will offer an opportunity to highlight environmental peacebuilding to key stakeholders in the Geneva and international community, including representatives from permanent missions, journalists, environmental peacebuilding practitioners, researchers, and many more.
The vision for the closing ceremony includes a mix of media, including live interviews and discussions, pre-recorded videos, and audience participation through online chat features. The ceremony will range from Geneva to the international levels and feature global thought leaders, technical experts, and peacebuilders in their own communities. The closing ceremony aims to focus the conversation on impact and policy, pushing the collective community of practice towards what comes next.