Conference Program

Build Peace 2026: Enabling Encounters

Each year Build Peace focuses on one central theme and three sub-themes, linked to the location where the conference takes place. To help curate this year’s program, the Kindred Centre for Peace Advancement has convened a Local Advisory Committee. Recent crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics point to the fact that we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition in the international rules-based order. Ruptures are also increasingly evident within our communities, organizations, and even our inner selves. How can peacebuilders, technologists, and artists enable meaningful encounters in the midst of a world increasingly marked by ruptures? 

We invite you into a space where we can dwell in the dissonance of this reality. While we may aspire to bridge gaps or to sand down the rough edges that divide us, perhaps we need to start with something more tentative and provisional. The conference will lay the groundwork for deeper understanding and the possibility of generative connections by enabling:

Encounters between rural and urban. Economic prospects and political fault lines increasingly align with distinct geographies. How can both rural and urban sensibilities inform our peacebuilding, technology, and art?

Encounters between origins and diasporas. Global mobility, as well as displacement and dispossession, has fuelled both opportunities and challenges. How can the capacity of individuals and communities who find themselves in new contexts play a constructive role in old contexts, and vice versa?

Encounters between resisters and fixers. In response to the role that technology is playing as a driver of conflict, resisters are eager to mobilize publics and advocate for practices and policies that get in the way, while fixers have a penchant for diving in and developing solutions to particular problems that move the needle in a better direction. How can we get better at both opting out and opting in?

Across these three sub-themes, we will particularly welcome perspectives, approaches and actors (including migrant, diaspora, indigenous and spiritual) that are often underrepresented in international conversations about cultivating a culture of peace.