Geneva Peace Week, the leading annual forum on international peacebuilding, is a flagship initiative of the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform in collaboration with the Graduate Institute’s Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP). This year, the series of events will take place from the 2nd to the 6th of November.

Click here for more information on GPW2020.

Overview of the CCDP’s Geneva Peace Week events:

Building Trust in Cybermediation: A Collective Leadership Challenge?

Tuesday 3 November 2020, 14:00-14:50

This session is organized by CyberMediation Network, swisspeace; the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue; Build Up, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta (CSIS); DiploFoundation; the European External Action Service (EEAS); ICT4Peace; the Mediation Support Unit of the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs.

This panel will explore how mediators can build trust in Cybermediation, by discussing past mediation experiences from an interdisciplinary perspective.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge of CyberMediation activities. Given the global lockdown and widespread travel restrictions, many mediators and mediation support actors increasingly rely on digital technologies to keep up the communication with conflict parties and stakeholders. They have also scaled up their digital inclusion activities. Yet, digital technologies remain largely associated with the possible risks that they can pose to a peace process, namely related to the security of communication and the safety of participants. Digital technologies, and especially social media, also have well documented polarizing effects and have been instrumental in mobilizing for armed conflict and violence, rather than against it. The increasing use of digital tools may thus further reduce the trust in mediation efforts. Nevertheless, trust is exactly what is required to bring conflict parties to the negotiation table and engage them in dialogue. While trust was traditionally built under the leadership of an eminent person or senior mediator, building trust online seems to require a collective “leadership” by technology designers, providers and users.

Moderator: Andreas Hirblinger, Post-doctoral Researcher, Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding

Speakers:

Deqa Yasin Hagi Yusuf, Minister of Women and Human Rights Development, Federal Government of Somalia

Miriam Coronel-Ferrer, Member, United Nations Mediation Support Unit Standby Team

Vladimir Radunović, E-diplomacy and Cybersecurity Programmes Director, DiploFoundation

Mirko Manzoni, UN Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General for Mozambique

The Future of Peacebuilding in Global Asia: Fostering An Inclusive Dialogue between the Liberal Peace and Alternative Approaches

Wednesday 4 November 2020, 11:00-12:15

This session is organized by the Graduate Institute’s Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP); University of Manchester, and Waseda University.

The session seeks to explore the intersection of two broader trends in contemporary peacebuilding. The first is the “local” and “hybrid” turns through which scholars and practitioners have aspired to transcend Eurocentric concepts, discourses, and practices deeply ingrained in the mainstream “liberal peace” paradigm. The second is the rise of “alternative” peacebuilders– such as China, Japan, and India – who are increasingly active in promoting the agendas for sustaining peace both within and beyond Asia. This trend is expected to be further accelerated by the global corona crisis, in which Asian nations have so far suffered relatively less than their North American and Western European counterparts.

Despite these new trends, existing research and debate on peace and peacebuilding continue to suffer from the deficits of binary thinking rife in the field – such as European liberalism vs Asian developmentalism or the liberal peace vs the “illiberal peace” – which have constrained our ability to think openly and creatively in search for a common future. These constraining straightjackets have largely impeded scholars and practitioners from engaging in an open dialogue which could potentially foster productive mutual learning. By privileging dialogical and non-binary perspectives on the future of peacebuilding in global(izing) Asia, the panelists in this session seek to foster an inclusive discussion on the following questions: How does the rise of global(izing) Asia affect the international peacebuilding architecture? How do peacebuilders with different worldviews and priorities learn from each other? What are challenges and opportunities for peace and security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (and beyond)? Featuring panelists of diverse backgrounds who have worked extensively on Asia and peacebuilding, the session offers fresh insights and locally-grounded perspectives on the future of peacebuilding in global Asia.

Moderator: Keith Krause, Professor, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Director, Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding

Speakers:

Oliver Richmond, Research Professor of International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies Department of Politics and International Relations, The University of Manchester

Yuji Uesugi, Professor, Waseda University

Kazushige Kobayashi, Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP)

Xinyu Yuan, Doctoral Researcher, Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP)

How to participate?

This year's Live Sessions will all take place online exclusively. Attendees can engage in live panel discussions and workshops once they have registered.

A Digital Series will also be launched for GPW on 2 November! This series will present GPW’s partner organisers’ peacebuilding expertise and stories through research, pre-recorded videos, podcasts, and other media. The digital series will be free to view, listen, download, and interact with on this website during and after GPW20. 

Register here

Other Geneva Peace Week collaborators include the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG), the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF); the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP); Interpeace; and the Quaker United Nations Office, Geneva (QUNO).