The call for proposals has been released for Build Peace 2026, the 13th edition of an annual conference that will bring peacebuilders, technologists, and artists from around the world to Waterloo from November 13-15.
This year’s conference is co-organized by Build Up and the Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement, with the support of the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the Global Centre for Pluralism.
The Build Peace conference explores emergent challenges to peace in a digital era, and peacebuilding innovations to address these challenges. It holds an interdisciplinary space to address the most pressing topics and transformative practices in peace, conflict and innovation.
This year’s conference theme is “Enabling Encounters.” 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?
Contributors and participants will be invited into a space where they can dwell in the dissonance of this reality. 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, the organizers 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.
Applications are due by May 22 for proposals to present short talks, workshops, and art installations or performances at the conference. Registration for the conference will open in June.
