The world’s systems meant to safeguard peace are failing us. The institutions charged with mediation and protection are too often absent, broken, or reinforcing the very inequalities and violence they should prevent. In the face of this crisis, movements, communities, and everyday peacebuilders are already working to imagine and practice alternatives. The history of the peace movement and the anti-apartheid movement teaches us that it is through peoples’ power from below and beyond borders that we can win the struggle for justice, peace and freedom from war and want.
As Martin Luther King Jnr famously said, "Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war".
This is our urgent contemporary challenge — and the opportunity —at the heart of the Towards a People’s Peace initiative. Over the past year, a growing constellation of movements, indigenous leaders, youth networks, researchers, artists and community defenders have begun to ask:
What if we co-created a “Global Ministry” of Peace — not rooted in top-down institutions, but in the lived wisdom of people resisting violence, practicing real grassroots alternatives, and weaving justice every day?
In Phase I, together we held five online webinars and a live session at the Copenhagen People Power Conference. We surfaced powerful insights and energy for this vision.
Now, as we step into Phase II, we invite you to help shape what comes next:
- Revisit and build on the insights and shared knowledge from past webinars and consultations
- Explore and refine the emerging vision of a grassroots-led “Global Ministry” of Peace
- Share how this initiative could strengthen your work, your community, and our collective movements for peace and justice
(“Ministry” - something that serves as an agency, an instrument, a service, a function, a body or means. Dictionary.com)
