Rethinking Peace at the Basel Peace Forum 2018

The second edition of the Basel Peace Forum took place on 14 and 15 January 2018 in the Basel Museum of Art and the Conference Centre Basel. Its aim was to inspire new and unconventional ideas for peacebuilding, connecting carefully selected leading personalities and decision-makers from business, diplomacy, academia, and civil society.

During the two days, the forum assembled more than 160 participants from more than 20 countries, working in seven different sectors. Amongst them were Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Daniel Högsta; UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, Adama Dieng; Chief of Political Affairs at the Office of the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Robert Dann; as well as Syrian architect and author, Marwa Al-Sabouni.

The forum was centered around four innovation forums that elaborated on the nexus between artificial intelligence and peace; architecture, urban planning and peace; health, migration and peace; as well as extractive industries, risk and peace. In the subsequent workshops, those forums led to fruitful discussions and concrete ideas for future action paths that will be published on the Basel Peace Forum website shortly.

Besides key notes and speeches by leading experts in the field of peacebuilding, the forum consisted of interactive pavilions, which invited visitors to discuss topics such as emotions in peacebuilding, arts in peacebuilding, sports in peacebuilding, new technologies in peacebuilding as well as nuclear disarmament. It also gave plenty of room for networking, artistic performances and even a meditation session.

Moreover, the Basel Peace Forum was accompanied by two side events, the premier of the movie «Taste of Cement» that witnesses the life of Syrian refugees working on construction sites in Beirut as well as a lecture by Syrian writer Hamed Abboud, who read from his book «Der Tod backt einen Geburtstagskuchen».

Sustaining Peace: Partnerships for Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding

On 8 December, QUNO cosponsored an event on sustaining peace coordinated in partnership with the President of the United Nations General Assembly’s Office, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), the UN Foundation, Global Compact, and New York University’s Center for International Cooperation. The discussion focused on the topics of conflict prevention and partnerships for sustaining peace, and featured experts from civil society, academia, members of the private sector, and UN colleagues. In the first panel, participants focused particularly on how different actors can best contribute to the preventive aspects of building long-term sustainable peace. The second panel, respecting the critical role of inclusivity and partnerships that were mentioned in the first panel, focused on how to build such partnerships for peace. This half-day event was one of many avenues that will be taken to contribute towards developments ahead of the High-Level Meeting on Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace, which will be held in 2018. QUNO looks forward to continuing to support such efforts, with a particular focus on the need for inclusive, partnership based peacebuilding approaches.