Tag: positive peace

Intergenerational Dialogue for Well-Being Futures: Reflections from Workshop

On 19th September, scholars, researchers and practitioners gathered in Mansfield College, Oxford, for a workshop on Intergenerational Dialogue for Well-Being Futures. This event was co-convened in partnership with the Journal of Dialogue Studies, which will publish a special issue (Vol. 14, 2025) on the same theme.

My motivation for guest-editing this issue arises from five years of work with the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative. At the heart of Initiative are the Collective Healing Circles (CHCs), intergenerational spaces created in communities across Africa, the Americas, and Europe. In these circles, people of all ages come together to acknowledge historical mass atrocities, recognise continued wounds, reclaim ancestral wisdom and human dignity, transcend divisions, and co-imagine shared flourishing. They have shown me both the transformative potential and the challenges of intergenerational dialogue and inspired me to bring these questions into wider academic and policy exploration.

A workshop structured as a journey

Prof Youssef Mahmoud offering words of wisdom in his keynote speech

Following an inspiring keynote from Youssef Mahmoud, former UN Under-Secretary-General, the academic workshop’s programme followed a deliberate arc:

  • Contexts – situating dialogue in linguistic, historical, ethical, grassroots, digital, and spiritual arenas.
  • Conceptualisations – examining how intergenerational dialogue is conceived epistemologically, ethically, and culturally, and how it can serve healing, and transformation.
  • Practices – exploring how dialogue is enacted and transmitted through arts, memory, and creative media.
  • Futures – considering how intergenerational dialogue might serve as a foundation for justice, solidarity, and flourishing societies.

This progression created space not only for rich scholarly exchange, but also for deep reflection on the ethical, methodological, and political dimensions of dialogue across generations.

Insights across the sessions

Several themes resonated across the day:

  • Transmission and transformation: Dialogue mediates the tension between preserving ancestral wisdom and inherited knowledge and transforming it for the future.
  • Agency and co-authorship: Who has the authority to decide what is remembered, transmitted, or reinterpreted? Intergenerational dialogue demands genuine co-authorship.
  • Dialogue as ethical practice: Listening, translation, ritual, and creativity are not just methods, but ethical commitments.
  • Challenges of reconciliation: Dialogues are often uncomfortable — grappling with guilt, silence, or denial — yet necessary for relational repair.
  • Futures through justice: Dialogue is not only about the past; it is a path to recognition, resilience, and flourishing futures.

One aspect that remains insufficiently addressed is the overwhelming domination of structural injustice, which continues to define the lived experience of the global majority. While academic research offers decolonial critique and systemic analysis, the challenge ahead lies in reimagining global governance that can respond to these realities.

Looking ahead

For me, one of the most moving aspects of the workshop was how much it echoed the spirit of the UNESCO Collective Healing Circles. We saw how dialogue is never neutral: it carries risks of stereotyping or tokenising, but also profound possibilities for recognition, resilience, and transformation. We saw how young people are not simply listeners or translators, but co-creators of meaning and futures. And we saw how elders are not only custodians of memory, but partners in reshaping change.

As we move forward, the next step is to revise and deepen the papers in light of the workshop conversations. Guided by the Journal of Dialogue Studies framework, the special issue will ensure that contributions are theoretically rich, methodologically and ethically strong, and — most importantly — relevant to the question at the heart of our gathering: how intergenerational dialogue can nurture well-being futures in contexts marked by structural injustice.

I am grateful to all who joined us in Oxford, for your generosity, insights, and presence. This is not the end, but part of a continuing journey to explore and enact intergenerational dialogue as a vital resource for our shared futures.

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Academic Workshop: Intergenerational Dialogue for Well-Being Futures: Theories, Practices and Policy Pathways

Photo credit: Wikipedia

19th September 2025, Mansfield College, Oxford

The Journal of Dialogue Studies, in partnership with the GHfP Institute, the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace and UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative, invites contributions for a special issue exploring the role of intergenerational dialogue in shaping collective well-being futures.

We recognise that despite global commitments to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), progress remains impeded by persistent barriers, including transgenerational trauma, structural injustice, gender inequality, limited youth engagement, and fragmented political responses. In the face of these obstacles, intergenerational dialogue is increasingly important as it creates facilitated spaces for younger and older people to encounter and learn from each other. Such dialogue allows the community to draw insights from multiple generations, diverse cultural traditions, and rich cosmological worldviews towards building better futures. 

This special issue is inspired by the power and potential of intergenerational dialogue. It is a response to the call of the United Nations Pact for the Future, which underscores the necessity of equitable intergenerational processes and collaborative approaches to multilateral governance to ensure sustainable peace, structural justice, and inclusive well-being. 

International Academic Workshop Programme – Intergenerational Dialogue for Well-Being Futures Theories, Practices, and Policy Pathways – University of Oxford – 19 September 2025 (2)Download
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A Global Study on Futures-Forming Leadership

This year, the GHfP Institute has engaged in a global study, commissioned by UNESCO, to explore youth’s needs for leadership development. What marks this research unique is that it has involved youth co-researchers throughout, from identifying research questions, to designing the research questionnaire, from hosting focus-groups, to analysing the data and identifying themes and proposing recommendations. Furthermore, this global study intentionally focuses on the voices of youth from marginalised communities.

Over 1,500 young people across every world region contributed to this research through a desk review, survey questionnaire, focus groups, and in-depth interviews. Their message is clear: leadership must be reimagined. No longer hierarchical, elitist, or tokenistic, youth envision leadership as relational, dialogical, and futures-forming — a practice that is grounded in care for people and the planet. In fact, this study reveals that young people are already leading change today, often under extraordinary constraints, and more importantly, they are leading with visions of justice, dignity, and well-being that the world urgently needs to hear.

What Youth Told Us

  • Their concerns are urgent and overlapping. From climate change and unemployment to gender-based violence, mental health, and political exclusion, young people confront intersecting crises every day.
  • They are already leading. In their communities, youth are mobilising for climate justice, creating safe spaces, preserving culture, and challenging systemic injustice.
  • Barriers are structural, not personal. Youth are not held back by a lack of talent or ambition, but by ageism, tokenism, underfunding, weak civic spaces, and exclusionary education systems.
  • They know what enables leadership. Trust, mentorship, intergenerational solidarity, sustained resources, and spaces of safety and belonging emerged as essential conditions for flourishing.
  • They are re-framing leadership itself. Leadership, they argue, is not about power over others, but about dialogue, shared responsibility, and accountability to future generations.

A Blueprint for Futures-Forming Leadership

From these insights, the study distilled:

  • Three imperatives: address systemic injustice, strengthen intergenerational solidarity, and reimagine governance for the common good.
  • Five values: collective well-being, dialogue, relationality, justice, and responsibility to future generations.
  • Seven proposals: practical recommendations from youth, ranging from experiential learning and mentoring to sustainable funding and co-governance structures.

Together, these constitute a youth-authored blueprint for leadership that is capable of meeting the challenges of our time.

A Call to Action

Young people are not asking for charity. They are calling for recognition, resources, and authentic partnership. They ask institutions to:

  • Institutionalise youth co-governance.
  • Secure long-term funding and seed grants.
  • Embed youth leadership into UNESCO and partners’ core systems.
  • Build decentralised hubs for exchange and solidarity.
  • Leverage partnerships across sectors to scale impact.

Why This Matters

Leadership for the future cannot be postponed. The crises we face are urgent, and the creativity and courage of youth are already shaping the path forward. What is needed now is not another round of rhetoric, but a living covenant between generations — a commitment to co-create futures where dignity, justice, and flourishing are shared by all.

UNESCO’s Futures-Forming Leadership Report amplifies the voices of young people. The responsibility lies with us — institutions, funders, educators, policymakers — to act on what they have said.

Because youth are not the leaders of tomorrow. They are the leaders of today.

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The Golden Patches: Embracing Intergenerational Wisdom

In the Department of Cauca, south of Popayán, the Estrella Roja Humanitarian Camp, established during the 2021 Social Outbreak, has emerged as an organizational experience sustained by community self-management and the leadership of women, youth, and diverse families who defend life, territory, and dignity.

As part of the implementation of the Collective Healing Circles Program, an artistic project called “Golden Patches” has been developed, which constitutes a strategy of memory, expression, and collective care.

The activity brings together adult and older women, along with young women and girls, who, gathered in simple community spaces, work with needles, fabrics, and golden threads. Each participant uses a scrap of fabric from personal items that have accompanied their lives, on which they embroider simple and deeply meaningful symbols.  These embroideries express their resistance to displacement, gender violence, social exclusion, and urban precariousness, as well as the inner treasures cultivated amidst these experiences.

The images that result from this exercise—trees, roots, flowers, and hearts—reflect the community’s resilience and spiritual strength. Each golden stitch becomes an act of healing and a recognition of the inner strength that has allowed them to resist and transform pain.

The embroidered fragments will be compiled in a collective golden book, presented on community altars as a tribute to shared struggles, living memories, and the hope built collectively.

The Mendiendos Dorados process is more than a craft practice: it constitutes a living heritage, a way of narrating memory and affirming dignity through symbolic and spiritual languages that strengthen community bonds.

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Prof Scherto Gill’s Keynote Lecture at SMN Annual Gathering 2025

On 29th June, Prof Scherto Gill provided a closing keynote lecture at the Scientific and Medical Network’s 2025 Annual Gathering, entitled: Love: Mediating the Earthly and the Heavenly, Integrating the Immanent and the Transcendent. Other speakers at this event were Prof Federico Faggin and Prof Sarah Stewart-Brown.

In her lecture, Scherto sets the challenge in an era defined by profound tensions, stark oppositions and fragmenting contradictions. While unprecedented technological and material abundance enriches the lives of a small minority, pervasive deprivation, both economic and environmental, continues to diminish the lives of the majority. Whereas monetary wealth is pursued as precious goods, nature’s beauty and goodness are being irreversibly destroyed. Claiming to seek growth beyond human constraint, modern life often ignores the value and wonder of grounded everyday experiences, such as the depth of friendship, the delight of gardening, the inspiration of the creating and appreciating arts, the awe of nature, and the joy of living in congenial political communities.

She then asks: what if the very tensions and paradoxes we face hold the key to a richer and more integrated life? How might we bridge these oppositions and restore a vital connection between our immediate, earthly living and transcendent aspirations?

In pursuit of answers, she turns to Diotima of Mantineia, whose teachings on love, as depicted in Plato’s Symposium, offer profound insights into harmonising these opposing realms. Most of us are familiar with Plato’s ladder of love, a vision of ascending from possessing physical beauty and attraction towards the seeking spiritual and eternal goodness or beauty itself. This is typically described as a transcendent vision. Yet Diotima’s insight goes further, inviting us not merely to ascend but to integrate, honouring every rung of experience as essential and sacred, in an infinite process of creative becoming.

The lecture delves deeper into Diotima’s teachings, particularly her conception of Erôs as a daimon, a powerful spirit neither wholly divine nor simply mortal, born of Poros, the god of abundance, and Penia, a mortal embodying poverty. This symbolic lineage endows Erôs with both creative potential and persistent need, perpetually dwelling in the vibrant tension between gratification and longing, contentment and aspiration.

Through engaging dialogue and reflective practices, her session further explores how embracing this daimonic tension can help mediate contemporary divides. Scherto asks the participants to consider how recognising and honouring the inherent goodness, beauty, and creative possibility within our everyday, our earthly lived experiences can bridge us towards transcendent ideals and values, enriching our personal, communal and political life in peace.

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Advancing Positive Peace in a Fractured World: Reflections from the GHfP Institute’s 2024 Achievements

The year 2024 was a paradoxical one. As global conflicts deepened and social inequalities widened, efforts towards positive peace, well-being, and collective healing gained momentum. The Global Humanity for Peace (GHfP) Institute has been at the forefront of these efforts, fostering transformative research, facilitating intergenerational dialogue, and nurturing changemakers committed to reimagining more just and harmonious societies.

GHfP-Institute_Annual-Report_2024Download

Shaping the Future of Peace and Well-Being

At the core of our work is a commitment to positive peace—a concept that extends beyond the absence of conflict to embrace social justice, intergenerational healing, and ecological integrity. Through research, symposia, and policy advocacy, we have sought to bridge divides, empower communities, and reframe governance structures toward values of dignity, dialogue, and care.

1. Advancing Research on Positive Peace

One of our key research areas in 2024 focused on the Pacific’s vision of an Ocean of Peace. Working alongside colleagues from leading UK universities, we explored how peace studies can support indigenous-led efforts to nurture peace as an ethos woven into governance and daily life. This research offers critical insights for regions beyond the Pacific—where tensions and ecological crises demand fresh approaches to peacebuilding.

Our commitment to positive peace also led us to facilitate high-level discussions, such as the International Symposium on Peace in the Middle East, which we co-convened in London, and a panel on the same topic that we presented during the annual Imagine Peace Forum in Iceland. Amidst the backdrop of escalating conflict, these platforms provided rare and necessary spaces for dialogue, exploring how relational peace processes can overcome entrenched divisions.

2. Healing the Harms of Inhumanity

For over three years, the GHfP Institute has played a pivotal role in the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative, developing intergenerational dialogue & inquiry (IDI) methodologies to address the historical and ongoing harms of structural injustice. In 2024, our Collective Healing Circles (CHCs) expanded in communities in 14 countries across 4 continents, offering a structured yet deeply transformative process of communal healing and contributing to the well-being of future generations.

Our newly launched Handbook for CHC Facilitators & Co-Creators, presented at the UNESCO 30th Anniversary of the Routes of Enslaved Peoples, is now a key resource for collective healing practitioners worldwide. The CHCs—led predominantly by women and youth—are proving to be caring spaces where communities can acknowledge past traumas, restore dignity, and co-imagine just futures.

3. Rethinking Governance for Human and Planetary Flourishing

In a world where political and economic systems often prioritize short-term gains over collective well-being, we have continued our efforts to articulate principles of well-being governance. Our latest publication, Beyond Instrumentalised Politics, proposes an alternative vision—one where governance is guided by non-antagonism, equality, and a deep commitment to the well-being of all.

These ideas underpinned our plenary session at the UNESCO Well-Being of Future Generations Forum, where we engaged policymakers, scholars, and youth leaders in co-constructing pathways for a future where governance is not merely about managing crises but about fostering societal transformation.

4. Transforming Education for Well-Being Futures

Education remains central to our vision for positive peace. In collaboration with the Fetzer Institute, we conducted research into how relational approaches in schools can enhance student well-being. Our findings are informing global efforts to integrate caring and ethics-based education into curricula, ensuring that schools nurture not only academic success but also emotional and moral resilience.

As part of this commitment, we are proud to be a research partner in the Ethics Education Fellowship Programme, working with six ministries of education in Asia and Africa. This initiative is a testament to our belief that education is not just about preparing for the future but about shaping it.

Looking Ahead: A Call to Action

The challenges we face today—from environmental degradation to erosion of democracy, and to youth disempowerment—are complex, but they are not insurmountable. The work of the GHfP Institute in 2024 has demonstrated that peace, healing, and politics of dignity are not abstract ideals but lived realities that we can co-create.

As we move into 2025, we invite partners, educators, policymakers, and communities to join us in advancing this vision. Whether through research collaborations, policy dialogues, or grassroots peace initiatives, each effort contributes to a larger movement towards a world where peace is not just the absence of war, but the presence of justice, dignity, and well-being for all.

GHfP-Institute_Annual-Report_2024Download

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Building a Global Healing Alliance 

Throughout April 2024, experienced facilitators from across the world have been brought together by the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative in a major step towards creating a global healing alliance of community-rooted Collective Healing Facilitators.

The UNESCO Collective Healing Capacity Building Programme prepares participants to understand the key theoretical and methodological ideas underpinning the Collective Healing Initiative and builds their capacity to design and host bespoke Collective Healing Circles in their local communities.  

Thanks to the support and generosity of the Global Humanity for Peace Institute, Guerrand-Hermès Foundation and Fetzer Institute, the capacity building programme in April has brought together 25 participants from across 5 continents, including representatives from Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Uruguay, USA, Mexico; Martinique & Guadeloupe; France, UK and Germany; and Kenya, Nigeria and Cameroon. The group includes voices from African, Afro-Caribbean, African-American, European-descent, and Indigenous communities. Participants engaged in a multi-lingual online space, with live simultaneous interpretation available in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese at all times. 

The online capacity building space is one which celebrates rich diversity, whilst also deeply acknowledging the shared experiences of loss, trauma and displacement which pervade the history of all cultures. Through experiential and dialogue-based sessions, participants have been guided through the four interlocking modules which form the structure for the collective healing circles: 1) Acknowledging our shared histories of dehumanisation and recognising their enduring legacies and harms​; 2) Restoring our sense of human wholeness and re-affirming our dignity​; 3) Strengthening relationships & deepening interconnectedness; and 4) Envisioning structural justice & activating our responsibilities for shared future(s). These modules work together to initiate and sustain collective healing within communities whose history has been characterised by structural dehumanisation, displacement, racism and inequality, towards a shared future of social justice and holistic wellbeing. 

As one of the team shared:

“This capacity building programme is so much more than a ‘training’; it is a space for mutual sharing and learning, where each participant is bringing their many years of experience and cultural treasure to the space. Each session opens and closes with a participant sharing a cultural practice or ritual from their community – we have shared poems, songs, Indigenous chants… Each of us feels honoured to be in the space together and we are building bonds and friendships that will sustain us and our communities for many years to come.” 

Following completion of the capacity building programme, participants will continue to develop community-rooted UNESCO Collective Healing Circles, with the ongoing guidance of experienced UNESCO Collective Healing Mentors. All participants completing this cycle will be awarded a UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative Certificate of Achievement in formal recognition of their role as UNESCO Collective Healing Circle Facilitators. A waiting list for participation in the next capacity building opportunity is already growing. 

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