Peace Science Digest · Special Issue · 2026
The Future of Peace
Eight essays on how peace work can adapt and evolve as aid budgets are cut, institutions are dismantled, and military spending climbs.
Published by the War Prevention Initiative of the Jubitz Family Foundation, in collaboration with the Alliance for Peacebuilding and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.
Where the issue starts
The War Prevention Initiative establishes our position on the future of peace: militarism belongs at the center of the analysis, not the background of it.
Rethinking the Militarized Future We’re Building
Military spending is rising as diplomacy and peacebuilding are dismantled. The field has to treat militarism as a driver of political violence and ecological harm, not as the backdrop to them.
Adapting tested practice
Mediation and peace agreement implementation are essential and long-established peacebuilding practice. How will these practices respond to geopolitical shifts and inadequate funding?
Shaping Future Peace Mediation in a World without a Center
No single country now sets the terms on which wars end, and the states that once carried the norms applied them selectively. What is left is leverage: coalition pressure that weakens war economies and raises the cost of ruling without legitimacy.
Sustaining Future Peace Processes amid Global Institutional Austerity
Agreements come apart when the parties cannot agree on what has actually been implemented, and ambiguity becomes something to exploit. The Peace Accords Matrix work in Colombia shows what transparent, independently verified monitoring holds together, at exactly the moment funding for it is disappearing.
New tools, new sectors
The peacebuilding field can stay relevant by expanding to new fields beyond established approaches. These essays consider the opportunities and risks in artificial intelligence, engagement with the private sector, and environmental peacebuilding.
Scaling Future Peacemaking through AI-Powered Public Deliberation
AI is enabling a surge of disjointed information on partisan news outlets and social media, skewing how we view reality and one another. In response, Schirch argues that peacemaking practice must develop and embrace new tools that facilitate more deliberation and public sensemaking.
Unlocking Financing for Future Peace: Building Bridges with the Private Sector
Conflict is expensive for firms that need predictable environments to invest, and public funding for prevention is falling sharply. What is missing between peacebuilders and investors is not interest but a shared language, a common evidence base, and standards that would let good practice travel.
Regenerative Adaptation: A Path for Future Environmental Peacebuilding?
Increasing violent conflicts and global environmental change calls for more effective environmental peacebuilding responses at the local level. Regenerative adaptation, or livelihood production methods that promote ecosystem health while harvesting natural resources, can respond to the social-economic needs of communities emerging from conflict while protecting healthy and vibrant ecosystems.
Non-traditional approaches
Peacebuilding should adapt to the needs of communities outside of (or, excluded from) formal institutions. Feminist and decolonial approaches offer critical insights on how peacebuilding can better respond to marginalized, racialized, or otherwise excluded voices.
Feminist Peace Approaches for the Future
Feminist peace approaches start by asking who carries the greatest cost of political, economic, and environmental upheaval, then ask what security organized around those people would look like. Communities are already doing this work outside the field’s view; the task is resourcing what exists rather than designing something new.
The Future of Peace is Decolonial
Eight scholars and practitioners in recorded conversation across March and April 2026, published as dialogue rather than resolved into a single argument. They work through hope, power without coercion, and how a peace that assumes rights to Indigenous land is not peace.
Letters from the partners
Two introductions to the issue, from the organizations that shaped it.
Alliance for Peacebuilding
On the Future of Peace and Security Project, the March 2026 conference on American peacebuilding, and the case for renewed investment in conflict prevention.
Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies
On forty years of the Institute, the strain on the international system, and the responsibility of peace scholarship to reconsider its own strategies.
Read the issue as it was set for print
Download the full issue (PDF)The Peace Science Digest is a project of the War Prevention Initiative of the Jubitz Family Foundation. This special issue was produced in collaboration with the Alliance for Peacebuilding and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.
