Local peacebuilding involves people from all walks of life coming together to promote peace and end violence in their communities. To Lina Maria, the co-founder of the peacebuilding initiative Agenda Jovin and a member of international charity Peace Direct’s Global Advisory Board, local peacebuilding refers to, “processes whose initiative and development arise from communities that organize themselves to resist contexts of violence, resolve conflicts, promote spaces for reconciliation or influence processes of negotiation and agreements between parties in dispute.”
This form of not dependent on political context, Maria said. Diana Ishaqat, a development practitioner, researcher, and heritage artist, also on Peace Direct’s Global Advisory Board, said that local peacebuilding’s focus is more grassroots. ”People can assume various roles in society without necessarily being a part of civil society organizations or negotiation parties. Teachers, artists, social workers, religious leaders and others could be peacebuilders,” she said.
The state of local peacebuilding today can look very different in different countries. For example, Ishaqat said that in the Middle East and West Asia, there is currently a lot of disillusionment with civil society and international organizations. The word “peace,” she said, has become synonymous with giving up on indigenous or local populations’ rights, or at least “meeting the aggressor halfway” under unjust terms.
Yet, Ishaqat said, people still want to hear stories ‘from the ground,’ and many people follow citizen journalists and local content creators on social media. People want to participate in campaigns, fundraising, and awareness.
Local peacebuilding struggles to gain as much recognition as political-level peacebuilding. “It is as if local peacebuilding were happening 30 floors below what happens at the political level, which is the top floor of the skyscraper, from which people look down to see the view and the landscape,” Maria said. “But in reality, it is the strong roots of these local processes that keep the structure from falling even if it wobbles.”
But Peace Direct is working to empower local peacebuilders from around the world. From October 13 to 17, 2025, Peace Direct will host a global peacebuilding gathering in Nairobi, Kenya. The gathering, titled Peace Connect, plans to bring together hundreds of peacebuilders from the Global South.
Grace Rowley, Peace Direct’s Head of Fundraising and Communications, said, “We’re tired of conferences where people from the Global South are in the minority, being talked about by Global North donors and INGOs and not shaping the agenda.” She said that Peace Connect will feature “inspiring, useful and creative sessions” which will help drive change and strengthen collective efforts to build peace. The event also, she said, has a clear focus on mental health and self-care, as peacebuilding is “difficult and demanding work,” and peacebuilders can face mental health challenges. “Anyone coming to Peace Connect can access self-care practices, resilience-building strategies, and psychological well-being support,” Rowley said.
One difference between a gathering and a conference or forum, Ishaqat said, is that at a conference or forum, “Most attendees are being ‘instructed’ and ‘taught’ rather than engaged in mutual exchange.”
The event’s sessions will explore a wide range of topics including: Women, Peace, and Security; reimagining human rights in the Global South; trends shaping societies; documenting human rights violations; Youth, Peace, and Security; and more. A session titled “How change happens: philanthropy at a crossroads,” will discuss finding better ways to fund peace and development.
Ishaqat stressed that there has never been a greater need for voices of peace to stand by one another than there is now. “Human suffering is highly televised and constantly broadcast on our screens and social media. It is becoming normalized,” she said.
Maria says that gatherings are a good forum “not only to connect and learn from others but also to recognize our capacity and potential to achieve mobilizations and calls for collective action that transcends borders.”
Both Maria and Ishaqat value their past experience connecting with peacebuilders from other parts of the world. Maria has worked with youth leadership in Colombia as part of Agenda Joven. Her experiences with peacebuilding initiatives between young people from Turkish-Cypriot and Greek-Cypriot communities have taught her valuable lessons that she has kept with her as part of her work with Agenda Joven. She says she learned “to rethink the historical narratives behind the Turkish-Cypriot conflict that have made the partition to be perceived as something normalized in the lives of communities divided by a conflict that has not been transformed.”
Maria says her experiences with Peace Direct’s work around the world have taught her participatory approaches, adaptive management capacity and above all, the consolidation of peacebuilding networks.
Ishaqat says that her experiences meeting other peacebuilders have taught her the power of wellbeing and community healing events. In her Jordanian Circassian culture, she said, wellbeing is often neglected, and feeling low is seen as a sign of weakness or an inability to cope. “My perspective shifted significantly after working with a colleague from the Philippines,” she said. “I began exploring literature on the subject and realized that the community volunteering I’ve been involved in for over a decade had actually been a form of healing for me—I just didn’t recognize it at the time.”
Peacebuilders can buy tickets to Peace Connect at this link.
Keywords: peace, peacebuilding, local peacebuilding, peacebuilders, Kenya, Nairobi, global, gathering
Tara Abhasakun
Tara Abhasakun is Peace News Network (PNN)'s managing editor. She is journalist based in Christchurch, New Zealand, and formerly in Bangkok, Thailand. She has reported on a range of human rights issues involving youth protests in Thailand, as well as arts and culture. Tara's work has appeared in several outlets, including Al Jazeera and South China Morning Post.
