Current Context
The global community faces a cluster of dynamic, inter-related crises that have combined to ignite and sustain international, regional and local conflicts: unfettered arms production and territorial aggression by major powers; the growing existential threat of nuclear war; unprecedented disruptions in longstanding trading relationships and defence alliances; the deepening effects of climate change, including extreme weather events; mass migration by conflict and climate refugees; radical economic disparities within and across nation states; extreme political polarization fueled by social media; and wholly inadequate ethical governance of artificial intelligence.
The institutions created after World War II to maintain peace, security and a rules-based international order – especially the United Nations, its Security Council and many conventions; the International Criminal Court; and the Bretton-Woods organizations – have proven incapable of addressing the complexity of this polycrisis. From Gaza to Ukraine, Iran to Sudan, the world is less safe and more dangerous. New momentum must be built to meet this moment.
Core Questions
Keynote speakers and panelists will be asked to address a common set of questions:
1) What are the most promising new or emerging strategies, coalitions, and institutions for securing global peace and justice given the breakdown of the rules-based international order?
2) How can plurilateral alliances led by middle-power governments, civil society and Indigenous organizations drive change and renew institutions for peace?
3) What policies, practices, ideologies, and approaches have eroded and/or strengthened international institutions and the rule of law?
4) How can the main beneficiaries of war—militaries, arms makers, the fossil fuel industry, billionaires and coercive hegemons—be denounced, disrupted and defunded?
5) What twenty-first-century social and political developments or strategies show the most promise for redirecting capital towards peacemaking and sustainable development?
6) What lessons can be learned from successful youth-led peacebuilding organizations and political movements, and how could these lessons be adapted, leveraged, and scaled?
7) What can AI and other emerging technologies contribute to ethical governance, conflict transformation, ecological balance, and sustainable peace?
Canada’s Responsibility
Cutting across all these questions are the tasks of assessing the ways in which Canadian foreign policy promotes war and identifying and advocate for better policies that would hold the agents of conflict accountable, defund their operations and instead vigorously advance peace. We note Mark Carney’s clarion call for middle-power leadership in a world where, as he so clearly put it, the “powers that be” have long manipulated international law and empty rhetoric about human rights to create the illusion of a fair and defensible geopolitical system. Canada is a member of NATO, whose member countries are ramping up their military spending and rejecting the international Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Canada is also a member of the International Criminal Court, the global community’s prime instrument for prosecuting war crimes, and must strengthen the Court against its well-resourced opponents.
At a time of growing geopolitical destabilization, reconfiguration and uncertainty, we need to critically assess the hidden and opportunity costs of this kind of spending – especially when urgent environmental and social challenges must be confronted – and more broadly reflect on the consequences of Canadian commitments to primarily military alliances, particularly NATO.
Deliverables: Engaging a Chief Rapporteur supported by a team of Student Rapporteurs from Ottawa and Carleton universities, the conference will generate 1) a conference report; 2) conference background papers and list of pre-conference readings; 3) a video recording of the proceedings; and 4) a conference statement on how the Government of Canada can and should support, contribute to and lead the urgent and essential process of reinventing the architecture of peace.
The conference will produce a set of policy recommendations to the Government of Canada.
Conference Speakers: The Group of 78 is identifying speakers for keynotes and panels who represent some of the most leading-edge and critical policy analysis, scholarship, and activism in the peace and security field. These include both international and Canadian leaders and experts. A priority is placed on recruiting speakers from peace-seeking civil-society, women’s, youth and Indigenous organizations in both the Global South and North. The conference will also draw on the deep experience and skill in peace and security among the Group of 78’s own Board of Directors.