World War 2 Peace is a new research program documenting and sharing the history of peacebuilding with communities across the globe. As citizens worldwide start to collectively envision what kind of societies we would like to create in the wake of our current global crisis, it is essential to look to other crossroads in history—like the end of World War II—to understand the many forms that “peace” can take.
Our initiative seeks to train and empower international peace practitioners with research skills to explore social movements in their home countries, tracing the historical threads back in time in order to make meaning and draw inspiration from the past. Informed by the founding of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we seek to examine how sharing local approaches to peace can help generate innovative methods on a global scale.
Notably, this project will explore the historical impact of local actors and events, as well as national narratives and public memory around peacebuilding, on every continent. A team of selected researchers from within a fellowship community called the Bosch Alumni Network will collect multimedia materials documenting these local and regional stories, and we will analyze and present the various themes that connect them together. To make this history of peacebuilding accessible to diverse audiences, we intend to create an online exhibition and offer opportunities for these important stories to be displayed and discussed around the world.
By connecting the past to the present—and the local with the global—we hope to better understand how "peace" has been a motivating force for the past 75 years.
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Phase I: World War II @75 Dialogue Series, 2020
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Phase II: Research Training Workshops, 2021
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Phase III: Peace History Research Projects, 2021
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Phase IV: Local Community Events, 2021
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Phase V: Global Online Exhibition, 2021-2022
World War 2 Peace arose out of the Peace Cluster within the Bosch Alumni Network, a cooperation between the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the iac Berlin. It is also generously co-sponsored by the Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability at Columbia University.
For further information and details about how you can get involved, please contact project co-directors Erica Fugger and Adis Hukanović at worldwar2peace@gmail.com. Visit World War 2 Peace’s YouTube playlist here.
