Global Peace
Almanac

Dear reader,

This is not a good season for peace. These statistics bear repeating: over one quarter of humanity now lives in areas affected by conflict. More than 200 million people need humanitarian assistance. Nearly 120 million have been forcibly displaced. Meanwhile global military spending is projected to more than double by 2035, while funding for peacebuilding has contracted further still.

The heyday of the liberal peace framework, which defined the 1990s, is receding into history. For a time, it gave shape not only to the practice of peacemaking but to the idea of peace itself: a shared language, a professionalized field, and a genuine public expectation that peace and security could be deliberately built. It was part of a broader international order shaped by expanding institutions, economic integration, and the belief that political and economic convergence would produce shared stability. Though many of its assumptions and institutional habits remain with us, the conditions that once sustained confidence in that model have eroded, and are now beyond living memory for a generation coming of age in a very different world.

Those growing up in the dimming light of the liberal peace ideal are inheriting its contradictions without having shared in its promise. In many Western countries, public faith in globalization, international institutions, and large-scale intervention has fractured under the weight of inequality, political disillusionment, and prolonged conflict. Elsewhere, the liberal peace was often experienced less as a shared project than as a framework imposed through external assumptions about what peace should look like and who had the authority to define it. The failures of those assumptions have produced not only mistrust, but also a growing insistence that peacebuilding must become more locally grounded, politically honest, and open to forms of knowledge and agency long pushed to the margins.

These are important contexts to hold as we navigate our own moment. This field remains heavily concentrated in the West, and many of us have felt the contraction personally — in our staffing, our sense of purpose, and our standing in the world we set out to serve. To pursue honest solutions that confront entrenched habits and incorporate the hard-won lessons of the last few decades, amid this degree of disorientation, is no small ask. Yet how we respond to this moment matters. We could retreat into nostalgia and defensiveness, or we can approach these changes with the humility and openness required to reconsider what peacebuilding is, in both purpose and in practice.

With that in mind, I am moved by the candor and practicality with which our contributors approach that challenge. The Global Peace Almanac is no eulogy. In naming our changing times, our collective failures as well as our genuine achievements, the contributors model something the field needs more of: honest, rigorous conversation about how peace really works, by whom and for whom. The questions gathered here range from the technical and operational to the strategic and philosophical, but are all grounded in an epistemic humility that is, perhaps counterintuitively, a source of real hope.

I invite you to take your time with this issue and to engage with it. Reach out to colleagues who contributed. Write back with your own experiences. The Global Peace Almanac is designed to be a living dialogue, and with this inaugural issue we aim to establish a foundation that grows more rigorous and representative with every edition. We are actively seeking voices that sharpen this conversation: policymakers, private sector leaders, practitioners, and scholars from every corner of the world where peace is both contested and reenvisioned.

I look forward to building it with you.

Respectfully,

Ahn LeeExecutive Director, Effective Peacebuilding Initiative