The 2024 Notre Dame Student Peace Conference committee announces this year’s conference, Peace by Piece: Disrupting Dualities in Peacebuilding.
How do we define peace in an era of increased polarization? Over the past few years, we have witnessed a distressing rise in dualistic patterns of thinking and acting that challenge our work as peacebuilders.
From deeply-entrenched views of “the other” to the traditional binary of “war and peace,” and even the useful terminology of “global and local,” these dualisms frequently obscure the complexity of violence and fracture efforts to build sustainable peace, reducing it to overly simple absolutes or outright idealism.
As current and future architects of peace, we must affirm our commitment to peacebuilding as a dynamic and co-constructive process. We have chosen our theme to highlight the importance of embracing the discomfort of the gray and resisting the temptation to view people, parties, and events through black-and-white, all-or-nothing lenses.
We want this conference to explore the many parts and pieces necessary for a multifaceted understanding of peace, one that is capable of bridging divides. Each piece of the peacebuilding puzzle moves us towards a more complete picture of the barriers to justpeace and the multiplicity of ways we can overcome them.
We invite undergraduate and graduate students from all different fields of study and practice to propose presentations that engage the nuances of peacebuilding and highlight efforts to disrupt dualities and establish intersectional lenses.
Strong proposals might engage with, but are not limited to, topics such as:
Peacebuilding in Other Fields
• Digital Peacebuilding
• Business & Peace
• Peacebuilding & Health
• Environmental Peacebuilding
• Peace Economics
• Peace Architecture & Design
• Arts & Peacebuilding
• Peace Science
• Literature & Narrative
thematic areas of focus
• Gender-Based Violence
• Democratic Backsliding
• Diplomacy & Sovereignty
• Nonviolent Resistance
• Racial & Ethnic Conflict
• Sustainable Development
• Political Polarization
• Restorative Justice
• Natural Resource Conflict
Peace studies lenses
• Conflict Transformation
• Decoloniality
• Structural Violence
• Local Turn in Peacebuilding
• Slow Violence
• Religion & Peacebuilding
• Transformative Justice
• Intersectionality
• Strategic Peacebuilding
specific ongoing conflicts
• Israel–Palestine Conflict
• Unrest in Pakistan
• Conflicts in the D.R.C.
• War in Ukraine
• Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict
• Political Instability in Haiti
• Instability in Afghanistan
• Civil War in Myanmar
• Power Struggle in Sudan
We welcome a variety of different session types: research papers or research posters; reflections on experiential learning; panel discussions; artwork, performance, or media projects; or other innovative project formats. Proposals may highlight practice as well as research.
Students are encouraged to review proposal requirements and accepted presentation formats before beginning the submission process.
The deadline to submit is Friday, January 26, 2024. Please direct all questions about the submission process to the conference organizers at peacecon@nd.edu.