Every year, the conference features one or more keynote speakers who are invited to share from their deep experience with peacebuilding as a result of their work, scholarship, or traditional practices. Read more about this year’s invited keynote speaker below!
Siobhan McEvoy-Levy
Professor of Peace & Conflict Studies and Political Science, Butler University
Director, Desmond Tutu Peace Lab (DTPL)
Siobhán McEvoy-Levy works at the intersections of critical peace studies, youth studies, and critical constructivist international relations. Through her work over the last twenty-five years, she has advocated for young people’s active inclusion in peace processes, highlighting their roles in knowledge production about peace and peacebuilding. Her scholarship focuses on how young people conceptualize, narrate and enact conflict, violence, and peace as well as how they participate in (everyday) peace work. Her other interests include youth participatory research methods; critical peacebuilding through the arts, museums, and pop culture; and breathwork and meditation for activists and peacebuilders.
McEvoy-Levy’s current work includes a project on photography, street, art and youth-led peacebuilding (with Caitlin Mollica) and the book Art Activism and Critical Peacebuilding. She is currently co-editing a special issue “Methods and Approaches for Youth-ed Futures of Peace and Security” (with Helen Berents and Ingrid Valladares) for the journal Peacebuilding as well as a volume titled Youth, Peace and the Politics of World-Building (with Helen Berents and Katrina Leclerc). Other publications include Youth and Sustainable Peacebuilding, co-edited with Helen Berents and Catherine Bolten (Manchester University Press: 2024); Peace and Resistance in Youth Cultures: Reading the Politics of Peacebuilding from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (2018); Troublemakers or Peacemakers? Youth and Post-Accord Peacebuilding, as editor (2006); and Peacebuilding after Peace Accords: Violence, Truth and Youth, with Tristan Anne Borer and John Darby (2007).
McEvoy-Levy is the director of the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab (DTPL) and a professor of peace and conflict studies and political science at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. She is on leave for Spring 2026 and is currently a visiting research fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. She earned her B.A. in politics and English from Queen’s University Belfast and completed her M.Phil. and Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge.