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Peaceful Futures is an action research project conducted by Global Education Futures, School of International Futures, VZOR Lab, and Next Generation Foresight Practitioners. Future Worlds Center delegates, Yiannis Laouris, Marcus Hallside, and Kevin Dye, have been invited to participate in the four online sessions and subsequently to organize an online Structured Democratic Dialogue in order to structure the "winning ideas" into an Influence Map.
The premise of the project is to explore the possibility of creating a peace-based civilization on our planet in the next 50 years. Over the last half a сentury many prominent thought leaders pointed out the fact that weaponry is becoming increasingly lethal while the global socio-economic system becomes increasingly fragile. In 2022, the world once again recognized the fact that world peace should not be taken for granted and that the existential risk of a global thermonuclear conflict could be very real. If this condition remains, the possibility of a sustainable human civilization should be ruled out. In the words of Buckminster Fuller, “either war is obsolete, or humans are”.
Through a series of foresight and Structured Democratic Dialogue sessions, participants from over 30 countries of the global north and south have explored the range of political, economic, technological, educational, and socio-cultural strategies that can create peace for all. As a result, a time map of critical paths towards peaceful futures was created, and an opportunity map of civic and cultural peace-focused solutions was produced.
The next focus of the project is to create a range of thematic groups that will explore different aspects of Peaceful Futures and plans to launch a range of collaborative initiatives to accelerate the transition towards this scenario. During the follow-up workshops, results of the foresight and the manifesto of Peaceful Futures will be presented, and plans for 2023 will be elaborated together with the workshop participants.
The first international presentation of the project has taken place Jan 26, 2023, with the following sharing the results: