Our National Roundtable on Peace-First: CollaborationNet Blog One

Introduction

This is the first of a two-part blog post. Part One, which you are reading here, sets the broader context for the National Peace Roundtable hosted in Toronto and the GTA over the last several months. While the roundtables were hosted in person in this region, two of the four sessions were held in a hybrid format, with participants joining both in person and virtually from across several provinces, including Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Alberta, and British Columbia. The remaining two sessions were conducted in person with youth-only cohorts, ages 14–25, in Toronto neighbourhoods that are economically vulnerable and socially marginalized.

Part Two of this blog post will follow soon, and it will offer a summary and commentary on the four roundtable discussions held so far in Toronto and the GTA.

Beginning with a simple but complex question

“In your opinion, what is peace?”

This is the open question our roundtable conversations on peace and peacebuilding usually begin with. It is, in many ways, both an easy question and a deeply complex one. Each time we invite a new group into the conversation, we begin by sharing a brief background on the origin story of the Peace-First project, which began in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

At the second roundtable session, we also invited a few participants from the first session to return, as they had expressed interest in continuing to be part of the Peace-First process. That continuity added something meaningful to the conversation.

For Cyrus and me (Alka), in our role as facilitators of the National Peace Roundtable, one of our main objectives has been to create a safe space where this conversation can happen with ease, openness, and genuine engagement. We try to sit in a circle, in the spirit of the roundtable format, and we always begin by answering the question ourselves first. We share our own reflections to help lead the way. Participants are always given the option to pass, or to speak only if and when they feel comfortable.

As the discussion unfolds, we break the opening question into smaller reflective prompts. Some of these help open up the conversation at the beginning, while others are introduced later as people become more engaged and ready to dig deeper.

Some of the questions we explore include:

1. What is your understanding of peace? What words or examples come to mind when you think about peace? What does peace look like in your everyday life? What thoughts and emotions arise for you when you reflect on it?
2. Is peace relevant to you? Does it matter? In what ways? Why or why not?
3. Can each of us play a role in making our society, our communities, and the world safer, stronger, and more peaceful? What action steps can we take, individually and collectively, to move toward these goals?

How this project understands peace

It is important to say that, when this project was first initiated, and as it continued to grow through several iterations, our framework for understanding and conceptualizing peace did not come from a simple war-versus-peace binary. Instead, it emerged from a lens of social inclusion and justice.

We wanted to explore what it means to pursue equity, diversity, human rights, and freedom from violence, hate, and racism in marginalized communities and in society more broadly. We wanted to challenge and address the forms of discrimination that flow through unjust policies and systems, often making those with less power even more vulnerable and excluded. This includes communities of newcomers, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, international students, temporary workers, refugee women, members of cultural communities, and Indigenous peoples.

The influence of Johan Galtung’s ideas

When we first began this work, the ideas of Johan Galtung, the well-known peace studies scholar and practitioner, were relevant to our thinking. His concepts of positive peace and negative peace helped offer language and a framework for understanding peace not as a fixed state, but as something that exists along a spectrum.

Galtung described negative peace as the absence of war and direct violence. Positive peace, by contrast, is something more sustainable and lasting. It is built through strong institutions, economic development, social conditions, and shared attitudes that foster peace. In that framework, positive peace reflects a society where systems work well and where wealth, opportunity, safety, and power are more equitably distributed.

His work also helps us understand the opposite reality: those times when societies are experiencing direct violence such as war, bombing, drone attacks, genocide, civil unrest, and forced displacement. In those contexts, people lose safety, certainty, loved ones, homes, and often the very foundations of identity and belonging. Fear and trauma become part of daily life. In such moments, there is not even negative peace, let alone positive peace.

Sadly, this is not merely theoretical. It describes the world many people are living in today.

Positive peace — and how much the world has changed

At its heart, positive peace can be understood as the achievement of safety and dignity, inclusion, and equal access to rights, resources, and opportunities for all members of a society. It is about a society that is thriving, where well-being is possible, and where people can live with a genuine sense of peace.

That was the vision this project began with.

And yet, when I look back now, I feel disappointment and despair. I find myself thinking: what a far cry from where we started. In just a few short years, the world seems in many ways to have regressed rather than progressed. It is deeply unsettling, and more than a little ironic, that the vision of positive peace now feels so distant from the realities many people are facing.

We are living in a time that is intensely political, where authoritarianism is no longer an exception but increasingly a norm; where direct violence is inflicted upon innocent citizens; and where wisdom, humanity, and democratic thinking often feel as though they are slipping away. In such a moment, it can seem almost unimaginable that a world of thriving, safety, equity, inclusion, and shared well-being could be realized.

And yet, perhaps this is exactly why we must continue to ask these questions.

So, what should moving forward look like?

Surely the hope we carry as human beings is that we keep moving forward, not backward. That we do not reverse the gains of the past, but continue to become better, more aware, and more responsible with one another.

Moving forward, to me, means becoming more conscious of the gaps in our society as we educate ourselves about them. It means choosing to improve, and working toward becoming better versions of ourselves. It means supporting and uplifting one another by sharing resources, opportunities, and care. It means being kind, compassionate, and empathetic. And it means refusing to define progress only in terms of individual success or private achievement, while ignoring the wider social good.

Progress must be broader than that. It must be more inclusive, more humane, and more widely shared.

My reflections on contributing to peace

There are many pieces of the puzzle that need to come together if we are to move toward the goals that Peace-First began with. We need collective thinking. We need a sincere commitment to the cause of peace, in whatever ways are possible. We need inclusive mindsets. And we need more people willing to act, both spontaneously and deliberately, from a place of humanity and compassion rather than selfishness.

Most of all, I continue to believe that what Mahatma Gandhi said decades ago still holds true today: we must each take responsibility to “be the change we want to see in the world.”

Let us walk together. Let us take leadership. Let us be accountable. Let us not simply wait for others to take charge.

See you soon with Part Two.