The role of cultural understanding in peacebuilding collaboration

21 September 2026 · Online · Marking the UN International Day of Peace

The question

Peacebuilding is collaborative work, and almost none of it is done by people from a single country, service or professional culture. Diplomats work alongside soldiers. Civilian agencies work alongside militaries. Coalitions are assembled from states with different assumptions about how decisions get made, how authority is exercised, how disagreement is voiced, and what counts as a commitment.

Those assumptions are usually invisible to the people holding them. They surface as friction attributed to personality, or politics, or bad faith long before anyone identifies them as cultural. The panel starts from the position that cultural understanding is not a soft accompaniment to peacebuilding but a working condition of it, and asks how practitioners actually navigate it.

What the panel will cover

Questions are circulated to panellists in advance, and the discussion is built around a set of themes rather than a script:

Working across difference. How do people collaborate effectively when they hold strongly differing cultural assumptions about decision-making, leadership and communication and how have the panellists handled that in their own careers?

Finding common ground. How do you identify shared cultural interests, and how can they be used to strengthen professional and personal relationships inside peacebuilding work?

Sport. Sport has long been a point of contact between countries and between militaries. Does competition strengthen those relationships, or can national rivalry cut the other way?

Media. How does national coverage of another country’s culture shape the way military and diplomatic personnel perceive their counterparts and what can be done about it?

The internet. For young people especially, has connectivity bridged cultural difference, or have echo chambers done more damage than the contact has repaired?

Training. Should cross-cultural skill be taught in military and professional training with the same seriousness as leadership, teamwork and technical competence?

Running underneath all of it: what makes an encounter between people from different cultures produce a lasting connection rather than an enjoyable but temporary one.

The panel

Three panellists, chosen for the distance between their vantage points:

• A diplomat or foreign affairs professional on how cultural awareness shapes relations between states.
• An academic working in peacebuilding or international relations on the broader relationship between culture, conflict and international cooperation.
• A practitioner in international cultural exchange, someone working with international students, youth exchange or cultural diplomacy or a serving or former military officer with experience of peacebuilding operations and multinational deployments, offering the practical view closest to the career paths many in the network are heading for.

Panellists will be announced here as they are confirmed.

Format

Sixty minutes, online.

The start time will be confirmed shortly and set to suit a network spread across Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.

Who it is for

This event is for members of the IFPSP Alumni Network.

The network is made up of participants from the 2026 International Forum for Peace, Security & Prosperity in Palermo, delegates from more than twenty countries across Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. It is predominantly officer cadets attending military academies, together with university students working in international relations, defence and security. Many are heading into careers in diplomacy, international organizations and the armed forces.

The panel is built for that audience: the discussion assumes people who will shortly be doing this work, not observing it.

Why 21 September

The date is the United Nations International Day of Peace.

The General Assembly established the observance in 1981, and in 2001 voted unanimously to designate 21 September as a day of non-violence and ceasefire, a fixed point in the calendar on which the pursuit of peace is treated as a fundamental human right rather than an aspiration.

The 2026 UN theme is “Invest in Peace For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day.” It is a deliberate turn away from summitry and toward the people who do this work at ground level, on the argument that peace is not built only in conference rooms it is shaped by everyone, everywhere, every day.

That is very close to this panel’s own premise. Cultural understanding is unglamorous work. It does not get signed, ratified or reported. It happens in corridors, over meals, on sports fields, in the ordinary business of getting on with people whose assumptions differ from your own and without it, the formal agreements tend not to hold. A panel on that subject belongs on a day dedicated to everyday peacemakers.