17.11.2025 Students from the Center for Conflict Studies Participated in the Paris Peace Forum 2025
A participant’s perspective
By Hannah Moll
Students from the MA Peace and Conflict Studies programme at the Center for Conflict Studies, Marburg University, had the exceptional opportunity to attend the Paris Peace Forum from 29 - 30 October 2025. Since its foundation in 2018, the Paris Peace Forum has served as a global platform dedicated to strengthening multilateralism. It does this by convening civil society, international organisations, governments and private-sector actors, who then work together to advance sustainable peace. This year’s topic was “New Coalations for Peace, People and Nature”.
The study trip was organised as part of EUPeace, a cross-border consortium of universities dedicated to promoting academic collaboration, mobility, and shared learning opportunities that foster peace, justice, and inclusive societies.
Attending the Forum under the theme “New Coalitions for Peace, People and Nature” offered our group a diversity of panels and roundtables. Experiencing the event first-hand significantly deepened my appreciation for international conferences. It was particularly compelling to witness how topics we discuss in our university courses - or engage with through volunteering - were taken up, expanded, and challenged by policymakers and NGO activists. This added an entirely new and motivating dimension to my studies. The Forum also introduced numerous new ideas that sparked reflection and prompted intense conversations within our group long after the sessions had ended.
One of my personal highlights was a panel on the impact of social media on peace. The expert panel - featuring a war correspondent, the Director of Reporters Without Borders, and an activist - offered a rich set of perspectives. They demonstrated how crucial social media can be in providing access to information from otherwise unreachable areas and in disseminating voices often absent from mainstream media. At the same time, the discussion illuminated the risks that unregulated social media pose to democracy and freedom of expression. My key takeaway came from the Director of Reporters Without Borders, who stressed that regulating social media is not a restriction of free speech but rather an essential form of societal responsibility. Social media, he argued, does not belong solely to its founders who decide which content is amplified, it belongs to society as a whole and must be governed accordingly to safeguard democracy.
A second highlight was the roundtable on financing women in peace education. This session again underscored the vital role of feminist perspectives and feminist projects in peacebuilding. The atmosphere was particularly inspiring due to the intimate setting, which allowed us to sit mere steps away from remarkable women who have founded and led transformative initiatives. Listening to their experiences was both empowering and deeply motivating.
Kontakt
Dr. Stéphane Voell