Paris Peace Forum | 11-12 Nov. 2024
Paris Peace Forum | 11-12 Nov. 2024
For the fifth consecutive year, the Paris Peace Forum gathered the most important actors in global governance on November 11 and 12. The 2022 event focused on Riding out the multicrisis and preventing a destructive world polarization that would jeopardize the collective efforts on many critical challenges for humanity. This year, the Forum returned under one roof in a beautiful new venue, the Palais Brongniart, gathering those from around the globe to participate in Paris once again.
"The lesson of this 5th edition is that the response to global challenges and peace negotiations go hand in hand. When we advance dialogue we facilitate the resolution of global problems and those that reduce the risk of war."
Justin Vaïsse, Founder and Director General of the Paris Peace Forum
The Fifth Edition in Numbers
Major Outputs
This introductory session featured three opening addresses by high-level visionary personalities, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, Gustavo Petro, President of the Republic of Colombia and David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), who shared their take on this year’s edition theme “Riding out the multicrisis”.
"Looking at this (climate) crisis, it’s very clear we can no longer turn the other way."
Gustavo Petro, President of the Republic of Colombia
"We who still hold the social, economic, and political levers of power have simply got to do better. Our power isn’t a right; it’s a trust. Our job is to be good stewards of our time."
Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan
"Shame on us when there are 430 trillion dollars of wealth on planet earth. Shame on us that we are not able to resolve some of the complex conflicts we have today."
David Beasley, Executive Director, World Food Programme
The war in Ukraine is jolting the foundations of our multilateral system. It opens a breach in the post-World War II peace and security architecture based on rules common to all countries. The very notion of universalism is being put to test by a growing skepticism as to agreeing on shared principles and values, making the world more chaotic and international cooperation on major global issues more difficult. This geopolitical divide is coming after a pandemic that has considerably increased global inequalities. A new dialogue between the continents is needed. It should be based on recognizing differences in a multipolar world while deepening the authority of international law and guaranteeing the foundations of peace. This high-level session between key global leaders and thinkers from the global North and the global South forged this new dialogue. It was an opportunity to confront visions on the meaning of this war in a forthright way, and to open up new paths on which we can hope to build a more peaceful and cooperative future.
"We must continue to make this multilateralism effective (...) to do this, we need to reform our international institutions, rendered ineffective when they no longer reflect a balance."
Emmanuel Macron, President of France
"This war has caused famine. It’s not just a war for the countries from the North, it’s also a war for the countries from the South."
Alberto Fernández, President of the Argentine Republic
Peace work must continue its process to encourage dialogue between the opposition and the Venezuelan regime. The Paris Peace Forum is part of this process, the voice of Latin America is crucial to resolve the multicrisis. Putting Latin America in the spotlight, the 5th edition offered the occasion to host a private sequence around the Venezuelan negotiators.
"It is in concrete responses to global challenges that the risks of war are reduced, but the Forum is also a discreet place of diplomatic negotiation and reconciliation between adversaries."
Fabienne Hara, Secretary General of the Paris Peace Forum
At the 5th edition of the Paris Peace Forum, actors from all over the world launched the “Acting Together for a Responsible Critical Minerals Sector” initiative to enable the energy transition and achieve net zero. International organizations, companies and business alliances, NGOs, foundations and high-level dignitaries agreed on the need to remove obstacles to collaboration to ensure sustainable access to and use of critical minerals. This will be done through concrete commitments to address existing and upcoming geopolitical, ecological and social concerns about the value chains of these key minerals.
Learn more about the initiative
During the roundtable “Being real about the governance of early warning and response systems”, the Paris Peace Forum presented a groundbreaking report entitled “People, politics and the governance of early warning and response for pandemics”, looking at the political conditions to identify early and respond to a health threat to avoid another pandemic. Learning from important field work on the detection of the Omicron variant in Botswana and South Africa in November 2021, and drawing on dozens of interviews with decisive actors from the first lab that detected the new virus to those at the heart of the global response, the report contains novel findings on the trust deficit between North and South, the role of scientific networks, effective communication of scientific findings and new models to finance pandemic preparedness. The Paris Peace Forum provides a set of recommendations to strengthen health ecosystems in the global South by incentivizing scientific discovery which is crucial for pandemic preparedness.
Following the 2021 International Call to stand up for children's rights in the digital environment at the Forum’s fourth edition, in 2022 the Paris Peace Forum hosted the launch of the Children Online Protection Lab. This groundbreaking new multi-stakeholder partnership will identify, assess and develop concrete protocols and solutions enabling children to use digital tools safely and benefit from their full potential without being exposed to abuse. The initiative is the result of a large consultation with the digital platforms and the civil society, both which will play a key role in its implementation. After the official launch around French President Macron on the eve of the Paris Peace Forum, a high-level session brought together key stakeholders from Amazon, TikTok, Microsoft and the French Ambassador for digital issues to unpack ambitions and unveil first concrete solutions.
Since its launch in November 2021, the Net Zero Space initiative to protect the Earth’s orbital environment has been calling for concrete actions to tackle the pressing challenge of space debris, with the ultimate aim of achieving sustainable use of outer space by 2030. Over the past year, the Net Zero Space coalition has grown from 11 initial supporters to over 50 actors from 24 countries, and has been looking into developing further policy recommendations in relation to the observation and commitments of the Net Zero Space declaration. These White Papers summarize key conclusions of the discussions that took place in the framework of Working Group 1 and 2.
White Paper: Developing Reference Modelling to Assess Risks of Collision in Orbit
During the Forum, new supporters of the initiative were announced, including Amazon's Project Kuiper and SES.
Over the past decade, ransomware has emerged as a prominent component of the global cyber threat landscape. As a global phenomenon, the ransomware threat spares no industry or region across the globe the world and relies on a complex ecosystem. The dynamics thus reinforce the need to achieve effective cooperation and common understanding between private and public actors. Starting from this premise, the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace has launched a workstream aimed at informing the intergovernmental work of the Working Group n°3 of the Counter Ransomware Initiative by providing a global, multistakeholder lens. This workstream brought together representatives from the public sector, industry and civil society for a round of discussions initiated in mid-2022, where participants agreed on the drafting of the present compendium of existing global initiatives aimed at fighting ransomware threats through PPP cooperative models.
Governance of online content, which has gained big momentum recently, was one of the pillars of the Forum's digital program. Since the emergence of Web 2.0, the Internet has radically expanded the scope of the public sphere and the potential for intersubjectivity by providing its users with an unprecedented means for instantly interacting and sharing content across the globe. The traditional debate on the extent and limits to the freedom of expression thus soon had to be raised for this new, extended public sphere. The global scale and immediateness of the cyber environment however bring critical tensions in any possible answer.
As of January 2022, experts from all over the world and from all sectors have been working to unpack the very idea of 'harmful' content online, as part of a prospective, multistakeholder working group, whose progress report is now available. Its main conclusions were presented and further explored during a high-level roundtable gathering policymakers, representatives from the private sector and the civil society.
Launched Spring 2022, the Climate Overshoot Initiative was the central focus of multiple program highlights, confronting the difficult, sometimes contentious question of how to reduce risks if global warming exceeds 1.5 C–a prospect that is increasingly likely and may be unavoidable. The Commission will convene for its third meeting later this month.
After launching the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM) initiative at the 2021 Paris Peace Forum, Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs Catherine Colonna announced France’s support of 15 million euros over 3 years at this year’s 5th edition. The Fund is a new kind of multilateral, independent partnership that aims to radically increase the funding available to support independent media in low- and middle-income countries, and thus respond to what UN SG Antonio Guterres called a "major risk of extinction" of independent media with immense consequences for democracy and development when he supported the Fund. IFPIM is co-chaired by Mark Thompson, former CEO of The New York Times and BBC, and Maria Ressa, Filipino journalist and founder of Rappler and winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. Mark Thompson announced yesterday at the Forum that IFPIM will establish its headquarters in Paris.
Already supported by the United States, Switzerland, Sweden and several other states, as well as philanthropic foundations and several technology companies, IFPIM has begun to allocate its first funding to independent media in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The Forum is not only about these large deliverables, but it also takes a bottom-up approach to accelerate concrete initiatives. The Paris Peace Forum continues to demonstrate that in a deteriorated international environment it is still possible to advance governance solutions, scale up projects and launch new initiatives. Since its creation, the Forum has supported and accompanied more than 400 projects that respond to the cross-border challenges of our time.
Within the dedicated Space for Solutions, these projects exchanged with public and private stakeholders and presented their concrete answers to international challenges.
At the end of the Forum, ten projects were chosen by a jury to benefit from a dedicated and customized support for a full year.
Discover the 10 Scale-up projects to be supported in 2022-23
