A Special letter from afp’s executive director, liz hume

March 1, 2023

Dear Colleagues,

(I know this is a long letter. If you don’t have time to read it all, please skim the bolded top paragraphs because I promise there is vital information for everyone!)

As we move into 2023, we are celebrating the 20th anniversary of AfP’s incorporation. AfP was established over two decades ago by a small group of visionary peacebuilders who knew peacebuilding organizations must work collectively to build the field to prevent and reduce conflict and build sustainable peace. Today, AfP’s nonpartisan network represents over 180+ organizations and 30,000+ global peacebuilders in 181 countries working to end violent conflict and build sustainable peace across 32 areas of expertise.

Last year, AfP received the Warren Knight Distinguished Service Award—a prize recognizing the work of extraordinary individuals and organizations. As I always say, AfP is only as strong as its members, and this award belongs to all of us.

But there is more work to be done to strengthen the peacebuilding field. In the coming weeks, AfP will release its new 10-year Fieldbuilding Strategy to advance and strengthen the peacebuilding field by elevating the following strategic priorities:

●      Accelerating collective action through collaboration and exchange;

●      Advocating for policies, laws, and funding to prevent and reduce violent conflict;

●      Creating standards of practice to align peacebuilding around common tools, frameworks, and approaches;

●      Developing an evidence base to ensure better policies and practice;

●      Shaping new narratives to develop and amplify effective peacebuilding messaging.

We are grateful to the Strategy Member Advisory Committee and all our members who contributed to the development of AfP’s Fieldbuilding Strategy, and we will continue to call on everyone to hold us accountable to implement the strategy successfully. We are extremely grateful for a newly strengthened Board of Directors. When we put out the call for new Board members, the response was overwhelming!

Last year’s PeaceCon@10 welcomed over 1,600 participants from 120 countries, and on May 3-5th, in partnership with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), please join us for PeaceCon 2023: Beyond Fragile Ground: New Peacebuilding Architectures for Today and the Future. We encourage you to sponsor and attend (in person or virtually) to share your challenges and best practices, learn from other experts, and build partnerships. Thank you to our members who submitted a proposal for PeaceCon 2023. We received a record number of proposals again and are working hard to finalize the agenda by early March.

AfP’s communication strategy is growing. Please let us know if you have ideas for AfP’s podcast or want AfP to amplify your messages or reports. AfP now has more than 26,000 Twitter followers, 28,000+ followers on LinkedIn, 14,000 followers on Facebook, and a budding Instagram following of almost 2,500. On September 21st, International Day of Peace, AfP’s campaign, under the hashtag #PeacebuildingInAction, achieved hundreds of thousands of impressions on social media. AfP’s “Peace: We Build It!” podcast has been downloaded thousands of times and featured esteemed guests, including Iryna Venediktova, former Prosecutor General of Ukraine, and Amanda Ripley, award-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author. AfP also continues to connect with the media, and this past year, we were featured in several media outlets, including Foreign Policy, Just Security, and DevEx.

However, as a sector, we have not explained what peacebuilding is and why we need it now more than ever. AfP will develop training and workshops to help us be better messengers, including an op-ed training, and we are grateful to the Fund for Peace for helping to pilot this training. We have also conducted training for our members on public presentations, and we encourage all presenters at PeaceCon to watch the video. AfP can also help our members develop and publish op-eds, articles, and reports.

Additionally, in partnership with the Horizons Project, we are working to reframe the peacebuilding narrative. AfP is working with the creative agency Buena to design a "Peace Force" campaign based on our peace framing and narrative research. Launching in the spring, this campaign will provide a platform for the public in the U.S. to learn about peacebuilding and how to build peace in their own neighborhoods.

AfP is also working to advance the field to embrace a more rigorous evaluative culture to prove impact and better understand what works and what doesn’t through practical and accessible methods. AfP’s blog, Research Talks with L&E, provides short syntheses on new advancements in the field, and AfP’s video series, #CreativityInCrisis, regularly publishes stories with over 3,000 views. We also know that faith leaders are a vital part of peacebuilding, and AfP co-hosted the Evidence Summit on Impactful Interreligious Action in partnership with the USAID’s Local Faith and Transformative Partnerships Hub, bringing together more than 400 faith-based organizations, donors, and experts to integrate peacebuilding and inter-religious action programming better.

Looking forward to this year, we are excited to release the digital, interactive, and participatory Eirene Peacebuilding Database®. AfP members have been testing and providing feedback for the Eirene Peacebuilding Database® open-source platform that will help us better measure peacebuilding outcomes. The new platform revolutionizes the original database by providing multiple new user-friendly features that allow us to capture real-time indicators currently used across the field to inform future research efforts on best practices and standardized measurement.

As a Principle Investigator on the USAID CPS/CVP Learning Agenda Team, AfP also looks forward to releasing new research that includes a systematic mixed methods review on P/CVE, a literature review on Conflict Sensitivity and Peacebuilding, and a series of Measurement Guides for P/CVE, Climate Security, Violence Reduction, and Conflict Sensitivity/Integration.

AfP, through evidence-based advocacy and education globally, continues to co-lead the GFA Coalition with Mercy Corps—now more than 100 organizations strong. The Global Fragility Act (GFA) centers peacebuilding in U.S. foreign policy in four priority countries and one region. With its members and strategic partners, AfP led eight workstreams to provide key recommendations for the implementation plans in real time to the U.S. government. We are grateful for all our members who co-led these groups. The plans are currently awaiting Presidential approval and will then be sent to Congress. Following the submission to Congress, the GFA Coalition will be invited to meetings with the State Department, the Department of Defense, and USAID. 

But there is more work to be done for the GFA to succeed. In September, AfP published a policy brief on key operational reforms Congress must make, including procurement, earmarks, and localization to implement the GFA. AfP and a robust coalition of over 50 NGOs have advocated policy and lawmakers for the past decade to fix the recognized problems of broad legal restrictions on “material support.” While the peacebuilding carveouts announced by the Department of Treasury in December are a welcomed first step, Congress must legislate a permanent fix. AfP continues to lead on this critical issue and recently secured a Democratic co-sponsor in the Senate supporting a tailored, GFA-specific fix that would exempt NGOs from liability in the GFA countries and hopefully lead to more widespread support. AfP is working to socialize this fix to secure additional bipartisan champions.

AfP also recently assumed the leadership of the Prevention and Protection Working Group (PPWG), a coalition of over 255 organizations and atrocity prevention experts dedicated to improving U.S. and global policies and civilian capacities to prevent violent conflict, avert mass atrocities, protect civilians, and advance the atrocity prevention agenda. The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) established and led the PPWG for over a decade, and we are grateful for their leadership. PPWG and its members were instrumental in enacting the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act and the Atrocities Prevention Strategy. In addition to overseeing the implementation of the law and strategy, the PPWG also helped ensure the creation of the Complex Crises Fund and the Atrocity Early Warning Task Force (formerly known as the Atrocity Prevention Board).

AfP will continue to ensure the PPWG is a strong advocate for atrocity prevention and provide robust oversight of its implementation. AfP will also ensure atrocity prevention is robustly integrated into other peacebuilding laws and strategies and focus on identifying and remedying key emerging threats in a standardized way.

But as I repeatedly say, you can't do it if you don’t have the resources. AfP’s Policy & Advocacy team worked to secure funding in the U.S. appropriations process by submitting hundreds of appropriations requests to individual congressional offices, Questions for the Record, letters, and public statements. Last year, AfP, with its members, secured several increases for key peacebuilding accounts for FY23, including USAID’s Democracy Fund, the State Department’s Human Rights and Democracy Fund, the Prevention and Stabilization Fund, as well as increased resources for Atrocities Prevention and Women, Peace, and Security.

AfP is starting to work with the 118th Congress and will continue to advocate for robust peacebuilding funding and policy reforms, including through AfP’s new Congressional Briefing Book. Again, we are grateful for our members who supported these key recommendations, and we encourage you to use them in your advocacy and education.

While the U.S. is a major donor, AfP works with other bi- and multilateral donors. We are deeply concerned by the peacebuilding funding cuts by the United Kingdom and the Swedish government, which have been critical peacebuilding donors. We must work collectively to build the peacebuilding donor base. AfP is consulting with other bilateral governments, including the Germans, to assist with implementing their increased stabilization funding.

We are also working closely with the UN Peacebuilding Support Office (UNPBSO) and UNDP as AfP’s Congressional Briefing Book calls for increased financial support for both. Currently, the UN is developing the New Agenda for Peace (NAP) in advance of the Summit of the Future in September 2024, with the goals of reducing strategic risks, strengthening responses to violence, elevating the role of women and girls, and investing in prevention and peacebuilding. The NAP is a critical opportunity to prioritize and center upstream conflict and violence. AfP recently submitted feedback to the UNPBSO with practical key recommendations. AfP is sponsoring a session at the June Academic Council on the UN System (ACUNS) Annual Meeting on the NAP. We are also sponsoring the upcoming #GlobalFuturesForum (GFF), a civil society conference held in March that creates recommendations for the Summit for the Future (SOTF), scheduled for September 2024, and the preceding Ministerial Forum on the SOTF later this year.

But we also need to grow the peacebuilding donor pool and build peacebuilding champions in other sectors to truly integrate peacebuilding and conflict prevention in the health, humanitarian, climate, food security, and other sectors. We must go beyond conflict sensitivity because we know the earthquake in Turkey is more than just a humanitarian crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic is more than just a health crisis, and conflict and climate are compounding factors. But even when we successfully make a case for including peacebuilding in policies and strategies, we need to hold policymakers and donors accountable to ensure successful implementation. Moving forward this year, conflict and peacebuilding integration will be vital to AfP’s work to advance the field. If you are not already a part of the Conflict Sensitivity and Integration Working Group, please join. 

We also need to continuously innovate and get out in front of evolving and interrelated complex conflict dynamics. Mis/disinformation is fueling conflict, while technological mass disruption and generative artificial intelligence will continue to impact our work. We encourage you to join AfP’s Digital Peacebuilding Community of Practice. Additionally, people’s psychological experiences and mental health greatly impact their behavior, attitudes, and relation to conflict and peace, and the field must better understand the connection between brain science, mental health, psychology, conflict prevention, and peacebuilding.

AfP’s Locally-Led Peacebuilding Peacebuilding Working Group has developed and continues to develop recommendations to ensure that locally-led policies are practical and achievable and that needed reforms are developed. We encourage you to review our policy brief on locally-led peacebuilding.

While we can’t work on every violent conflict, AfP, in partnership with its members, has and will continue to develop recommendations on major violent conflicts worldwide, including Afghanistan, Haiti, and Ethiopia. In November, AfP released an updated global call to action on Ukraine, advocating for de-escalation, continued and inclusive diplomacy, unimpeded humanitarian and peacebuilding assistance, and, most importantly, support for and protection of the Ukrainian people. AfP marked the recent first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine with a statement amplifying these tasks and urging the international community to promote conflict and atrocities prevention globally and continue to address and robustly respond to other violent conflicts. In late December, AfP, in partnership with key women’s rights and humanitarian organizations, released two statements in response to the Taliban’s decision to ban women from university and working at NGOs.

However, in the U.S., we know conflict is not something that just happens overseas. In December, AfP released a report from a survey of 160+ leading peacebuilding and conflict experts on the state of democracy, social cohesion, and the rule of law in the U.S. Not surprisingly, the report finds the U.S. has an escalating conflict problem. In his second State of the Union Address, Biden stated, “we must all speak out. There is no place for political violence in America.” While the rhetoric is welcomed, we need more resources and sustained urgency at scale from the U.S. government, the private sector, and private foundations. Fortunately, civil society, one of America’s greatest resiliencies, works in communities throughout the U.S. to prevent and reduce violent extremism and political violence.

Last year, AfP secured additional funding for the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Community Relations Service. We are currently advocating for increased support for the Department of Homeland Security’s Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention grant program, DOJ’s community violence intervention and prevention programming, and more holistic, trauma- and mental-health informed approaches to violence prevention and reduction. In the coming days, AfP will release a new policy brief that calls for urgent action to address increasing hyper-polarization, violent extremism, and political violence in the U.S.

AfP is also leading with a Champions of Change award to highlight organizations that are working on diversity of leadership and who are committed to practical actions that promote justice, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (JDEIA). AfP recently announced the Network of Traditional and Religious Peacemakers as the latest Champion of Change for their work to integrate diverse faith actors in peacebuilding. AfP also recently became a signatory of the Coalition for Racial and Ethnic Equity in Development (CREED) pledge. I was honored to provide the keynote address at a USIP event, Amplifying Women’s Voices in Peacebuilding, where I highlighted AfP’s work on the need to promote  diversity of leadership and transparency.

AfP is developing capacity-building workshops for its members, from op-ed training to proposal drafting to public speaking. If you have an idea for a capacity-building workshop, please contact us! We are developing a mentor/mentee program to connect senior and young peacebuilding professionals, particularly women and people of color, and to start a working group of senior women leaders at the CEO, Executive Director, and Vice President level, which will be launched at PeaceCon.

Also, many of our organizations are small but mighty and need operational support. Over the last five years, AfP has developed robust operational and administrative systems and can recommend organizational partners, including auditors and more. We have the systems and policies, and these resources are yours for the asking! We also hold a small organization community of practice. 

Finally, I want to thank the AfP team, who work tirelessly and make AfP a great workplace. We spent considerable time rebuilding our internal and external values in our new strategy and we are working hard to embody them. But let us know what we can be doing better! Again, AfP belongs to all of you; we are stronger when working together.

Peace doesn’t just happen; we have to build it. Please contact us if you are not a member or want to recommend a member. We are a big peacebuilding tent, so join us! I can’t wait to see you all at PeaceCon and look forward to continuing to build this growing and powerful peacebuilding field.

All my best,

Liz Hume