In January, key peacebuilding stakeholders gathered in Geneva to launch the ground-breaking ‘Peacemaking Covenant,’  a practical framework that reconsiders the traditional conventions of peacemaking. Grounded in eight Principles for Peace and four shifts to peacemaking, the Covenant is a framework that can chart a path to lasting, inclusive peace to invest in a lasting and inclusive future everywhere.

Principles for Peace is a global participatory initiative to develop a new set of principles, standards, and norms that will fundamentally reshape how peace processes are structured, sequenced, and actualized. A broad range of partners and actors in the peacemaking, peacebuilding, humanitarian, and development fields contributed to the realization of these participatory consultations laying the foundation for longer-term peace action seeded in local contexts.

Peacemakers Network Executive Director Dr. Mohamed Elsanousi spoke to stakeholders on how faith and traditional communities can utilize the Principles to bolster their peacebuilding work. He also encouraged multi-stakeholder partnerships with the faith community to ensure a ‘whole of society’ approach to support sustainable peace.

The Peacemakers Network supported in hosting two rounds of regional consultations with over 111 individuals of faith, representing 49 countries on what the Principles of Peace should include and how to frame the Covenant to be meaningful for their local contexts.

The Peacemaking Covenant provides a framework for action. Principles for Peace will now work with mediators and negotiators, security forces and national authorities, international actors, donors, civil society, and businesses, to name a few, to identify practical ways to implement the Covenant at all levels of society.