Geneva Peace Week, which was held from the 7th to the 11th November, is a collective initiative facilitated by the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG), the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, and the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform in collaboration the Swiss Confederation.

This week-long event underlined that each and every person and institution has a role to play in building peace and highlighted that peace promotion occurs in many different contexts and cuts across disciplines and sectors. In this sense, Geneva Peace Week is an attempt to break down the divisions which tend to characterize the international community and can limit more creative responses.

This was an exciting week for QUNO, as we co-organised and participated in a number of events, including the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform Annual Conference, which this year focused on the war economy in Syria and the necessity to address these political economy aspects of the conflict as part of the process of peacemaking and peacebuilding. It was a week of engagement and opportunity for QUNO and other non-governmental-organizations, UN agencies and academic and research institutions that connected with each other and shared ideas about good practices in sustaining peace and prevention in relation to other areas of work such as business, human rights, food security etc.