Professor Gearoid Millar will be speaking at ZB Bibliotheek van Zeeland on Monday March 30th. Prof. Millar’s talk will be entitled ‘Peace Work amid the Polycrisis: Interdisciplinarity and the Challenge of Future Peace’. This will be the inaugural lecture for a series on “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Peace and Conflict”.
Peace work has long been framed in normative terms—conflict resolution or peacebuilding—yet has evolved as understandings of threats to peace have shifted, from the end of the Cold War to the post-9/11 period. Today’s interconnected polycrisis demands renewed reflection. Drawing on interviews with 156 peace practitioners, the lecture argues that more deeply interdisciplinary forms of peace work are needed to address climate change, inequality, mass mobilisation, AI-driven polarisation, pandemic risks, and the fragility of global order. Contemporary peace challenges are increasingly complex and resistant to single-disciplinary approaches, requiring more radical interdisciplinarity to build future peace.