Podcast Series
Voices of Peace – Stories, Ideas, and Conversations for a Better World
Voices of Peace – Stories, Ideas, and Conversations for a Better World is a podcast series dedicated to exploring peace as both an idea and a practice in an increasingly fragmented world. Bringing together scholars, policymakers, peacebuilding practitioners, journalists, and civil society voices, the series examines how peace is understood, communicated, and pursued across different contexts. It offers a space for critical reflection on the promises and limitations of prevailing approaches to peacebuilding, including the liberal peace paradigm, while highlighting alternative perspectives and emerging pathways towards more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable forms of peace. Through engaging conversations and diverse experiences, Voices of Peace seeks to foster dialogue on the conditions needed to build more peaceful societies and strengthen international relations grounded in cooperation, solidarity, and peaceful coexistence.
Podcasts
Episode 1 of our podcast series opens with a conversation with human rights lawyer Laila Simoncelli, whose decades of experience in conflict zones, international human rights advocacy and peacebuilding offer a compelling perspective on one of the ;ost urgent questions of our time: what does it really mean to build peace? Rather than treating peace as the mere absence of war, this conversation explores it as a political, cultural, and deeply human process grounded in justice, relationships, nonviolence, and shared responsibility. Drawing on her work in the Balkans, with the UN, and with the Communita Papa Giovanni XXIII, Simoncelli reflects on the lessons of past conflicts, the importance of dialogue and reconciliation, the role of civil society and institutions, and the idea of a Ministry of Peace as a concrete public policy. This episode invites listeners to rethink peace not as a distant ideal, but as a practical commitment that begins in everyday relationships and extends to the global community.
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In this episode, former British diplomat Peter Jones reflects on the changing nature of diplomacy in an increasingly fragmented international order. The conversation explores the relationship between diplomacy, dialogue and peace, asking whether preventative diplomacy can still help avert conflict in an age of geopolitical rivalry, polarization and declining trust.
In this episode, negotiation expert Francesco Marchi explores how negotiation can become a more systematic tool for conflict prevention, management and peacebuilding. Moving beyond the idea of negotiation as a single moment at the table, the conversation examines the importance of preparation, institutional capacity, implementation and learning, and asks why organizations so often rely on individual negotiators rather than building reliable negotiation systems. We also explore the human side of negotiation – emotions, intuition, empathy and subjectivity – and consider whether a good negotiator can ever be truly “objective”. Finally, the discussion looks at the opportunities and limits of artificial intelligence and at what governments and institutions would need to change in order to treat negotiation as a genuine strategic capability for peace.
In this conversation, Dr. Giulia Grillo is joined by Roberto Mancini, Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Macerata, in Italy, to discuss the concept of peace. At a time when the term is frequently used yet often understood in different ways, we seek to clarify its meaning and examine the pathways through which a genuine and lasting peace can be achieved.
Watch Here (English Subtitles Available)