Written by Chuchun Yu and Tiffany Jan
Image credit: Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation
When ‘Peace’ Becomes a Stigma
When our Chair, Lung Yingtai, first proposed organising forums on war in 2017, we were surprised and, frankly, unconvinced. This was a time when few in Taiwan worried about war and its consequences, referring to a time that occurred in Hong Kong, Ukraine, Gaza, or Iran. In 2022, Dr Lung assembled us for a study group to learn about conflict and resolution. Her reason was simple: you have to be more farsighted and knowledgeable to lead change.
As tension across the Taiwan Strait increased, we realised that the prospect of conflict had shifted from a distant possibility to an everyday concern. Taiwan was bracing for a new presidency amidst a tightening vice of military pressure, with People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft buzzing the island and warships encroaching upon our territorial waters. The logic of defence budgets and civilian mobilisation increasingly shaped public discourse.
Anxiety and animosity were bubbling to the surface. “Peace” felt like a ghost: an ethereal, haunting presence lingering from an earlier time, and perhaps even a dangerous distraction from the hard power reality of survival. Critics asked: What leverage does a weaker power, such as Taiwan, have to negotiate peace with a far more powerful China?
Promoting peace was labelled defeatism, recalling Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of an aggressor that had already broken its promises to the people of Hong Kong. Calls for action were seen as indicative of vulnerability or weakness. A futile echo of a fractured international order, as important as the United Nations in struggling to enforce its own mandates. As one of our colleagues challenged: “If even the UN has failed to keep the peace, how are we to succeed?”
We were a small team of five full-time staff, with three others contributing part-time. Our roots stretch from Taiwan and China to Canada and Panama. Our political views are as diverse as our origins. We clashed regularly. We stumbled into numerous setbacks.
Sometimes we would be shocked out of the ordinary day-to-day life by the events unfolding around us. One colleague’s ten-year-old son, while watching the news, out of the blue shouted, “Death to the Chinese!” as footage of military drills in Taiwan appeared on the TV screen. In an instant, the shattered domestic quiet made clear what was at stake. We are not only arranging forums or editing social media posts; we are confronting the question of what ideas the next generation will inherit.
The ordinary conditions of life, the ability to live without fear, to speak without hatred, and to see others as human, turned out to be more fragile than we had assumed.
Learning What “Peace” Means
For decades, the Foundation has hosted more than 300 forums, tracing the arc of global developments with an eye toward historical context and emerging trajectories across regions and disciplines. These diverse explorations converge on a central insight: understanding the world is not an end in itself. It provides the intellectual grounding and moral imperative for responsible civic engagement.
We began our peace initiatives by listening to the narratives of peace practitioners, who had long been engaged in the difficult work of peacebuilding. Partners and fellows brought a shared understanding of what was at stake. Many came from regions marked by ongoing conflict, some as refugees from Venezuela and Gaza, carrying with them the weight of unresolved struggles at home. But we are grateful that they still chose to stand with us, driven by a deep, lived commitment to solidarity, showing us that Taiwan’s story is not as isolated from their own as we might have thought at first.
It was through this outward-looking process that we began to understand peace not as a fixed ideal or political slogan, but as a discipline of listening, relationship-building, and sustained civic responsibility.
Image credit: Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation
Practising Peace in Small Ways
Actions took shape as small, practical efforts. We brought together practitioners from Japan, Switzerland, Venezuela, China, France, Israel, and Palestine, whose work spans climate security, digital dialogue, displacement, historical memory, and peace education. They showed us that resilience is not only a matter of policy but also of functioning institutions, bonded communities, and citizens who remain informed and engaged.
In polarised environments, meaningful dialogue becomes increasingly challenging, but all the more necessary. We opened the space to discuss peace with the public, and through integrating the stories from the Peace Fellows, we curated the Taipei International Peace Forum. Our media partners expressed their own scepticism about where themes such as marine governance, trauma healing through theatre, or racial conflict would fit in the conversation about Taiwan. These intersections required careful translation into a context more accustomed to viewing peace through the lens of military deterrence and cross-strait negotiations.
One such moment was when Israeli peace educator Roi Silberberg and Palestinian scholar Hazem Almassry engaged in a difficult yet honest exchange of perspectives at the forum. Their dialogue did not aim to resolve political disagreements or to assign responsibility. What they did was speak carefully, honestly about their own experiences, their losses, and the limits of what they could accept or understand.
For the audience, this was a rare encounter with the human realities behind the headlines. The exchange showed that dialogue does not have to begin with agreement. Sometimes, it begins with the willingness to stay in conversation, even when agreement remains out of reach. Building on Johan Galtung’s foundational conception of positive peace, John Paul Lederach’s notion of the “moral imagination” suggests that peacebuilding requires the courage to reimagine ourselves within a web of relationships that includes even our enemies. Thus, dialogue becomes not an exercise in idealism, but a practical tool for deconstructing systemic biases, reducing misunderstanding, and strategically interrupting cycles of fear. We would have needed these insights: Before long, the concept of “peace” itself had become a key battleground in the political debate between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), each of whom had different ideas of what it might mean for Taiwan.
Scaling Change Through Peace Education
Image credit: Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation
Along with the stigmatised “peace,” what became most visible was the lack of peace education on the island. This is where Lederach’s framework becomes especially useful. He argued that sustainable peace cannot depend solely on elite-level negotiations or formal agreements. It requires the construction of peace infrastructure: relationships, institutions, practices, and educational systems that can sustain long-term transformation. Seen in this light, peace education is not peripheral to peacebuilding. It is one of the ways societies cultivate the civic imagination, analytical capacity, and relational skills needed to live with conflict without being consumed by it.
We began with the Thinker School, training the first cohort of Peace Ambassadors. In partnership with local universities, we curated hybrid classes on peace theory, practices, and negotiation skills. Curious, self-driven, and deeply invested in their role in Taiwan’s future, they brought an energy that the team learned to harness. They developed their own peace action plans and stepped into classrooms themselves to guide younger students.
The colleagues of the Foundation gave careful thought to these initiatives to deepen the collective impact. The fellows were the stars of the public forum; the Peace Film Festival expanded engagement into communities; and connections were built between the fellows and the young ambassadors through exchanges on field visits to schools in Taipei and memorials to the White Terror, to the island’s legislature and historic battlefields on Kinmen island, where Chinese landing forces were repelled during the civil war. These encounters created space for the fellows to understand Taiwan while allowing mentor-mentee relationships to take root and continue beyond the programmes themselves. Together, these initiatives transformed peace education from an abstract aspiration into a concrete practice of civic learning, intergenerational exchange, and social resilience.
What We Carry Forward
We carried out this work with limited resources and without a clear template, learning as we stumbled through. This shared journey taught us that collaborating on peace initiatives is our most practical means of safeguarding ordinary life and our valued democracy.
On a more personal level, the true shift came when we realised that peace was not only something we advanced through our initiatives but also something we ourselves were learning through the work. When asked why we do this work, our answer no longer came from abstract ideals alone but from how these projects had changed us. Through them, we learnt how peace could be practised in everyday life; how to speak when power makes silence easier; how to act without being governed by fear; how to understand those we find difficult or even disagreeable; and how to reclaim agency in our own lives.
Through this practice, the humanism in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday and Lung Yingtai’s Big River Big Sea, along with Johan Galtung’s positive peace concept of addressing inequality beyond the mere absence of violence and John Paul Lederach’s framework of moral imagination that appreciates human capability in building sustainable relationships independent of top-down negotiations, became more than intellectual references. They are a way to understand what peace demands from our grassroots perspective: the courage to resist the suffocating singular logic of geopolitics while insisting on more humane possibilities through the everyday practice of peacebuilding.
Peace is a choice, and it is the responsibility we carry forward.
Notes: We would like to sincerely acknowledge Chunchi, Jufang, Sophie, Yating, Yen Sheng, Yuan, our Peace Ambassadors, and the volunteers for their shared dedication and invaluable contributions to advancing the peace initiatives.
Chuchun Yu was born in Taiwan and raised in Panama. She received her graduate degree from the University of Dublin in Ireland. In 2007, she crossed paths with the Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation and has been a central part of the team since. Having previously served as the Director, she now continues her work with the Foundation as a Senior Researcher.
Tiffany Jan received her graduate degree in Environmental Technology from Imperial College London. Prior to this, she studied Anthropology and International Development in Montréal, Canada. She began her journey with the Foundation as a recipient of the Peace Boat Global University Scholarship in 2017 and has since continued to promote international exchange and collaboration.