Build Peace 2025
Build Peace is the annual conference of Build Up, co-organized this year with the ICIP. It is a global space where digital technology, the arts, and other innovations are used to transform conflicts and advance peacebuilding.
Bringing together activists, tech professionals, academics, and members of civil society organizations from around the world.
Build Peace 2025 was held on 21–23 November at La CIBA in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a center focused on women’s resources, innovation, and feminist economics.
This edition focused on innovation and the use of creative and technological tools to transform conflicts and promote coexistence. The City Council of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Catalunya Internacional, and the Government of Catalonia supported the conference.
Conference Topics
Build Peace 2025 started with a central theme of debate and different subthemes linked to the context and location where the conference takes place.
“Build Peace 2025 – Towards a Pluriverse of Peace”
In today’s world, marked by oppression, division, inequality, and a loss of trust, it is essential to rethink what it means to talk about peace. How can we recover and give meaning to peace in this context? How can we take advantage of new possibilities to connect, learn from the experiences of diverse communities, and cultivate interdependence?
Through art, technology, and other innovations, Build Peace 2025 proposed a space to question, redefine, and imagine together what a culture of peace means. To do so, the conference focused on three subthemes that addressed key dilemmas in the field of peace and conflict:
Between Polarization and Deliberation
The sessions focused on the challenges posed by rising disinformation, hate speech and polarisation across social media platforms. Discussions highlighted the need to develop more ethical, human-centred platforms and algorithms that avoid the dominant corporate logic.
Proposals included online hate-speech monitoring, pre-bunking tools to prevent disinformation, participatory-designed text classifiers and AI models incorporating social and peacebuilding perspectives. Participants also explored how technology can strengthen participatory democracy and enable healthier public dialogue.
Between Deterrence and Nonviolence
In the second day of the conference, the thematic focus turned to human and community security, questioning the militarised narratives that dominate public discourse.
Against a global backdrop marked, especially in Europe, by the war in Ukraine and the violence in Gaza, speakers discussed how technology can serve war but also peace. Presentations examined the use of surveillance technologies, particularly at borders and in movement control, which can violate human rights but may also become tools for peace if developed with safeguards and public participation.
Between Erasure and Memory
The third day of the conference explored how societies deal with memory and forgetting in contexts of violence and authoritarianism, looking at concrete cases such as the Franco dictatorship and the Holocaust. Speakers warned of the risks of constructing single narratives or instrumentalising memory, and emphasised the role of listening and remembrance as forms of resistance that help repair collective trauma and foster reconciliation.
Discussions also highlighted the need for a feminist lens in peacebuilding: the voices and memories of women continue to be invisibilised, particularly in rural contexts, and the construction of diverse, plural narratives remains essential.
Background
Since 2014, the Build Peace conference has gathered 300 people for three days. It has been held in cities such as Boston, Nicosia, Zurich, Bogotá, Belfast, San Diego & Tijuana, Nairobi, and Antipolo. Participants from over 60 countries and territories work in national and international organizations, the United Nations, academic institutions, civil society, governments, and the private sector.
ICIP has participated in the last three editions of Build Peace, held in Germany (2022), Kenya (2023), and the Philippines (2024).
The 2025 conference brought together people, organizations, and institutions from Catalonia that promote peacebuilding in the digital space. Sharing experiences and advancing the use of technology, the arts, and other innovations to transform conflicts positively.
