This theme explores how health and peace reinforce one another, especially in places affected by conflicts. In such contexts, communities often endure trauma, deteriorating health outcomes, and restricted access to care due to insecurity and fragile health systems. Conversely, resilient, inclusive health systems can foster trust, strengthen social cohesion and lay the foundation for sustainable peace.

This interdisciplinary theme analyses how physical and mental health influence peacebuilding processes by drawing on local perspectives on healing, wellbeing, and community resilience. Furthermore, it assesses how digital technologies and environmental conditions shape mental health, recovery, and peace efforts. Central questions include which policy actors are most influential, whose perspectives remain excluded, and how gender, age, and migration dynamics intersect with health and security. Our research further examines the roles of arts, culture, and local knowledge systems in supporting peace and wellbeing. In doing so, we highlight indigenous forms of knowledge that reveal how health and peace are linked in ways that are grounded in local realities and that can be sustained over time.

It examines how violent conflicts reshape cities, destroys infrastructure, and disrupts the built environment. Damage to roads, housing, water systems, and public spaces leaves long-lasting scars on communities, often deepening divisions and driving displacement. Climate change further increases risks by placing additional stress on fragile urban systems. Yet across Africa, inspiring examples of innovative architecture and infrastructure respond creatively to local contexts, resource constraints, and environmental conditions are offering valuable lessons for building more peaceful, inclusive, and connected communities.

This theme explores how architecture, urban space, and infrastructure shape prospects for peace, and how peacebuilding efforts can reimagine cities through reconstruction, reconciliation, and designs that reconnect people and places. It also addresses questions around gendered experiences of violence, the impacts of technology and environmental change, migration dynamics, and the policy actors who influence urban transformation. By foregrounding indigenous knowledge and local perspectives on cities, the theme generates fresh insights into how built environments can actively support sustainable and lasting peace.

This theme explores the impact of conflict and peace on migration in Africa and how these migratory dynamics influence ideas of safety, belonging, and stability. While emphasis has been placed on young Africans leaving the continent, most migration takes place within Africa itself. Conflict can force displacement, yet peace and opportunity also drive mobility (of a voluntary type), creating overlapping patterns of internal displacement, return migration, circular migration, and labour mobility with varied social, economic, and political ramifications.

Migration and Peace investigated how people on the move understand and experience peace, whether they are fleeing violence or migrating in times of stability. It critically examines persistent myths portraying Africa as defined by instability, and analyses how diaspora communities contribute to peacebuilding in their countries of origin. Key questions address gendered experiences of violence, the emotional and social dimensions of displacement, and which policy actors and perspectives are overlooked in current debates. By foregrounding indigenous knowledge and lived experience, the theme offers deeper insight into migration’s vital role in shaping and sustaining peace.

This theme examines the links between access to, ownership of, and control over land and conflict and peace dynamics across Africa. Land lies at the heart of livelihoods, identity, and political power, and has long been entangled with dispossession, structural inequality, and contestation. These issues have been made worse by climate change, environmental pressures and competition over natural resources which can ignite or prolong violence. However, at the same time, fair and accountable land governance holds significant potential to advance equity, restorative justice, and long-term stability.

In sum, this interdisciplinary theme investigates how communities most directly affected by land and resource tensions define and experience peace and how their perspectives can inform more effective interventions. It analyses how climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies reshape land use, how colonial and post-colonial legacies continue to structure land governance systems, and how identity, gender, and transitional justice influence experiences across rural, urban, peri-urban, and borderland contexts. It also looks into civic participation in land decisions, the consequences of development-driven displacement, and the role of indigenous knowledge in rethinking relationships between land, environment, and sustainable peace.

Description This theme explores how emerging technologies and climate-driven energy transitions are reshaping daily life and influencing experiences of peace. Digital tools can expand access to information, strengthen cross-border connections, and create spaces for civic engagement, particularly for young people seeking to imagine and build more peaceful futures. At the same time, unequal access to technology, concentrated control over data, and gaps in digital infrastructure risk deepening existing inequalities. In some contexts, technologies are deployed to spread misinformation, enable surveillance, or reinforce military power, posing serious challenges to peace and security.

In brief, this research area examines how technological change can both enable and undermine peace. As societies invest in renewable energy, digital infrastructure, and climate-responsive innovations, new opportunities emerge for inclusion, economic participation, and regional cooperation. Yet these same dynamics can also generate tensions over critical minerals, land use, energy access, and technological control, potentially reinforcing inequalities or triggering new forms of conflict. The Technologies and Peace theme also examines whose voices are heard in digital spaces, how young people influence peace debates, and how things like mineral extraction, energy transitions and everyday technologies shape communities. It also explores how local and indigenous knowledge can guide more inclusive and peaceful technological futures.goes here

Africa is home to one of the world’s youngest and most diverse populations. This demographic reality carries profound potential. With meaningful support and opportunity, young people can drive innovation, shape political life, and play a transformative role in building and sustaining peace. Yet, in any peace and security debates, youth are framed primarily as a source of risk or instability. This theme challenges that dominant view by foregrounding the creativity, leadership, and aspirations of younger generations, while recognising that demographic change also involves shifts in ethnicity, culture, gender, and identity. All these factors shape how peace is understood, negotiated, and lived.

This theme explores how different generations experience conflict, peace, and social change, including how demographic changes impact on attitudes toward migration, the environment, new technologies and community life more generally. It also unpacks the tensions and solidarities between age groups and in the process examines how intergenerational dynamics shape political participation, social cohesion, and future trajectories. By identifying inclusive strategies and elevating local knowledge, the theme seeks to ensure that demographic change becomes a driver of fairness, resilience, and lasting peace.