October 16-18, 2019 | Warrenton, VA, USA | All Issue Areas

60th Strategy for Peace Conference

Invitation Only

The Stanley Center convenes its Strategy for Peace Conference annually to consider key policy challenges, drawing on the experience and knowledge of invited experts from the public and private sectors who meet in concurrent roundtables. Held at the Airlie Center outside Washington, DC, this is the 60th consecutive year of the conference. Roundtables are focused on each of the center’s three current areas of programming—avoiding the use of nuclear weapons, mitigating climate change, and preventing mass violence and atrocities.

2019 Concurrent Roundtables 

Open Source: A Geospatial Ethics Simulation

Open source nonproliferation analysts and journalists both seek to enhance the public policy conversation through impactful, accurate, and ethical work. Journalists often rely on analysts to inform their reporting through geospatial and other open source analyses. Analysts often rely on journalists to get analyses to readers, elevate public profiles, and demonstrate the impact of their work. Both analysts and journalists may try to do the right thing and avoid causing undue harm. But who upholds ethical standards in this relationship? And can those standards endure the pressure of day-to-day competition?

These questions lack easy answers. But by using “Open Source,” an original game modeling the ethical stakes of using open source intelligence for reporting on nonproliferation, players have the chance to reconsider their approaches. Participants play alongside colleagues from the journalism and nonproliferation communities and have discussion sessions in which players can consider challenges, learn about ethical best practices, and collaborate on ways to enhance ethical practices among stakeholders in the field.

The Next Global Financial Crisis and Climate Change: A Policy Agenda to Align with the Paris Agreement 

This roundtable examines the complex relationship between the financial system and the threat of climate change and identifies which aspects of the regulatory and economic framework must change to deliver a climate-safe world. Despite the growing recognition of climate-related physical, transition, and liability risks, there has not yet been a material change in market attitudes or investor behavior that corresponds with addressing those risks. A paradigm shift is required to change market rules and sentiment and reform regulatory and economic frameworks so they align with the scale of the climate challenge.

Crises are moments when radical change is possible. The global financial crisis of 2008 propelled a rapid period of reform in the financial sector that led to a new suite of banking regulations and consumer norms. It is difficult to predict what will trigger the next financial crisis or when it will present; however, a credible set of transformational reforms and an influencing plan can be developed now to shift the global economy onto a more sustainable course at such a critical juncture.

Participants include the climate community as well as representatives from treasuries, national banks, financial regulators, and government executive offices in North America, Asia, and Europe. Roundtable objectives include creating a baseline in order to collate, categorize, and prioritize a final reform package that is coherent, transformational, and deliverable; and exploring the most salient narrative and influencing plan to mobilize broad coalitions and key influencers with access to the likely chief architects of any response.

Making the Case for Peace in Cities: Halving Urban Violence by 2030 

With a focus on strategically aligning the peacebuilding, mass violence prevention, and urban violence prevention communities on evidence and advocacy to build peaceful cities and halve urban violence by 2030, this roundtable is co-organized with Impact:Peace and the +Peace Coalition. To realize the ambition of more peaceful, just, and inclusive societies, as articulated in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16, it is essential to consider the role of subnational leaders at the state and city level in significantly reducing all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere. Subnational leaders have an imperative to reduce violence in the immediate term while also addressing the root causes of violence in ways that increase equality and inclusion in their communities.

To build a successful global campaign to halve urban violence by 2030, the community must be able to answer the question, “So, how do you do it?” The focus of discussion is on preparing advocates, experts, and influencers with the evidence needed to improve collective capacity to make the public, political, and policy cases to halve urban violence by 2030 in ways that increase societal resilience, advance equity, and tackle identity-based discrimination.

Contact

Jennifer Smyser

Vice President and Director of Policy Programming Strategy