EuPRA Conference | Sarajevo 2026

Reclaiming Peace and Cultivating Hope Beyond the Crisis Narrative: Towards Accountability and Action

To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination 
- bell hooks (2003, 36)

The world today is marked by overlapping and intensifying crises — from genocidal violence and accelerating ecological collapse to the militarisation of Europe and the ongoing reproduction of racialised and colonial hierarchies. In such context, peace research is called to reckon with its own histories by recognising a plurality of ontologies and epistemologies, and engaging with ethical responsibilities. Instead, the field has been entangled with the very structures it seeks to critique, reproducing frameworks that stabilise the status quo rather than challenge it. The dominance of crisis narratives shaping contemporary politics across scales adds to these stabilising processes; they help legitimise responses that prioritise urgency over accountability and narrows the space for political imagination.

The task before us is not simply to reform peace research, but to reimagine its horizons, methods, and commitments. Rather than reinforcing the crisis narrative, the current times require us to critically examine alternative ways of living together that foreground accountability and social justice. 

In this context, the 2026 EuPRA Conference in Sarajevo invites critical, decolonial, feminist, Indigenous, diasporic, and other forms of engagements with the question of how we might live together otherwise. We welcome contributions that foreground forms of knowledge, experience, and struggles that have been marginalised, silenced, or rendered unintelligible within dominant peace discourses — including those emerging from liberation movements, community organising, artistic and embodied practices, and everyday acts of care and survival.

The conference aims to collectively cultivate and engage with the work of re-imagining and building worlds that might yet be. We therefore encourage dialogues and collaborations that explore what peace might mean as justice, as repair, as accountability, as refusal, as creativity, and as radical hope.

We warmly encourage contributors across all stages of life and professional experience to submit abstracts, whether you are involved in academia, in arts, working as a practitioner or if you in other ways identify yourself in peace work. We particularly welcome contributions from those who have traditionally been marginalised or excluded within academic spaces.

By bringing together scholars, activists, artists, and communities, this conference seeks to create a space in which peace is not only discussed or theorised, but also practiced: as resistance to violence and erasure, as solidarity across borders and struggles, and as collective worldmaking grounded in dignity, relationality, and the possibility of living otherwise.

Themes

#EuPRA2026 will cover the following 10 themes:

1. War, Genocide and Everyday Violence
2. Dialogues, Mediation and Local Peace
3. Security, Power and Contemporary Challenges to Peace
4. Feminist Peace Research
5. Decolonial and Critical Peace Studies
6. Nonviolence, Democracy and Social Movements
7. Youth, Education and Peace Pedagogies
8. Mobility, Borders and Geographies of Peace
9. Climate, Ecology and Peace
10. Arts, Media and Digital Peace Practices

Safe Space

All EuPRA events are conducted within the frame of the EuPRA Safe Space and Code of Conduct rules. 

Attending EuPRA events means you agree with these rules.

Socials

The conference uses #EuPRA2026 as a hashtag on all platforms.

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