We would like to thank all donors.
A wave of solidarity accompanied the Munich Peace Conference 2024. The loss of funding from the City of Munich, the Catholic Fund and Greenpeace was compensated for by many small and large donations. A cushion remains for possible legal action and for the 2025 peace conference.
More detailed descriptions of the events can be found under Press HERE
The International Munich Peace Conference 2024 – The elephant in the room of discourse – Narrowing the room of discourse
Report by Julian Mühlfellner
“Whether and to what extent the discourse space for pacifist positions in Germany is narrowing – and how best to deal with this narrowing – is difficult to assess objectively. In any case, the International Munich Peace Conference is just one of hundreds (or thousands) of events motivated by peace policy that take place in Germany every year. The experiences of the 2024 Peace Conference and the lessons that can be learned from them are therefore by no means universally valid or unambiguous. Nevertheless, they are worth discussing – because they give hope that there are ways and means of maintaining or even expanding the discourse space.
The bouncers
The topics on the basis of which the (supposed) narrowing of the discourse space takes place are generally known; these include in particular the Gaza war and the Ukraine war as well as the progressive militarization that is justified with them.
The 2024 Peace Conference dealt with all of these topics, so it was hardly surprising that it came into conflict with various discourse space bouncers (not a polemic, but a sociological loanword). These primarily included the Greens/Rosa Liste and SPD/Volt parliamentary groups in the Munich City Council, Munich’s Head of Cultural Affairs Anton Biebl, Munich’s Lord Mayor Dieter Reiter and the Catholic Fund.
Within the last two weeks before the start of the event, they withdrew project funding from the Munich Peace Conference amounting to around a third of the planned budget for the Peace Conference. This withdrawal of funding was potentially capable of preventing the peace conference from taking place. To what extent this was intentional is unclear.”
Read the full report HERE
The Global North from the perspective of the Global South. A change of perspective
Grassroots civil society movements
Report by Maria R. Feckl
“… Self-appointed elites in both the Global South and North are cultivating sinister alliances and a culture of death that has prevailed for centuries. There are profiteers and losers of the capitalist and neo-colonial economic system in all parts of the world. Therefore, Dr. Mabanza Bambu, together with Prof. Yanis Varoufakis, University of Athens, called for grassroots movements. Boundaries between north and south, west and non-west are to be broken down. The grassroots movements cannot be governments, they must become civil society movements. They have to be carried by people from Germany, Nigeria, South Africa, China and the United States, among others.
Dr. Mabanza recalls the philosophy of the Zapatista, an indigenous organization in Mexico’s poorest state: “Let’s create a world in which there is room for many worlds.”
Read the full report HERE
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