Reclaiming Peace against Procedural Capture: A Manifesto for a Civic Board of Peace
SPOTLIGHT, 26 Jan 2026
Derya Yüksek - TRANSCEND Media Service
23 Jan 2026 – Sometimes it takes a grand eclipse of reason for us to remember our power—as people, as civilians, as human inhabitants of Earth. In the wake of a highly publicized announcement by the U.S. President Donald Trump on what has been called the “Board of Peace”, one is forced to confront and contest not only what is being proposed, but who gets to define peace and on whose terms. From a conflict transformation perspective, this moment exposes not only the dangers of authoritarian peace imaginaries, but also an untapped possibility—which will be elaborated here.
As a brief summary, the so-called “Board of Peace” announced at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos has been presented as a new international mechanism to oversee ceasefire stabilization and post-war reconstruction, beginning with Gaza. Framed as decisive and pragmatic, the proposal was unveiled with limited transparency regarding its composition and mandate, and was met almost immediately with unease from diplomats, skepticism from peace scholars, and sharp criticism from civil society actors and affected populations. While some governments cautiously welcomed the initiative, others warned that it risked bypassing established international norms, sidelining Palestinian self-determination, and reducing peace to a matter of executive authority and territorial management rather than justice, accountability, and repair.
From early impressions, the Board of Peace appears less concerned with peace-making or peace-building than with land-as-commodity geopolitics. Gaza—like so many conflict zones before it—is implicitly reframed as real estate, peace becomes deal-making, and civilians are once again erased as political subjects. Yet precisely because the proposal is so crudely oriented around power and territory, it inadvertently exposes a fissure in dominant peace imaginaries—a crack through which we might actively promote bottom-up, civic imaginaries of peace. We now know that peace no longer requires procedural legitimacy to be spoken and acted upon. And if that is the case, then civilians, communities, and transnational publics do not need permission to imagine peace differently, and unapologetically.
The task before us, then, is not to nostalgically return to the “power of the powerless,” but to reclaim peace itself as a civic, ethical, and relational act — especially at a moment when peace is spoken again, but too often spoken in the language of power rather than responsibility.
It is from this realization that the idea of Civic Board of Peace emerges—an independent, transnational civic platform that seeks to reclaim peace from state-centric, land-based, power-driven, and procedurally hollow frameworks. It is rooted in the insight that peace today is in crisis not simply because of unrelenting violence, but because of the widespread articulations of peace as transaction, territory as commodity, and civilians as objects rather than political subjects. Against this backdrop, the Civic Board of Peace becomes a counter-hegemonic response, seeking to reclaim peace as an ethical, relational, and life-centered platform and practice designed and run by civilians, communities, and transnational publics, rather than imposed through geopolitical power.
Unlike diplomatic boards or negotiation tables, the proposed Civic Board of Peace will not claim authority over borders, ceasefires, or treaties. Nor will it aspire to replace existing peace processes. Instead, it will operate as a critical and ethical intervention, challenging how peace itself is defined, claimed, and legitimized; who is authorized to speak it; and which lives are rendered visible or disposable in its name. Peace, in this framework, is not the redistribution of land or the reconfiguration of borders, but the repair of relations between peoples, ecologies, memories, and futures.
Central to this initiative is the principle of relational accountability. The Civic Board will speak not on behalf of states or populations, but from lived relations to violence, displacement, care, survival, and repair. Its members will not be political leaders and official representatives, but relational witnesses: civilians from conflict-affected communities and diasporas; peacebuilding practitioners, artists, cultural workers, and storytellers; health workers, educators, and environmental defenders; peace scholars, and critical thinkers across different disciplines and traditions—foregrounding lived experience and relational accountability over abstract representation.
In this structure, peace is explicitly life-centered. Human and more-than-human life—water systems, soil, ecosystems, burial grounds, infrastructures of care — are understood not as background conditions of conflict, but as political actors in peace-building. This perspective directly challenges dominant narratives that normalize violence through the language of security, realism, or inevitability.
Accordingly, the Civic Board of Peace will not produce conventional peace plans. Instead, it will generate counter-hegemonic peace instruments: ethical peace statements that name violence and responsibility without reproducing state-centric legalism; counter-maps that visualize erased relations and ecological destruction beyond borders and sovereignty; relational peace proposals that foreground care corridors, memory corridors, and ecological repair zones; and performative hearings and civic testimonies — public, transnational forums where peace is articulated through witnessing, storytelling, and collective presence rather than closed-door diplomacy.
What distinguishes the Civic Board of Peace is not that it competes with official peace processes, but that it destabilizes their taken-for-granted assumptions. It refuses neutrality where neutrality masks structural violence. It treats peace not as an endpoint to be announced or enforced, but as an ongoing ethical practice that must be continuously articulated, contested, and cared for.
In conclusion, Trump’s announcement of the “Board of Peace,” despite its crudity and hollowness, acts as a timely wake-up call for us to remember our capacity to imagine and make peace — to affirm that peace is not something only elites announce, militaries enforce, or technocrats measure. When legitimacy collapses, any voice that sounds decisive can fill the void, so why not fill this void with critical and creative voices? The Civic Board of Peace proposed here is not a bureaucratic entity, but a civic intervention in how peace is imagined: peace beyond land, beyond deals, beyond silence — peace as an ethical, transformative, civic act. It reminds us that it is time to speak much louder about peace by those who live its absence, bear its costs, yet usually excluded from deciding its terms—and in the language of responsibility, care, and life itself.
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Dr. Derya Yüksek: Researcher and Lecturer of Communication and Media Studies
Tags: Board of Peace, Hegemony, Imperialism, Trump, USA, Utopia, World Order
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 26 Jan 2026.
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