Cultivating social imaginaries toward flourishing peace

In the 2020s, peacekeeping was transformed into a predictive and preventative endeavor through widespread datafication. In the span of a few years, machine learning flattened the world into a supposed comprehensive codex for future prediction. By 2027, peacebuilding was preached on the contention of conflicts by algorithmically considering all past data points of human interaction. The assumption was that stability and the absence of friction, policed by quantification and automation, would inescapably lead to peace. However, new dimensions for conflict were instead opened. Predictive peacekeeping transformed citizens into objects onto which conflict suppression machines were deployed. Conflict erasure became future erasure as common histories were reduced to data points. By the 2030s, multilateral peacebuilding institutions could not ignore the deafening murmurs of citizens deprived of past and future imaginaries any longer. Murmur Community was born as a reaction to decades of solution-based approaches that conceived peace as a homeostatic end state. Instead, Murmur seeks to reimagine peaceful futures as dynamic and reflexive processes. Peacebuilding involves recovering and unfolding a plurality of voices to articulate social tensions, conflicts, limitations, and failures. Murmur Community activates the global citizenry, especially the historically excluded, oppressed, and marginalized, as the primary actors of peacebuilding in an effort to create imaginaries of belonging that reframe and surpass current cultural and national understandings. This project was selected by the Innovation Cell of the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) and Design Futures Initiative (DFI) as part of the Futuring Peace initiative celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the United Nations.