This essay introduces a roundtable featuring contributions from Nomusa Mngoma, Stefanie Teuring, Quentin Eichbaum, Rosemary J. Jolly, Chioma Ohajunwa, and Charles-Antoine Barbeau-Meunier (in order of appearance). The full roundtable is available as the WPF occasional paper, Ways of working for more peaceful futures: A global health humanities roundtable. Each contribution will also be published individually on Reinventing Peace as part of an essay series.
The pursuit of more peaceful and just futures requires attention not only to the futures we hope to achieve, but to the processes we use to work toward them. At a moment of profound global change and uncertainty, that distinction takes on particular importance. Polarization and contested values, deep inequalities and unequal power relations, institutional mistrust, technological and ecological change, violent conflict, and other complex challenges are reshaping the conditions in which people live and work. However, these challenges also invite us to expand what we imagine as possible and reconsider the ways of working that can– or should– help shape what comes next.
Prior to my current role with the World Peace Foundation, I spent more than four years at a research institute focused on inequalities in global health. The field was new to me; my prior scholarship and practice was in conflict resolution, political transitions, and divided societies. Part of what drew me to global health was a sense that it may offer ways of working that would be new to me, and that I could carry into other justice-oriented work. I had long been interested in process, and in what the process itself produces or makes possible that we may miss when focused only on outcomes: How can we produce knowledge with, rather than simply about, the people whose lives are implicated in it? How should we navigate differences in power, expertise, experience, and ways of knowing? And how might the processes through which we pursue change reinforce, undermine, or even begin to embody the change we hope to achieve?
As suspected, working in global health brought me into contact with new ways of thinking about these questions. Alongside substantive concerns with equity and the structural conditions that shape health, I encountered people and spaces grappling with what equity requires of how work is done. Questions of community engagement, co-production, reciprocity, positionality, epistemic humility, and power feature in these conversations, often emerging precisely from critiques of global health’s own hierarchies and colonial inheritances. It was within this grappling, rather than any settled approach, that I found ideas about process that I valued.
During this period, I became involved with the Global Health Humanities Working Group, an interdisciplinary community of scholars bringing humanities perspectives into conversation with global and public health. I was struck by the range of disciplines, geographies, knowledge traditions, and forms of practice its members bring to questions of health and wellbeing, and particularly by their attention to how work is done. This was, to me, one of the most valuable parts of the Working Group; it created space for perspectives and ways of working that remain less common in global health, and that have also sharpened how I think about process in my work within and beyond that field.
These observations have stayed with me as I moved into my current role directing the World Peace Foundation’s Future of Peace program. Health and peace have long been understood as interconnected: violence profoundly shapes health, while health inequities reflect and reproduce wider structures of power and injustice. However, my interest here is in a somewhat different connection. Many of the changing conditions shaping possibilities for peace also intersect with longstanding questions about methods and approaches in global health. For the Future of Peace program, this reinforces that there is no reason to assume the most useful lessons will come only from work using the language of “peace.” Other fields and communities are already experimenting with ways of relating, knowing, organizing, and acting that have important lessons to offer.
That insight is the premise of this roundtable, published in full as a World Peace Foundation occasional paper.
I asked members of the Global Health Humanities Working Group to reflect on the following question:
Drawing on your own experience, what ways of working do you think are particularly important for navigating current and future global health challenges? What lessons might others– within and beyond global health– who care about shaping less violent and more just futures learn from these ways of working?
The responses do not offer a single model, nor do they suggest that global health provides a blueprint. Instead, they bring different practices and intellectual traditions into conversation around a shared proposition– that the ways we work are not incidental to what our work makes possible.
The contributors bring perspectives spanning global health research and practice, medicine, the health humanities, Indigenous approaches to health and wellbeing, and beyond. Nomusa Mngoma begins with the structures and relationships through which knowledge is produced, asking what more equitable research partnerships require in practice. Stefanie Theuring moves beneath these practices to their normative and epistemological foundations, asking how global health might retain a universal commitment to human dignity while continually questioning the assumptions and categories through which it understands the human. Quentin Eichbaum turns to the capacities required for such questioning, presenting metacognition as a practice of recognizing the limits of expertise, interrogating assumptions, and remaining open to correction. Rosemary Jolly pushes further into questions of what counts as knowledge and how we encounter it, showing how embodied practices can make otherwise obscured forms of knowledge available through listening. Chioma Ohajunwa approaches these questions through Indigenous spiritual and relational understandings of personhood, asking what changes when engagement begins from connection rather than separation. Charles-Antoine Barbeau-Meunier widens the lens further, locating these practices within an emotional ecology of trust, belonging, and relational safety that makes solidarity and collective action possible.
The contributions gathered here offer diverse perspectives from global health on ways of working and what they might contribute to more peaceful and just futures. As becomes apparent across the essays, what is striking, despite their different starting points, is their degree of convergence.
The authors often return to humility, including about what we know, the limits of expertise, and the assumptions we carry into encounters with others and into our work. They also return to reflexivity, not simply as individual self-awareness but as a capacity within institutions and relationships to continue learning and, in turn, revise their practices. Across quite different approaches, they emphasize forms of listening that have consequences; relationships built through reciprocity rather than extraction; and forms of engagement that treat people as participants in producing knowledge and shaping action rather than as recipients of expertise. Across the contributions, connection itself emerges not as an incidental feature of the work, but as part of what the work both requires and produces.
There is something deceptively simple about many of these propositions: listen before acting; approach others with humility; recognize the limits of one’s own knowledge; attend to context; share authority; create conditions in which people can trust and be trusted. None sounds especially radical when described as a feature of human relationship. Yet their recurrence in these reflections is a reminder of how easily these practices can be displaced when fields become overly professionalized and institutionalized– when efficiency, scalability, technical expertise, standardized knowledge, and measurable outcomes become dominant ways of determining what is deemed rigorous or effective work. The field of global health has grappled explicitly with many of these tensions; it was partly out of this grappling that the Global Health Humanities Working Group formed in the first place. Peace research and practice have been shaped by many of the same forces of professionalization and internationalization. Similarly, efforts toward “localization” within peacebuilding offer one parallel attempt to address these dynamics through deeper engagement with communities and greater local ownership, but have themselves struggled with what this means in practice, both as a way of working and in terms of who shapes the goals toward which that work is directed. The reflections here therefore offer not only lessons from another field, but an invitation to ask what peace work itself may have marginalized, standardized, or lost through those processes– and what we should and could do differently.
It is also notable that several contributors arrive at these questions through African intellectual traditions, experiences, and contexts, particularly those of southern Africa. There is undoubtedly some positionality in that convergence. I learned to ask many of these questions through my own doctoral work in South Africa, and it may be that members of the Working Group situated within related intellectual traditions were particularly likely to see themselves in the question I posed. The composition of this roundtable is therefore no more neutral than the forms of knowledge production its contributors ask us to examine. Even so, the recurrence itself is revealing. Ubuntu appears repeatedly, but not simply as a concept invoked in the abstract. Contributors draw on relational understandings of personhood to think differently about knowledge production, care, responsibility, community, and the relationship between individual and collective wellbeing. This resonates with a broader emphasis on relationality across the roundtable, including among contributors arriving from quite different starting points. For peace research and practice, that convergence points not only to the importance of relationships themselves, but to the value of looking beyond familiar intellectual traditions for different ways of understanding what relationships require and make possible.
Together, these contributions invite us to pay closer attention to the processes through which change is pursued: how we understand our relationships to others, whose knowledge we recognize, how we respond to the limits of our own expertise, where authority sits, and what kinds of relationships our ways of working create along the way. They do not prescribe a single way of working; rather, they show what becomes visible when process is treated as consequential in its own right. If more peaceful futures depend partly on the conditions we create in the present, these are not secondary questions of method. They are part of the work of peace itself.
Individual contributions will also be published on Reinventing Peace over the coming weeks.
