This essay is part of Ways of working for more peaceful futures: A global health humanities roundtable, an effort through the Future of Peace program to bring perspectives from global health humanities into conversation with questions of peace. Read Michelle E. Anderson’s introduction to the series, or explore the full roundtable paper bringing all six contributions together.
Feelings are facts: An emotional ecology for peace
Throughout my years of involvement in global health, I have learned to perceive the field as devoted to solving practical problems: reducing the burden of disease, preventing epidemics, strengthening health systems, mitigating the climate crisis, and promoting universal healthcare. From my background in sociology, I paid particular attention to the social determinants of health, well aware that disparities in wealth and health go hand in hand. In the last decade, however, there has been a more somber shift across the social gradient. Loneliness, disempowerment, shame and resentment have spread across the emotional landscape, giving way to fear of otherness, polarization and radical violence. Institutional legitimacy and social trust are eroding to the point it is now an existential risk of the magnitude of the misalignment of artificial intelligence, rapid ecological collapse, and our growing desensitization towards human suffering. Global solidarity seems awash in apathy, but the truth is that most of us are staggered.
If we are hoping to reinvent peace, new technologies, better policies or changes in governance won’t get us there. We need to reinvent how we look at the problem. Every intervention and aspiration in global health is rooted in human relationship, yet the emotional ecosystem sustaining those relationships is quickly decaying. How is collective action sustainable after empathy and care have become suspect?
As the poet Paul Valéry wrote, l’on pense comme l’on se heurte (“our struggles make up our thoughts”). Now working in child psychiatry, I witness this principle daily. Children growing up in stable, nurturing relationships approach the world with confidence, openness and playfulness. By contrast, neglect and abuse cultivate vigilance, excessive self-reliance and mistrust. As we all are born profoundly interdependent, pervasive mistrust is not our natural state, but the hallmark of relational trauma.
How then may we build peaceful, less violent societies? If our emotional environment sets the frame of mind for our thinking, we must consider an ecology that can “make the world trustworthy again.” We must nurture a structure of affect that makes solidarity psychologically possible: relational safety at a collective scale, so that we approach others with curiosity rather than suspicion and build meaningful connections rather than merely professional contacts. The greatest challenge facing global health is therefore not simply a question of treatment and cure, but a journey towards healing and repair.
The good news is that this does not necessarily require new ways of working. Human civilization was built on trust, and time-tested traditions and rituals have long given communities anchoring and duration. Gathering around food is one example. Initiatives that strengthen community education and outreach similarly bolster the social fabric. Playing, as Donald Winnicott championed, enables children and adults to access their creativity, personality and capacity to connect. Educational programmes that foster empathy decrease bullying and dropout, but also cultivate lifelong prosocial tendencies. Community outreach workers deliver essential health interventions, but also create spaces where people feel recognized and safe. Institutions that genuinely connect with vulnerable populations strengthen their efficacy, but they also bolster trust and legitimacy to the eyes of the people they serve.
The same principle extends to our shared environments. Public parks, community centers and other “third places” sustain an infrastructure of trust by allowing encounters outside performance and competition. Natural landscapes soothe our racing minds, restore attention and set the stage for curiosity and connection. Beauty, through architecture, art, landscapes or seasonality, can evoke awe, loosening our self-preoccupation and nurturing a sense of belonging beyond the self.
Greater access to the arts and humanities likewise attests to a focus on people rather than systems. Our scale for progress has tipped towards statistics, science, technology and leaner management, leaving suffering, trust and belonging an increasingly lonely burden. Global health’s rallying cry to “leave no one behind” will remain a distant bureaucratic fantasy if we continue prioritizing biometrics over human relations. The emerging field of global health humanities, by attending to cultural, historical and narrative dimensions of health, offers an important return to the human scale.
These examples are diverse but share a common purpose: creating environments where people repeatedly experience themselves as valued and others as trustworthy. They cultivate the emotional foundations from which empathy, dialogue and solidarity emerge. Global health has long recognized that health is shaped less by hospitals than by the conditions in which people live; this insight must now be extended to peace. Just as health is not merely the absence of disease, peace is not merely the absence of violence. Peace requires lasting, meaningful relationships that protect us from desensitization and nihilism. They motivate us to care for what we love, and love what we care for.
Beyond diplomacy, reinventing peace, I do think, will be the patient work of cultivating the emotional conditions in which we can once again trust one another to imagine and build a shared future.
