Turning Possibility Into Practice: How the RESPACE Scenarios Are Helping Reimagine Collaboration for Peace
(The blog was originally published on respace.org)
The world is at a crossroads. Rising conflict, inequality and climate injustice are testing our collective imagination, while systems meant to foster cooperation are often gridlocked by polarisation and inertia. Yet cracks in the system also create space for alternatives. Across the world, communities and civic actors are proving that new forms of solidarity and collaboration are possible.
In this landscape, RESPACE emerged as a collective effort to imagine and grow new ways of working together for peace. Developed in 2024 through collaboration between Conducive Space for Peace, the Network for Empowered Aid Response (NEAR) and Reos Partners, the initiative brings together diverse voices to explore how global collaboration for peace could evolve by 2035.
Co-created by 23 individuals from different regions and generations, the RESPACE scenarios explore four interconnected futures for global collaboration on peace. Some are bleak, others hopeful, but all are designed to help us think differently about the paths ahead. They are not predictions but tools for reflection and strategy, mirrors we can hold to the present to ask, how can we act today to shape tomorrow?
Exploring the RESPACE Scenarios
The scenarios are presented in the RESPACE Report, which brings their stories to life and explores what each future could mean for peace, solidarity and civic action. Created to inspire dialogue and new ideas, the report helps users connect global challenges with emerging opportunities for collaboration.
To complement the report, four short videos, each about two minutes long, invite you to experience these futures visually and emotionally. Together, they serve as an entry point to imagine what peace could look like under different global conditions. Both the report and videos are available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
Tools for Action and Imagination
To make the scenarios accessible and practical, the team created the RESPACE Resources Hub, a collection of tools, guides and creative materials that help people apply the scenarios in real-world contexts. In the Hub you will find,
- Dialogue Inputs: Scenario-based prompts on global, regional and translocal developments to stimulate strategy and action.
- Community Engagement Guide: Templates and facilitation strategies for workshops and strategy sessions.
- RESPACE Posters, Playing Cards, Scripts and Scenario Summaries: Creative tools that make futures thinking interactive and accessible.
- Slide Deck: A flexible presentation kit for training sessions, classrooms and community meetings.
All materials are free to use and adapt. They help educators, peacebuilders, activists and policymakers hold forward-looking conversations in classrooms, community spaces or global dialogues. Together, they form a living toolkit for exploring how peace, collaboration and civic imagination can take shape in different contexts.
Bringing the Scenarios to Life
Following the publishing of the scenarios, RESPACE entered a new phase of openness and experimentation. What began as a small, facilitated process has grown into a self-organising community that connects people across movements, regions and disciplines.
Over the past year, the scenarios have become tools for reflection and strategy in workshops, classrooms and policy discussions. Several global networks and alliances are using them to inform collective planning, examining power dynamics, reimagining collaboration models and identifying practical pathways for more equitable, locally rooted approaches to peace and development.
RESPACE has also hosted dialogues and consultations with West African civil society, Sudanese women peacebuilders and in spaces such as the UN Summit of the Future, Geneva Peace Week and CSO–UN Dialogue. Additional exchanges in Danish civil society and the Dutch MFA and their partners have shown how the scenarios can bridge regions and sectors in rethinking strategies for peace and collaboration. The scenarios also ventured into the educational realm, engaging master's students at Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia. Together, they explored potential futures for peace work and are launching local RESPACE projects both on and off campus, fostering a spirit of collaboration and hope.
A Community in Motion
What makes RESPACE remarkable is not only its resources but how people are using them. Over the past year, it has evolved into a living network of practice, where scenarios spark collaboration and shared experimentation.
Monthly virtual coffee catch-ups have become informal spaces for updates and reflection, often leading to new partnerships and ideas. Four working groups have emerged, focusing on:
- Building translocal solidarity infrastructures: Mapping grassroots civil society actors and linking them with similar efforts elsewhere.
- Stakeholder engagement: Using the scenarios to open dialogue across local, regional and global levels.
- Resourcing futures: Exploring new models of funding and shared support aligned with RESPACE values.
- The RESPACE Secretariat: Combining coordination by CSP staff with community creativity to support design, communication and logistics for community-led events.
The RESPACE Fund provides modest but meaningful support for local teams using the scenarios in their own contexts, including initiatives in Afghanistan, South Sudan and Colombia.
RESPACE Community Gatherings offer another entry point, focusing on transformative issues such as alternative resourcing for civil society. These gatherings draw participants from across the Majority World and provide fertile ground for exploring how collective action can grow through shared imagination.
Where We Go Next
The scenarios continue to travel across continents and disciplines, informing strategic processes, educational programmes and network dialogues that reimagine collaboration and civic agency.
Looking ahead, RESPACE is exploring partnerships with cultural and educational institutions to bring the scenarios and artwork into public spaces through storytelling, exhibitions and dialogue. These collaborations aim to help people imagine what peace could look like in the future.
An emerging initiative on civic infrastructures and reclaiming civic sovereignty continues this spirit, extending the practice of reimagining collaboration for peace into the broader work of rebuilding civic life and solidarity in times of disruption and transformation.
Join the Conversation
The RESPACE community grows through everyone who takes part. Whether you are a peacebuilder, educator, activist, artist, policymaker or simply curious about new ways of working together, you are welcome to join.
All materials are free to use, adapt and share at respacepeace.org/resources.
Join a monthly catch-up, take part in a community gathering or start a dialogue using one of the RESPACE tools. Every exchange helps keep the scenarios alive and evolving. Together, we can keep asking better questions, discovering new possibilities and shaping the futures of peace.
