Back to all films

Bringing Journalists and Peacebuilders Together
Jamil Simon, Producer – Spectrum Media
Peter Agoos, Creative Director – Agoos D-zines

War Stories Peace Stories (WSPS) mission is to seed the critical work of getting news about peacebuilding and reconciliation more widely reported.

Peace efforts are nearly invisible to the public—they are rarely reported in the news. We occasionally see two leaders shake hands and sign a peace accord, but we rarely hear the compelling stories that led to those moments, or what happened afterwards. These powerful, stories need to be told across all media platforms to increase awareness and investment in peace.

The first WSPS Symposium convened in spring 2018 at the NY Times Center. 400 experienced practitioners, who engage daily and globally in this work, as peacebuilders or journalists, took a deep dive into highlighting best practices to improve reporting on peace and conflict. This hugely successful event fostered serious ongoing dialogue, and immediate tangible results in the form of news articles about international peace efforts published in global media outlets. The project was awarded the Luxembourg Peace Prize in Peace Journalism by the World Peace Forum. This 90-second video captures the amazing dialogue the event provoked.

The groundwork for a second Symposium, in Brussels, and for a third in Bogota, has been laid, with plans to follow in other major media centers around the world: London, Washington DC, Nairobi, Mumbai, Sydney, and Tokyo. But due to the COVID 19 pandemic, WSPS has pressed the pause button on in-person events.

Our team is focused now on transforming the current WSPS website into a dynamic collaboration platform, capitalizing on the global online focus. The new web platform builds upon our commitment to bringing journalists and peacebuilders together to explore new approaches to writing about peace and conflict. And it lays the groundwork for in-person Symposia when these become possible once again. We are creating an interactive online home for our unique community of journalists and peacebuilders to generate opportunities for networking and reporting collaborations. In doing so, WSPS will make international peace efforts more visible.

Our extraordinary group of partner organizations includes the Alliance for Peacebuilding, American Friends Service Committee, Center for Global Peace Journalism, Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, Institute for Economics and Peace, Partners Global, Peace Direct, Search for Common Ground, Brussels Press Club, International Federation of Journalists, the Global Peace Film Festival and the World Peace Forum. We’ve hired an award-winning team of web designers to help us implement the plan.

We need your help to continue to expand our work with these partners. Please make a tax-deductible donation to the project through our fiscal partner Filmmakers Collaborative here.