Future Studies: Peace, Conflict, and Resilience in a Changing World
Anticipating the Future of Conflict, Strengthening the Possibilities for Peace
A Forward-Looking Research and Dialogue Platform
The Conflict and Resilience Research Institute Canada (CRRIC) is developing a forward-looking research and dialogue initiative on the future of conflict, peace, and resilience. Building on CRRIC's post-COVID reflections on emerging conflict dynamics, this initiative asks a central question about how societies can better anticipate future risks while identifying pathways to prevent violence and sustain peace.
The world is entering a period of accelerating uncertainty. Geopolitical rivalry, climate stress, democratic fragmentation, economic inequality, forced displacement, organized crime, cyber insecurity, and emerging technologies are reshaping the conditions under which conflict emerges and peace is pursued. These forces rarely operate in isolation — they interact, overlap, and compound one another, producing new forms of insecurity but also new opportunities for prevention, dialogue, resilience, and peacebuilding.
CRRIC's Future Studies initiative is designed as a platform for research, policy dialogue, public education, and partnership-building. It is not limited to the study of war. It also examines the future of peace: how communities, institutions, governments, civil society, and international actors can anticipate disruption, reduce violence, strengthen trust, and build practical alternatives to conflict.
A World of Accelerating Disruption
The post-COVID world has revealed how quickly social, political, technological, and economic systems can be disrupted. Conflicts today are no longer confined to battlefields — they unfold across borders, supply chains, migration routes, information ecosystems, digital platforms, climate-stressed communities, and fragile governance systems.
Future conflict may be shaped by military competition, but also by food insecurity, water stress, disinformation, identity polarization, refugee displacement, cyberattacks, resource extraction, corruption, organized crime, and the erosion of public trust.
Four Interconnected Research Areas
CRRIC's Future Studies initiative will explore several interconnected areas covering the full spectrum from conflict dynamics to peacebuilding, climate security, and geopolitics.
The Changing Nature of Conflict
Future conflicts are likely to be hybrid, networked, and multi-dimensional — involving states, non-state armed groups, digital actors, criminal networks, private military companies, extremist movements, and transnational influence operations.
- How are armed conflicts changing in an age of drones, cyber operations, AI, and information warfare?
- How do non-state actors and criminal networks adapt to new technologies?
- How do economic grievances, inequality, and resource competition fuel instability?
- How do conflicts persist when peace processes fail to address root causes?
The Future of Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation
CRRIC's work is grounded in non-violent conflict transformation, dialogue, education, and resilience-building. Future Studies must examine not only how conflict evolves, but also how peacebuilding must adapt.
- Track II diplomacy, mediation, and community-based peacebuilding
- Peace education, restorative justice, and reconciliation
- Refugee return and post-conflict reconstruction
- Locally led resilience models and evidence-based approaches
Climate, Displacement, and Human Security
Climate change is increasingly connected to food insecurity, livelihood loss, displacement, resource pressure, and social instability. In fragile regions, climate stress can interact with weak governance, armed violence, ethnic tension, and economic exclusion.
- Climate-related insecurity and vulnerable communities
- Refugees, Indigenous peoples, migrants, and conflict-affected populations
- Arctic sovereignty and climate security
- Myanmar's long-running conflict and Rohingya protection
Geopolitics, Multipolarity, and Middle-Power Responsibility
The global order is becoming more fragmented and contested. Great-power rivalry, shifting alliances, regional blocs, and strategic competition are creating new challenges for diplomacy and international cooperation.
- Canada's role in the Indo-Pacific and the Arctic
- Global refugee protection and peacebuilding architecture
- Democratic resilience and responsible AI governance
- Middle-power peace diplomacy and human security
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Conflict and Peace
Artificial intelligence is becoming one of the defining technologies of the twenty-first century. It is already reshaping economies, public services, education, defence, policing, humanitarian response, media ecosystems, and democratic institutions. Its implications for conflict and peace are profound.
Canada's new National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, AI for All, highlights the importance of trust, safety, sovereignty, democratic protection, responsible adoption, and trusted global partnerships. For CRRIC, these policy priorities open an important research and dialogue space: how can AI be governed in ways that reduce conflict risks, protect vulnerable communities, and strengthen peace rather than deepen insecurity?
AI can accelerate misinformation, disinformation, deepfakes, propaganda, foreign interference, online radicalization, surveillance, cyberattacks, fraud, and identity-based harm. It may also affect military decision-making, autonomous systems, battlefield intelligence, targeting, strategic escalation, and the speed of crisis response. In fragile societies, AI-enabled manipulation can deepen mistrust, inflame grievances, and undermine peace processes.
AI may support conflict analysis, early warning, humanitarian mapping, mediation preparation, stakeholder analysis, peace education, trauma-informed programming, and evidence-based policy design. Used responsibly, AI can help researchers and practitioners process complex information, identify risks earlier, and support human decision-making in peacebuilding and conflict prevention.
Interdisciplinary and Policy-Facing Methods
CRRIC's Future Studies initiative will bring together scholars, practitioners, students, policymakers, civil society actors, community leaders, and technical experts to examine plausible futures of conflict and peace.
CRRIC will pay particular attention to the interaction between global trends and local realities. Future conflict is not only a matter of state strategy or military technology — it is also experienced in communities through fear, displacement, polarization, economic insecurity, digital manipulation, and loss of trust. Future peace must therefore be built from both policy insight and lived experience.
A Distinct Canadian Conversation on Peace, Conflict, and Resilience
CRRIC sees an opportunity to contribute to a distinct Canadian conversation on the future of peace, conflict, and resilience. Canada has important strengths in AI research, human rights, peacebuilding, refugee protection, Indigenous knowledge, democratic governance, and multilateral diplomacy. Yet these fields are often discussed separately.
The initiative will support Canada's broader role as a middle power committed to peace, human security, democratic values, and responsible innovation.
Invitation to Collaborate
CRRIC welcomes collaboration with universities, think tanks, policymakers, civil society organizations, technology experts, educators, students, and community leaders interested in the future of conflict, peace, and resilience.
The future is uncertain, but it is not beyond our responsibility. Through research, dialogue, foresight, and collaboration, CRRIC seeks to contribute to a more peaceful, resilient, and humane future.
Get in Touch with CRRICRelated Global Initiatives & Knowledge Platforms
Curated reference ecosystem for peace, conflict foresight, AI & security, climate-security, resilience, mediation, and strategic futures.
Geneva Centre for Security Policy – Future of Peace and War
RecommendedGESDA – AI Futures: Peace and War
RecommendedUNIDIR – Artificial Intelligence and International Security
RecommendedSIPRI – Artificial Intelligence / Governance of AI Programme
RecommendedCSIS Futures Lab – AI and the Future of Conflict
RecommendedAlliance for Peacebuilding – Future of Peace and Security Project
RecommendedPolicy Horizons Canada
RecommendedPolicy Horizons Canada – AI Futures
RecommendedCIGI – Global AI Risks Initiative
RecommendedProject Ploughshares – Emerging Technology & AI
RecommendedCanadian AI Safety Institute Research Program at CIFAR
RecommendedInternational Crisis Group – Future of Conflict
RecommendedAtlantic Council – Scowcroft Center Foresight
RAND – Global and Emerging Risks
GPPi – Strategic Foresight
Weathering Risk
Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue – HD
Berghof Foundation
International Alert
Peace Direct
ACCORD – African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes
Toda Peace Institute
Institute for Economics & Peace
Strategic Foresight Group
Carnegie Endowment – Technology and International Affairs Program
Harvard Belfer Center – AI and Conflict Resolution
UNU Centre for Policy Research
Recommended First 12 Links for the CRRIC Webpage
A balanced ecosystem across Europe, Canada, UN/Geneva, climate-security, AI-security, and peacebuilding.