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Our Priorities

To advance our goal towards becoming a leading global academic centre for peace and intercultural understanding, the Centre鈥檚 priority areas include:

• Collaborative Research: Exploring mediation, post-conflict reconstruction, sustaining peace, conflict and crisis prevention, polarisation and social cohesion – drawing on the perspectives and experiences of different Global South and middle power actors, with a special focus on Qatar and South Africa.
• Knowledge Sharing: Hosting scholar鈥損ractitioner dialogues, workshops, and public seminars to foster mutual exchange and learning, solidarity and impact.
• Academic Exchange: Creating immersive opportunities through student and faculty exchanges, study abroad, and short courses across our thematic areas.
• Training & Support: Partnering with institutions across the Global South to strengthen capacity to engage effectively in peace processes with sustainable outcomes.
• Youth Engagement: Empowering young people through peace education, leadership initiatives, and intercultural dialogue.

Key Thematic Areas

The Centre鈥檚 work is anchored in South African (and broader African) and Qatari (and wider Gulf, Middle Eastern) experiences and expertise, focusing on two core areas and cross-cutting themes:

• Emerging powers in mediation and sustaining peace: This theme explores how Qatar, South Africa, and other emerging powers are shaping new approaches to mediation and diplomacy. It examines their roles as convenors, donors, and credible mediators鈥攑articularly in Africa and the Middle East鈥攁nd assesses how these actors contribute to and can better drive post-conflict reconstruction, inclusive development, resilient social contracts, and conflict and crisis prevention. The work also reflects critically on how emerging powers are reshaping multilateral institutions and the global peace and security architecture.
• Intercultural perspectives on peace, justice, and reconciliation: CPIU engages with Qatari, South African, African, and Middle Eastern traditions to explore contextually grounded understandings of peace, justice, and reconciliation. Drawing on diverse experiences, the Centre considers pathways to address historical and structural legacies of conflict and injustice and their contemporary manifestations, as well as efforts to foster cohesion in the face of division and polarisation. Special attention is given to intercultural approaches that strengthen inclusion and promote more unified, socially cohesive societies.

Cross-cutting themes

Polycrisis and conflict complexity
Understanding how intersecting political, economic, environmental, and humanitarian crises intensify fragility, and advancing integrated responses across sectors.

Inclusion and women鈥檚 advancement

Advancing approaches to inclusion in peace and transition processes, with particular attention to the role of women, youth, and minority and marginalised ways such strategies contribute to more inclusive political and social outcomes across diverse contexts.

Climate and peace
Supporting efforts to incorporate climate mitigation and adaptation into peace agreements and social compacts, and promoting conflict- and context-sensitive climate action, including Just Transition strategies, in fragile and post-conflict settings.

Digital technology, media, misinformation, polarisation
Investigating the roles of digital technologies as both threats to and tools for peace, including the spread of disinformation and polarisation, and leveraging innovations like AI, digital mediation platforms, and peacetech to support inclusive processes and humanitarian efforts.

Global frameworks and southern contributions
Critically engaging with the design, implementation, and localisation of global frameworks such as the SDGs and the UN Pact for the Future, and highlighting Southern contributions to peace and development agendas in multilateral settings.