As the city prepares to host the 2025 NATO Summit, the festival offers an urgent civic counterpoint, the Just Peace Festival 2025: a space where art, dialogue, and community come together to imagine and pursue peace from the ground up.
In times of global uncertainty, peace cannot rely solely on military preparedness or top-down diplomacy. As the Mayor of The Hague, Jan van Zanen, remarked during the opening:
We must prove ourselves resilient in uncertain times like these. Not only in terms of our military and defense: there are more roads to peace.
The festival embraces this belief, inviting people to explore how peace can also be forged through storytelling, solidarity, creativity, and care.
The festival opened with a public statement titled “The Hague Speaks for Peace: Rebalancing Security”, introduced by The Hague Humanity Hub’s managing director Jill Wilkinson. Endorsed during the opening by Mayor Jan van Zanen and Leiden University Rector Magnificus Hester Bijl, the statement calls for a more balanced vision of peace and security: one that places people at its centre.
Endorse the statement here
At the Humanity Hub, we believe that peace is not only determined at negotiating tables, but rather takes shape from within society tself. That’s why the Just Peace Festival brings together citizens, thinkers, artists, youth, and activists to ask: What does peace look like in practice? What new approaches can we co-create when we centre imagination, inclusion, and lived experience?
Running from 12–26 June, the Just Peace Festival transforms The Hague into a city-wide platform for rethinking peace and justice. From movie screenings to dialogues, performances to public interventions, the programme amplifies bottom-up perspectives and community-driven change.
Because building peace is not a passive act. It’s a shared responsibility.
Check out the full programme