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By Melissa Whaling, Hamzia Bawa-Zeba, Fatima Syed, and Navya Nair
In Gaza, hospitals lie in ruins, clean water is scarce, and the doctors who remain are working beyond exhaustion. In the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, generations of Rohingya have lived without citizenship, security, or meaningful access to education and healthcare.
These were not distant headlines at the Pegasus Institute’s recent Interconnected Futures Conference they were at the centre of the conversation. Health professionals, advocates, and people with lived experience of displacement used these crises to illustrate a central claim of the conference: peace is not just the end of armed violence, but the presence of justice, rights, and functioning systems that allow people to live and to heal.
Through personal testimony, policy discussions, and research presentations, the Waterloo University-based conference pressed participants to see Gaza, the Rohingya crisis, and “overlooked” conflicts in Africa as interconnected examples of how health, environment, and human rights are inseparable from peace.
One of the conference’s most powerful sessions focused on the immense challenge of rebuilding Gaza.
Speakers outlined the scale of destruction: “Rebuilding Gaza is not just about bricks and concrete,” one participant said. “If people do not have access to healthcare, education, livelihoods, clean water, food, and do not respond to the deep psychological trauma inflicted on civilians, particularly children, there is no real recovery and there is no peace.”
Yet they warned against seeing reconstruction as a purely technical or engineering task.
Health experts at the session argued that any serious reconstruction plan must:
These elements need to be part of an interconnected, multidimensional, and globally supported approach rooted in local leadership and community knowledge a model, they argued, that should guide responses to crises well beyond Gaza.
If Gaza represented one epicentre of structural violence, the story of Rohingya advocate Rahima Khushi brought home another: the human stakes of protracted displacement.
Born in a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, on the southeast coast of Bangladesh, Khushi grew up in a context where the Rohingya were denied citizenship, subjected to violence, and confined to camps with few basic services. Educational opportunities were minimal; recognition of their suffering, even less.
Despite this, Khushi pushed beyond the limits imposed on her. She pursued informal education and then formal training, eventually working as a psychosocial assistant, medical interpreter, maternal health worker, and midwife.
During the height of the Rohingya crisis, she helped deliver more than 5,000 babies and supported families who had survived violence, persecution, and perilous journeys. Later, she turned to journalism, film, and public advocacy to make Rohingya stories visible to the world despite facing death threats and serious personal danger.
Now resettled in Canada, Khushi continues to advocate for refugee rights, contributes to refugee health services, and studies political science. Her testimony at the conference challenged dominant narratives that reduce refugees to passive victims.
“Rahima showed us that refugees are not just recipients of aid,” one attendee reflected. “They are leaders, caregivers, and peacebuilders. If our policies ignore that, we’re missing the point.”
Her story encapsulated a core theme of the conference: lived experience is not an afterthought in peacebuilding it is expertise.
Another set of sessions turned attention to conflicts that rarely dominate global headlines: Ethiopia’s Tigray region, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Panelists documented the destruction of hospitals and clinics, the targeting and flight of health workers, disrupted vaccination campaigns, and the collapse of maternal and child health services. Gender-based and sexual violence, they noted, is being used systematically as a weapon of war.
Yet even in these conditions, speakers highlighted powerful examples of resilience. Women-led initiatives and community-driven care networks have emerged to fill the gaps left by broken systems: informal clinics, mobile health teams, and peer networks for survivors of violence.
These stories reinforced a pattern visible in Gaza and in Rohingya camps: when formal institutions collapse or are weaponized, communities themselves create parallel systems of care.
For many at the conference, this was a clear signal that peace agreements alone are not enough. Lasting peace, speakers argued, requires rebuilding trust in institutions, investing in local leadership, advancing gender equity, and reconstructing health systems with communities not just for them.
Only after hearing these grounded stories did the conference turn to the larger question: what does peace mean in a world of overlapping crises?
The Pegasus Institute, a Canadian charity formed to explore the links between health, peace, and environmental sustainability, convened researchers, health professionals, academics, policymakers, community leaders, students, and advocates to wrestle with that question.
Across panels and plenaries, a consistent message emerged: peace is not merely the absence of overt violence. It is the presence of social, political, environmental, and economic conditions that enable individuals and communities to heal, thrive, participate meaningfully in society, and live with dignity.
Participants argued that peacebuilding:
In this view, a ceasefire that leaves people without healthcare, education, clean water, or safety from gender-based violence is not peace it is a fragile pause.
If the stories from Gaza and Cox’s Bazar revealed the stakes, the Ontario-based Emerging Leaders Network highlighted where change might come from.
Composed of young professionals, students, and grassroots organizers, the network’s members spoke about growing up in what they described as a “permanent state of crisis”: climate emergencies, pandemics, economic precarity, and war.
Rather than focusing only on personal resilience, they emphasized the importance of:
The network argued that youth particularly those with lived experience of displacement, racism, or marginalization must be treated as equal partners in policymaking, not as symbolic “youth voices” brought in at the end of the process.
They also drew attention to the power of language in shaping public attitudes toward migrants and refugees. Terms such as “waves,” “floods,” or “burdens” were identified as dehumanizing and inaccurate. fuelling fear and legitimizing harmful policies.
Conference participants called for more precise, humanizing language that recognizes migrants and refugees as rights-holders and contributors a shift they described as essential to any serious peacebuilding agenda.
The conference closed not with a policy statement, but with music.
The Del O Jaan Choir of Waterloo, Ont., a Persian Canadian ensemble, performed a moving set that wove together themes of memory, displacement, loss, and hope. Through song and storytelling, the choir echoed the conference’s central insight: that peace and healing are cultural and emotional processes as much as they are political ones.
Their performance underscored a final message that had threaded through the stories from Gaza, Tigray, Cox’s Bazar, and beyond: peace is not a destination, treaty, or single event. It is an ongoing practice of justice, dignity, relationship-building, and collective responsibility.
For the Pegasus Institute and the diverse voices gathered under its banner, the task ahead is clear: to ensure that Gaza is not seen only as rubble, that Rohingya are not seen only as victims, and that “overlooked” conflicts are not ignored.
Instead, these crises must become starting points for reimagining what peacebuilding looks like grounded in health, rooted in rights, and led by those who live its consequences every day.
Melissa Whaling is the Executive Director of the Pegasus Institute. Hamzia Bawa-Zeba is Pegasus Program and Communication Officer; Fatima Syed is Pegasus’ Administrative & Program Communication Officer; and Navya Nair is the Project Assistant and Graduate Researcher at Pegasus Institute.