Bridging worlds at the 2026 Global Peace Summit: A peace ambassador’s reflections

When the words “AK-47 before 13” were said, the room changed completely.

This was one of those instances where you can feel an audience stop being just an audience. People stopped shifting in their seats. Pens stopped mid-writing. Even the air felt different, heavier. I remember thinking, almost defensively, that my brain was trying to turn the words into something abstract because the alternative was so much worse. A kid. A weapon. A child who never got the chance to be a child.

The Global Peace Summit in Bangkok was not particularly inspiring in a “comfortable” way. It was uncomfortable, and that is how the summit was supposed to be. It was like a series of truths delivered so directly that you had to completely rethink the world around you and decide what kind of person you were going to be afterward.

Before I even got to the United Nations Centre, I was already nervous. The delegates wore suits, traditional clothing and national dress. Languages overlapped in the halls. People looked young and serious at the same time, as if they had been forced into adulthood early or had chosen it deliberately. Most delegates came with their schools or organizations, but I came alone. I was holding extremely strong coffee, like it could stand in for confidence, and trying to do what seemed like the simplest thing in the world: sit down and start introducing myself.

“Hi, where are you from?”

I asked that question so many times over the week that it started to feel like one of the driving forces of the summit. Sometimes it was just that question and other small talk, but at other times it was the furthest thing from that. This is because where you’re from can mean a city, country, war you escaped from or person you buried. It became clear very fast that we were all arriving in the same building from completely different worlds.

The summit didn’t begin with trauma. It began with a challenge. Patricia Shafer, Executive Director of the international nonprofit organization NewGen Peacebuilders, framed peace-building as a very complex “blueprint” that you intentionally build through empathy, inclusion and leadership. I left her session feeling pressured; her message didn’t treat us youth as a future concept, but rather as accountable young adults right now. Not someday. Not when we graduate. Right now.

That accountability sharpened when Dr. Manal Omar, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Across Red Lines, spoke about how women are systematically excluded from global peace conversations. Dr. Omar explained that if a woman’s life is shaped by conflict but her voice is constantly excluded from the solutions, the “peace” people celebrate is temporary, superficial and designed to break. Listening to her, I kept thinking about how easily the word “peace” is used and how rarely people ask who it is really meant for.

Then UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Emtithal “Emi” Mahmoud walked on stage with presence and power. She performed spoken word poetry defined by displacement and survival. She explained that if you speak to someone politically, they will respond politically, but if you speak with your humanity, they will respond with humanity. That’s exactly what her poetry did. In spaces like this, it’s easy to treat stories as supporting material for policy, but Mahmoud made it clear that stories are not decoration. They are how empathy gets built in people who are conditioned to look away.

Alfred Orono, the Head of Field Office at the United Nations Mission in South Sudan, then spoke about being forced to become a child soldier at 11 years old, and he is also the one who spoke about the reality of children holding guns before reaching adulthood. Not only did his story shake me, but what he decided to make of it did, too. Orono now works to help demobilize child soldiers, transforming his stolen childhood into the reason other children might keep theirs. This was beyond inspirational and powerful; it was a clear example of what peace-building actually looks like when it leaves the stage and enters real life.

When Mirsad Solaković, a Bosnian genocide survivor, spoke to us delegates, he refused to let his story sit at a safe distance. Throughout his speech, he stepped down and engaged with the audience, looking directly at people, asking questions and making it impossible to disappear into anonymity. He also apologized for making us listen to the utter horror of his story, but it was ever so important to hear. His presence made me realize how often we treat genocide like a unit in a history class instead of something that rearranges generations and affects real people to this day.

Lejla Damon, a different kind of survivor, spoke as well. Born during the Bosnian War as a result of wartime sexual violence, Damon talked about growing up with an identity formed by something she never chose, and the erasure and shame that surround children born of war. She knew her birth mother saw her as “one of them.” She interned at the U.N. Refugee Agency and, from her lived experience of confusion and loneliness, she helped create a platform for other children of war seeking guidance, community and help. Her message taught me that peace agreements might end fighting, but they do not automatically heal stigma, lost identity or the aftermath of violence.

One of the most personal moments for me came from Ruben Mawick, a 22-year-old volunteer medic from Germany who served on the frontlines in Ukraine. He is close to my age, and that made me see his story in relation to mine — a deep contrast that makes me feel guilty, if I’m being completely transparent. War is usually presented to people my age as news, as politics, as something so distant that it will never “be us.” Nevertheless, Mawick spoke about his current experience and loss in a way that disproved that statement and made us feel his pain. He showed us delegates a photo of a young Ukrainian girl and him playing with her dogs. A couple minutes later, he revealed that both her parents are now dead, and he has no idea where this innocent child is today or if she is even alive. He mentioned that his friends were killed right in front of him and how he has tattoos of their names. He also added the painful detail that he will go back to the parlor to get more names tattooed on him. That detail stuck with me because tattoos are so ordinary, yet they carry a different kind of weight. Mawick’s tattoos are a symbol of his grief, carried into everyday life.

Speakers and activists Sulaiman Khatib, a Palestinian, and Chen Alon, a former Israel Defense Forces soldier, were once enemies who are now working together in peace-building. They spoke about choosing dialogue even when hatred is expected and taught. These two men, in this unlikely friendship, have been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts in uniting two sides into one. They made it clear that peace is not passive and requires someone brave enough to be misunderstood.

Hadiya Alneamat, a Yazidi genocide survivor, spoke about captivity, escape and living with missing loved ones long after the world’s attention moves on, as it often does. What stayed with me was her insistence that forgetting is not neutral and being silent is political.

Between sessions, I did what everyone does when something is too heavy to carry alone. I talked. I networked with fellow delegates. Over coffee at round, white tables, we compared notes and tried to process what we had just heard. Those conversations mattered because they reminded me that the summit wasn’t only happening on stage. We were also being changed in real time by what we were learning and hearing.

By the end, I didn’t feel “inspired.” I felt responsible.

The summit’s theme, A World Together, is easy to treat as a slogan until you sit in a room with people who are living proof of what happens when the world is so deeply divided and corrupt. Until you have listened to survivors describe what the rest of the world misunderstood, ignored, moved on from or even profited from. Until you watch someone your age talk about carrying loss permanently — not figuratively, but literally on their body. Until you hear things that are almost unimaginable.

I came to Bangkok not knowing what to expect, but I left with something much greater than words can describe. I understand now that peace is not just a distant ideal. It is work. It is necessary. It is people deciding, over and over, that cruelty is not inevitable, and actually doing something about it.

Speakers kept returning to the same message: our generation is the emerging leaders. This truth is not just encouragement, but an urgent warning. Even if older generations failed to prevent the world we are inheriting, it is our duty to do better.

After leaving this summit, what I yearn for is real change. Not the kind that is performative or comfortable. The kind that begins with awareness and turns into action, because I refuse to let these stories become background noise or fade into the background. If telling the truth can bring people together, then paying attention and sharing the truth becomes a form of peace-building as well.  
I’m back at UCLA now, but I can still feel the emotions I felt when the words “AK-47 before 13” were spoken. I can still picture Solaković entering the audience. I can still hear Mawick describing tattoos for friends he lost. Those moments don’t allow you to see the world as you did before. Maybe that is the whole point.