Kyung Hee University System held its 44th annual Peace BAR Festival on Friday at the university's Seoul campus, bringing together approximately 100 international scholars, policy experts, civic activists, and students to address pressing global challenges. The festival, which stands for spiritually Beautiful, materially Affluent, and humanly Rewarding, coincided with the International Day of Peace and focused on the theme "The Moment of Chaos: Planetary Consciousness and Future Politics."

The Peace BAR Festival has been celebrated annually on September 21 since 1981, when the concept was first introduced by former Kyung Hee University President Choue Young-seek. Endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly, the event aims to celebrate humanity's efforts in overcoming conflict and confrontation while working toward peace and mutual prosperity. This year's two-day festival addressed critical issues including climate change, geopolitical complexity, and the collapse of democracy.

Kyung Hee University System designated the week beginning September 15 as World Peace Week, with the Peace BAR Festival serving as the centerpiece event. The festival took place across multiple locations, including the university's Peace Hall at its Seoul Campus, as well as its Global Campus in Suwon and Gwangneung Campus, both located in Gyeonggi Province.

During his opening remarks at Peace Hall, Kyung Hee University System Chancellor Choue In-won emphasized the existential crises facing humanity. "I have often said mankind is now standing at a crossroads between progress and annihilation, or peace and destruction," Choue stated. The 70-year-old politics expert highlighted the urgent reality of climate change, noting that "last month, more than 1,100 people were reportedly killed by extreme heatwaves for over two weeks in Spain. Not only its neighboring countries, like Portugal and France, but also Korea suffered a similar climate crisis this summer."

Chancellor Choue expressed deep concern about the lack of international cooperation despite global threats to human existence. He referenced UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres' warning from the previous year: "We are playing Russian roulette with our planet. We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell." Choue criticized the international community for moving "in an opposite direction, away from cooperation and solidarity," citing ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Russia, Gaza Strip, and Yemen as examples of mounting international tensions.

Harvard University's affiliated professor of earth and planetary sciences, Naomi Oreskes, delivered a keynote speech via conference call, calling for cooperation over competition. "We are guided by wrong values," Oreskes argued. "In American society, this often elides into the idea that we need to be mean in order to be lean. We see this in the behavior of business executives like Elon Musk, who at times seem to take pleasure in sacking workers, with little or no regard to what happens to those workers as people."

Oreskes emphasized the importance of listening skills in addressing global challenges. "We teach our students to talk and to write, but we do not teach them to listen," she explained. "We judge ourselves and each other on how much we have published and how much others have listened to us, but we do not attend to how much we listen to others." She stressed that while competition works well in sports like football matches or Olympic Games, many areas of life require empathy and cooperation instead.

Following the commemorative speeches, a special discussion session featured Chancellor Choue, Professor Oreskes, and Princeton University politics and international affairs professor John Ikenberry. The panel addressed current global crises including climate change, the risk of nuclear conflict, and uncertainties surrounding rapid scientific and technological development. The discussion provided insights into the complex interconnections between these challenges and potential pathways toward resolution.

The festival included the annual Havel Dialogue, a discussion session dedicated to studying civic values and revisiting the beliefs of former Czech President Vaclav Havel, who is widely regarded as a beacon of peace and humanitarianism in Eastern Europe during the 1990s. Tomas Sedlacek, a Czech economist and representative of the Vaclav Havel Library, participated alongside Korean scholars to discuss structural problems facing humanity and explore possibilities for new paradigms of coexistence.

The second day of the festival focused on public engagement and intergenerational dialogue, beginning with the Citizens and Students Commemorative Ceremony. This was followed by a colloquium and Youth Peace Forum, which examined topics including climate justice, intergenerational justice, and the future of democracy. Student representatives from Kyung Hee University and international exchange students actively participated, bringing younger perspectives to discussions traditionally dominated by academic and policy experts, ensuring that multiple generations could contribute to finding solutions for global challenges.