Football 4 Peace Korea at the 2019 Paris Peace Forum!

KSM’s peace education programme “Football 4 Peace Korea”(F4P Korea) was invited to the 2019 Paris Peace Forum. 7,000 participants including French President Macron and 33 other heads of state, as well as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, attended the forum which was held at the La Grande Halle de La Villette in Northern Paris.

The Forum was first initiated by President Macron in 2018 on the centennial of World War I Armistice Day. This was an effort to reflect together, propose concrete initiatives, and reinvent multilateral and various forms of contemporary cooperation in the pursuit of peace. Representatives of 140 countries attended the conference this year hosted from November 11th to the 13th where 114 peace promoting projects were being showcased. These 114 projects had been whittled down from over 700 applications.

F4P Korea was not just a chosen project but also had the honor of being deemed worthy by the organizers of financial support in the form of waived registration fees and travel expenses for two KSM employees. Furthermore, F4P Korea was the only sport related project at the forum and the only project team that had come from Korea.

The forum provided the opportunity, and with it the responsibility, to convey South Korea’s message of peace to the world. The KSM delegation went to great efforts to propagate the voice of Korean civil society. Especially, it sometimes seems that in Europe there is a common discourse that sanctions are a legitimate, effective tool in diplomacy with North Korea. In light of this the KSM team really emphasized to visitors to the F4P Korea booth the need to encourage humanitarian cooperation and inter Korean exchange rather than sanctions, as well as the desire of many in South Korea for a peace process to develop in place of top down summit diplomacy. At the Paris Peace Forum KSM were not solely focused on the overall Korean Peninsula situation but also wanted to draw attention to issues within South Korea. The division of South and North has naturally had a very significant impact on South Korean society. Not least of these impacts is the super competitive environment that young South Koreans face during their formative years in education and trying to enter the world of work. KSM argue that this competitive system leaves little space to engage in open thinking or discussion regarding south-north relations and highlights a need to provide peace education to those seemingly uninterested in south-north conflict and peace. The KSM representatives spoke with visitors to the forum and stated that there is a pressing need for peace education. More specifically there is a pressing need for peace education that eschews rote lecturing but that puts students front and center and provides them with agency, peace education that emphasizes the participation of all in a peace process, and peace education that provides students with the opportunity to experience conflict and cooperation within a safe environment.



The reaction from those gathered in Paris was overwhelmingly positive! Whether it was because the F4P Korea project was quite distinct from other projects or because of interest in the Korean conflict, there was a constant stream of forum participants visiting the KSM booth. Along with two members of KSM staff the Football 4 Peace booth was also supported by KSM Policy advisor and Trinity College Dublin Professor Dong Jin Kim, as well as two representatives from the University of Brighton where F4P International was originally founded.



FIFA Foundation CEO and 1998 World Cup winner Youri Djorkaeff also stopped by KSM’s booth for around 30 minutes to listen to an explanation of what F4P Korea does. KSM emphasized that if and only when care is taken to provide the necessary conditions for success, sport does have a meaningful and powerful role to play in the social transformation of society. The important factor here being that sport in itself is not necessarily moral or peaceful but that if it is used as an access point, with care, it can become a powerful tool in peacebuilding. In Korea this means transcending symbolic elite level inter Korean sports events and finding a new role for grass-roots level sport in Korean society that assists in developing awareness of and about peace in young peoples’ lives. This point about this new role for sport attracted a lot of sympathy from forum attendees.



It was not only at the F4P Korea booth that this message could be spread as there was also a twenty-five minute ‘project pitch’ where KSM could talk about what possible role sport has in peace processes with gathered participants from various countries around the world.



The Paris Peace Forum maintains a focus on governance solutions in six major themes. These are peace & security, development, environment, new technologies, inclusive economy, and culture & education (where F4P Korea was placed). There was a range of diverse projects presented in Paris that were professing solutions to a range of the world’s problems in the pursuit of peace. One pertinent theme running throughout the forum was the reaffirmation that peacebuilding is not the sole prerogative of governments but that civil society has a large role that it has to carry out.

KSM and F4P Korea achieved three main things by attending the Paris Peace Forum. Firstly, the Korean peninsula’s message of peace could be shared with participants hailing from all over the world. Secondly, it was an opportunity to make global connections and develop international solidarity for KSM’s work. Thirdly, a lively discussion could take place regarding what role sport has in peacebuilding when the right conditions are created.