CWC Conference Series 2027

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2nd-5th September 2027

Jen George Town by Shangri-La

In September 2026, thinkers, leaders and practitioners gathered in George Town for the inaugural Penang Peace Dialogue with a simple but increasingly urgent proposition: peace is not simply the absence of war. It is a state of mind, a culture and a value system that must be cultivated and defended.

The inaugural Dialogue brought together an exceptional group of international voices, including His Excellency Joko Widodo, the 7th President of the Republic of Indonesia; Professor Kishore Mahbubani; Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs; and Professor Emeritus Jomo Kwame Sundaram, among others.

Together, they examined how civilisations could engage rather than collide in an increasingly divided and multipolar world. The Dialogue looked from Bandung to Penang, and from Southeast Asia to the world. It called for stronger multilateralism, a reformed United Nations, a renewed Non-Aligned Movement, ASEAN neutrality, urgent climate action and greater wisdom in the age of artificial intelligence.

But a declaration should not be the end of a dialogue. It should be the beginning of one.

In September 2027, the Second Penang Peace Dialogue will bring the conversation back to Penang - but take it into new territory.

The question this time is not only how nations can live peacefully with one another. It is also how human beings can live peacefully with one another, with technology, with our cities and with the natural world.

We are entering an age unlike any before it. Artificial intelligence and robotics are transforming how we work, communicate and understand the world. Technology connects us instantly, yet societies can feel increasingly fragmented. Economic progress has created extraordinary prosperity, but it has also produced inequality, environmental stress and a relentless culture of speed.

Against this background, the Second Penang Peace Dialogue asks a more fundamental question:

And what role can Southeast Asia play?

For centuries, Southeast Asia has been a meeting place rather than a single civilisation. Across the maritime routes of the Nusantara, people, religions, languages, ideas, art and commerce encountered one another, adapted to one another and often lived alongside one another.

Penang itself is an expression of that history. Its streets, architecture, places of worship, food, languages and communities tell the story of cultures meeting without one having to erase the other.

This experience may have something important to say to the world today.

The Second Penang Peace Dialogue will therefore bring together voices that do not normally sit around the same table: statesmen and diplomats, artists and architects, philosophers and economists, scientists and technologists, environmentalists and urban planners, business leaders and young people.

They will explore peace not merely as a geopolitical objective, but as something that can be imagined, taught, created and lived.

Can art help us see the humanity of people different from ourselves? Can our cities accommodate both the speed demanded by modern economies and the slower rhythms human beings need to live meaningful lives? Can nature once again become part of the living city rather than something pushed beyond its boundaries? Can artificial intelligence advance human civilisation without diminishing human dignity?

And can Southeast Asia's long experience of fluidity, accommodation and civilisational exchange offer another way of thinking about a world increasingly divided into competing blocs?

These are ultimately questions about the kind of civilisation we want to build.

A distinctive feature of the Second Penang Peace Dialogue will be Art for Peace, bringing together artists, architects and creative thinkers to explore how art and the spaces we create can contribute to a culture of peace.

Art crosses borders in ways politics sometimes cannot. Architecture shapes how we live and encounter one another. Together, they can create spaces for reflection, connection and understanding.

In Penang - where art, architecture, heritage and different cultures have long existed side by side - Art for Peace will give physical and creative expression to the Dialogue's central idea: that peace is not only negotiated. It can also be imagined, designed and built.

The ambition of the Penang Peace Dialogue is deliberately larger than another international conference. It seeks to establish Penang as a continuing meeting place for ideas - a place where East and West, North and South, established powers and emerging nations can meet on more equal intellectual ground.

The first Dialogue began that journey. The second will build upon it.

Its starting point is simple: peace begins long before the negotiating table. It begins in the values we teach, the communities we build, the technology we create, the art and spaces we encounter, and the relationship we establish with the natural world.

If the first Penang Peace Dialogue was about bridging civilisations, the second is about asking what we should build once we have crossed that bridge.

We invite those who believe that peace must be more than an aspiration to come to Penang.

Come not simply to speak about peace. Come to help imagine what a culture of peace could look like - and how, together, we might begin to build it.