By Dildar Kaya, Advocacy and Global Partnerships, NWI
Peace is often imagined as something leaders sign. But from Cape Town to Northern Ireland, I keep seeing it begin somewhere else: in the choices of ordinary people, and very often young women, who refuse to pass hatred on to the next generation.
In the beginning of November, One Young World brought thousands of young leaders from across the world to Cape Town: activists, organisers and changemakers working on some of the hardest questions of our time. Amid the plenaries and hallway conversations, former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos told a story at the Nelson Mandela Lecture that captivated the room.
A woman in Colombia lost her husband, her son and her brother to the FARC. Years later, she chose to forgive the young man who had tortured and killed her son. Not because he had earned it. Not because anyone asked her to. She forgave him because she did not want to carry that hatred for the rest of her life. She wanted to be free of it.
Santos spoke about finding a way forward even when none seems visible, and about peace as the only path to living together in safety and dignity. Real, enduring peace, he said, is like a plant. It needs to be nurtured.
We usually talk about peace as an event: a signature, a handshake, a ceasefire that starts at midnight. Santos was describing something slower. An agreement is only a seed. Whether anything grows depends on what happens afterwards - between neighbours, inside families, and within each person who has to decide what to do with their grief.
I want to be careful here. Forgiveness can never be demanded of those who have been harmed, and it is no substitute for justice or accountability. What moved me was not that she forgave, but that she chose - and that her choice opened a possibility that politics alone could not.
It mattered that we heard this in South Africa, a country once told that apartheid would never end, and one that tried to face its past publicly through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Imperfect as it was, it rested on a similar conviction: a society cannot move forward while carrying everything that came before.
It is tempting to call the Colombian mother exceptional. But I had seen something in a similar direction only a few months earlier.
A room in Northern Ireland
In September, I joined a gathering of women from across the world - among others from Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Palestine and Israel - in a remote village in Northern Ireland.
The Palestinian and Israeli women did not arrive with a shared story, and no one pretended otherwise. Their realities were not equal, and the conversations did not treat them as if they were. There was grief in that room, and anger, and tears. But they stayed. They listened to what was hard to hear, said what was hard to say, and came back the next morning. They showed that it is possible to disagree without giving up the need for dialogue.
Northern Ireland itself was a reminder of how long this work takes. More than twenty-five years after the Good Friday Agreement, its divisions have not disappeared. But people there continue to choose, again and again, not to let those divisions have the final word.
That is what Santos was describing. There is an appetite for peace, even in deeply wounded communities, among people who refuse to keep hatred alive or to hand it down to their children. The Colombian mother is not an exception. She is evidence.
Different struggles, familiar patterns
South Africa, Colombia, Palestine and Kurdistan are very different places, and none should be folded into the others. Yet side by side, the patterns are hard to miss. Each is a struggle over belonging - over land, identity, language and the right to be recognised as equal. Each has been told that its conflict is permanent. In each, grief has been passed down to children who inherit losses from before they were born. And in each, women have been at the heart of the struggle for peace, often without a seat at the table where it was negotiated.
A door that is open now
Listening in Cape Town, as a Kurd who works on peace every day, I also thought of the peace efforts now under way in Türkiye and Syria. In both, processes have begun that many had stopped believing were possible. They remain fragile.
Peace - aştî, as we say in Kurdish - is not a moment. It is something that has to be tended.
Colombia, South Africa and Northern Ireland all point to the same lesson: peace has to be lived, not only signed. In Türkiye and Syria, it requires recognition of language, culture and identity, genuine political representation, and the confidence that everyone has a place in a shared future. There too, young women are already doing much of the work - organising in their communities and insisting on a voice in the decisions that will shape their lives.
But no one tends peace alone. As a Kurdish saying goes:
“Destê bi tenê deng jê nayê.” A single hand makes no sound.
That is why bringing women peacebuilders together matters. Through the Nobel Women’s Initiative, we brought Nobel Laureates to One Young World alongside young women leaders from Northeast Nigeria, Honduras and Malawi - women who work for peace every day, often in isolation and at real risk. In rooms like these, in Cape Town or in Northern Ireland, a woman leader from Northeast Nigeria can recognise her own struggle in that of a Kurdish activist, a South African organiser, or a Northern Irish woman who chooses to stay in a difficult conversation. Each is one hand. Together, they make a sound that is much harder to ignore.
Refusing the inevitable
In Cape Town, Santos urged us not to stay silent and accept war being normalised as statecraft.
South Africans were told apartheid would last forever. Colombians were told the war could only end in defeat. Palestinians and Israelis are told, every day, that there is no alternative. Each time, people have refused to accept it and they continue to do so.
Santos was right: peace has to be nurtured. But it begins with a choice - what we will no longer carry, and what we will plant instead.
Written by Dildar Kaya
Dildar Kaya is NWI’s Advocacy and Global Partnerships staff member, joining the team after serving on its board. With a background in Psychology and a passion for sustainable development, women’s rights, and minority rights, she has worked with organizations including Oxfam, UNICEF, and the SEED Foundation, focusing on gender equality and social justice with marginalized communities across Europe and Iraqi Kurdistan. Most recently, her work centred on mental health access and recovery support for survivors of ISIS, sexual and gender-based violence, and the Syrian conflict. Dildar is a One Young World Ambassador, a Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom fellow, and a fellow of the Johns Hopkins AICGS transatlantic program for young minority leaders.