Reinventing Diplomacy From the Ground Up: What This Year’s Call for Solutions Reveals

By Francesca Bosco, Selection Committee Member, 2026 Call for Solutions

Of the 607 applications the Paris Peace Forum received for the 2026 Call for Solutions — the largest and most geographically diverse pool in the Call's recent history, spanning 97 countries — the resulting cohort skews decisively toward the Global South, which outnumbers the Global North roughly two to one. That imbalance is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is not a diversity statistic in the usual sense. It is a signal about where the most consequential thinking on today's hardest governance problems is actually happening.

As a member of the 2026 Selection Committee, reviewing a meaningful share of the pool across the New Technologies and Peace & Security themes, two patterns stood out clearly enough — and map closely enough onto the challenges multilateral institutions themselves are now naming as most urgent — to be worth setting out publicly, ahead of the Forum's 9th edition this November.

A Shift From Reactive to Structural

For the third consecutive year, the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report ranks misinformation and disinformation among the two or three most severe risks the world faces, identifying it as the risk that most consistently amplifies every other one, from state-based conflict to democratic backsliding.¹ Independent researchers tracking synthetic media report that detected deepfake incidents rose roughly ninety-fold between 2023 and 2025, with AI-generated content projected to account for a substantial share of everything circulating online by year's end.

Against that backdrop, the Safeguarding Information Integrity theme drew this cycle's largest number of applications, and reading through them revealed two distinct generations of response. The first treats disinformation as discrete claims to verify one at a time — still valuable, particularly where applicants had done the hard work of building genuine linguistic and cultural specificity into verification systems, rather than importing tools built elsewhere. The second, more structurally ambitious generation is building infrastructure to prevent distortion from taking hold in the first place: cryptographic authentication embedded into evidence at the point of capture, open-data platforms that pre-empt information vacuums before rumor fills them, algorithmic mapping of how bias propagates across an entire information ecosystem rather than scoring individual posts. This approach tracks the trajectory of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, the open standard now backed by more than six thousand member organizations, including most major technology and camera manufacturers.²

Tellingly, the strongest structural applications came disproportionately from applicants working in, or in direct response to, active conflict and instability — a strong overlap with the Global South representation noted above. Necessity appears to be accelerating structural thinking fastest precisely where the pressure is most acute, often years ahead of the governance frameworks meant to support it. That gap between what civil society is already building and what formal institutions have caught up to is close to a textbook description of what the Forum's Solutions Hub and Policy Incubation pillars exists to close.

Frameworks That Haven't Caught Up

A second, more concentrated pattern deserves direct attention: applications working at the intersection of gender, digital security, and information integrity — countering trafficking recruitment conducted through deceptive job postings, defending women in peacebuilding roles against coordinated digital smear campaigns, building AI-literacy tools for women navigating local governance.

October 2025 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, the founding instrument of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, and the milestone prompted sober reassessment. A 2025 study by the Association for Progressive Communications, examining how national WPS Action Plans across more than a hundred countries address digital threats, concluded that the omission reflects "a fundamental misalignment" between the threats women now face and the frameworks built to protect them.³ Attacks on women in public life are still overwhelmingly processed as individual online harassment rather than as coordinated, often politically motivated attempts to remove women from public life — a categorization gap that determines whether a case reaches victim support or platform accountability, and currently routes almost always toward the former.

The tools this cycle's applicants are building — trained on survivor interviews, co-designed with women leaders across dozens of countries — represent civil society filling a gap the policy literature has now documented with real precision. What most still lack is the connective tissue to the multilateral bodies that could translate their evidence into policy.

What This Means Heading Into November

Neither pattern is fundamentally a call for more tools. This year's pool suggests civil society's capacity to build sophisticated, evidence-based responses is currently outpacing the capacity of formal governance to recognize, resource, and scale them — and that the Global South, far from being a secondary contributor to this work, is where a striking share of its most structurally ambitious thinking now originates. That is precisely the space the Forum's Solutions Hub and Policy Incubation function exists to occupy: not originating solutions from a standing start, but building the coalitions and institutional pathways that let solutions already built by the right actors, in the places facing the sharpest pressure, reach the scale their evidence justifies. As the Forum enters its 9th edition, that is the bridge worth building next.

The views expressed here reflect the author's own observations across the applications she reviewed as a member of the 2026 Selection Committee, and do not represent a statement on the outcome of the selection process, which remains under embargo until the Forum's public announcement.

Further reading: World Economic Forum, Global Risks Report 2026; United Nations, Global Principles for Information Integrity (2024); Baekgaard, K., The Missing Link: Cybersecurity and Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence in the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, Association for Progressive Communications (2025); Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), adoption data (2026).