TFF at 40 # 4 – Manifesto for True Peace Ahead

TFF founders & Board

January 1, 2026

On January 1, 2026, TFF – The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research – turns forty. In a West where peace has been cancelled in politics, research, and media, we might just as well have used the anniversary to close down.

But we shall move on — because peace by peaceful means is not negotiable. It is our compass and a universal principle of the future. Only uneducated or immoral people advocate violence where there are other options.

We endure because:

– Our founders and about 50 TFF Associates have lived a lifelong commitment to peace by peaceful means.

– We are financed only by people, no governments and, thus, don’t have to practise self-censorship or change away from true peace to more or less militarised “security” research.

– We are all volunteers — no salaries, no staff, no bureaucracy.

This strategic freedom is our strength. It permits TFF to move forward, forty years older, yet still young in perspectives and hope.

Two strategies for the future

1 ◆ More future- and solutions-oriented peace research and education: We will expand constructive, proposal-making, and future-oriented dimensions. Less short-term criticism of day-to-day events and trends, fewer diagnoses of what is wrong. More treatment, more creative pro-peace thinking, more visions and peace-making plans.

Why? Because there is far too much focus on the past and present and far too much doom and gloom that only makes citizens give up. We choose to thrive on positive energy and ideas and see it as a compliment when some call it “unrealistic.” Visionlessness stands in the way for a better world.

2 ◆ From knowledge to wisdom
Inspired by E.F. Schumacher, we feel that the world has enough knowledge – enough analytical Diagnosis and Prognosis – and that it now needs Treatment with a dose of wisdom and inspiration from culture and non-Western ways of seeing and thinking about the world.

TFF will continue to focus on facts, but increasingly turn to convey ways of thinking that promote ideas and concepts for a more peaceful future – the future after the demise of the US Empire with NATO and the EU.

Peace research is goal-oriented. Its goal is to help a) reduce all kinds of violence and b) devise how to achieve more peaceful development and societies. It shares much with medicine: it is not enough to describe the illness and immoral to only predict death and destruction. We feel obliged to suggest ways to heal the sick elite addiction to violence, militarism, and injustice and imagine a better future with peaceful coexistence: True peace in diversity.

We’ll plant such peace seeds, no matter what.

What lies ahead

A new homepage
12,000+ articles and videos, soon including all our pre-internet, printed publications. A unique site with new analyses, education and debates and an archive of international affairs history with a peace perspective and peace research history useful to future generations: 40 years of peace productivity by extremely experienced Associates from many fields, some now legendary or classic in the true sense of those words. This homepage will be free to access forever and for everyone.

A secured future for TFF
The homepage will endure for decades, be backed up at a uniquely strong security cloud and global archive sites. It will live and be accessible as an archive for a lifetime ahead, even after founders and associates step aside, or we have closed down TFF.

More videos, fewer texts
Provocative, educative or heuristic: among them the forthcoming TFF Peace Pulse and all we do with media worldwide. In a world full of fake peace, we cannot reach too many with the message of professional true peace.

Going beyond the West
The Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, considers peace dangerous. Long ago, TFF was blocked by mainstream media, de-ranked by Google, thrown out of Google’s YouTube, and sidelined by Facebook’s, X’s and LinkedIn’s algorithm/censorship – all without any explanation. That is not our problem; it’s the problem of the decaying West.

Today, instead, we reach so many more through non-Western media. Thanks to deliberate cooperation and the use of modern communication tools, a shoestring operation based in a villa in Southern Sweden reaches millions among the 88% of humanity outside the Western bubble.

A lighter rhythm
There will be slightly fewer publications, but each will carry weight. Doing a little less while achieving more. The founders will devote themselves to other joys too, yet true peace will always stream from TFF.

Our promises
We won’t despair. We sow seeds of peace — knowing, as Gandhi taught, that every right means or step we take is the good goal in the making – thus, peace by peaceful means.
We walk with the conviction of Martin Luther King Jr., that light can drive out darkness, love can drive out hate. And we add that knowledge can drive out kakistocracy (government by the least able and least good people).
We believe with Sun Tzu that wars are best won before they start, and that is what is called conflict resolution with as little violence as possible.
We heal, not by force, but by intellect and creativity.
We plant trees whose shade we may never sit beneath.
We move forward — forty years older, yet forever young and full of ideas.
Knowing that the only constant factors in politics and academia is change. And curiosity.

Finally, we take this unique opportunity to say Thank YOU

– to all the 150 TFF Associates over the years and friends who, over all these years, have made TFF what it is today;
– to all the supporters – with money, morals, materials, discounts, etc. who have enabled us to run a shoestring operation and go around the world to say the word ‘peace;’
– to the Swedish government that cancelled its meagre financial support to us in 1999 when we had mediated peace in Yugoslavia and advised against NATO’s bombing (about 20 years later it cancelled support to all other peace organisations too); it taught us to be independent and do free research;
– to the roughly hundred organisations we have cooperated with in various places and roles, the UN in particular;
– to all the students we have interacted with, taught and learned from at universities in Asia, Africa and Europe;
– to mainstream media which, up to about the turn of the century, sometimes asked us for our knowledge and analyses and, finally…
– to the many thousands who have sent appreciative comments about what we do and often re-posted our articles.

You’ve all encouraged us on a daily basis to push the Sisyphus-like stone of peace up the mountain again and again.

Thanks to you, we shall continue to do so. Working for true peace – whether activism, research, politics or a mix of them – remains the most meaningful thing one can do in life.

The TFF founders and Board

Christina Spännar
Jan Oberg
Biljana Vankovska
Annette Schiffmann
Pascal Lottaz

This 40th Anniversary could be a good reason to support us, if you are not already doing so. Click on the red button. It is easy, secure and safe. Thanks for thinking of true peace!