PART I — From Stencils to Substack

Jan Oberg, TFF director

April 10, 2026

How TFF Sent Peace Into the World Before the Internet Existed

This article is part of the series “TFF at 40″ and it invites you to learn about Four Decades of Publishing Peace. It takes a look at how a small, people‑financed peace foundation has communicated across four generations of technology — from wax stencils and fax machines to mass email and Substack — and why TFF continues to publish every single day in a system that rewards noise, conflict, and militarism.

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Follow me on a journey through forty years of peace publishing — from wax stencils and hand‑cranked duplicators to the fax machine that never slept, and finally to the global reach of online publishing. This is the story of how TFF carried ideas across borders long before the internet made it easy, and why we chose independence over academic profit-making and exploitation.

How new technologies have helped – and hindered – our peace publishing

There was a time — and it is not as distant as it feels — when publishing peace research and education materials meant sitting at a manual typewriter, striking each letter through a thin wax stencil that would become the master copy. One mistake, and the whole sheet had to be redone. Then came the duplicator: the smell of spirit fluid, the soft resistance of the hand‑cranked drum, the slow birth of each page. Ideas travelled by bicycle, by post office, by patience.

We were as proud as exhausted when, the next day, we had brought 1200 filled and address labelled envelopes to the post office.

Between that era and the digital one came a brief but unforgettable chapter: the fax machine. Now it wasn’t registers of street addresses that counted, it was telephone fax numbers. For years it stood in the office, ticking and humming day and night, spitting out tens of thousands of pages to ministries, embassies, NGOs, and media around the world. It was the first time TFF could send a message globally in seconds — and the first time the world could answer back just as fast. That’s how the TFF PressInfo was born, and we are now close to 800 of them.

Then the computer and email arrived and changed everything. The envelope disappeared, but the message still had to earn its way into someone’s attention. Few had emails to begin with. But the world sped up; inboxes filled; the peace perspective remained the quiet voice in a global room that preferred shouting.

The Internet was another technology that changed the world. The first TFF homepage appeared in 1997.

Up to 2004, TFF also published printed, newsletters, reports, anthologies, books and TFF Statements — boxes of them, heavy enough to reshape your spine, shipped across borders in the hope that someone would read past page three. But after two decades of experience, we made a decision: to publish exclusively online.

There were three reasons.

First, online publishing reaches far more people worldwide than any printed report ever could. A student in the Global South can access a TFF text instantly and freely — something no academic publisher would ever allow. Today, they shamelessly charge USD 25 or so if you want a copy of your own article.

Second, TFF online publishing will be free forever. Free for anyone who seeks knowledge, no paywalls, no library budgets, no gatekeepers, no profits made.

Third, we refused to continue feeding the ever‑growing, increasingly arrogant academic publishing industry. After some bad experiences — including spending more than 100 hours co‑editing a peace encyclopedia only to receive a single complimentary copy while the publisher pocketed the profits — we decided never again to let our work be exploited in that way.

And so TFF moved fully online, long before it became fashionable. The tools changed. The world changed. The noise increased. But the rhythm — the commitment — did not: Peace publishing for 1200 recipients of enveloped analyses till today’s global reach of tens of thousands.

Being a shoestring operation, our capital consisted of creativity and adopting every technology that could help us say the word ‘peace’ – locally and nationally to begin with, then also regionally and globally. It’s been one long learning process. The latest innovations that benefit TFF, of course, is AI – that has helped me make this text a slightly better reading experience for you – and video production (you’ll see soon).

And while we welcomed and used technological innovations with joy, we have also seen how high-tech companies like Google, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, etc. have planted nasty innovations into these technologies to censor and punish peace and reward war and militarism. But undeterred, TFF moves on.

But do people read?

From 1990 to 2010, I served as a visiting professor in several countries. Before that, I directed the Lund University Peace Research Institute (LUPRI) from 1983 to 1989. And before that, I was a student of sociology and peace at Lund University. My youth was spent reading, often ten hours per day and often thick, demanding books whose arguments required time, patience, and humility. There was no Internet.

Students read primary literature: the authors themselves, not summaries of summaries. Complex arguments about a complex world could not be compressed into a few pages, let alone a few lines. There were good lecturers around, and they were available, read your drafts, and took time to be both critical and constructive.

Today, my intuitive understanding — supported by countless observations — is that people read far less than they did three or four decades ago, especially when it comes to academic or non‑fiction literature. I recently came across an article claiming that 70% of Facebook users read only the headline and the author’s name. They do not read the article itself, not even when they press “Like.” Whether that number is exact or not is almost irrelevant. What matters is the trend: people increasingly shape their worldview through extremely short texts, photos, memes, and videos. The attention span has collapsed to historic lows, and so has critical assessment of sources.

As an “old‑timer,” I will say this plainly: this development breeds superficiality. It weakens the ability to understand complex issues, and the world is complex. It encourages black‑and‑white thinking. And worst of all, it makes societies far easier to deceive through simplified, emotionally charged media narratives designed to serve political and military interests.

From a TFF perspective, this is deeply worrying. Peace requires knowledge — real knowledge — about how the present system thinks, operates, and legitimises itself. You cannot meaningfully oppose offensive deterrence, arms races, or wars if you do not understand their driving forces, their intellectual foundations, and the theories that justify them. Likewise, you cannot propose viable alternatives without some familiarity with the theories of peace, nonviolence, alternative defence, and conflict transformation.

In other words, this is a double task. Those inside the militarist‑security system don’t have a double task because if they also knew the alternatives, their lives would become too complicated. And the public is increasingly unprepared to absorb complex arguments that challenge the dominant narrative. And visions about a better future have disappeared from public debate, at least in the Western world.

This raises a hard question: Is it meaningful to publish serious, research‑based peace analysis into a world with the shortest attention span in human history — a world that does not read long arguments and is therefore highly vulnerable to propaganda that favour war rather than peace?

How do we break through that layer of manipulation?

TFF has only four answers:

1. We continue doing what we have always done — without compromising academic peace research quality; it may be implicit or explicit, and sometimes make our texts long and demanding.
2. We use shorter formats on social media where appropriate, without diluting substance.
3. We embrace video, both our own and those of others, because many people now learn primarily through visual media.
4. We know from daily feedback that there are still people — study circles, teachers, older citizens who have more time, lifelong learners — who want the longer, deeper argument and refuse to surrender to the new illiteracy.

In conclusion: The new illiteracy is real and deeply worrying. But TFF will continue serving those who refuse to slide into it — and that is a mission of enormous importance.

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