Small and different + among the 10% most active + 9,000 texts + 150 Associates + 60 000 a day — and a stubborn belief that peace is smarter and must be secured by peaceful means.
In 2026, the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF) turns 40.
On Monday, October 5, 2026, a new TFF homepage will go live — a new gateway to more than 9,000 articles, analyses, research papers and other contributions produced over four decades of independent peace research.
But this is not simply a new website.
For four decades, TFF has worked from a simple conviction: peace is smarter than militarism and can be brought about by peaceful means. This is not merely an aspiration. It is the principle expressed in the UN Charter and the Gandhian tradition that has guided our work from the beginning.
TFF is a research-based, independent and people-financed foundation. Over the years, some 150 people from many countries have served as Associates and contributed their knowledge, ideas and work on an all-volunteer basis.
They are an essential part of what TFF has been and remains. Many have been with us for many years; some are no longer with us, while others have joined along the way. Together, they represent something that means a great deal to TFF: trust, friendship and a lasting commitment to the idea that peace research matters and, therefore, so does peace research.
We can’t thank them enough.
No large institutional machinery has stood behind us. TFF is two founders in a private villa in Lund, Sweden, with no staff, and a worldwide network of people who believe in these goals and research for them and helped make it possible. When we started in 1986, many told us we wouldn’t survive long doing it that way.
Our work has never shared identity with what is conventionally called security studies, geopolitics or political science. Peace research is different. We have sought to understand the causes of violence and war, but equally to explore the possibilities of conflict resolution, reconciliation, nonviolence, disarmament, common security, peace-building, mediation and visions of a more peaceful world order.
And we have always believed that peace research should happen inside academia but also outside in the real world. We sent conflict mitigation teams to all parts of former Yugoslavia, Georgia, Burundi, Iraq, Iran, Syria, China – and we did peace education on three continents. We never stayed in the safe ivory tower but did what a good doctor does: we went into the real world and produced Diagnosis and Prognoses and also proposals for Treatment.
TFF therefore combines peace research, public education and policy proposals. Our aim is to make serious knowledge accessible not only to scholars and students, but also to journalists, policymakers, activists, citizens — and anyone who wants to understand the world and help change it.
Today, the TFF archive contains more than 9,000 articles, analyses, research papers and other contributions, produced over 40 years. They form not only a body of peace research, but also a record of how people have thought about war, peace and the future across four decades.
The new TFF website makes this body of knowledge considerably more accessible. It will be supplemented by digitalised versions of publications that saw daylight back then when there was no internet.
The new Transnational homepage has an advanced search system that allows students, researchers and citizens anywhere in the world to explore this extensive archive and discover connections across time and subjects.
We are proud that this work has remained independent, freely accessible and committed to peace by peaceful means – mainly thanks to the Associates and our policy to neither seek nor accept government or corporate funds but remain entirely people-financed.
A warm thank you to all those thousands of supporters over the years. Thanks to you, we remain free to do and say things no NATO government would listen to, much less support.
And we want all we produced and will produce to remain freely available – as a small gift to the world, to peace.
That is why the new website is much more than a new homepage.
It is also an attempt to preserve a substantial part of the history of contemporary peace research and make it available to future generations — long after those of us who created and developed it are no longer here to do so. We have also secured it from attempts at sabotage.
Today, about 60 000 people around the world – most outside the Western 12% of humanity – encounter TFF’s work each day. Everything on this site is freely available and will always be – in contrast to academic publishing houses’ outrageous paywalls.
You may support that principled policy and our free peace research here.
This is our gift to anyone, anywhere, who believes that understanding the world is a necessary step toward changing it—and that a more peaceful future must be pursued by peaceful means—and research and education.
So, the necessary work continues.
Welcome to TFF and its new home!
A personal note of thanks
A new homepage like this does not happen by itself. We want to express our warmest thanks to the team at CaptivateClick in Stockholm and especially to team leader Adam Ögren, with whom we have worked through virtually every detail over the last 15 months.
It has been a unique pleasure. The team has gone far beyond what could reasonably have been expected — in time, patience, creativity and commitment. “We can’t do that” was never the answer; there was always a way forward, and often at any hour of the day or night.
Just as importantly, they understood what TFF is about. They did not merely build a beautiful home for our work. They understood the message behind it — and gave that message the home it deserves.
For that, too, we are deeply grateful.
Christina Spannar & Jan Oberg
Founders, TFF
