Themes & programs

From 2018 and onwards, TFF’s themes and programs focus on these areas with criticism and constructive alternatives for each:

1. The Middle East – Conflicts, changes and future peace options. Focus on Iran with three sub-projects: A) Countering the West’s negative view. B) Help develop academic peace research at Tehran’s University. C) A photo book from Iran.

2. Europe – A) The New Cold War: From 1989 till today’s new Cold War with Ukraine and criticism of EU and NATO security thinking. B) The EU and its failed handling of asylum seekers coming to Europe and integration into Sweden as well as it’s lacking action capacity independent of the US.

3. Terrorism and the Global War On Terror – Wrong diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. What should have been done since September 11, 2001?

4. Human and common security – Criminalizing war, nuclear abolition and alternative civil and military defence. Since 2020, a focus on the Coronavirus as a security policy failure.

5. The Silk Peace Art Road (SPAR) – an art photography-based multi-media installation related to the China-initiated Belt And Road Initiative (BRI); it’s a collaboration between TFF and Oberg PhotoGraphics. It was shown for the first time at the Venice Biennale 2019 and will then be travelling to and around China and back to Europe via BRI capitals. To put it crudely, it’s about war and peace, the Western decline and Eastern rise and about the past and the future.

6. Various other themes: Less systematically, we also monitor A) foreign policy and security policy-related matters in Denmark (incl Greenland), B) Sweden’s incremental inclusion in US/NATO structures; C) Developments in Burundi and D) Net censorship and related reductions of Western democracy and rights.

These themes are dealt with – directly or indirectly – through theories and concepts such as theories of peace and making peace by peaceful means; nonviolence in various cultures; theories of imperialism, world order and globalisation; the paradigm of empirical analysis, criticism and constructivism; and in most cases through a critique of the images of global events and conflicts carried by Western-dominated mainstream media.

TFF has conducted many research and policy-oriented projects since it was established in 1986. A selected few without chronology:

• East-West-Nordic teams on “Economy, Ecology and Ethics.”

• Common Security and Nordic Security in the 1990s.

• The Nordic region as a nuclear-weapons free zone and as a zone of peace.

• A series of projects in Burundi related to reconciliation, public outreach at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, building of youth organisations.

• UN reforms and restructuring.

• Mao and Gandhi – a comparative study of social defence philosophy.

• Alternative military and civilian defence.

• Comprehensive study of the concept of ‘nuclear winter’.

• Alternatives to world disorder – and global ethics.

• The European Union – Conflict and Peace.

• Conflict consortium and reconciliations centers – what, why and how?