A World BEYOND War Australia symposium (in association with the Victorian Quaker Centre) Monday 15 June 2026 from 9:00am-1:00pm AEST (find the time in your time zone) This event will be livestreamed. Please register on this page for the Zoom link.

Between the two periods of Taliban rule (roughly 2001–2021), Afghanistan saw a dense landscape of civil society initiatives around peacebuilding, women’s rights, and gender equality, led by Afghan NGOs, informal community groups, and international partners.

Afghans who fled after August 2021 have become key actors in keeping Afghan peace, social justice and gender equality struggles alive from exile, combining direct support to people inside Afghanistan with advocacy, movement-building and institution-building abroad.

This symposium, organised by World BEYOND War Australia (the Australian chapter of the international World BEYOND War movement), will explore a number of themes related to Afghans promoting peace and social justice in new lands.

We have three impressive keynote speakers:

• Dr. Mujib Abid, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Initiative for Peacebuilding at the University of Melbourne, is an Afghan-Australian scholar of modern Afghan history, peace studies and political theory whose current work focuses on the Afghan diaspora in Australia.
• Efat Abulfazil, a peace advocate now living in Italy, has a long history of promoting mental health, gender equality, and nonviolence in communities affected by conflict and displacement. Efat is the founder of the Malika Soraa Foundation.
• Nemat Ahangosh, a peacebuilder, poet, and activist now living in the UK. Nemat is the founder of Stretch More, a UK registered charity dedicated to empowering disabled individuals in conflict zones and disaster-prone areas.