Marking the International Day of Peace in 2025 feels like a bad joke played on a weary audience. While officialdom issues press releases and well-meaning NGOs light their symbolic candles, the world’s reality is anything but serene. Gaza lies in ruins, Ukraine’s towns still thunder under shellfire, and countless corners of Asia and Africa remain scarred by conflicts the television cameras no longer even bother to cover. Peace, we’re told, is fragile. These days, it’s more like an endangered species.
And as always, those who never lit the fuse pay the highest price. Women and children, not generals or politicians, shoulder the heaviest burden. It is the mother clutching a child while fleeing bombardment, the father who never comes back from the bakery. This teenager learns the language of hatred before mastering multiplication tables. These aren’t statistics; they are the raw human wreckage of war.
Mahatma Gandhi had it right when he warned:
“If we are to reach real peace in this world… we shall have to begin with children.”
A line so painfully obvious yet endlessly ignored that one wonders whether it should be tattooed on the foreheads of world leaders.
Tourism: More Than Souvenirs and Selfies
Here’s where the cynics scoff: what does tourism, that great engine of delayed flights, overpriced cocktails and cheesy souvenirs, have to do with peace? Quite a lot, if you ask Dr Lou D’Amore, who, back in 1986, founded the International Institute for Peace through Tourism (IIPT).
Dr D’Amore saw something most others missed: when people travel, borders blur. They swap stories, stumble through foreign greetings, share meals, laugh at misunderstandings and in those unguarded moments, walls of suspicion crumble faster than any peace accord could manage.
Tourism, at its most authentic, is not about five-star hotel check-ins. It’s about walking through a souk in Marrakech and realising that the “other” is not some frightening caricature but a merchant with a cheeky smile and children to feed. It’s about sitting in a Greek taverna or a Balinese village hut and discovering that family, food and laughter are universal languages.
From Hostility to Hospitality
The IIPT has long insisted that tourism can transform hostility into hospitality. While this may sound like a neat slogan, there’s substance beneath it. The travel and tourism sector represents nearly 10% of global GDP and supports one in 10 jobs worldwide. That’s not fluff; that’s power.
If handled properly, power rebuilds communities shattered by conflict, restores dignity by reopening hotels and guesthouses, and proves that shared prosperity is a sturdier foundation than shared enmity.
Peace Is Not Weakness
On this International Day of Peace, the IIPT has urged governments and communities to use the moment not for hollow speeches but for action. “Silence the guns and open the doors to dialogue,” it says. Peace, it reminds us, is not weakness but the ultimate strength.
It’s easy to fire a bullet; it takes infinitely more courage to sit across a table from your enemy and share a meal. Tourism, in its humble way, creates those tables. It offers a chance for dialogue not dressed up as diplomacy, but lived out as a human connection.
The Industry’s Responsibility
Let’s not pretend that tourism will stop wars overnight. It will not ground a bomber or defuse a landmine. But it can chip away at the foundations of prejudice and fear, one journey at a time.
And let’s be blunt: the industry cannot shirk responsibility. Airlines, hoteliers, and cruise companies are not just flogging beds and tickets. Whether they like it or not, they are actors on the global stage. Each itinerary has the chance to be more than a transaction; it can be a small act of reconciliation, an antidote to division.
Why It Matters More Than Ever
The International Day of Peace is not a fluffy calendar filler. It is a necessary jolt, a reminder that peace is not a luxury to be postponed until the world calms down. It is urgent, possible, and everyone’s business.
Tourism, unlike politics, thrives on connection rather than division. It introduces strangers and quietly turns them into neighbours. And if peace is to have any hope of surviving the coming decades, we will need more neighbours and fewer enemies.
So, as the IIPT insists, let us reimagine tourism not as an indulgence but as a force for peace, a force that heals, restores livelihoods, and reminds us that the person we fear across the border is more often than not just the friend we haven’t yet met.
By Jason Smith
