Make peace games, not war games

In a small conference room in Minamata, Japan, intense negotiations are taking place across pushed-together tables. Small flags identify each table for the entity they represent — Japan, China, the U.S., Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea), Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) and Women for Peaceful Asia.

The debate at hand regards the safety and security of women all over the globe, considering how to implement a regional plan for a UN ruling that laid out expectations for the safety and treatment of women during conflict. And while the debate and the UN resolution in question are very real, the members of this group are not state dignitaries, but students and civil society members, acting out a session of the Peace Games.

The Northeast Asia Peace Games, developed by MCC partner American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in collaboration with the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC), are a role play simulation that invite students to be part of the process of peacebuilding through cooperation and empathy.
 

MCC’s partnership with the AFSC supports creative, experiential peacebuilding initiatives like the Northeast Asia Peace Games. Through this collaboration, MCC helps foster dialogue, empathy, and mutual understanding among students and civil society members from across the region, encouraging practical engagement with peace and reconciliation beyond political boundaries. If you’re interested in peacebuilding programs like this, contact your local MCC office to explore opportunities to get involved.

Each Peace Game establishes an appropriate environment and scenario — such as a 2024 session in Mongolia, where the topic was energy dependence — and assigns participants to one of the countries or entities. They’re given a brief including their parties’ goals for the session and important information for negotiating  with the other groups.
 

Deting Lu was one of the participants of the Peace Games in Japan focused on women, peace, and security and says the role play nature of the games forces participants to think about issues in a totally different way than they’re used to.

“Often in Northeast Asia, I find we tend to use our ‘brain’ or ‘head’ knowledge, which means that our body is not involved in the learning process,” says Lu, who holds a PhD in human rights studies. “Intellectually we’re aware of things, but there's a huge gap between the theories and the practice. So doing this kind of role play helps in some ways to shorten the gap in between ‘knowing’ and ‘feeling’ some of these things.”

Lu says some students have strong reactions to confronting their own unidentified biases. One participant in the Japan Peace Games in 2024 came from a Korean family who were separated two generations ago by the division of the Korean Peninsula. When he was assigned to be part of the North Korea delegation at the games, he was surprised by his emotional reaction.

“He told me he was very uncomfortable representing North Korea, which is a nation that he does not have very pleasant feelings toward,” says Lu. “He’s also been living the U.S. and considering getting his citizenship there, so it was bringing up a lot of feelings and questions about national and familial identity for him.”

The Peace Games are currently designed as a half-day process, so they don’t leave a lot of room for debriefing big feelings like that, notes Lu, but building out the games into a full day or longer to account for a debrief is something she’d like to see.

Bo Badamsambuu is a human rights advocate and Peace Games facilitator from Mongolia. He was also a participant in the 2024 Peace Games in Japan. He says the games have a way of bringing out emotions that may surprise participants.

“Even a humble person can express themselves aggressively in the name of a state interest,” says Badamsambuu. “We had a university student who was part of the UN in our game. And in some sessions, the big countries never shared any information, saying just the ordinary diplomatic answers and that's it. He was so frustrated because his goal was to foster cooperation, but their goal was more about keeping their power.”

Peacebuilding is so often a long, slow process, sowing seeds that may take time to blossom. AFSC has operated Peace Games events in eight countries, over 600 participants in more than 30 simulations The material has been translated into multiple languages and contexts to bring more people into the experience.