Kyung Hee University System hosts 44th Peace BAR Festival

Kyung Hee University System Chancellor Choue In-won speaks during his opening remarks for the 2025 Peace BAR Festival at the university’s campus in Seoul, Friday. Courtesy of Kyung Hee University

Kyung Hee University System, the private institution’s foundation and operator, hosted the 2025 Peace BAR Festival at the university’s campus in Seoul, Friday.

The term “BAR” stands for “spiritually Beautiful, materially Affluent, humanly Rewarding.”

Coinciding with observance of the International Day of Peace, the Peace BAR Festival has been celebrated annually on Sept. 21 since the idea was first put forward by former Kyung Hee University President Choue Young-seek in 1981.

Endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly, the event aims to celebrate humanity’s efforts at overcoming conflict and confrontation to work towards peace and mutual prosperity.

This year’s festival, titled “The Moment of Chaos: Planetary Consciousness and Future Politics,” brought together approximately 100 international scholars, policy experts, civic activists and students for two days starting Friday, to discuss issues such as climate change, geopolitical complexity and the collapse of democracy.

The university also designated the week starting Sept. 15 as “World Peace Week,” with the Peace BAR Festival serving as the centerpiece. The festival took place at the university’s Peace Hall at its Seoul Campus as well as its Global Campus in Suwon and Gwangneung Campus, both in Gyeonggi Province.

Kyung Hee University System Chancellor Choue In-won said during his opening remarks that mankind is facing existential crises on various fronts.

“I have often said mankind is now standing at a crossroads between progress and annihilation, or peace and destruction,” Choue said during his opening remarks at the university’s Peace Hall in Seoul on Friday.

“Last month, more than 1,100 people were reportedly killed by extreme heatwaves for over two weeks in Spain. Not only its neighboring countries, like Portugal and France, but also Korea suffered a similar climate crisis this summer. Taking account of developing countries, the damage should be global. Climate change is real.”

Kyung Hee University System Chancellor Choue In-won, right on the stage, speaks during the special discussion session of the 2025 Peace BAR Festival at the university’s campus in Seoul, Friday. Courtesy of Kyung Hee University

The 70-year-old politics expert expressed his concern over a lack of international community cooperation despite the crisis threatening the very existence of mankind.

“United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned last year: ‘We are playing Russian roulette with our planet. We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.’ The international community is, however, going to an opposite direction, away from cooperation and solidarity,” he said.

“The end of the war between Ukraine and Russia still seems so distant. The tragedy in the Gaza Strip and Yemen is ongoing. Tensions in international situations are mounting every day. Each country prioritizes their own interests over the coexistence of mankind. The trade war started by ‘America Firstism,’ followed by massive tariffs imposed to its partner countries. Such a trend isn’t sustainable.”

Naomi Oreskes, affiliated professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University, agreed, calling for cooperation over competition.

“We are guided by wrong values,” she said during her keynote speech via conference call.

“In American society, this often elides into the idea that we need to be mean in order to be lean. We see this in the behavior of business executives like Elon Musk, who at times seem to take pleasure in sacking workers, with little or no regard to what happens to those workers as people. Competition is good for some things. We’ve all enjoyed a good football match, or watching the Olympic Games. But there are many areas of life where we need not competition, but empathy and cooperation.”

Oreskes emphasized that it is time to listen.

“We teach our students to talk and to write, but we do not teach them to listen. We judge ourselves and each other on how much we have published — and how much others have listened to us — but we do not attend to how much we listen to others,” she said.

Following the two commemorative speeches, the event started a discussion session featuring Choue, Oreskes and Princeton University politics and international affairs professor John Ikenberry, where the panelists addressed current global crises including climate change, the risk of nuclear conflict and the uncertainties surrounding rapid scientific and technological development.

The annual “Havel Dialogue” followed — a discussion session to study civic values and revisit the beliefs of former Czech President Vaclav Havel. Havel is often considered to be a beacon of peace and humanitarianism in Eastern Europe in the 1990s.

Tomas Sedlacek, a Czech economist and representative of the Vaclav Havel Library, joined the session alongside Korean scholars to discuss structural problems facing humanity and possibilities for a new paradigm of coexistence.

The next day, the event discussed public engagement and intergenerational dialogue, starting with the Citizens and Students Commemorative Ceremony, followed by a colloquium and Youth Peace Forum.

Topics included climate justice, intergenerational justice and the future of democracy, with student representatives from Kyung Hee University and international exchange students participating to add younger voices to discussions that have traditionally been led by academic and policy experts.