Peace Institute Annual Report 2025: Research, Public Engagement, and Partnerships for a Democratic Society

The Peace Institute has published its Annual Report 2025, presenting our research, educational, and advocacy work during a year marked by growing militarisation, increasing pressure on civil society, attacks on independent media, and the deteriorating conditions for critical social science and humanities research.

Our work is guided by a central question: how do societies produce exclusion, inequality, and violence, and how can knowledge contribute to a more democratic, just, and peaceful future?

In the report’s foreword, we argue that attacks on civil society and attacks on science follow a similar logic: critical thinking and research on inequality, human rights, migration, gender, media, and democracy are increasingly judged according to standards of utility and political conformity. This is precisely why stronger connections between academia, the research community, and civil society are more important today than ever before.

In 2025, the Peace Institute carried out 33 projects and published 132 bibliographic outputs registered in SICRIS, including 18 scientific journal articles, 11 book chapters, and 40 conference papers. Our research focused on democratic backsliding, the rule of law, media freedom, media ownership concentration, hate speech, migration regimes, the situation of migrant workers, social inequalities, the transnationalisation of care, anti-gender mobilisations, the digitalisation of feminised sectors of work, sex work, the rights of the Erased, statelessness, and the ethics of research involving vulnerable groups.

Among our key achievements were our contribution to the European Rule of Law Report, the special issue on hate speech in the journal Annales, co-editing the scientific volume Framing Solidarities in Times of Multiple Crises (Palgrave, 2025), participation in the European peace research community, research on the conditions necessary for news media to fulfil their democratic role, the development of an interactive map of media ownership in Slovenia, and the preparation of research findings and policy recommendations on sex work, research ethics, and human rights.

We invite you to read the report, share it with others, and stay connected with us. Your engagement and support help sustain a space where we can work together to defend the public interest, promote peace and equality, and uphold human rights.