founding vision statement

The British Empire continues as a living system that shapes political, economic, environmental, and epistemic conditions across the world. The empire may have renamed itself as the Commonwealth, as development, as humanitarian intervention, as free trade agreements but the structures of extraction, racial hierarchy, and epistemic violence did not disappear.

The Global Peoples’ Educational Forum exists to confront these ongoing harms and legacies of empire. The Forum is a transnational, community-led initiative that operates as a political and pedagogical process of truth-telling, testimony, and collective memory. Its purpose is to enable those directly affected by imperialism to speak and be heard on their own terms, to build alliances across struggles, and to open space for historical justice and global repair.

The Forum will be decentralised, plural, and participatory. No single process or institution can account for the full scope of imperial harm. The Forum affirms the importance of local, community-led forms of truth-telling that reflect different histories, geographies, epistemologies. It makes space for collective analysis and political imagination and it does not aim to produce closure or reconciliation.

The Forum’s ultimate horizon is a world ordered around interdependent autonomy, where freedom means the capacity of all peoples and ecosystems to flourish in mutual relation and shared responsibility.

And yet, we cannot know exactly what a world after empire looks like. That world must be imagined and built by the people who will live in it. That is the work of the coming decade: truth-telling as the foundation - reparative justice as the process - transformation as the horizon.

The Forum invites participation. Create a node. Give testimony. Share research. Hold local institutions accountable. Imagine what comes after empire. Then help build it.