Welcome to PeaceTalks

Building conversations about what peace really means for Georgia — and what it takes to build a future worth staying for.

Peace Talks is a space for calm, serious conversations about what peace really means for Georgia.

Not peace as a slogan. Not peace as passivity. Not peace as the mere absence of conflict.

Peace as something lived: dignity, trust, strong institutions, democratic accountability, and a future people can believe in.

Too much of public life is shaped by noise, fear, and performance. Peace Talks exists to make room for a different kind of conversation — one that is thoughtful, grounded, and honest about what building a better country actually requires.

Why PeaceTalks Exists

I started Peace Talks because I felt a growing need for a different kind of public language.

We hear the word peace constantly, but often in ways that make it smaller, weaker, or emptier. Too often it is used to lower expectations, silence difficult questions, or turn civic life into a choice between fear and passivity.

I wanted to reclaim the word.

For me, peace is not silence. It is not resignation. It is not a refusal to see danger clearly.

Peace is the condition that allows people to live well. It is being able to trust the state. It is knowing that institutions function. It is being able to raise a family with dignity. It is getting an ambulance when you need one. It is feeling that public life is based on truth, not manipulation. It is believing that your country belongs to its citizens — and that its future is still open.

That is the conversation Peace Talks wants to have.

Peace Talks also begins with translation.

Bringing Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom into Georgian has not felt like a side project or a publishing task. It has felt like a way of thinking more clearly about Georgia — about freedom, responsibility, sovereignty, solidarity, and the choices that shape public life.

Translation, for me, is not mechanical. It is a way of testing ideas against language, history, and lived reality. It is a way of asking what survives when words move from one world into another — and what those words demand in a specific place, at a specific time.

That is why this project begins here.

The late-April launch of the Georgian edition of On Freedom is an important part of the Peace Talks story. The book comes first not because the podcast is secondary, but because the translation introduces the deeper questions behind everything that follows. Peace Talks continues that conversation in a more public, open-ended way: through episodes, essays, reflections, and dialogue with its audience.

I want this platform to think with people, not at them.

That means making the process visible. It means showing how ideas take shape. It means connecting big political questions to daily life in Georgia — to institutions, services, work, family life, memory, and the feeling that a country is or is not becoming worth staying in.

Translating On Freedom

Brining Synder to Georgia.

Peace is something lived, not declared.