Youth & Leaders Summit 2025: Peace by piece

The 10th edition of the Youth and Leaders Summit 2025 concluded with a poem on international cooperation and peace by Oriel Wagner, a PSIA student in the Master of Human Rights and Humanitarian Action. It was a wonderful way to end the 3-day summit, inspiring the next generation of leaders to continue the legacy of fostering and strengthening international cooperation.

Read the poem below! 

Peace by piece

As I was sitting at my desk, thinking about how to call for peace in a text,
my eyes wandered around my room.
A shiny piece of something caught my attention.
It was an old vase, broken into pieces, that I had clumsily glued back together. It had been gifted to
me by I don't know who, I don't know when, but since then I had carried it with me everywhere.
At that moment, in its imperfect appearance, in the broken reflections of glass and uneven glue, I saw
what peace means to me.
Peace is fragile. But like the vase in my room, peace can be glued back together, with the strongest
glue there is: international cooperation.

Look at the glue between the shatters
How it shows peace’s frailness
But in the end, all that matters
Is the hand, full of haleness
Picking up the pieces,
Cutting itself, and still
Restoring what peace is:
efforts, compromises, and goodwill.

Look at the vase, broken and broken again
It could simply have been casted aside
And yet, after all that strain
The glue shows that we tried.
We tried to improve
And even in a world full of vice
The vase’s scars are the proof
That it is unique and beyond price.

It’s not just about the vase
It’s about all that makes it one
It’s how it beautifies a place
How the crystal reflects the sun
It’s about how it makes thrive
The most delicate flowers
How it keeps alive
Precious memories of ours.

So don’t repeat the ways it has been broken before
Bend down and pick up the shards from the floor
Think about new ways of making glue
No matter how broken, the vase can make it through
Help those for whom bending down is hard
Be attentive, protect every shard
And always keep in mind:
We have only one vase of this kind.