The Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development 2025 was held in the capital of Sweden on May 12-14, 2025.

The 2025 Stockholm Forum was hosted by SIPRI, co-convened with the Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA) and with the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida). The forum brought together participants from around the world, with emphasis on representation of policymakers, civil society leaders and practitioners from the Global South.

The three-day conference, featuring high-level sessions, roundtables, workshops and discussions, focused on conflict prevention, resolution and peacebuilding amid global military spending and geopolitical differences.

The Forum created a bridge between the global policy, research and practitioner spheres, and provided a neutral platform and safe space for sharing knowledge, practice and solutions.

Askar Sydykov, Executive Director of the International Business Council, spoke at the panel session “Beyond Shrinking Space: A New Model of Collective Action in Peacebuilding” on May 14, 2025. In particular, he spoke about Yntymak (Solidarity) Week as a platform for dialogue and collective action in peacebuilding.

People usually don’t quite understand what the private sector’s role could be in this sort if initiatives.

“Actually, global trend across the world is that business and politics (policymaking) are intertwined and private sector players cannot afford to just do business while otherwise staying passive and adapt to any policies coming from elsewhere anymore. It is especially the case in small and medium-sized countries like the Central Asian ones where we are in the process of important transitions shaping our region,” IBC head said.

Businesses do realize that peace and stability directly correlate with profits they get and with the amount of risks they have to deal with, but they might not necessarily understand if and how they could be involved, so the role of business associations is to communicate this all to private sector and be their voice in all peace-building initiatives, make them heard.

Platforms like Yntymak greatly help in launching this awareness in the first place and setting path for further cooperation between public and private sectors, civil society and internationals.

Based on experience, IBC head suggested how peacekeeping participants and private sector entities can cooperate.

“I think we can take each other’s strongest characteristics and make use of them for common purpose: peacebuilding actors can integrate private sector’s result-oriented, cost-effective, adaptive, straight-to-the-point and ‘getting things done’ fast practices, while private sector could benefit from taking a bigger picture approach, consultations, diplomacy and conflict minimization instruments,” Sydykov said.

Dialogues like this very Forum will greatly contribute. Once both parties understand what is in it for them here and start speaking the same language, collective action will follow. It could be in the form of jointly agreed policy decisions, business practices, investment, etc.

Speakers at the forum from Kyrgyzstan also included Gulsharkan Kultaeva, member of the Central Election Commission of the Kyrgyz Republic; Aisuluu Bukambaeva, director of the Center for Civic Education and Electoral Technologies at the Central Election Commission; Samara Papieva, country director in Kyrgyzstan, Search for Common Ground; and Kanatbek Abdiev, Central Asia program officer, PeaceNexus Foundation.