Intelsat Joins Film Star Forest Whitaker In Utopian Peacemaking Pilot

Forbes

21-07-2025

The colossal satellite operator Intelsat has joined forces with actor and humanitarian star Forest ... More Whitaker to power an array of peace centers across 3 continents. Shown here is a Russian rocket about to carry an Intelsat satellite into orbit. AFP PHOTO (Photo credit should read STR/AFP via Getty Images)
Behind the scenes of his sensational filmmaking life, Forest Whitaker is the director of a fascinating pilot project aimed at fostering generations of young peacemakers stretching from Africa to Europe to North America.
A decade after the utopian, Oscar-winning film star started constructing a web of peace-building centers on three continents, Intelsat is joining his mission by providing the satellite operator's high-speed internet connections to supercharge these outposts.
Intelsat CEO Dave Wajsgras tells me in an interview that Whitaker 'has personally been involved and has done amazing things for thousands and thousands of people around the world.'
The geosynchronous satellite giant, he says, is now beaming broadband Web access to an archipelago of outposts the Whitaker Peace & Development Initiative has built across Uganda and South Sudan.
These tech-powered oases provide courses on the basic building blocks of peace mediation and conflict resolution, along with primers on universal human rights enshrined in the UN Charter and the UN's own goal of a war-free world in an imagined future.
Intelsat CEO Dave Wajsgras says he initially got hooked up with Forest Whitaker's utopian peace ... More project on the sidelines of the United Nations. The Oscar-winning film star Whitaker is also a UNESCO Special Envoy for Peace (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Wajsgras, himself a remarkable philanthropist, says he initially connected with Whitaker, who's becoming a pole star in the cosmos of independent humanitarian projects, on the sidelines of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
'Forest is a UNESCO Special Envoy for Peace and Reconciliation, working closely with UNESCO.'
'I am on the [UNESCO-founded]The Broadband Commission, jointly set up with the heads of vanguard internet technology outfits planet-wide, is aimed in part at overcoming the 'digital divide,' or the barricades that still separate the global citizens who have access to the internet and those who don't.
With a fleet of super-satellites positioned in orbit more than 35,000 kilometers above the Earth, Intelsat's constellation can provide gateways to the cybersphere from virtually any point on the planet, Wajsgras says, including the ten peace and learning centers that Whitaker has already christened across East Africa.
Intelsat's super-satellites, orbiting 35000 kilometers above the planet, are now beaming broadband ... More internet connections to Forest Whitaker's peace and learning centers across Africa
With Intelsat's next-generation satellite dishes and Whitaker's peace instructors, these outposts have become beacons of hyper-technology and anti-war activism, with the aim of radiating their waves of pacifism outward.
Some centers founded by Whitaker focus on training and transforming youths who have fled the armed conflicts in South Sudan to turn them into powerful prophets of future harmony.
One of his peace outposts has begun gradually reshaping the Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement—a way station for teenagers fleeing the battlefronts of South Sudan for sanctuary in Uganda—partly through providing Web-connected laptops and courses on building peaceful enclaves that promote freedom of speech and cross-cultural dialogues.
Leaders of the Whitaker peace coalition say this sanctuary is the result of Uganda's liberal open border policies toward refugees, and that their pacifist outreach is ultimately aimed at halting—step-by-step—conflicts across the region.
Outstanding activists who emerge here, like their counterparts at Whitaker's peace citadels in Seine-Saint-Denis, outside Paris, and in Tijuana, Mexico, might join the group's Youth Peacemaker Network, which spans the continents.
Intelsat's creating launch pads for these nascent peacemakers to lift off into cyberspace is also part of its crusade to one day enable all eight billion global citizens to crisscross the Web, Wajsgras tells me.
Intelsat aims to help overcome the globe's digital divide - between the 5.5 billion people plugged ... More into the Web, and the 2.6 billion others still stranded outside - via its expanding fleet of broadband satellites (Photo by: Alan Dyer/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The International Telecommunication Union, the UN's specialized agency for digital technologies, reports that while 5.5 billion people are now plugged into the World Wide Web, 2.6 billion others are still stranded outside of the global network.
Statista says that in 'Norway 99 percent of the population used the internet as of February 2025.'
'North Korea,' the group adds, 'was at the opposite end of the spectrum, with virtually no internet usage penetration among the general population, ranking last worldwide.'
Africa lies somewhere in between, the Geneva-headquartered ITU says, with an estimated 38 percent of the population now integrated into the Web.
Intelsat's opening cyber-ports for Whitaker's brigades of peacemakers is part of a greater mission to connect the continent.
Melissa Longo, the scholarly writer and researcher, and onetime journalist, who is now Intelsat's global media relations manager, tells me in an interview that the Titan-size satellite operator has joined forces with Africa Mobile Networks to provide Net connections to more than 10 million people across Africa.
Plummeting launch rates to loft broadband satellites into orbit, she adds, are enabling Intelsat to offer these new explorers hyper-cheap sojourns across the borderless worlds of the Web.
Intelsat leader Dave Wajsgras, meanwhile, says he envisions a long-term alliance with Forest Whitaker and his expanding matrix of peace-builders.
'We are just honored to be a small part of what Forest and his team are accomplishing,' as the movement to promote peace unfolds, he says.
The techno-utopian Wajsgras also suggests that this novel approach to generating generations of peace activists by powering them with leading-edge technologies and the vision of a conflict-free cosmopolitan globe are just part of the prospects for universal internet access to remake the world.
As this super-internet's potential to speed new ideas—across peace centers, cities and continents—to co-design a more perfect, paradisiacal planet evolves, he muses, 'The impact on civilization will no doubt be more significant in a positive way and happen at a much faster pace.'