A Framework for Peace Realism
How sustainable Peace systems and Enemymaker systems install and stabilize
There are scores of regions around the world where peace has reigned for generations. Nearly two-hundred (180+) peace systems exist today according to the Sustaining Peace project at Columbia University. A peace system is “a cluster of neighboring societies that don’t make war with each other.” These peaceful regions are far from conflict-free, but they all resolve disputes without violence.
Peace systems exist on every continent and in every stage of human development. Some are inhabited by indigenous peoples like the San bush people of Botswana, but many flourish in developed nations. The Swiss cantons and the European Union have lived in peace for generations. The five Nordic nations haven’t waged war on each other in 200 years.
A number of research teams have been sorting out what success factors peace systems might have in common. Do they all share the same key factors? Do those factors wire together the same way in all peace systems? Will they create sustainable peace wherever they land?
These are world-changing questions. Finding a single system that can create and stabilize sustainable peace wherever it’s installed would be a boon to humanity. It could give us a roadmap, an algorithm of steps any society can use to build a peace system. But this begs a deeper question. Why aren’t peace systems more common already? Might there be a second system of failure-factors that keep much of humanity stuck in binary conflict? Can we identify those factors and learn to counter them?
To make this second system visible, we first need to understand two kinds of peace: negative peace and positive peace. A society that lives in negative peace is in a temporary ceasefire. Although there’s been no violence for a while, the peace is unstable. The society hasn’t yet built any structures to support lasting peace. Positive peace, on the other hand, is a sustainable condition. A society doesn’t rest just because violence is absent. It strives to build customs, institutions, and structures that allow people to trust each other and work together.
Think of negative peace as a camp ground that could be a site for a future house. If you want that house to stand for hundreds of years you have to know how struts, beams, and rafters push and pull on each other to provide strength. In the same way, a peace system relies on structures that help people handle the push and pull of conflict and civic discourse. People need to trust their institutions and each other to come to consensus about disputes.
It can take years to lift a society up from negative peace to positive peace. People have to first agree about what set of behavioral norms will create a peace system. Then they have to value those norms and practice them year after year, generation after generation.
A Second Shadow System
Positive peace-building depends on people learning what to do and what not to do. The not-to-dos include dozens of pitfalls and failure-factors, any few of which can cause a society to polarize. Add more failure-factors and a system of mutually reinforcing dysfunctions begins to thicken. The fight against a common enemy becomes people’s primary way of cooperating. Punishing the bad people binds and impassions them. Call this second system an Enemymaker system – a society energized by struggle against a common enemy.
There are three kinds of enemy possible: real, imagined, and contrived. Real enemies cause actual harm and require vigorous defense. Imagined enemies arise in local pockets of fear and panic. One town, one church, one household. The third kind, the contrived enemy, is intentionally shaped to herd the masses and hold large bases of political power. The contrived enemy might be foreign or it might be a domestic enemy within. Provocations, outrages, even atrocities are cited to arouse people into condemnation. Once a binary split is created, each side creates its own reality. Partisans only believe the “facts” that help their side win. They ignore or dismiss “fake facts” that make the enemy appear human. Personal identities vanish, merging into a tribal identity. “I win if my tribe wins. I lose if my tribe loses.”
Like the stairway descending into Hades, a series of steps leads down into an Enemymaker system. With each step, we commit more energy to a worldview where only two sides exist and one must win. One reason we do this is simple. Imagine that a powerful group you depend on offers you social rewards in exchange for your belief in a enemy they say is to blame for everyone’s suffering including yours. They want your cooperation to prevent disaster and defeat the enemy they hate. In exchange you get inclusion, belonging, status, meaning, identity, certainty. If you don’t cooperate, you’re aiding the enemy.
In short, peaceful cooperation responses that humans evolved in small bands get hijacked and rewired for war. Positive social reflexes humans all have, naturally selected for at least 200,000 years, get twisted. Defeating the Other becomes what we think cooperation should feel like. Rewire hundreds or thousands of minds the same way and you have the dark social fuel an Enemymaker system runs on. We become one big family against Them. Let’s call this kind of cooperation low-road cooperation.
In peace systems, people pitch in on projects that benefit most people in their region without needing to defeat another team. We call this kind of cooperation high-road cooperation. In a peace system, you don’t earn your keep by soldiering against another group. You get the same social rewards that low-road cooperators promise, but you retain freedom of thought. You have no loyalty pledges restricting what you can think or say. High-road cooperators get more done because disputes settled peacefully don’t create defiant reactivity and gridlock.
So now we have two kinds of human social systems, a high-road Peace System and a low-road Enemymaker System. They differ by the kind of cooperation they value – high or low.
Light and Shadow: Learning what to do and what not to do.
An eye that can only see light is blind. Our eyes and our minds depend on light and shadow.
The graphic above shows a new, broader peacebuilding model. Ceasefire – negative peace – is an unstable opportunity. It shouldn’t be taken for granted. Two systems are possible above or below the dashed negative peace line. Wise societies seize opportunity as soon as negative peace opens the way. They start building a peace system knowing that failing to do so opens the way for Enemymaker messages to gain a foothold and momentum.
One thing is true for both peace systems and Enemymaker systems. The more factors pile into either system, the more they those factors support each other and stablilize the system. Stable systems are hard to pry apart. Stability is good news for those building sustainable peace systems. The more peace-factors you wire together the more durable the peace will be. Stability is bad news when a society is sinking into an Enemymaker system. As more failure-factors pile up, the system becomes harder to dismantle and, eventually, intractable. So many failure factors are locked together that the only behavior the system is capable of is fighting and violence.
There’s one more dimension to add – what social psychologist Kurt Lewin called “Chains of Development,” by which he meant one thing building on another. Early ideas act as anchors for later ones in the chain. It’s possible that in both systems certain key factors get traction first, providing a beachhead for later factors. If we can identify these early anchors, we might prevent an Enemymaker system from taking hold. Perhaps we’d also learn how to plant a beachhead for a peace system. If we want to know how systems intensify, we have to do more than list factors. We have to create a time-lapse, slow-motion film of how those factors anchor, accumulate, and interact. We need to map chains of development.
To visualize how both systems grow, it helps to imagine an hourglass with unstable negative peace at the waist and two systems expanding above and below it. As either system adds more factors up or down, it widens, becomes denser, and is harder to pick apart. At first, systems grow slowly, factor by factor. The waist of the hourglass is full of potential. People are relieved, hopeful. They want to enjoy peace, but no sustaining structure has been built yet. It’s possible that any menu of words, ideas, and beliefs might take root in their minds. Whether a state of lasting positive peace or a slide toward intractable warfare develops will depend on how well people know the factors that create each – the to-dos and the not-to-dos. One by one, factors will anchor, accumulate, and reinforce each other. By the time a system is fully built out, it’s stable. It has become society-wide habit. At the top of the hourglass we have Iceland. At the lower end, we have South Sudan. We can only build or dismantle a stable system if we know which anchors and keystone beliefs hold it together.
Two stable outcomes: positive peace at the top and intractable warfare at the bottom.
How will we use a ceasefire period? We have a choice. Will we take our temporary peace for granted (even a 75-year one), enjoying it passively while the social lures and rewards of low-road cooperation slowly pull our neighbors into an Enemymaker system? Or will we be pro-active, taking the time and effort to assemble the success factors of a lasting peace system?
How Peace Systems and Enemymaker Systems evolve. A first map.
Successful peace systems show us what to do. Enemymaker systems show us what not to do. Peacebuilders need to learn from both. Two pages below explore possible chains of development for how Peace Systems and Enemymaker Systems grow.
As a framework, the two pages lay out most of the known factors in each system growing upward and downward from the split between the pages. The split between pages 56 and 57 represents the waist of the hourglass model. The Peace system on page 56 rises from the bottom of the page to the top, developing toward stability. The Enemymaker system on page 57 descends from the top of the page down, sinking down toward violence and intractability.
If you connect the pages, bottom edge of 56 to top edge of 57, you’ll see the entire framework, with the negative peace line (the waist of the hourglass) between the two. To see how a Peace System develops, scan up from the page break. To see an Enemymaker system develop, scan down from top left of page 57.
The total framework is a work in progress and contains nearly 140 factors. It suggests plausible chains of development for each system. Factors farther from the ceasefire line build on earlier factors (anchors) closer to the line. Later factors rest on those early anchors. Keep in mind, though, that the elements don’t stack neatly in a single chain. These are systems of many interdependent chains.
The Success Factors of a Peace System
The system evolves from the bottom factors upward to stable, sustainable peace. At the bottom of the page, the boxes under Unwinding to Negative Peace contain seed questions designed to nudge people out of the low-road justifications that bind them to an Enemymaker system. The five labeled black boxes cluster peace-factors into family themes. These themes unfold upward, from Foundations to Reconciling injustice and Attitude modeling, then Vision. At the top are the final Stable outcomes.
The Failure-Factors of an Enemymaker System
System factors cluster in themes upper left corner rightward and downward: Loss of agency, Status/Humiliation, and Six Master Clan Loyalties. Then Story role identity. Pre-violence opens the final gates to Tight Packs, Power, and Violence. Those are the final steps to a stable Enemymaker system where cycles of violence never end.
To sum up, there are two kinds of stability. There are stable Peace systems that allow people to coexist peacefully for long periods of time. There are stable Enemymaker systems that entangle their societies in decades of intractable conflict against their common enemy.
1. Success Factors Leading to a Sustainable Peace System
READ FROM THE BOTTOM UP
2. Failure Factors Leading to an Enemymaker System
READ FROM TOP LEFT DOWN
Getting real. Staying real.
With this new peace realist framework, the size of our peacebuilding canvas expands. The picture now includes every tone from dark to light. What-to-do and what-not-to-do becomes the yin and yang of peacebuilding.
Trying to “manifest” a peace system without knowing everything we can know about Enemymaker systems is a form of spiritual bypass, what Nelson Mandela called “Rainbow-ism.” Blissfully averting our eyes from the shadow side of human nature might give some of us a feeling of peace-for-now, but without a realistic knowledge of how Enemymaker systems persuade us, peace can’t hold. Only a society of people who know both what-to-do and what-not-to-do can build strong immunity to demagogues, populists, and extremist propaganda.
Establishing a positive peace system requires hard work over time. 180 peace systems exist today, but more can be built. Around the world Peacebuilders are working to prevent Enemymaker systems from forming. Even as they do, many free nations let their democracies backslide. Only peace realists who are fully cognizant of both systems can help societies rebuild and maintain strong peace systems that are resistant to backsliding.
Getting a populace to adopt positive peace habits can be difficult. High-road societies are less dramatic. They can feel boring to some. People are suddenly no longer motivated by the zeal to defeat a common enemy. As those incentives are retired, new incentives for high-road cooperation need to take root – rewards like increased trust, dignity, and non-violent dispute settlement. Despite initial resistance from some, people gradually learn how to contribute to projects that benefit all without needing to defeat a foe. They get used to the high road.
There are a few seed questions that can liberate people from low-road beliefs that bind them to an Enemymaker system, as “Unwinding to Negative Peace,” the cluster at the bottom of page 56 suggests. “Who are you a victim of? Who are you being a hero for?” These are a few examples of early nudges and interventions. There are many more to discover and test.
Rising up from negative peace to positive peace requires hard work over time, but it’s possible. Today 180 peace systems exist. More could be on the way. Peace-makers and enforcers work hard around the world trying to untangle chronic Enemymaker systems. Our hope lies in a global network of peace realists building a knowledge base and working together to find interventions.
This framework content is drawn from A Roadmap to Enemymaker Systems linkable here.
The “Peace Realist Framework” and “A Roadmap to Enemymaker Systems” are Copyright © 2007-2023 Tim Moore and the High Roads Institute.
All rights are reserved while the framework and institute are under development. Notify the rights holders for permission to use this content.
Appreciations
Sincere thanks to the thousands of peacebuilders who report their results from field locations around the world, and the many repositories of peace-building wisdom that are now proliferating online. In particular, I’m grateful to Columbia University Earth Institute’s Sustaining Peace Project, Australia’s Institute for Economics and Peace (their Global Peace Index, Positive Peace Index, and Pillars of Peace); and Guy and Heidi Burgess’s “Beyond Intractability” website, an exhaustive repository of peacebuilding knowledge.