A New Framework for Peace Realists
Are the factors of sustainable peace and intractable conflict inseparable?
All around the world there are places where peace has reigned for generations. Over 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 in regions inhabited by indigenous peoples like the San people of Botswana. Others flourish in developed nations. The Swiss cantons and the European Union have lived in peace for generations. The five Nordic (Scandinavian) nations haven’t waged war with each other in over 200 years.
Sustaining Peace’s team has been sorting out what success factors all these peace systems might have in common and whether those factors wire together the same way across all peace systems. Can the same factors produce peace no matter where they land? How do peace systems stabilize over time and stay peaceful generation after generation?
Those are world-changing questions. Finding a single system that can produce sustainable peace wherever it’s installed would be a boon to humanity. It could give us a roadmap, an algorithm of steps any society could use to build lasting peace. But this begs a deeper question. Why aren’t peace systems more common already? Is there a second system of “failure factors” that keep much of humanity mired in binary conflict? Don’t we need to study that system too?
To answer this in peace-building terms, we first have 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 – even for years, the peace is unstable. People haven’t bothered to build structures that support lasting peace. Without them, backsliding is possible, even likely.
Positive peace is stable and sustainable. Societies reach it by building a system of customs, institutions, and structures that everyone can trust and inhabit.
Think of negative peace as a camp ground that could become a site for a permanent house. Designing a house to stand for hundreds of years depends on knowing how studs, beams, and joists push and pull on each other to provide strength. A peace system relies on structures that help people deal with the push and pull of public discourse and compromise. People need to trust their institutions and each other.
It can take years to lift a society up from negative peace to positive peace. People have to first agree about what behavioral norms create a peace system. Then they have to value them 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 one of which can cause a society to backslide into two-sided combat. Failure factors can wire together into a system too, a kind of culture where cooperating against a common enemy is the primary social motivation that brings people together and arouses them the most.
Let’s call this second system an enemymaker system – a social network energized by two-sided “us versus them” enmity. The enemy that people unite against might be real, imagined, or deliberately contrived. In each case, the dynamics are more or less the same. Neutral individuals are badgered into taking sides. The society becomes increasingly hyper-polarized. You soon believe only those facts that help your side win while ignoring “fake facts” that make the enemy appear human. Personal identity merges into one’s tribal identity. “I win if my tribe wins. I lose if my tribe loses.”
Like the stairway descending into Hades, there are a series of steps that lead down into an enemymaker system. With each step, people commit more energy to a world where only two sides exist. One reason they do this is easy to grasp. Imagine that a powerful group you depend on offers you social rewards in exchange for your belief in a common enemy they teach you about. They want your cooperative good-will committed to defeating the enemy. In exchange you get inclusion, belonging, sustenance, status, meaning, identity, and certainty. In short, your natural inclination to pitch in and help gets hijacked. A positive human social reflex, naturally selected for over 200,000 years, gets twisted. Cooperating against other humans becomes what you think cooperation should feel like. We’ll call this kind of cooperation low-road cooperation. Now, hijack hundreds or thousands of minds the same way and you have the social fuel that enemymaker systems run on. We become one against them.
Peace systems are different. People cooperate with others on projects that benefit humans of diverse kinds. Call this kind of cooperation high-road cooperation. There’s no need to fight against another group to belong or earn your keep. You connect socially, just like low-roaders do, but no one loses. You get the same inclusion rewards that low road cooperators get, but without harming or defeating other human beings. High-roaders get more things done smarter because they don’t have tribal loyalty pledges and mob intimidation dumbing down their thinking.
So now we have two kinds of human social systems, a high-road peace system and a low-road enemymaker system, differing by the kind of cooperation they value.
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 both light and shadow.
The graphic above shows two systems above and below a negative peace line (ceasefire). In a time of temporary peace we have a choice to sink lower through inaction or to strive higher proactively. Peace-builders actively build the factors of a positive peace system. Those who get hijacked by low-road cooperation rewards sink down into a thickening enemymaker system.
Peace-builders need to study both systems equally. The upper system shows us what to do. The lower system shows us what not to do. Both lessons are equally important.
Systems rely on stability. They become more stable as more factors are added. The more factors added, the more struts there are between them and the more they support each other. The system grows progressively tighter and harder to take 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. But stability is bad news when your society is sinking into an enemymaker system. As more failure factors pile up, the system becomes increasingly entangled and harder to dismantle. A stable enemymaker system interlocks so many failure factors that no matter where or how lightly you poke it, the system reacts with a retaliatory spasm.
There’s one more wrinkle to add – what social psychologist Kurt Lewin called “Chains of Development.” He meant the sense of one thing building on another. Early ideas act as anchors for what comes later. It’s plausible that in both systems certain keystone factors get traction first, providing a beachhead for other factors. It will help to know what factors these are, not only so we can establish a beach head for peace but so we can detect the first signs of an enemymaker system taking hold. When we visualize how systems add ingredients, we’re doing more than listing factors. We’re looking at how those factors build up and interact We’re mapping an operational model.
It helps to imagine our entire framework as an hourglass shape with negative peace at the waist and two systems expanding above and below it. As a system adds more factors, it widens. It becomes denser and harder to pick apart.
Usually, systems thicken slowly, factor by factor. Near the waist of the hourglass, only a few ideas, words, beliefs, and images take root in people’s minds. But as more factors pile in they connect and reinforce each other. By the time a system is fully stable, it’s very hard to dismantle. At that point, the society will either be in a state of durable positive peace or a period of intractable war. At one end we have Scandinavia. At the other, we have South Sudan.
At the top and bottom are two stable outcomes: positive peace at the top and intractable warfare at the bottom.
So, there’s our choice. We have a ceasefire period. How will we use it? Will we work proactively to gather the success factors of a peace system and wire them together for a stable positive peace? Or will we take the temporary peace for granted and let the low-hanging social incentives of an enemymaker system slowly hijack growing numbers of our people into low-road cooperators?
Mapping How the Factors of Peace and Enemymaking Develop
The peace realist framework below proposes chains of development for two systems. It maps out how each kind of system can evolve over time, factor by factor. To trace the evolution of a system, find the the ceasefire line (midway down the framework) and scan up or down. To see how a peace system develops, scan up and see how the factors develop one by one. To watch an enemymaker system develop, scan down.
There are close to 140 factors arrayed in this framework, top to bottom. A few minutes of scanning will reveal a proposed chain of development for each system. Later factors depend on earlier factors. Those factors further from the ceasefire line depend on the ones closer to it.
Black boxes cluster similar factors into family themes. For peace systems, the themes unfold upward from “Unwinding to negative peace” and “Foundations” to “Reconciling injustice”, “Attitude modeling”, and “Vision.” At the top are the “Stable outcomes”. Likewise, enemymaker system factors cluster in themes downward: “Loss of agency,” “Status/Humiliation,” “Story role identity,” and so forth.
The upper system, if it stabilizes, allows humans to coexist peacefully for long periods of time (stable outcomes). The lower system, if it stabilizes, bottoms out in years of intractable hostility and violence.
Link to a full-size two-page document of the Peace Realist Framework here.
Peace Realist Framework copyright © 2007-2022 Tim Moore and High Roads Institute
Link to a full-size two-page document of the Peace Realist Framework here.
With this framework, the size of the peacebuilder’s playing field expands. Future peace-building will now depend on learning everything about how enemymaker systems develop. What-to-do and what-not-to-do is the yin and yang of peace.
Enemymaker systems are held together by words, images, beliefs, superstitions, and identity roles. The theme cluster “Unwinding to Negative Peace” suggests some seed questions that can liberate individuals from low-road thinking that keeps them bound up in an enemymaker system. There are more interventions to discover.
Trying to “manifest” a peace system without learning everything we can about enemymaker systems is a form of spiritual bypass, what Nelson Mandela called “Rainbow-ism.” Blissfully avoiding shadow thoughts might give us a feeling of “nice peace for now” but not a sustainable peace. Only a society of people who know what to do and what not to do can build strong immunity to demagogues, populists, extremists, and propagandists. It takes dark and light colors to paint a master-peace.
Rising up from negative peace to positive peace requires hard work over time, but it’s possible. 180 peace systems exist today. Others could be on the way. Peace-makers and enforcers work hard around the world trying to untangle chronic enemymaker systems. Many nations idle in negative peace. They aren’t peace systems yet. The real hope lies in peace realists trained in both systems who can help a society rise from ceasefire (or passive complacency) to build a stable positive peace.
Building peace systems will always be challenging. High-road cooperation is less dramatic. It may even feel boring to some. People are no longer aroused or unified by their zeal to defeat a common enemy. When that incentive disappears, new incentives for high-road cooperation need to be seeded – rewards like increased trust, dignity, and non-violent dispute settlement. Despite such transition problems, if a society perseveres, people gradually learn how to create things that benefit all without harming others. They’ll be on the high road.
Acknowledgements.
For the sources of the framework’s peace system success factors, see footnote acknowledgments below.
Footnote1 goes to a list of people who have influenced the Peace Realist Framework.
Footnote2 goes to a list of organizations that inspire and inform the High Roads Institute’s work.
The enemymaker system failure factors used in this framework are the product of a multi-year research effort by Tim Moore for the High Roads Institute. See them in more detail in “A Roadmap to Enemymaker Systems”, a preview draft of which is viewable here. Keep in mind that, like this framework, it is a work in progress.
The concepts of negative and positive peace were first suggested by Jane Addams and Martin Luther King. They became standard parlance in the peace studies community in the 1990’s after being formalized by Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung.
The publishers of the annual Global Peace Index, the Institute for Economics and Peace, headquartered in Sydney, Australia, has a 2022 Positive Peace Report. In it is a Positive Peace Index (page 21) listing how 163 nations rank for positive peace.
PEOPLE
HUMAN ORIGINS
Primatology – Jane Goodall, Franz DeWaal, Barbara J. King, Robert Sapolsky,
Anthropology – Douglas Fry, David Graeber, Harvey Whitehouse, Helga Vierich
Evolutionary Psychology – Robert Sapolsky, David Sloan Wilson, E.O. Wilson, Robert Wright, Nicholas Cristakis (the Social Suite), Richard Dawkins, Robin Dunbar
Moral Psychology – Jonathan Haidt, Robert Wright, Joshua Greene, Rollo May,
SOCIAL SCIENCE
Social psychology – Susan Fiske, Eliot Aronson, Carol Tavris, Judith Rich Harris, Philip Zimbardo, Robert Jay Lifton. Henri Tajfel (SIT), Stanley Milgram, Muzafer Sherif, Leon Festinger.
Cognitive Psychology – Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, Jean Piaget, Milton Erickson.
Cognitive Neuroscience – Antonio Damasio, Joshua Greene, Richard Davidson, Sam Harris, John Cacioppo.
Behavioral Economics - Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, Amos Tversky.
Behavioral Learning – Albert Bandura, Ivan Pavlov, B.F. Skinner.
Crowd Psychology – Mattias Desmet, Gustave LeBon, Wilfred Trotter, Elias Canetti, Wilhelm Reich, Eric Hoffer.
Social Superorganisms / Social Networks – Nicholas Christakis.
Epidemiology – Larry Brilliant (Subradmanyam), the Gates foundation, Gary Plutkin
SENSEMAKING, MEDIA, DIGITAL TECH, AI
Propaganda and Influence – Robert Cialdini, Frank Luntz, Sam Keen, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Steve Bannon Gustav LeBon, Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, Joseph Goebbels, Lee Atwater
Public Relations – Edward Bernays, John Stauber, Sheldon Rampton
Cognitive Linguistics – George Lakoff, Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky. Gustave Guillaume (psycho-mechanics)
Persuasion Tech – B.J. Fogg, Tristan Harris, Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab
Viral Marketing / Memes – McKinsey, Hubspot, KnowYourMeme.com, Buzzfeed,
Consilience – The Consilience Project, Daniel Schmachtenberger,
Social media – Tristan Harris, Whitney Phillips, Ryan Milner, Brad Kim
Media Genome / Bio-Media – Heidi Bosvert (Limbic Lab)
Gaming Community – Twitch activists, i.e. Destiny, TriHex, Hasan Piker
PERSONAL GROWTH AND POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Meditation and Psychology – Daniel Goleman, Richard Davidson, H.H. Dalai Lama, Eckhardt Tolle, Jon Kabat Zinn
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy – Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis.
Buddhism & Buddhist ethics – John Daido Loori, Pema Chodron, Jack Korngold, Joko Beck, Mark Epstein
Self-responsibility – Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, Steven Covey, David K. Reynolds
Self-Actualization, Resilience and Flourishing – Martin Seligman, Scott Barry Kaufman, Abraham Maslow.
Couples therapy –Bill Doherty, Terence Real, John and Julie Gottman.
Flow – Steven Kotler, Andrew Huberman, Cass Sunstein, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Recovery and Rehab / Shame and Family Dynamics – Brené Brown. Alice Miller, John Bradshaw.
Love – Gerald Jampolski, Wayne Dyer.
CHILD DEVELOPMENT
Developmental Psychology – Paul Bloom, Daniel Siegel. John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, Terry Brazelton.
Emotional Intelligence – Paul Ekman, Daniel Goleman, Joseph LeDoux, Willard Gaylin, Sylvan Tomkins.
Social Intelligence –Daniel Goleman, Erik Erikson.
CONFLICT STUDIES
Genocide Studies – Gregory Stanton, David Livingstone Smith.
Conflict Resolution – Peter T. Coleman, Scott Atran.
Hate and Aggression studies – Bard College’s Hate Studies and Hannah Arendt Centers.
Human Dynamic Systems – Donella Meadows
Political Theory – Timothy Snyder, Eric Hoffer, Umberto Eco.
Terror Management –Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Ernest Becker.
Hate Intervention – Tony McAleer (Life After Hate).
Religious Nationalism/ Theocracy – Katherine Stewart, Chris Hedges, Sam Harris. Beyond Belief fellows.
Right-center conservatives – Arthur Brooks (Love Your Enemies).
Mimetics – Rene Girard.
Chris Hedges – War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002).
Law Enforcement, Community Building – David Kennedy, Gary Slutkin
HISTORY
Jared Diamond – Historian. Guns, Germs and Steel; Collapse; Upheaval
E.O. Wilson – Evolutionary biologist. The Social Conquest of Earth.
Yuval Noah Harari – Historian. Sapienship project.
Steven Pinker – Psycholinguist. Cognitive linguist and psychologist.
Timothy Snyder – Yale historian. Scholar of early 20th century fascism.
Rutger Bregman – Historian, journalist. (Utopia for Realists; Humankind)
ORGANIZATIONS
Search for Common Ground Shamil Idriss. Building peace in 30 nations.
Cure Violence Global Gary Plutnik. Epidemiology for urban violence.
Braver Angels John Wood. Peace-building using couples therapy models.
The Greater Good Institute Dacher Keltner, UC Berkeley.
The Sustaining Peace Project Columbia U. Peter Coleman, Douglas Fry.
A4C / Earth Institute Columbia U. Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity.
The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) Global Peace Index, Australia.
Beyond Intractability Guy and Heidi Burgess. Encyclopedic peace-building website.
More In Common Stephen Hawkins.
Peacetech Lab Pres. Wm. J. Clinton Center. Hate speech lexicon project.
Bridging Divides Initiative Princeton University.
International Dialogue Initiative Vamik Volkan.
Beyond Conflict Tim Phillips, Boston.
Center for Humane Technology Tristan Harris, The Social Dilemma.
Energy and Our Future (ISEOF) Nate Hagen, Joan Diamond, Brian Maschhoff.
Future of Humanity Institute Nick Bostrom, Toby Ord, Oxford. Existential risks.
Civilization Research Institute Daniel Schmactenberger.
The Consilience Project Daniel Schmactenberger, Tristan Harris, et al.
Huberman Lab Andrew D. Huberman, Stanford U. Neuroplasticity.
Flow Genome Project Jamie Wheal, Steven Kotler.
Ethicalsystems.com Jonathan Haidt, Alison Taylor. NYU Stern.
The Constructive Dialogue Institute Jonathan Haidt, Caroline Mehl. NYU Stern
Effective Altruism / 80,000 Hours Toby Ord, Will MacAskill, Benjamin Todd.
Sapienship Yuval Noah Harari.
Nonzero / Apocalypse Aversion Project Robert Wright.
Hate Studies Institute Bard College, Kenneth Stern.
Hanna Arendt Institute Bard College, Roger Berkowitz.
Omega Institute Rhinebeck. NY
PEW Research / Center for Media Studies University of Pennsylvania.
Tony Blair Institute for Global Change Tony Blair, Executive Chair, London.
Academy for Systems Change Donella Meadows.
Fetzer Institute Kalamazoo, MI.
The Lean Logic Transitions Community David Fleming, Shaun Chamberlin.
Doughnut Economics Action Lab Kate Raworth.
Thank you.