Two Promising Peace Projects
Two ambitious projects are tracking down the success factors of peaceful societies in the real world.
High Roads Institute focuses on the conflict prevention stage of peacebuilding. So when we find projects that are making real progress in preventing conflict, we spread the news.
The two projects you'll read about below are both grounded and promising. Each is working to identify all the success factors that help some societies achieve a state of sustainable peace.
Even if violence ceases in a society, the work isn’t done. People still have to build and maintain a resilient society that resolves conflicts without violence and resists backsliding. Today’s peacebuilders call that stable state positive peace.
Read on. Each underlined link will take you to deeper information. Toward the end, you’ll see how one High Roads project adds a crucial prevention piece to these peacebuilding projects.
1. The Sustaining Peace Project (SPP)
Based at Columbia University.
Led by conflict resolution expert Peter Coleman, author of The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization (review 1) (review 2)
SPP's groundbreaking contribution is the ways they’ve cataloged and analyzed actual Peace Systems - real-world societies where people have resolved conflicts for generations without resorting to violence.
Key to this project is Douglas Fry, an anthropologist who co-authored "Nurturing Our Humanity" (2021) with Riane Eisler. Fry has spent almost two decades cataloging the known peace systems around the world – some regional, like Scandanavia, and many indigenous. With this inventory in hand, the SPP team looks for the success factors all the world's peace systems have in common. The team wants to know how those factors interact and support each other. To see an overview of SPP’s robust approach, click here. To see an interactive map of the factors they’re working with, click here.
What's grounded?
Today's real-world peace systems are not theoretical utopias. Nor are historical peace systems like the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois Nation). These are sustainable human social ecologies that last. For generations, their peoples have resolved conflicts without violence. So, how do they do that? SPP is cracking this puzzle by seeing how the success factors of these systems interact. What are the key support beams of a sustainable peace “house?”
What's promising?
If the SPP team is able to find the main support beams common to all peace systems, and map how they brace each other, we may be able to find new ways to create sustainable peace at all scales, from the local to the international. New designs can emerge that don’t rely on the monoculture of vast global consumer markets to create a human family.
More about the Sustaining Peace Project
Videos
Invest in Peace: Five aspects of the SPP project. 4:14 min
Introduction to the Sustaining Peace Project. 5:02 min
Articles
The Greater Good Science Center: summarizes SPP's work
Scientific American: Peace is more than War's Absence.
This research paper (2021) updates their work since 2015.
A January 2021 progress report – logged after the first six years.
Links
See the interactive system map of peace system factors SPP is developing.
2. The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP)
Based in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 2005 by tech entrepreneur Steve Killilea.
IEP publishes annual indexes and maps that score how peaceful each country in the world is. Australian tech founder Steve Killelea has poured a generous portion of his personal fortune into this effort since 2005. His vision has expanded into a full suite of annual indexes, maps, and reports you can find at Vision of Humanity.
Follow these links to see IEP's peace indexes, maps, and reports.
The Global Peace Index
Since 2007, this index has ranked 163 countries by their degree of peacefulness. Each year, they publish the annual Global Peace Index, a ranking of 163 nations for their peacefulness, as measured by 23 indicators. (The indexed nations contain 99% of the world's population.)
The Positive Peace Index
In 2020 IEP began reporting on positive peace. It defines positive Peace as the set of attitudes, institutions, and structures that people need to set up after violence ends to create and sustain a peaceful society. (more on Positive Peace here)
The Eight Pillars of Positive Peace
An eight-part taxonomy of the factors associated with peaceful societies. This schema is drawn from IEP's analysis of the indicators used in their indexes. After 2019, IEP expanded from just measuring negative peace (via the Global Peace Index) to measuring positive peace (via their Positive Peace Index).
2022 Positive Peace Report
This report showcases the findings of IEP's research, including its latest results on Positive Peace and systems thinking. Like the Sustaining Peace Project, IEP thinks in terms of systems and doesn't shy away from complexity.
What's Grounded?
IEP has given the world its first country-by-country indexes showing the relative peacefulness of 163 nations. This annual pulse check has been invaluable to peacebuilders and policymakers. IEP's data comes from international NGOs, the UN, Unesco, Freedom House, WHO, IMF, and many other sources.
What's Promising?
IEP is focused on the ever-evolving idea of positive peace. What factors help build a sustainable peace system and how do those factors need to interact?
IEP has billionaire Steve Killelea's dedication and deep-pocketed resources to fund continuing research and promote benchmarks that can help countries to raise their annual peace score.
IEP offers aspiring peacebuilders a free course on positive peace called the Peace Academy.
Concerns
1. IEP analyzes peace systems at the national level almost exclusively. Because its perspective is global/international, its perspective differs significantly from Sustaining Peace's.
Sustaining Peace works from Doug Fry's ethnographic catalog. They study any and all known peace systems whether they be small or large, intertribal or international. SPP likely does this because they respect what we now know about human evolution.
The human social brain was wired over tens of thousands of years as our ancestors foraged and hunted in small nomadic bands. Tearing that social brain out of nature and urbanizing it has had consequences that impact cooperation, peaceful coexistence, mental health, and even our ideas of who is and who isn’t “us.” Because this history can’t be ignored, SPP looks at indigenous populations. IEP doesn't, so far.
2. Economics is a keyword in IEP's name. Some of IEP's Eight Pillars for Positive Peace have a pro-business flavor. One Pillar is "Sound Business Environment," which they define as...
"… the strength of economic conditions as well as the formal institutions that support the operation of the private sector. Business competitiveness and economic productivity are both associated with the most peaceful countries and are key to a robust business environment."
It’s not surprising that the world's most developed countries dominate the top of the Positive Peace Index: Scandinavia, Western Europe, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and Japan. By this alone, you'd have to assume that robust business economies and peace can’t do without each other. IEP makes a case for this in their Business and Peace Report.
Still, it's hard to ignore one glaring fact. The largest economy on earth, the United States, is ranked 128 on the Global Peace Index. If there were a one-to-one correlation between peace and a "robust business environment," why would the U.S. rank so low? Is it because it scores much lower in other pillars? A country has to score well in all 23 of IEP’s indicators to rank high in negative peace. Evidently, the United States ranks low in many crucial violence indicators despite its robust economy.
There’s vigorous debate on the upsides and downsides of global free markets. As this debate continues, the connections between business and peace will need to be regularly re-evaluated. Many business sectors have a history of being conveniently blind to the externalities of their short term decisions.
3. IEP's mix of recommendations (the Eight Pillars) may be colored by the nation-by-nation frame they use to score and map world peace. IEP’s analysis may be overlooking important peace factors that succeed at smaller scales – factors that could benefit national and international peace. When peace system data is shoehorned into national boundaries, many of the subtler nuances of peace psychology get lost. Why do people cooperate? What kind of cooperation do they do, and at what scale? (After all, armies and unethical transnational companies “cooperate” too.) What does social psychology tell us about human groups and individuals?
4. Can IEP really get to the foundations of what makes a peace system tick if they only have nation windows to look through? Maybe there are other kinds of information to process before delivering the “ten commandments” for positive peace? If so, are the eight pillars final or are they subject to revision? If scientific methods matter, revision is inevitable. But even if IEP’s pillars are a work in progress, are they helpful still? IEP has done a fantastic job with its data gathering so far. Their future contributions can only benefit from a few good collaborators and wider peer review.
5. Big data projects can't reveal everything about human motivations, feelings, or cognitive shortcomings. Many questions about incentives to peace are qualitative. Why would any individual play by the rules in a peace system? What deep down is good and pro-social about the average human child that can be encouraged early? It's unlikely that analyzing big group data will answer these kinds of questions.
CLOSING COMMENTS ON BOTH PROJECTS
SPP and IEP are onto something big. They’re both hacking into what makes peace systems sustainable. That’s exciting. Watching these two projects operate in different silos so far is frustrating. There’s potential synergy here that shouldn't be wasted. If both teams are pursuing the same quarry, they can easily build on each other’s insights. They can also work through funding needs together. This is why a clearinghouse is needed to collect and synthesize research from over three dozen fields of study.
HIGH ROADS' CONTRIBUTION
ENEMYMAKER SYSTEMS: WHAT NOT TO DO
It's good to know what to do for peace. It's just as important to learn what not to do. High Roads has been researching every shade of what not to do for over ten years. We believe Enemymaker systems exist and that most of the world stands in them ankle-deep or deeper.
An Enemymaker system is a system of interlocking failure factors that keep a society susceptible to fear and hostility – capable of sinking into hatred and violence. In a chronic Enemymaker system, a powerful group rallies people against an external or internal common enemy and rails against that enemy daily. Hostilities keep escalating and the word "enemy” is heard regularly. Increasing numbers of people fear violence or actually experience it. Men and women, even children are pressured to pick sides, pledge loyalty, take up arms. People who don’t choose sides (moderates) are called traitors and have to endure threats and intimidation.
If you flip IEP's Positive Peace Index upside down, you'll see the world's least peaceful countries at the top of the list – nations trapped in a rigid, self-renewing Enemymaker dynamic. It’s ironic that by ranking 163 countries for their peacefulness, IEP has also created an Enemymaker index.
The United States and other democracies suffer today because we know so little about the failure factors that keep Enemymaker systems alive. America, with its private firearms, a culture of defiance, and increasingly extremist language, is sliding down the Positive Peace Index and moving up the Enemymaker index. What factors are driving this? Why is polarization so difficult to brake and reverse? We believe it's because we don't know nearly enough about the systemic forces in motion. We treat symptoms (hate speech), not the disease. We need to map Enemymaker systems the same way SPP and IEP are mapping peace systems. We won’t be able to develop effective tools to de-escalate polarization until we do.
The Open Enemymaker Project (OEP)
Enemymaker systems are held together by an interlock of failure factors we have yet to inventory. Even as SPP and IEP point the way to peace systems, the free world barely has a handle on the failure factors that sustain Enemymaker systems. Our ignorance becomes more costly by the month.
High Roads' Open Enemymaker Project is creating a clearinghouse1 to gather expert research from over forty disciplines in order to unravel how Enemymaker systems begin, persist, and worsen.
The key questions OEP wants answered are the same ones SPP and IEP ask, but inverted:
What are the failure factors that make a society sink into an Enemymaker system? What keeps a populace sinking further until violence happens?
If we can find out what these failure factors are and how they interact, we'll know enough to design new interventions and interrupt the system. Understanding Enemymaker systems will require a massive global effort, with many experts from dozens of fields participating. To be successful, the Open Enemymaker Project will have to be undertaken at the same level of leadership and rigor SPP and IEP have brought to their study of peace systems.
Read Our Paper
To find out why dos and don't dos are both needed to build a peace system, link to this substack article: A Framework for Peace Realism.
See Our Project Proposal
See the full vision of what High Roads Institute plans to achieve with our Open Enemymaker Project: a clearinghouse and content production consortium.
Tim Moore
Executive director, The High Roads Institute
Clearinghouse: a central agency for the collection, classification, and broad distribution of information: an informal channel for distributing information, education, and assistance.