A Progress Report on the Sustaining Peace Project – State of the Planet

by Peter Coleman and Allegra Chen-Carrel|January 12, 2021

As partisan politics, systemic racism, and violence dominate the news cycle, it can be easy to lose sight of evidence from a variety of disciplines which suggests that for the vast majority of human history, Homo sapiens have lived in peace. Despite this, today many societies around the world struggle with fractures and divides. Science could offer meaningful contributions to peace policy and programming, but most peace scholars tend to study what prevents and mitigates conflict rather than focusing on what sustains positive peace. In response, the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexitys Sustaining Peace Project was launched in 2014 to better understand what leads to sustainable peace.

A causal loop diagram of empirically derived factors related to peace. Source: Sustaining Peace Project

The Sustaining Peace Project includes six key components: (1) Developing a basic theoretical model of the core dynamics of sustainably peaceful societies; (2) Learning from complexity and creating visualizations that map the ways observed peace-related factors interact; (3) Examining historical and ethnographic data comparing peace and non-peace systems to uncover key variables associated with peace; (4) Mathematical modeling of the ways these different factors interact over time to create robust and resilient cultures of peace; (5) Learning from peaceful communities and ground truthing the theoretical model through dialogues with local stakeholders in peaceful societies; and (6) Developing new methods and metrics for measuring and tracking trends related to sustaining peace.

Six years into this process, what have we learned?

A recent publication in American Psychologist provides a progress report on this initiative and identifies several key lessons learned:

Recently, we launched the Sustaining Peace Project website, which includes an overview of the project and a map locating contemporary societies sustaining peace. An interactive version of the causal loop diagram allows users to click on the variables and links between them to access evidence supporting the diagram, and an interactive version of the mathematical model encourages users to plug in values and play with the model.

While this initiative is an ambitious undertaking, progress to date highlights the ways a variety of scientific methods and modes of inquiry can contribute to our understanding of the processes and dynamics which can lead to a more durable and holistic peace.

Peter Coleman is a professor of psychology and education, and co-director of the Advanced Consortium for Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4). AllegraChen-Carrelis the program manager for the Sustaining Peace Project at AC4.

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A Progress Report on the Sustaining Peace Project - State of the Planet