Summary

Today, more countries are experiencing violent conflict than in the last 30 years. And global military spending is at an all time high.

The Earth Institute at Columbia University has brought together a top team of scientists with diverse areas of expertise to develop new ways to understand| build and sustain peace. We are working in 5 ways. Mapping| Peaceful Societies| Mathematical Modeling| New Metrics and Methods| and Engaging Communities.

The Sustaining Peace Project has convened an interdisciplinary group of researchers to better understand the science of peace.

Both global and local communities work tirelessly to address violence. It is important to reorient beyond crisis management and maje building and sustaining peace a priority. The scientific community should be able to help us sustain peace. But we face two obstacles to this.

The fear problem

First, we don’t know much about sustainably peaceful societies because they are rarely studied. Humans mostly study the things they fear – cancer, depression and war – and so we have mostly studied peace making and peace building in the context of war.
But the fact is there are hundreds of sustainably peaceful communities around the world that we can learn from…If we take them seriously.

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The frame problem

Second, in an increasingly complex, connected and changing world, our primary ways of problem solving and leading are still painfully slow and overly simplistic.
How we understand and respond to peace and conflict in our emerging world needs to mirror the pace, complexity and volatility of this new reality.

What are we doing

So we at The Earth Institute at Columbia University have brought together a top team of scientists with diverse areas of expertise to develop new ways to understand, build and sustain peace.