![]() Mauritians of all stripes tend to be respectful and careful in their daily encounters with others. For example, studies on Mauritius, the most peaceful nation in Africa, have found intentionality in how members of different ethnic groups speak with one another in public. Next, we started gathering together all the relevant science on positive or negative intergroup reciprocity. Sustaining peace happens through positive reciprocity: I show you a kindness and you do me a favor in return, multiplied throughout the social world a million times over. In other words, peace is not just an absence of violence and war, but also people and groups getting along prosocially with each other: the cooperation, sharing, and kindness that we see in everyday society. The more positive reciprocity and the less negative reciprocity between members of different groups, the more sustainable the peace. It views the central dynamic responsible for the emergence of sustainably peaceful relations in communities as the thousands or millions of daily reciprocal interactions that happen between members of different groups in those communities, and the degree to which more positive interactions outweigh more negative. Next, our core team worked with this information to develop a basic conceptual model of sustaining peace. We then surveyed this group to identify their sense of the most central components of achieving lasting peace (74 experts from 35 disciplines responded), and then invited the respondents to a day-long workshop to make sense of the findings. ![]() It began with a dive into the published science on peacefulness, which helped us to identify some of the more influential scholars in this area. Our journey to date has been circuitous but fruitful. The mere existence of peace systems challenges the assumption that societies everywhere are prone to wage war with their neighbors-and what we have gleaned from studying these societies is promising. ![]() Other examples of peace systems include 10 neighboring tribes of the Brazilian Upper Xingu River basin, the Swiss cantons that unified to form Switzerland in 1848, the Iroquois Confederation, and the E.U. None of the five Nordic nations, for instance, have met one another on the battlefield for over 200 years. ![]() Peace systems are clusters of neighboring societies that do not make war with each other, and anthropological and historical cases of such non-warring social systems exist across time and around the globe. We also share an appreciation of the benefits of using methods from complexity science to better visualize and model the complex dynamics of such societies, and as a platform for communicating with one another across such different disciplines to develop a shared understanding of stable, peaceful societies and of peace systems. We are psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, astrophysicists, environmental scientists, political scientists, data scientists, and communications experts, who are interested in gaining a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of lasting peace. In response to this gap in our understanding of how to sustain peace, an eclectic group of scholars started gathering together in 2014. As a result, we know much more about how to get out of war than we do about how to build thriving, peaceful communities.įrom the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being. When peaceful places are studied, researchers (much like the U.N.) tend to focus primarily on negative peace, or the circumstances that keep violence at bay, to the neglect of positive peace, or the things that promote and sustain more just, harmonious, prosocial relations. Humans mostly study the things we fear-cancer, depression, violence, and war-and so we have mostly studied peace in the context or aftermath of war. Unfortunately, our understanding of more pacific societies is limited by the fact that they are rarely studied. Science could play a crucial role in specifying the aspects of community life that contribute to sustaining peace. In fact, the United Nations has been attempting for decades to pivot from crisis management to its primary mandate to “sustain international peace in all its dimensions.” Yet by its own account, “the key Charter task of sustaining peace remains critically under-recognized, under-prioritized, and under-resourced globally and within the United Nations.” The international community has struggled with a similar attention-to-peace deficit disorder. What does it take to live in peace? The Sustaining Peace Project is finding out.
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