Throughout history, warfare has caused untold human suffering. In recent decades, the number of organizations dedicated to promoting peace has proliferated. However, without a common strategy, set of priorities, or plans, their hard work has not significantly
reduced the amount of armed conflict in the world.
There are encouraging signs that this may be changing. This website is intended to facilitate a sharing of ideas about how such change may be accelerated. Send your suggestions for posting in the Blogs by filing out the form here.
Mission
My mission is to contribute to the reduction of armed conflict by encouraging and funding needed research, collaboration, and locally led peacebuilding.
Research
Peacebuilders and their funders have little hard evidence on which to base decisions about where and how they can make their greatest contributions to reducing armed conflict. Research on the cost-effectiveness of various kinds of peacebuilding activities can show where to get the most bang for the buck. Studies of successful peacebuilding projects can inform practitioners about best practices. Reports of recent studies are available here. I am funding several additional research projects, but much more is needed. Impact:Peace plans to help fill that need.
Locally led peacebuilding
Local citizens can design, lead, and implement actions to prevent escalation of disputes in their communities into armed conflict.
Collaboration
Members of the peacebuilding community for the most part operate independently. There is no shared strategy, set of priorities, or overall planning. We must find ways to address the overall problem together. Promoting constructive collaboration is one of the objectives of Impact:Peace
Impact:Peace, an initiative aimed at significantly improving the effectiveness of peacebuilding work.
It will work with practitioners, funders, and policymakers to identify the processes within the peacebuilding field that have the most potential for real impact on the ground. It will create a powerful, agile, evidence-based infrastructure to accelerate and amplify these change processes.
The Purdue Peace Project is a university-based political violence prevention initiative that does peacebuilding work in areas threatened by such violence and conducts research to advance knowledge about political violence prevention at the local, community level. The PPP convenes everyday citizens to help them address immediate threats of violence in their communities. We continually monitor and evaluate our projects to maximize our impact. Then, we share our experience and effective practices with practitioners and scholars around the world.
