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Coming from different countries and backgrounds, we all have different experiences and approaches to what peace means to us. We would like to ask you to research a bit about good and bad examples of peace you can find in your country. These examples can go from very small and personal examples in your daily life to very big things such as government policies etc.

You don't need to write anything here but just think about how you see peace around yourself. You will be able to share it once you are in Bulgaria.

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Welcome to our Introduction Padlet!
Here you can introduce yourself so all the participants in the exchange get to know each other. Feel free to comment and ask questions to the other participants!
Click in the picture above to introduce yourself!

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Here you can upload any material that you consider interesting related to the topic of the exchange. It can be related to your country, your culture, peace, peace education, related educational tools, discrimination or anything that you consider important.

Videos, readings, documents, links, pictures and things of any format are welcome!

To upload any material just click on the "+" button below this publication.

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Here you have the contact information of the trainers and all the partner organizations involved in the project

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Here you have the contact information of the trainers and all the partner organizations involved in the project

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Mikel: +34 635279394
m.aguirre@infopass.eu

Infinite Opportunities Association (Bulgaria) office@infopass.eu

Avisory Center of the House SIKESO (Cyprus)
red_1948@hotmail.com

City Red Cross of Skopje (North Macedonia) skopje.mladi@redcross.org.mk

Abarka ONGD (Spain)
gorka@abarka.org

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Each of the participant countries will have a cultural night to show how their countries are!

For this we will need your help.

Mini-task 1: Please think on what do you want to show from your country/culture to the other participants (Food, music, traditional dances, fun facts...) You will be able to show it in the cultural night.

Mini-task 2: Please bring an object that represents something related to your country/culture. It can be whatever you want to share or show to the others.

Mini-task 3: QUIZ TIME!
We will start the cultural night with a short quiz about some interesting facts about your country/culture and you will be the ones creating the questions.
Before the exchange you will have to write down 3 questions (3 per person) about your country/culture with 1 correct and 3 incorrect answers. Once in the exchange we will play the quiz and learn more about our partners!

P.D Some of you come from different countries to the ones you live in or have a different culture. We encourage you to show us everything you want from the country where you live or your country of origin or culture. The more diverse the better!

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This is one of the most important tasks for the exchange. Please fill it in as soon as possible. It will help us with the logistics and will make the reimbursement process easier and faster.

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"The story of the human race is war," said Winston Churchill. "Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending."

In recent decades, policymakers and business leaders who attended gatherings at Davos and had the ears of western leaders were inclined to think otherwise. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a near-consensus prevailed among them that peace was the natural condition of the developed world and that globalisation was immune from geopolitical risk.

This confidence extended to a belief that generating prosperity through trade was conducive to democracy in developing countries - a notion that played an important part in the west's decision to welcome China into the global economy and grant it membership of the World Trade Organization in 2001. There is, of course, a superficial plausibility in a logic that echoes Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, who declared "Let me have men about me that are fat" because he feared the "lean and hungry look" of the murderous Cassius.

The extraordinary post-cold war climate of optimistic liberal internationalism was accompanied by notable complacency among central bankers and mainstream economists, who trumpeted a decline in macroeconomic volatility that they dubbed the "Great Moderation". There followed the great financial crisis of 2007-09.

Now war in Ukraine and strategic competition over Taiwan with an enduringly undemocratic China have given a new edge to Churchill's Hobbesian observation - all the more so since Vladimir Putin's announcement this week of a partial mobilisation of reserves, together with hints that Russia might now deploy nuclear weapons. And then there is the possibility that Xi Jinping's increasingly assertive China could inflict further damage on western industrialists and investors. The question is: how did the developed world sleepwalk into this mercantile trap?

John Maynard Keynes famously remarked, in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else." The big idea behind western capitalism's growing economic interdependence with authoritarian, nuclear-armed bedfellows is one usually attributed to the French enlightenment thinker Montesquieu, best known for his advocacy of the separation of powers incorporated in the US constitution. In De l'Esprit des Lois, published in 1748, he claimed: "The natural effect of commerce is to bring peace. Two nations that negotiate between themselves become reciprocally dependent, if one has an interest in buying and the other in selling."

This economic brand of liberal internationalism, which was shared by such thinkers as Adam Smith, Voltaire and Spinoza, reached its apogee in the first great period of globalisation that lasted from the 19th into the early 20th century. John Stuart Mill believed commerce was making war obsolete, while the pacifist and anti-imperialist Richard Cobden, campaigner for the repeal of the Corn Laws, declared: "I see in the free-trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe - drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race and creed and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace."

The seminal text of this idealist, liberal tendency was a book published in 1910 called The Great Illusion, by the British journalist and politician Norman Angell. Its theme was the futility of war in conditions of economic interdependence. Angell argued that the gains of victory were always outweighed by the costs. Then came the assassination in 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by the Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip. This and the ensuing great war dealt a catastrophic blow to liberal economic internationalism. It demonstrated precisely that nationalism and tribal instinct can trump economic interest.

The war also exposed the failure of such thinkers to understand the European balance-of-power system. This was inherently unstable because war was the ultimate mechanism for addressing any power disequilibrium. In the first half of the 20th century, disequilibrium occurred because Germany, after unification in 1871, was too big and assertive to be contained by balance-of-power coalitions within Europe. It took interventions by the US and the Soviet Union to put an end to its hegemonic ambitions.

The curious thing is that the devastation wrought in two world wars did not prove fatal for Montesquieu's nostrum. In proposing the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950, French foreign minister Robert Schuman declared that he wanted a process of European economic integration to "make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible". That process, aimed at preventing further war between France and Germany and cementing a broader peace across Europe, paved the way for the EU.

Today, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and fellow members of the Brussels elite like to refer to the EU as a peace project. This is the great half-truth of the postwar settlement. The reason peace has prevailed in Europe - the Balkans apart - is, first, that after losing two catastrophic world wars Germany was never going to adopt a third-time-lucky stance and send the tanks rolling outwards. France and Germany were anyway united after 1945 by a common enemy in the shape of the Soviet Union. Nuclear weapons added a further constraint on military aggression. And if Europe was protected from external threats it was thanks to the US security guarantee embodied in Nato, not the EU.

A more fundamental point is that wealth in modern economies, which relates more to people than natural endowments, is much harder to steal through force than was the case with agricultural and early industrial societies. The decline in the value of disputed territory relative to technological innovation means that the proceeds of resource theft via conquest are increasingly threadbare - a point indicating that Angell's thinking was not entirely without substance, even if its predictive power was nugatory. It also highlights that hacking government computer systems and stealing corporate intellectual property are low-cost alternatives to warfare.

Indeed, globalisation itself may have reduced the spoils of territorial conquest by making it easier to acquire resources via markets rather than the use of force. Had there been a global energy market in 1941, Japan might not have felt a need to attack Pearl Harbor in a preventive action designed to secure access to energy and natural resources in the Pacific region.

Europe remains a continent in which it can be convenient to believe in commerce as a substitute for foreign policy

Big European powers no longer want to fight for territory, still less to bear the costs of acquiring subject populations. Resource-based conflict is now largely confined to developing or downright poor countries. As for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it looks like an anachronistic throwback. Putin's motivation appears primarily concerned with destroying an independent Ukrainian state and rebuilding a Russian empire, not economic plunder. The success of the Ukrainian counter-offensive has highlighted the unexpectedly high cost of his imperial ambitions.

The genius of Schuman and the founding fathers of what became the EU was rather that they established a reconciliation process in a continent where history provided grounds for extreme mistrust. That mistrust has been ameliorated by institutional checks and balances together with international co-operation and shared sovereignty.

Yet Europe remains a continent in which it can be convenient to believe in commerce as a substitute for foreign policy, particularly in the case of Germany. The country makes a striking case study on the trade and peace thesis, given its chronic export dependency and extensive overseas investments. Understandably, in the light of history, postwar German politicians have not wished to play a foreign policy role commensurate with Germany's size in the world economy. They have cloaked themselves in the mantle of the EU.

Under chancellors Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel, the country pursued a policy of Wandel durch Handel, or "change through trade". This led to extreme energy dependence on Russia. It was, in effect, an outgrowth of Ostpolitik, the policy of engagement with the Soviet Union pursued by chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1960s and 1970s.

The snag is that trade brought the wrong sort of change. By waving a green flag to the Nord Stream 2 Russia-to-Germany gas pipeline after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, Germany sent a signal to Putin that he could probably invade Ukraine with impunity. It pursued a similar "change through trade" policy towards China, sharing the US assumption that integrating China into the global economy would make it more politically liberal. Yet China failed to oblige western expectations.

The two states now find themselves at odds over Hong Kong, Taiwan and the South China Sea. This sits uncomfortably with German industry's huge investment in China, especially in the motor industry. More than a third of total sales of Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes-Benz take place there. VW is estimated to rely on the country for at least half of its annual net profits.

This entails a marked geopolitical vulnerability. And as VW's recently fired chief executive Herbert Diess remarked last year: "China probably doesn't need VW but VW needs China a lot."

Rafał Ulatowski, a foreign policy specialist at the University of Warsaw, argues that Germany's Indo-Pacific strategy in recent years shows that economic ties do not determine the behaviour of states. While in the short term, close economic relationships may have a moderating effect on a state's behaviour, he adds, in the long run strategic interests prevail.

Another point overlooked by liberal internationalists is one made by Keynes in the interwar period as he retreated from his earlier liberalism. He worried that economic interdependence could increase the scope for friction between countries, even to the point of provoking war. Interestingly, economic relations within the eurozone often resemble war by other means. Germany looks to its eurozone partners (and other foreigners) to bridge the huge gap between what it produces and what it consumes, which is reflected in an astonishing current account surplus that was running at 7 per cent of gross domestic product at the start of the pandemic. This surplus is the counterpart of an excess of German savings over investment. Those savings were channelled into financing balance of payments deficits in southern Europe before the eurozone debt crisis of 2009-12.

German export dependency has often been a drag on the eurozone economy but, far from being grateful to the countries running counterpart deficits, Germany berated them in the eurozone debt crisis for supposedly profligate fiscal policies, while helping inflict savage shrinkage on the Greek economy and austerity more generally. In effect, argues Michael Pettis of Peking university, these peripheral countries absorbed the shortfall in German demand by increasing their unemployment and relaying excess German savings into investment booms that resulted in serious misallocations of capital.

What was striking about the second great period of globalisation was its much greater intensity than in the first episode before 1914. This was reflected in the larger number of countries participating in the global trading system, very complex cross-border industrial supply chains and the frenetic internationalisation of finance.

It was all hugely successful in increasing global welfare. In a recent blog, the IMF's Kristalina Georgieva, Gita Gopinath and Ceyla Pazarbasioglu say the forces of integration "boosted productivity and living standards, tripling the size of the global economy and lifting 1.3bn people out of extreme poverty".

But these successes, they add, came at the cost of widening inequalities and social dislocation in many countries. By creating losers as well as winners, globalisation thus made for a backlash. Populist politicians, most notably Donald Trump, sought an answer in welfare-reducing trade wars with China, among others.

The second great globalisation also tended to confirm Keynes's misgivings about trade because its sheer intensity increased the potential for weaponising trade and financial relations. The western sanctions in response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine were unprecedented in their ferocity, covering not only companies, banks and Putin's crony oligarchs, but also squeezing Russia out of the dollar-based global financial system. This was done by freezing much of Russia's war chest of $600bn of reserves. Several Russian commercial banks have been excluded from the Swift messaging system for cross-border payments.

Russian vulnerability is apparent in the World Bank's mid-year forecast that by the end of 2022 Russia's real gross domestic product will be 8.9 per cent lower.

What does this all mean for the world? The Russian economy is not globally significant, though individual sectors such as oil and gas do matter. The big worry is simply that we face what the IMF authors quoted earlier call a potential "confluence of calamities", including Ukraine and the pandemic, which pose a sharply increased risk of geoeconomic fragmentation. Since the war started, IMF monitoring indicates that about 30 countries have restricted trade in food, energy and other key commodities.

At another level, the risk is that strategic competition between the US and China could lead to the division of the world into US-centric and China-centric blocs. Eddy Bekkers, a research economist at the World Trade Organization, and Carlos Góes of the University of California, San Diego, estimate that the projected welfare losses for the global economy of such a decoupling could be drastic - as large as 12 per cent in some regions - and would be largest in lower-income regions as they would benefit less from technology spillovers from richer areas.

This is a world in which the need for resilience in the face of hard geopolitical realities will impose heavy costs on business, especially in relation to supply chains. Multinationals' manufacturing operations around the world are being shifted from potentially hostile to more friendly but more expensive countries. Economic efficiency will be impaired. People and businesses will also face new transaction costs if countries develop parallel, disconnected payments systems to mitigate the risk of economic sanctions.

George Magnus, an associate at Oxford university's China Centre, has long warned of the risks of closer western engagement with China and argues that encouraging its economic rise has manifestly not made it less threatening. "The upshot of all this," he says, "will not be so much a collapse in world trade but a significant stall in growth - beyond what's been going on anyway - and, importantly, a shift in patterns. While China's overall size and role in world trade is unlikely to change soon and some things cannot change quickly, I suspect all the rhetoric about China being the engine of global exports and growth is pretty much over."

What is clear is that the high tide of the second great globalisation has passed. While the prospect might not be quite as bleak as in Churchill's Hobbesian vision, the world is undoubtedly a more dangerous place than it was before the confluence of calamities. There can be no denying that economically liberal internationalism has, at least in aggregate, enhanced global welfare. But it has once again delivered a very disappointing political outcome.

John Plender is an FT columnist. Illustrations by Bill Butcher. Data visualisation by Keith Fray
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"The story of the human race is war," said Winston Churchill. "Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending." In recent decades, policymakers and business leaders who attended gatherings at Davos and had the ears of western leaders were inclined to think otherwise.

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Emeritus Professor at the University of Manchester

Some two billion people live in conflict zones across the world [File: Reuters/Alexander Ermochenko]

Today is the International Day of Peace, as declared by the United Nations. It recalls the noble words of its 1945 Charter to save us "from the scourge of war". Thus, the labours of generations of politicians, diplomats and security forces got framed by the dogma that war is always bad, and peace is an unquestionable good that must prevail.

War, per se, is not illegal. It is permitted in the UN Charter to counter crimes of aggression. The concept of a "just war" also exists under international humanitarian law. War may also be necessary, indeed moral. Historically, genocides and crimes against humanity have been ended through the use of force.

At the same time, our peacemaking track record is unimpressive. Over the past half-century, it is hard to think of many armed conflicts that have truly, fully ceased. Instead, most grumble along, boiling up or simmering down periodically. Think of the historical conflicts in Palestine or Kashmir, or the many struggles on Myanmar's periphery, or the insurgencies in the Maghreb and in the Sahel. Many national authorities are preoccupied with persistent internal divisions, such as Pakistan which is facing unrest in tribal areas and South Sudan which has seen ethnic violence.

Internationally, the UN has spent billions of dollars and deployed tens of thousands of peacekeepers in scores of countries. Dozens of UN envoys along with those of regional bodies such as the European Union, African Union, and ASEAN criss-cross warzones. Think-tanks and NGOs are busy, peacebuilding projects abound, and peace conferences fronted by eminent personalities fill the calendar.

Some efforts are sanctified by portentous UN Security Council resolutions on the increasingly rare occasions of consensus among the great powers. Sticks and carrots are dangled through sanctions and aid inducements.

But this well-practised modus operandi of the peace business produces meagre returns. It may put a temporary lid on violence as protagonists under pressure sign any piece of paper that allows a breather and chance to regroup. Then the conflict flares up again until the next ceasefire or "peace" deal. And so, the cycle goes on.

Worse still, there is concern that premature peace meddling prolongs conflict as happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina and on the Korean Peninsula. That is because conflicts end only when they are ready to do so. Ideally, that would be when underlying causes or differences have been resolved, including accountability and justice for wrongs inflicted. But, in reality, that hardly ever happens and so wars end only when one side has won decisively. Think World War II or the Vietnam War.

But modern war-making is multidimensional and much more resilient, especially when external sponsors pitch in on different sides. The durability of any subsequent peace depends on two key factors. First is the viciousness of the way in which the earlier war was waged. The reality is that nowadays, appalling atrocities are the norm, and raped, tortured, starved, dispossessed survivors are in no mood to reconcile with their assailants. The second factor then kicks in - the magnanimity or wisdom of victors. This is almost always in short supply.

The irony is that although we know a lot about waging war, we are not smart at making peace. It is easy to award Nobel Peace Prizes, but many winners are embarrassed when their efforts do not withstand the test of time. Prominent examples are former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed.

That is why, all peace is provisional and once a society has tasted violence, it is perpetually prone to it, especially when Hollywood, Bollywood, and Netflix myth-makers get into shaping the remembrance of history.

We should not be surprised, therefore, that endless armed conflicts have accumulated over the decades: some 170 of different types are now raging across the world. The numbers who died directly in combat increased approximately three-fold to 120,000 last year compared to mortality in the early 2000s. Such statistics give a partial view of the human cost of war, as they underestimate the indirect consequences that fall largely on civilians. These have increased greatly over past decades as wars last longer and become more vicious. The United Nations estimates that currently a quarter of the global population - two billion people - live in conflict areas.

The war-and-peace theory holds that it is not supposed to be this way. As more of us get educated, healthier, and better off, we are supposed to become more peace-loving because that serves our self-interest in achieving stable prosperity. Besides, with more of our essential needs satisfied, and more of our higher needs for voice and esteem realised through representative democracy, we should have less reason to fear or fight others.

Even if we do, we have a plethora of norms and entitlements, laws and institutions to constrain us. Thus, our disputes - within communities and nations, or between them - should be settled tranquilly, informed by the rationality of facts and balanced give-and-take.

Indeed, global indicators on poverty alleviation, human development, and institutional capacity suggest that despite periodic crises, including currently around energy and food, we have made historically unprecedented progress in most economic, social, and political dimensions. But that has not brought world peace. Does that mean the theory is wrong?

Not necessarily, because history also suggests that more education and development bring greater enlightenment about what is wrong with our world as well as the aspiration and capability to do something about it. Most of our social and political advancements have come through fighting for them.

For example, each of the human rights that we take for granted nowadays were achieved through struggle. This happened first in one pioneering setting, and then, as particular rights such as to food and water, or to vote or not to be tortured, got codified, they became universal.

But without the sturdy defence of hard-won rights, they easily flip into wrongs, thereby triggering renewed conflict. And some rights are yet to be fully realised everywhere, such as the right for women and girls to learn in Afghanistan or for them to have reproductive choice in parts of the United States.

Those who enjoy such rights in peace and comfort have no moral standing to stop others from acquiring them. While peaceful means to do so are preferable, conflict often breaks out when authoritarian regimes thwart progress.

Looking ahead, yet more conflicts loom with new geopolitical tensions, and novel insecurities from climate change, pandemics, resource competition, and dysfunctional globalisation. These spawn violence because inequalities within and between societies grow and people around the world continue battling vested interests to gain new human rights.

Every conflict has a logic that must be understood before countering it fairly and justly so that the consequent peace is sustainable. Otherwise, to get peace, we may be obliged to first give conflict a chance.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

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To get peace, we must first understand the causes and logic of war.

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South Sudan: Vice-President highlights commitments and challenges to peace

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South Sudan: Vice-President highlights commitments and challenges to peace

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The Revitalized Peace Agreement, signed by the Government and opposition groups four years ago, ended years of conflict in the world's youngest nation, independent since July 2011.

"Owing to relative peace, the internally displaced and the refugees have been voluntarily returning home, although more formal reintegration remains a challenge due to limited resources," said Mr. Abdelbagi.

Roadmap and challenges

Furthermore, the parties have agreed on a roadmap to complete the remaining tasks under the agreement, which will pave the way for elections when the transitional period ends in 2025.

The Vice-President added that the command structure of the National Unified Forces has also been established, describing the development as "a major leap" towards their transformation and regularization.

However, implementation of the peace deal is facing several challenges, "and sanctions imposed by international partners on individuals and entities are disservice to this course," he said.

Revise targeted sanctions

"We are calling upon the international community, and the UN in particular, to revise individual and targeted sanctions, arms embargo imposed on South Sudan, to enable successful completion of the remaining provisions of the peace agreement outlined in the New Roadmap."

Floods and food insecurity

Mr. Abdelbagi also reported on other obstacles South Sudan is facing. Up to 80 per cent of the country has been affected by floods for the past three years, making it evident that "climate change is real".

To mitigate the effects on both lives and livelihoods, the authorities are donating $10 million to the UN World Food Programme ( WFP) to assist displaced communities.

"However, we need the support of the international community to reach all the flood and drought-affected areas and communities," he said.

The Government also conducted an analysis earlier this year, which revealed that an estimated 6.8 million people, more than half the population, are facing food insecurity, with some 2.37 million at emergency level.

"The severe food insecurity is worsened by combinations of shocks including flooding, prolonged draught, physical insecurity, and the effects of COVID-19," he said.

COVID-19 impacts

Addressing the pandemic, Mr. Abdelbagi reported that South Sudan has been able to contain coronavirus spread "through thoughtful and targeted actions". The result has been very low morbidity and fatality rates.

As of 9 May, only 17,513 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 138 deaths, have been reported since the start of the pandemic, and vaccine coverage stands at 45 per cent among adults.

"Despite this positive health news, the pandemic has had negative effects on the economy, starting with dramatic declines in domestic production and revenue collection, followed by a rising cost of living," he said.

"These economic consequences are far-reaching, severely weakening, for example, human capital formation, especially in education, as the lockdown deprived school-age children of learning opportunities."

Promoting peace through mediation

Mr. Abdelbagi also highlighted South Sudan's efforts to promote peace and stability, both in the region and beyond.

The country successfully mediated the armed conflict in neighboring Sudan, which resulted in the signing of a peace agreement in 2020.

"South Sudan stands ready to mediate the current conflict between the army and the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) in Sudan so that Sudan can finally enjoy lasting peace," he said.

Recently, the authorities offered to mediate between Egypt and Ethiopia in their disagreement over the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, and in other situations that include the Tigray conflict.

"By participating in bringing regional peace and stability, South Sudan has demonstrated its ability as a reliable partner in quest for regional and international peace and security," he said.

"Further, the Republic of South Sudan is contributing one battalion of peacekeeping forces to be part of the East African Forces to bring peace in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Turning to the war in Ukraine, Mr. Agany pointed to how it has devastated lives in the country and affected the global economy.

"From the moral point of view, the South Sudan Government is calling on Russia and Ukraine to cease all forms of hostilities and resolve the dispute through diplomatic and constructive dialogue to avert further consequences."

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South Sudan: Vice-President highlights commitments and challenges to peace

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The Revitalized Peace Agreement, signed by the Government and opposition groups four years ago, ended years of conflict in the world's youngest nation, independent since July 2011. "Owing to relative peace, the internally displaced and the refugees have been voluntarily returning home, although more formal reintegration remains a challenge due to limited resources," said Mr. Abdelbagi.

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Trees of Peace | Official Trailer | Netflix

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Shake Hands With The Devil Official Trailer HD

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Bullfrog Films presents...Love and Solidarity

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Sustainable development requires the alignment of incentives between stakeholders for a common purpose. Increasingly, donors, development actors and peacebuilders are acting as bridge-builders and innovators that connect disparate actors with common causes.

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Today is International Day of Peace. Can you measure what peace is?

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Today is International Day of Peace. Can you measure what peace is?

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A woman waves a peace sign at the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin on Feb. 27 during a rally protesting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Markus Schreiber/AP)

Sept. 21 is the U.N. International Day of Peace, but how does the world measure peace, exactly? In the dictionary, you'll find the word "peace" nestled between "pea" and "peach." The formal definition will refer to peace as the absence of violence. In other words, it's a negative definition - explaining what peace is not, rather than what it is.

Our research on peace takes on a renewed urgency given the war in Ukraine and the uptick in the number of violent conflicts over the past decade. A number of countries - Lebanon, Colombia, Sudan and Myanmar, to name a few - appear extremely fragile and at increased risk of major violence. In times of war, or facing the threat of war, it seems sensible to think seriously about peace and how we might identify and measure it.

Wars between nations can be incredibly costly mass casualty events. While countless academic and legal studies have attempted to define peace, they often focus on the peace treaties that follow wars between nations. A peace in the conflict in Ukraine, for instance, will require political leaders in Moscow and Kyiv to reach agreement. A successful "peace" in this case would be if a cease-fire or peace accord was sustained for a long period, or if Moscow and Kyiv somehow normalized relations. Most ways of measuring peace concentrate on this type of expert-led indicator that looks at the whole country as the unit of measurement - and tends to view peace as the absence of violence.

Why the E.U. can't get Kosovo and Serbia to end their conflict
Peace matters even more at the local level
Of course, these top-down ways of measuring peace don't capture the full picture. Away from the diplomatic discussions, families and communities in cities and villages have to get on with their lives and make the best of the peace their national leaders have made. It is here in the everyday where peace becomes sustainable.

Whether in Colombia, South Sudan or Northern Ireland, peace is forged and lived locally. Peace, at this very granular level, might take the form of a former combatant being able to take a job in the civilian world, or a family being able to shop in stores that were formerly in "enemy" territory.

Tracking this everyday peace, or the ways that people navigate their lives in societies coming out of violent conflict, provides evidence of how people actually engage with and forge peace. This data provides valuable information on what happens in a country after the ink dries on the signed peace agreements approved by leaders. In this view, peace is not just an elite-level peace accord - it's also the daily reality of being able to go about your business. At the most fundamental level, peace is about getting the kids to school, food on the table and being able to pursue work, educational and cultural opportunities. All of these activities, or their absence, provide evidence of the extent to which peace has taken root at the local level, but the extent to which they are important depends on a place's location, history of violence, culture and stage of conflict.
We look for the signs of "everyday peace"
A number of initiatives have sought to capture signs of this everyday peace as a way of complementing the top-down evidence that we might get from monitoring a cease-fire or the extent to which governments have implemented peace accord provisions.

Will Israel further normalize relations with its Arab neighbors?

We created and now co-lead one such initiative - Everyday Peace Indicators. This project takes the novel approach of asking people in conflict-affected localities what peace means to them. So rather than rely on outside "experts" who arrive with premade definitions of peace, and ideas about how to implement it, the Everyday Peace Indicators team asks people what peace means to them in their own lives and how they identify it. In doing so, we have developed a systematic method to produce a database of quantitative and qualitative measures of everyday peace in villages and neighborhoods around the world.

We found, for instance, that many people see peace not in terms of the deals made by political leaders, but in terms of their family and immediate locality. In countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Colombia and Sri Lanka, our project hears from people who define peace in many different ways - including how safe they feel walking alone at night, whether a specific road in the neighborhood has been repaired or how sincere their leaders are in resolving their grievances.

In Afghanistan in 2016, for instance, some people saw peace in terms of the number of TV and radio antennas on rooftops or the presence of female vaccinators - both of which signaled that the Taliban was not present to object. In Colombia, certain people noted routine and regular trash collection as a sign of peace, as this meant the municipal authorities were functional. And our most recent work in Sri Lanka has shown how many people connect peace closely with the type of public services they can access easily and efficiently, such as being able to take something as simple as a blood test at a local hospital.

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Can local priorities inform peace processes?
Most importantly for international organizations interested in building peace, our research shows us that peace can mean many things - and that these things are often different from what international policies and programs actually target. Although there is a tendency to try to find key themes at a national or international level, communities within the same region or even the same district can have vastly different perspectives and priorities about peace. This matters because a policy or program that is helpful in one community may be counterproductive in another, especially in a complex war-torn context.

The Everyday Peace Indicators project has shown us the value in taking a step back from universal, template approaches to peace. Our conclusions may be useful to organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development and other groups that have shown interest in localization.

Ultimately, building peace is messy and often looks very different across different contexts, but our research shows that everyday people can offer ideas and ways of thinking about and building sustainable peace.
Professors: Check out TMC's latest topic guides for your classroom. Pamina Firchow Roger Mac Ginty (@rogermacginty) is professor at the School of Government and International Affairs, and director of the Durham Global Security Institute, both at Durham University. His latest book is Everyday Peace: How so called ordinary people can disrupt violent conflict (Oxford University Press, 2021). He is co-founder of Everyday Peace Indicators. (@pfirchow) is associate professor of Conflict Resolution and Coexistence at the Heller School for Social Policy at Brandeis University. She is the author of the award-winning book Reclaiming Everyday Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and is executive director and co-founder of the Everyday Peace Indicators NGO.

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Analysis | Today is International Day of Peace. Can you measure what peace is?

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Sept. 21 is the U.N. International Day of Peace, but how does the world measure peace, exactly? In the dictionary, you'll find the word "peace" nestled between "pea" and "peach." The formal definition will refer to peace as the absence of violence.