How to Make the World More Peaceful: What Actually Works
What science tells us about reducing violence — from personal responsibility and culture to education, institutions, and international mechanisms
- The short answer
- We are not condemned to war — and we are not born angels
- History is not on autopilot: Pinker, Sorokin, and the problem of culture
- The central mistake: we use one word for very different phenomena
- What do we mean by peace?
- Peace cannot be outsourced
- Where the practice of peace begins: family, childhood, education
- Do not exclude others from the moral circle: dehumanization
- Peace as a practice, not a profession
- Institutions amplify human choices
- Sometimes peace is built in very ordinary ways
- What happens when the “other” stops being an abstraction
- Peace is also a matter of the rules of the game
- How wars end: negotiation, mediation, and power-sharing
- Sometimes peace has to be physically held in place
- Nonviolence: moral choice and effectiveness are different questions
- Even good peace ideas can cause harm
- Words can bring violence closer
- How culture makes violence feel normal
- How do we know whether we are becoming more peaceful?
- Why good ideas do not work automatically
- What can be done today — without permission from above
- The essentials in brief: seven common questions
- What we still do not know
- So, is a more peaceful world possible?
- Key sources
The question “How can we make the world more peaceful?” sounds almost suspiciously simple. We could answer with the familiar list of good advice: listen to one another more carefully, cultivate empathy, respect differences, talk about peace, support dialogue. None of that is wrong. But if we ask the question seriously — not how to become a little more patient in conversation, but how humanity can actually reduce violence — the answer becomes much more complicated.
Wars continue. People commit violence not only in armed conflicts, but at home, on the street, in prisons, during political repression, and in clashes between groups. In 2025, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) recorded 65 state-based armed conflicts — the highest number since its records began in 1946. Thirteen reached the level of war, while organized violence overall killed nearly a quarter of a million people. [1] Even that captures only part of the problem: according to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, nearly one in three women worldwide has experienced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner, or sexual violence by someone else, at some point in her life. [2]
None of this suggests a world moving toward peace on its own. But neither does the opposite conclusion follow: that violence is an unchanging human destiny. Between naive optimism and grim fatalism lies a much more interesting territory. It contains evidence, contested hypotheses, cultural habits, political interests, moral choices — and work that no one else will do for us.
Science has found neither a single cause of violence nor a single formula for peace. What it can increasingly do is answer more precise questions. What reduces the risk of violence in families? What helps children handle conflict without aggression? When does contact between hostile groups reduce prejudice? Which political conditions make armed conflict more likely? What helps societies avoid falling back into civil war? Which interventions actually save lives? Once the big question is broken into parts like these, peace stops being only a beautiful aspiration and becomes something we can investigate. The first conclusion is not dramatic, but it is useful: levels of violence can change — not with certainty, not at the push of a button, and not forever, but they can change.
Peaceful World starts from one further premise. Violence does not begin only at the moment someone pulls a trigger or gives an order. By then, the groundwork has already been laid by culture, upbringing, language, and everyday habits: by how we learned to understand strength and weakness, us and them, victory and humiliation, power and obedience. Peace therefore cannot simply be outsourced to governments, diplomats, police, or professional peacebuilding organizations. Institutions are necessary. But they do not relieve individuals of responsibility for what passes through their own thoughts, words, and actions.
Wars continue. People commit violence not only in armed conflicts, but at home, on the street, in prisons, during political repression, and in clashes between groups. In 2025, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) recorded 65 state-based armed conflicts — the highest number since its records began in 1946. Thirteen reached the level of war, while organized violence overall killed nearly a quarter of a million people. [1] Even that captures only part of the problem: according to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, nearly one in three women worldwide has experienced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner, or sexual violence by someone else, at some point in her life. [2]
None of this suggests a world moving toward peace on its own. But neither does the opposite conclusion follow: that violence is an unchanging human destiny. Between naive optimism and grim fatalism lies a much more interesting territory. It contains evidence, contested hypotheses, cultural habits, political interests, moral choices — and work that no one else will do for us.
Science has found neither a single cause of violence nor a single formula for peace. What it can increasingly do is answer more precise questions. What reduces the risk of violence in families? What helps children handle conflict without aggression? When does contact between hostile groups reduce prejudice? Which political conditions make armed conflict more likely? What helps societies avoid falling back into civil war? Which interventions actually save lives? Once the big question is broken into parts like these, peace stops being only a beautiful aspiration and becomes something we can investigate. The first conclusion is not dramatic, but it is useful: levels of violence can change — not with certainty, not at the push of a button, and not forever, but they can change.
Peaceful World starts from one further premise. Violence does not begin only at the moment someone pulls a trigger or gives an order. By then, the groundwork has already been laid by culture, upbringing, language, and everyday habits: by how we learned to understand strength and weakness, us and them, victory and humiliation, power and obedience. Peace therefore cannot simply be outsourced to governments, diplomats, police, or professional peacebuilding organizations. Institutions are necessary. But they do not relieve individuals of responsibility for what passes through their own thoughts, words, and actions.
The short answer
Looking past the slogans, there is no single method. The risk of violence falls when several conditions come together: children are less likely to learn that violence is a normal way to solve problems at home or at school; people can handle conflict without turning the other person into an enemy or pushing them outside the circle of moral concern; and culture does not make domination and revenge the only recognizable language of strength. Safe channels for contact and cooperation between groups also matter, as does the ability of major communities to participate in politics and rely on credible protection. Societies need capable, accountable institutions that are open to different groups. Escalation is best prevented. Once it has begun, it must be contained, the conflict addressed, and the conditions for renewed violence reduced.
The strongest evidence usually appears where the outcome can be clearly named and measured: less child maltreatment, fewer assaults, less repeat violence, less prejudice, fewer civilian deaths, a lower risk of renewed war. The farther a claim moves from outcomes like these toward statements such as “this program creates a peaceful society,” the more cautious our confidence should become.
It is better to think of the question “What can we do?” neither as a checklist of virtues nor as a problem to be solved from above. The first place we can act is in our own lives: how we treat people close to us and people we consider outsiders; what language we repeat; what we teach children; how we respond to propaganda; which forms of harm we accept as normal simply because we are used to them. Beyond that come culture, communities, professions, and institutions — ways of amplifying better choices and constraining worse ones. International mechanisms become necessary when violence operates far beyond the reach of any one person. These levels do not compete. They are connected and can reinforce one another.
The central idea of this article is simple: conflict is inevitable, but violence is not an inevitable outcome of conflict. Peace cannot be outsourced. We cannot promise that nonviolent choices will always prevail. But we can steadily make violence less normal, less rewarding, and less likely.
The strongest evidence usually appears where the outcome can be clearly named and measured: less child maltreatment, fewer assaults, less repeat violence, less prejudice, fewer civilian deaths, a lower risk of renewed war. The farther a claim moves from outcomes like these toward statements such as “this program creates a peaceful society,” the more cautious our confidence should become.
It is better to think of the question “What can we do?” neither as a checklist of virtues nor as a problem to be solved from above. The first place we can act is in our own lives: how we treat people close to us and people we consider outsiders; what language we repeat; what we teach children; how we respond to propaganda; which forms of harm we accept as normal simply because we are used to them. Beyond that come culture, communities, professions, and institutions — ways of amplifying better choices and constraining worse ones. International mechanisms become necessary when violence operates far beyond the reach of any one person. These levels do not compete. They are connected and can reinforce one another.
The central idea of this article is simple: conflict is inevitable, but violence is not an inevitable outcome of conflict. Peace cannot be outsourced. We cannot promise that nonviolent choices will always prevail. But we can steadily make violence less normal, less rewarding, and less likely.
We are not condemned to war — and we are not born angels
In 1986, an international group of scientists formulated the Seville Statement on Violence. At its 25th General Conference in 1989, UNESCO decided to disseminate it. The authors challenged the idea that war follows directly from our biology: that humanity inherited war from animal ancestors, that war is written into our genes, that there is a special “violent brain,” or that some inborn instinct inevitably drives people toward organized violence. [3]
At the time, this was an important statement. It dismantled an intellectual alibi that becomes very convenient after every new war: “What can we do? That is simply human nature.”
Contemporary science requires a more careful formulation. Aggression is influenced by genetic, neurobiological, and evolutionary factors; these help explain human behavior and individual differences. But none of this establishes that any particular level of violence is inevitable, or that the complex political phenomenon we call war grows from a single aggressive impulse. Later scientific criticism of the Seville Statement likewise points toward a more complex interaction between biology and culture. [4]
The range of human responses and capacities is much wider. It includes aggression and cooperation, rivalry and care, the ability to form groups and the ability to reconcile, the capacity to hurt others and to risk oneself for them.
A more accurate formulation is this: human nature permits both violence and cooperation. Social environments, norms, institutions, and circumstances strongly influence which of these possibilities are expressed in behavior.
This may sound less inspiring than saying that people are naturally good. In practical terms, however, it is the stronger conclusion. If a particular level of violence is not fixed once and for all, it can be changed. The central question then is no longer whether people are “good,” but which capacities we cultivate, which norms we reward, and which conditions make harming others more or less likely.
Long before modern peace research existed, religious and philosophical traditions repeatedly emphasized similar practices: self-restraint, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, the refusal of revenge, and concern extending beyond one’s own group. Ahimsa, Buddhist compassion, love of enemies in Christianity, mercy in Islamic ethics, and secular humanism belong to very different traditions and cannot be reduced to a single formula. By modern scientific standards, they do not prove that these practices prevent wars. Yet their convergence across centuries offers at least a serious hypothesis: the human capacity for care, self-command, and an expanding moral circle can be deliberately cultivated.
For Peaceful World, the principle is simple: science should not replace ethics, and ethics should not become an excuse to ignore evidence. We can regard nonviolence as morally preferable while still asking honestly when particular nonviolent methods work, when they fail, and what harm they can cause.
At the time, this was an important statement. It dismantled an intellectual alibi that becomes very convenient after every new war: “What can we do? That is simply human nature.”
Contemporary science requires a more careful formulation. Aggression is influenced by genetic, neurobiological, and evolutionary factors; these help explain human behavior and individual differences. But none of this establishes that any particular level of violence is inevitable, or that the complex political phenomenon we call war grows from a single aggressive impulse. Later scientific criticism of the Seville Statement likewise points toward a more complex interaction between biology and culture. [4]
The range of human responses and capacities is much wider. It includes aggression and cooperation, rivalry and care, the ability to form groups and the ability to reconcile, the capacity to hurt others and to risk oneself for them.
A more accurate formulation is this: human nature permits both violence and cooperation. Social environments, norms, institutions, and circumstances strongly influence which of these possibilities are expressed in behavior.
This may sound less inspiring than saying that people are naturally good. In practical terms, however, it is the stronger conclusion. If a particular level of violence is not fixed once and for all, it can be changed. The central question then is no longer whether people are “good,” but which capacities we cultivate, which norms we reward, and which conditions make harming others more or less likely.
Long before modern peace research existed, religious and philosophical traditions repeatedly emphasized similar practices: self-restraint, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, the refusal of revenge, and concern extending beyond one’s own group. Ahimsa, Buddhist compassion, love of enemies in Christianity, mercy in Islamic ethics, and secular humanism belong to very different traditions and cannot be reduced to a single formula. By modern scientific standards, they do not prove that these practices prevent wars. Yet their convergence across centuries offers at least a serious hypothesis: the human capacity for care, self-command, and an expanding moral circle can be deliberately cultivated.
For Peaceful World, the principle is simple: science should not replace ethics, and ethics should not become an excuse to ignore evidence. We can regard nonviolence as morally preferable while still asking honestly when particular nonviolent methods work, when they fail, and what harm they can cause.
History is not on autopilot: Pinker, Sorokin, and the problem of culture
There is another tempting idea in discussions of peace: to treat historical declines in some forms of violence as an almost ready-made trajectory for the future. This view is especially associated with Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. It is worth arguing with Pinker himself rather than a caricature of him. He does not claim that progress is automatic or irreversible. His argument is more modest and more interesting: several forms of violence have declined historically, and a range of processes helped make that possible — state institutions, commerce and interdependence, an expanding moral circle, reason, self-control, and empathy. [37]
This perspective is a useful counterweight to the familiar apocalyptic picture of history. Humanity has achieved major moral and institutional victories. In many societies, slavery stopped being treated as a lawful order of things. Publicly brutal punishments ceased to be an everyday norm in many countries. The rights of women, children, and minorities expanded. International limits emerged on what states may treat as legitimate violence. Calling all of this an illusion would be as mistaken as declaring progress guaranteed.
The problem begins not with Pinker, but where statistics about the past quietly become a philosophy of the future. A downward-sloping graph does not establish a moral law of history. Pinker himself explicitly allows that violence may rise again and that major wars remain possible in the future. [37] Today’s data make the point especially clear: in 2025, UCDP recorded the highest number of state-based armed conflicts since 1946. [1] History is under no obligation to follow the previous trend.
Pitirim Sorokin belongs beside Pinker because he approaches the same problem from another direction. In The Crisis of Our Age, Sorokin located the crisis of civilization not only in bad political decisions or badly designed institutions, but in a crisis of its value system. His theory of cultural cycles and his concept of “sensate culture” cannot today be treated as a proven causal model. But the question outlived the theory: what does a society regard as real, desirable, successful, and worthy of admiration — and what kind of people does such a culture form? [38]
In this respect, Sorokin asks a question that can easily disappear inside institutional statistics. Parliaments, courts, and international organizations matter. But all of them operate within a culture that has already taught people what counts as strength, what counts as weakness, what ends can justify causing harm, and who belongs inside the moral circle at all. If a culture spends years romanticizing domination, revenge, and humiliation, institutions are not merely “managing conflict” — they are working against a language people have already learned.
Later Sorokin made an even more unusual move. Instead of merely diagnosing crisis, he tried to study creative altruism and love as social forces. His book The Ways and Power of Love was published in 1954 in the context of the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism. By contemporary standards, this research program does not provide the kind of rigorous causal evidence we would demand today, and some of its theoretical premises are too broad. Yet the turn itself feels strikingly modern: if humanity studies aggression, power, and war systematically, why not study the capacities for selfless care, moral transformation, and cooperation just as systematically? [39]
For Peaceful World, these two perspectives are most useful together. Pinker reminds us that progress is possible and should not be denied simply because the news is frightening. Sorokin reminds us that institutions do not live apart from culture, and that a civilization can become ill through its own ideas of success. Together they guard against both fatalism and complacency.
Progress is real, but it is not promised; peace has to be sustained again and again — through culture, upbringing, institutions, and everyday choices.
This perspective is a useful counterweight to the familiar apocalyptic picture of history. Humanity has achieved major moral and institutional victories. In many societies, slavery stopped being treated as a lawful order of things. Publicly brutal punishments ceased to be an everyday norm in many countries. The rights of women, children, and minorities expanded. International limits emerged on what states may treat as legitimate violence. Calling all of this an illusion would be as mistaken as declaring progress guaranteed.
The problem begins not with Pinker, but where statistics about the past quietly become a philosophy of the future. A downward-sloping graph does not establish a moral law of history. Pinker himself explicitly allows that violence may rise again and that major wars remain possible in the future. [37] Today’s data make the point especially clear: in 2025, UCDP recorded the highest number of state-based armed conflicts since 1946. [1] History is under no obligation to follow the previous trend.
Pitirim Sorokin belongs beside Pinker because he approaches the same problem from another direction. In The Crisis of Our Age, Sorokin located the crisis of civilization not only in bad political decisions or badly designed institutions, but in a crisis of its value system. His theory of cultural cycles and his concept of “sensate culture” cannot today be treated as a proven causal model. But the question outlived the theory: what does a society regard as real, desirable, successful, and worthy of admiration — and what kind of people does such a culture form? [38]
In this respect, Sorokin asks a question that can easily disappear inside institutional statistics. Parliaments, courts, and international organizations matter. But all of them operate within a culture that has already taught people what counts as strength, what counts as weakness, what ends can justify causing harm, and who belongs inside the moral circle at all. If a culture spends years romanticizing domination, revenge, and humiliation, institutions are not merely “managing conflict” — they are working against a language people have already learned.
Later Sorokin made an even more unusual move. Instead of merely diagnosing crisis, he tried to study creative altruism and love as social forces. His book The Ways and Power of Love was published in 1954 in the context of the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism. By contemporary standards, this research program does not provide the kind of rigorous causal evidence we would demand today, and some of its theoretical premises are too broad. Yet the turn itself feels strikingly modern: if humanity studies aggression, power, and war systematically, why not study the capacities for selfless care, moral transformation, and cooperation just as systematically? [39]
For Peaceful World, these two perspectives are most useful together. Pinker reminds us that progress is possible and should not be denied simply because the news is frightening. Sorokin reminds us that institutions do not live apart from culture, and that a civilization can become ill through its own ideas of success. Together they guard against both fatalism and complacency.
Progress is real, but it is not promised; peace has to be sustained again and again — through culture, upbringing, institutions, and everyday choices.
The central mistake: we use one word for very different phenomena
Consider several situations: a child hits a classmate; a person abuses a partner; large-scale clashes erupt between two ethnic groups; police fire on protesters; an armed organization starts a civil war; two states enter into armed conflict.
We call all of these violence, and we are not wrong. The mistake begins when we assume that all of them have the same cause and can be prevented in the same way.
Peace research constantly runs into the problem of scale: a method that works at the level of one person may fail entirely at the level of a state.
Empathy may help a child understand another child. Even the most empathetic population cannot substitute for political institutions when one group is systematically excluded from power and lacks credible protection.
Well-designed dialogue can change relations between two communities. One conversation is not enough to stop an armed group that keeps attacking.
International peacekeepers can reduce immediate violence under some conditions. Their presence does not guarantee trust between neighbors who have lived through civil war.
In other words: less interpersonal aggression is not yet a peaceful society. Less prejudice is not yet the absence of war. A ceasefire is not yet reconciliation. Good institutions are not yet good relations between people.
Peace therefore has to be built on several levels at once. This is the problem with universal recipes: any attempt to find a single “cause of war” or one method for peace will almost inevitably cut away part of reality.
We call all of these violence, and we are not wrong. The mistake begins when we assume that all of them have the same cause and can be prevented in the same way.
Peace research constantly runs into the problem of scale: a method that works at the level of one person may fail entirely at the level of a state.
Empathy may help a child understand another child. Even the most empathetic population cannot substitute for political institutions when one group is systematically excluded from power and lacks credible protection.
Well-designed dialogue can change relations between two communities. One conversation is not enough to stop an armed group that keeps attacking.
International peacekeepers can reduce immediate violence under some conditions. Their presence does not guarantee trust between neighbors who have lived through civil war.
In other words: less interpersonal aggression is not yet a peaceful society. Less prejudice is not yet the absence of war. A ceasefire is not yet reconciliation. Good institutions are not yet good relations between people.
Peace therefore has to be built on several levels at once. This is the problem with universal recipes: any attempt to find a single “cause of war” or one method for peace will almost inevitably cut away part of reality.
What do we mean by peace?
The word peace is deceptively broad: it can mean very different things. In a classic 1969 article, Johan Galtung proposed a distinction between negative peace and positive peace. Negative peace referred primarily to the absence of direct violence; positive peace pointed toward broader conditions of social justice and the absence of structural violence. [23] The distinction has strongly influenced peace and conflict research and remains useful, as long as we do not mistake this philosophical framework for a proven causal model.
Negative peace is relatively easy to measure: are there killings, assaults, or combat operations? How many people are victims of violence? Does war return after a ceasefire? This is not a “poor” version of peace. If people stop dying, that is an enormous result.
Positive peace pushes us to look deeper, which also makes it harder to measure. It is easy to place justice, trust, institutional quality, equal opportunity, and other desirable features of society under one label and then quietly move from “we value these things” to “we have proved that these things create peace.” Positive peace is therefore useful as a guide for analysis, while causal claims are better tested through more specific and measurable outcomes.
The same applies to structural violence. As an ethical and analytical concept, it can reveal suffering that does not arise from a single attacker but from durable institutional arrangements and unequal access to opportunities. For evidence-based analysis, it is better to ask narrower questions. Who is excluded from power? Who systematically lacks reliable protection? Which groups have worse access to services? Which inequalities coincide with political identities, and how are these patterns related to the risk of actual violence?
In other words, we have two tasks: reduce direct violence today and strengthen the conditions that make renewed violence less likely tomorrow.
Negative peace is relatively easy to measure: are there killings, assaults, or combat operations? How many people are victims of violence? Does war return after a ceasefire? This is not a “poor” version of peace. If people stop dying, that is an enormous result.
Positive peace pushes us to look deeper, which also makes it harder to measure. It is easy to place justice, trust, institutional quality, equal opportunity, and other desirable features of society under one label and then quietly move from “we value these things” to “we have proved that these things create peace.” Positive peace is therefore useful as a guide for analysis, while causal claims are better tested through more specific and measurable outcomes.
The same applies to structural violence. As an ethical and analytical concept, it can reveal suffering that does not arise from a single attacker but from durable institutional arrangements and unequal access to opportunities. For evidence-based analysis, it is better to ask narrower questions. Who is excluded from power? Who systematically lacks reliable protection? Which groups have worse access to services? Which inequalities coincide with political identities, and how are these patterns related to the risk of actual violence?
In other words, we have two tasks: reduce direct violence today and strengthen the conditions that make renewed violence less likely tomorrow.
Peace cannot be outsourced
It is tempting to imagine peace as a service that the right institutions should provide: good courts, honest governments, professional diplomats, an effective United Nations. All of these matter, but the picture is incomplete. An institution can restrain a person, protect them, or expand their options; it cannot make a moral choice on their behalf.
Not everything begins with the individual. A child is born into a world where laws, wars, family habits, economic conditions, religious narratives, and political stories already exist. Sometimes people have very little freedom and face severe coercion. A discussion of personal responsibility must therefore never become victim-blaming or the comforting claim that “everyone chooses their own destiny.” Structures are real, and they can sharply narrow the space for choice.
Yet every human system ultimately passes through human hands. Someone has to write and enforce a law. Someone gives an order, carries it out, challenges it, or refuses. Someone creates propaganda, repeats it, or rejects it. Someone humiliates another person — or refuses to. Someone notices another person’s pain or makes it invisible. Someone supports an institution, changes it, reforms it, or eventually refuses to treat its demands as a moral excuse.
Personal responsibility is not a warm-up before “real” politics. It is the first sphere in which a person can act directly. Institutions can then multiply the consequences of millions of human choices — toward protection or toward violence.
Within this logic, Peaceful World uses the Ethical Minimum — a line that cannot be erased by group loyalty, orders, habit, or convenience. Another person’s life and dignity must not become bargaining chips. Beyond that line lies the space of ethical growth — a gradual expansion of responsibility and a reduction of our own contribution to avoidable harm wherever we can realistically reduce it. People differ in their opportunities and risks, so responsibility must not become a contest in moral purity.
An institution is a human choice that has acquired rules, memory, resources, and power.
Not everything begins with the individual. A child is born into a world where laws, wars, family habits, economic conditions, religious narratives, and political stories already exist. Sometimes people have very little freedom and face severe coercion. A discussion of personal responsibility must therefore never become victim-blaming or the comforting claim that “everyone chooses their own destiny.” Structures are real, and they can sharply narrow the space for choice.
Yet every human system ultimately passes through human hands. Someone has to write and enforce a law. Someone gives an order, carries it out, challenges it, or refuses. Someone creates propaganda, repeats it, or rejects it. Someone humiliates another person — or refuses to. Someone notices another person’s pain or makes it invisible. Someone supports an institution, changes it, reforms it, or eventually refuses to treat its demands as a moral excuse.
Personal responsibility is not a warm-up before “real” politics. It is the first sphere in which a person can act directly. Institutions can then multiply the consequences of millions of human choices — toward protection or toward violence.
Within this logic, Peaceful World uses the Ethical Minimum — a line that cannot be erased by group loyalty, orders, habit, or convenience. Another person’s life and dignity must not become bargaining chips. Beyond that line lies the space of ethical growth — a gradual expansion of responsibility and a reduction of our own contribution to avoidable harm wherever we can realistically reduce it. People differ in their opportunities and risks, so responsibility must not become a contest in moral purity.
An institution is a human choice that has acquired rules, memory, resources, and power.
Where the practice of peace begins: family, childhood, education
Experiencing childhood maltreatment is associated with a moderately higher risk of violent behavior later in life. This finding comes from a meta-analysis of studies that followed participants over time and together included nearly 40,000 people. Results varied substantially across studies, and the association indicates a higher probability, not a predetermined fate. [5]
Some parenting support programs reduce harsh and violent parenting practices, especially in the short term. Reviews of this evidence underpin World Health Organization recommendations. [6] It is a remarkably ordinary example — no international declarations and no doves on posters. The result is simply that fewer children are harmed in the place where they first learn what relationships look like.
The evidence from schools is also becoming stronger. Large meta-analyses of social and emotional learning (SEL) programs find improvements in social and emotional skills, behavior, school climate, peer relationships, and academic outcomes. [7,8] Some randomized studies are especially instructive. For example, a program that taught children to take another person’s perspective reduced school violence and victimization in ethnically mixed schools in Turkey, reduced social exclusion, increased cross-ethnic ties, and improved helping and cooperative behavior. [9]
These results are encouraging, which is precisely why Peaceful World has to be strict about its own conclusions. We work in peace education ourselves, and the temptation to say “education creates peace” is understandable. The evidence supports a more modest statement. Some educational programs improve skills, relationships, and behavior; some reduce specific forms of aggression. Claiming more would be dishonest: existing research rarely allows us to trace a direct causal path from a peace education lesson to fewer wars twenty years later.
There is another trap. The absence of strong evidence for a final outcome does not always mean there is no effect: the causal chain may be too long, methods may be difficult to standardize, consequences may emerge years later, and randomized experiments at the scale of entire societies may be impossible or unethical. A gap like this does not vindicate a beautiful idea, but neither does it condemn it.
The reasonable position, then, is to test the effectiveness of peace education more rigorously rather than assume it in advance. It also needs better and longer-term research. In 2023, all 194 UNESCO Member States adopted the revised Recommendation on Education for Peace, Human Rights and Sustainable Development; in 2026, countries are reporting on its implementation for the first time. [42] At a minimum, this shows that peace education has become part of international education policy rather than a cause pursued only by individual advocates. Its long-term outcomes still need to be measured much better.
Research on programs designed to strengthen ties and cooperation between groups in fragile settings shows fairly modest results. Effects often remain local: relations improve among direct participants without spreading through the wider community. The authors of this review also warn that without addressing deeper sources of insecurity and inequality, such programs may be insufficient. [10]
There is an uncomfortable side to this question: education is not neutral. In the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre report The Two Faces of Education in Ethnic Conflict, Kenneth Bush and Diana Saltarelli showed how unequal access to education, segregation, cultural repression, and manipulation of history and textbooks can reproduce hostility between groups. [36] This is not a meta-analysis, nor does it prove that these mechanisms inevitably lead to conflict. It is an important warning for the design of educational programs. A single lesson on tolerance will do little if the education system itself entrenches exclusion or teaches students to see another group as a threat. The issue is not only how much education a society provides, but what it teaches, how learning is organized, and within which institutions.
Mature peace education has to pass two tests. First, it must not promise what it cannot yet demonstrate. Second, it must not confuse the absence of strong long-term evidence with proof of uselessness without asking how consistently, how widely, and for how long the approach has actually been studied. Ideas about peace deserve demanding standards; an evidence gap is a reason to investigate more carefully, not a convenient excuse to close the subject.
In 2025, global military expenditure reached almost $2.9 trillion, marking an eleventh consecutive year of growth. [40] To grasp the scale without pretending that the budgets are directly comparable, consider one specific international mechanism. Since 2025, the UN Peacebuilding Fund has received $50 million per year in assessed contributions. The UN Secretary-General has called for that figure to rise to $500 million annually. [45] Global military budgets and a single UN fund belong to entirely different categories, so they should not be reduced to a simplistic “war versus peace” ledger. Even so, the comparison raises a reasonable question: how seriously does humanity fund not only preparation for threats, but also conflict prevention?
Education systems themselves also face chronic resource shortages. UNESCO estimates an annual education financing gap of roughly $97 billion in low- and lower-middle-income countries. This figure concerns national targets related to Sustainable Development Goal 4 — quality education (SDG 4). [41] It is not a peace education budget, and the categories should not be conflated. But if education is one place where people learn how to deal with conflict, chronic underfunding of education clearly belongs in this conversation.
This suggests another task for Peaceful World: not only to address gaps in research, but also to close the gap between existing knowledge and public access to it. The knowledge already exists — in research, universities, UNESCO materials, mediation practice, restorative justice, civil resistance, and the work of dozens of organizations. For most people, it is scattered across disciplines, languages, and institutions, and they never see it assembled into a coherent map. Making that map visible is also part of peace education.
We cannot yet promise that peace education will prevent the next war. That is exactly why it deserves more serious and longer-term study — and why the knowledge we already have should be made more accessible to people who can turn it into everyday practice.
Some parenting support programs reduce harsh and violent parenting practices, especially in the short term. Reviews of this evidence underpin World Health Organization recommendations. [6] It is a remarkably ordinary example — no international declarations and no doves on posters. The result is simply that fewer children are harmed in the place where they first learn what relationships look like.
The evidence from schools is also becoming stronger. Large meta-analyses of social and emotional learning (SEL) programs find improvements in social and emotional skills, behavior, school climate, peer relationships, and academic outcomes. [7,8] Some randomized studies are especially instructive. For example, a program that taught children to take another person’s perspective reduced school violence and victimization in ethnically mixed schools in Turkey, reduced social exclusion, increased cross-ethnic ties, and improved helping and cooperative behavior. [9]
These results are encouraging, which is precisely why Peaceful World has to be strict about its own conclusions. We work in peace education ourselves, and the temptation to say “education creates peace” is understandable. The evidence supports a more modest statement. Some educational programs improve skills, relationships, and behavior; some reduce specific forms of aggression. Claiming more would be dishonest: existing research rarely allows us to trace a direct causal path from a peace education lesson to fewer wars twenty years later.
There is another trap. The absence of strong evidence for a final outcome does not always mean there is no effect: the causal chain may be too long, methods may be difficult to standardize, consequences may emerge years later, and randomized experiments at the scale of entire societies may be impossible or unethical. A gap like this does not vindicate a beautiful idea, but neither does it condemn it.
The reasonable position, then, is to test the effectiveness of peace education more rigorously rather than assume it in advance. It also needs better and longer-term research. In 2023, all 194 UNESCO Member States adopted the revised Recommendation on Education for Peace, Human Rights and Sustainable Development; in 2026, countries are reporting on its implementation for the first time. [42] At a minimum, this shows that peace education has become part of international education policy rather than a cause pursued only by individual advocates. Its long-term outcomes still need to be measured much better.
Research on programs designed to strengthen ties and cooperation between groups in fragile settings shows fairly modest results. Effects often remain local: relations improve among direct participants without spreading through the wider community. The authors of this review also warn that without addressing deeper sources of insecurity and inequality, such programs may be insufficient. [10]
There is an uncomfortable side to this question: education is not neutral. In the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre report The Two Faces of Education in Ethnic Conflict, Kenneth Bush and Diana Saltarelli showed how unequal access to education, segregation, cultural repression, and manipulation of history and textbooks can reproduce hostility between groups. [36] This is not a meta-analysis, nor does it prove that these mechanisms inevitably lead to conflict. It is an important warning for the design of educational programs. A single lesson on tolerance will do little if the education system itself entrenches exclusion or teaches students to see another group as a threat. The issue is not only how much education a society provides, but what it teaches, how learning is organized, and within which institutions.
Mature peace education has to pass two tests. First, it must not promise what it cannot yet demonstrate. Second, it must not confuse the absence of strong long-term evidence with proof of uselessness without asking how consistently, how widely, and for how long the approach has actually been studied. Ideas about peace deserve demanding standards; an evidence gap is a reason to investigate more carefully, not a convenient excuse to close the subject.
In 2025, global military expenditure reached almost $2.9 trillion, marking an eleventh consecutive year of growth. [40] To grasp the scale without pretending that the budgets are directly comparable, consider one specific international mechanism. Since 2025, the UN Peacebuilding Fund has received $50 million per year in assessed contributions. The UN Secretary-General has called for that figure to rise to $500 million annually. [45] Global military budgets and a single UN fund belong to entirely different categories, so they should not be reduced to a simplistic “war versus peace” ledger. Even so, the comparison raises a reasonable question: how seriously does humanity fund not only preparation for threats, but also conflict prevention?
Education systems themselves also face chronic resource shortages. UNESCO estimates an annual education financing gap of roughly $97 billion in low- and lower-middle-income countries. This figure concerns national targets related to Sustainable Development Goal 4 — quality education (SDG 4). [41] It is not a peace education budget, and the categories should not be conflated. But if education is one place where people learn how to deal with conflict, chronic underfunding of education clearly belongs in this conversation.
This suggests another task for Peaceful World: not only to address gaps in research, but also to close the gap between existing knowledge and public access to it. The knowledge already exists — in research, universities, UNESCO materials, mediation practice, restorative justice, civil resistance, and the work of dozens of organizations. For most people, it is scattered across disciplines, languages, and institutions, and they never see it assembled into a coherent map. Making that map visible is also part of peace education.
We cannot yet promise that peace education will prevent the next war. That is exactly why it deserves more serious and longer-term study — and why the knowledge we already have should be made more accessible to people who can turn it into everyday practice.
Do not exclude others from the moral circle: dehumanization
One of the most accessible ways to reduce the risk of violence begins before any physical act — in how we see another person. Dehumanization begins when a person or an entire group is no longer treated as fully human. In its most extreme form, the language is literal: people are described as vermin, a disease, filth, or an undifferentiated mass, as if ordinary moral rules no longer applied to them. It does not always require a poster or an official slogan. A line in a family chat or a comment thread may be enough: “they’re all like that,” “there’s no other way to deal with them.” Millions of different people are compressed into a single moral caricature, and harm becomes easier to rename as a “necessary measure” rather than cruelty.
The modern literature on dehumanization is extensive, but its conclusions do not always agree. Some classic theories described subtler forms — for example, attributing fewer uniquely human qualities or complex emotions to people outside one’s own group. Later research has shown that some of these effects may be explained by ordinary preference for one’s own group and by stereotyping rather than a distinct mechanism of “denying humanity.” [57,58] Not every form of dislike should therefore be labeled dehumanization. The concept is most reliable where people are explicitly denied humanity, or treated as objects, functions, or categories whose pain ceases to carry moral weight.
A 2026 systematic review brought together 96 recent studies. Closer, more positive relationships and greater empathy were associated with less dehumanization, while the belief that some groups should dominate others was associated with greater dehumanization. Most of the included studies used experimental methods and examined both relations between groups and relations between individuals. [50] A separate large 2026 study found that the link between explicit dehumanization and support for violence between groups could not be reduced to ordinary dislike: it remained even after accounting for general negativity toward the outgroup. [51]
The mirror effect is especially dangerous. Research suggests that when people believe another group “does not see us as human,” this can intensify reciprocal dehumanization and support for aggressive action. Across a series of ten studies, the pattern appeared in several real conflicts. Experiments also found the reverse: learning that the other group recognized one’s humanity increased willingness to reciprocate. [52] Our belief about how the enemy sees us becomes part of the conflict itself.
Dehumanization is not necessary for every kind of violence. Experiments by Tage Rai, Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Jesse Graham found that dehumanization increased violence when harm was used as a means to an end, but was not necessary when participants regarded the violence as morally right. [53] Sometimes the dangerous thought is not “they are not human,” but “they are human, and this is still the right thing to do to them.” We need to guard against both kinds of reasoning.
Practice begins with language. Do not assign collective guilt to millions of people. Do not speak of a state, army, party, religion, or nationality as if it were a single person with one will and a single burden of guilt. Do not spread a degrading label simply because it helps your side. Do not confuse recognizing an offender’s humanity with excusing the offense. Do not deny another group the human complexity we readily grant our own. And be especially alert to messages that make us instantly want to stop seeing someone as a person.
This is not a call for moral symmetry between a victim and the person causing harm. Responsibility, facts, and differences in role must be named accurately. Humanization means something else: even a guilty person remains human, and dignity is not a prize for good behavior. This is one of the difficulties of a nonviolent ethic: it asks us to see the wrongness of the act without erasing the person in our imagination.
Refusing to dehumanize does not mean excusing. It means refusing to let the people we oppose define our own humanity.
The modern literature on dehumanization is extensive, but its conclusions do not always agree. Some classic theories described subtler forms — for example, attributing fewer uniquely human qualities or complex emotions to people outside one’s own group. Later research has shown that some of these effects may be explained by ordinary preference for one’s own group and by stereotyping rather than a distinct mechanism of “denying humanity.” [57,58] Not every form of dislike should therefore be labeled dehumanization. The concept is most reliable where people are explicitly denied humanity, or treated as objects, functions, or categories whose pain ceases to carry moral weight.
A 2026 systematic review brought together 96 recent studies. Closer, more positive relationships and greater empathy were associated with less dehumanization, while the belief that some groups should dominate others was associated with greater dehumanization. Most of the included studies used experimental methods and examined both relations between groups and relations between individuals. [50] A separate large 2026 study found that the link between explicit dehumanization and support for violence between groups could not be reduced to ordinary dislike: it remained even after accounting for general negativity toward the outgroup. [51]
The mirror effect is especially dangerous. Research suggests that when people believe another group “does not see us as human,” this can intensify reciprocal dehumanization and support for aggressive action. Across a series of ten studies, the pattern appeared in several real conflicts. Experiments also found the reverse: learning that the other group recognized one’s humanity increased willingness to reciprocate. [52] Our belief about how the enemy sees us becomes part of the conflict itself.
Dehumanization is not necessary for every kind of violence. Experiments by Tage Rai, Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Jesse Graham found that dehumanization increased violence when harm was used as a means to an end, but was not necessary when participants regarded the violence as morally right. [53] Sometimes the dangerous thought is not “they are not human,” but “they are human, and this is still the right thing to do to them.” We need to guard against both kinds of reasoning.
Practice begins with language. Do not assign collective guilt to millions of people. Do not speak of a state, army, party, religion, or nationality as if it were a single person with one will and a single burden of guilt. Do not spread a degrading label simply because it helps your side. Do not confuse recognizing an offender’s humanity with excusing the offense. Do not deny another group the human complexity we readily grant our own. And be especially alert to messages that make us instantly want to stop seeing someone as a person.
This is not a call for moral symmetry between a victim and the person causing harm. Responsibility, facts, and differences in role must be named accurately. Humanization means something else: even a guilty person remains human, and dignity is not a prize for good behavior. This is one of the difficulties of a nonviolent ethic: it asks us to see the wrongness of the act without erasing the person in our imagination.
Refusing to dehumanize does not mean excusing. It means refusing to let the people we oppose define our own humanity.
Peace as a practice, not a profession
This idea has a long and uncomfortable history. In his essay The First Step, Leo Tolstoy was less concerned with the correct set of beliefs than with consistency in moral life. What troubled him was how easily people speak about high ideals while leaving everyday practice almost untouched. For Tolstoy, the seriousness of a moral aspiration was tested by whether it began with self-restraint where a person could actually change something in themselves. [55]
Tolstoy is easy to simplify. He explicitly noted that changing one’s diet does not by itself make a person moral. His argument was different: if someone is serious about reducing the harm they cause, that effort should gradually reach habits society considers so ordinary that it stops noticing the suffering behind them. In Tolstoy’s own case, this “first step” meant giving up food that required animals to be killed. [55]
Peaceful World does not turn this into a test of moral purity. Everyone lives inside systems whose consequences they cannot fully control, and everyone remains inconsistent. But it is reasonable to expect a higher degree of consistency from people who speak publicly or professionally about peace. Peacebuilding does not begin with a conference badge. It begins with a question: how visible is the principle of nonviolence in my own life — in how I treat family members, subordinates, political opponents, people from different backgrounds, and beings who are weaker than I am and cannot retaliate?
For Peaceful World, the moral circle does not end at the boundary of the human species. Other sentient beings can suffer too. Reducing our participation in practices that cause them suffering is one of the few ethical choices a person can make today, without waiting for reform of the United Nations. Science does not currently show that changing one’s diet by itself reduces the number of wars or makes a person kinder to other humans; we simply do not have such evidence.
The research suggests a subtler and more interesting relationship. Studies of how attitudes toward animals relate to human prejudice suggest that, in some samples, belief in a rigid hierarchy — “humans above, animals below” — is associated with dehumanizing human groups by comparing them to animals. In studies with children, a sharper perceived boundary between humans and other animals was associated with stronger racial prejudice; researchers linked part of this relationship to dehumanization. Perceptions of similarity between humans and other animals could also be shifted experimentally. [54] Recent reviews of the psychology of speciesism — discrimination on the basis of species — likewise connect attitudes toward animals with a broader tendency to support rigid hierarchies between groups. [43] These findings should not be mechanically transferred to relations between human groups, and they do not support the formula “being kinder to animals makes people more peaceful toward other humans.” But they make the boundary of the moral circle a scientifically interesting question, not merely a matter of personal taste.
There is another body of research, much of it observational. A systematic review of studies on animal cruelty among children and adolescents found an association with later interpersonal violence and other forms of antisocial behavior, but the studies were heterogeneous and do not support a simple causal chain. [44] It would be a mistake to treat this literature as proof of “one mechanism of violence.” Its more modest value is that different ways of treating vulnerable beings deserve to be studied together.
Psychologist Melanie Joy proposed the term carnism for one such cultural norm: a belief system that makes eating certain animals seem natural and largely invisible as a moral choice, while society treats other animals as beings with a very different moral status. [56] For this article, the concept is useful as a way of examining a cultural norm, not as proof of causation. It brings us back to Sorokin’s question: which forms of harm become invisible simply because culture has declared them normal?
The point extends beyond diet. Nonviolence that exists only in books, resolutions, and job descriptions can easily become a profession without a practice. No one has to be flawless in order to work for peace. But the more loudly we speak about nonviolence, the more honestly we should ask where our own choices can already reduce harm.
Moral purity is not required. What matters is direction: fewer excuses for harm based on habit, convenience, loyalty to our own group, or the phrase “that’s just how the world works.”
Tolstoy is easy to simplify. He explicitly noted that changing one’s diet does not by itself make a person moral. His argument was different: if someone is serious about reducing the harm they cause, that effort should gradually reach habits society considers so ordinary that it stops noticing the suffering behind them. In Tolstoy’s own case, this “first step” meant giving up food that required animals to be killed. [55]
Peaceful World does not turn this into a test of moral purity. Everyone lives inside systems whose consequences they cannot fully control, and everyone remains inconsistent. But it is reasonable to expect a higher degree of consistency from people who speak publicly or professionally about peace. Peacebuilding does not begin with a conference badge. It begins with a question: how visible is the principle of nonviolence in my own life — in how I treat family members, subordinates, political opponents, people from different backgrounds, and beings who are weaker than I am and cannot retaliate?
For Peaceful World, the moral circle does not end at the boundary of the human species. Other sentient beings can suffer too. Reducing our participation in practices that cause them suffering is one of the few ethical choices a person can make today, without waiting for reform of the United Nations. Science does not currently show that changing one’s diet by itself reduces the number of wars or makes a person kinder to other humans; we simply do not have such evidence.
The research suggests a subtler and more interesting relationship. Studies of how attitudes toward animals relate to human prejudice suggest that, in some samples, belief in a rigid hierarchy — “humans above, animals below” — is associated with dehumanizing human groups by comparing them to animals. In studies with children, a sharper perceived boundary between humans and other animals was associated with stronger racial prejudice; researchers linked part of this relationship to dehumanization. Perceptions of similarity between humans and other animals could also be shifted experimentally. [54] Recent reviews of the psychology of speciesism — discrimination on the basis of species — likewise connect attitudes toward animals with a broader tendency to support rigid hierarchies between groups. [43] These findings should not be mechanically transferred to relations between human groups, and they do not support the formula “being kinder to animals makes people more peaceful toward other humans.” But they make the boundary of the moral circle a scientifically interesting question, not merely a matter of personal taste.
There is another body of research, much of it observational. A systematic review of studies on animal cruelty among children and adolescents found an association with later interpersonal violence and other forms of antisocial behavior, but the studies were heterogeneous and do not support a simple causal chain. [44] It would be a mistake to treat this literature as proof of “one mechanism of violence.” Its more modest value is that different ways of treating vulnerable beings deserve to be studied together.
Psychologist Melanie Joy proposed the term carnism for one such cultural norm: a belief system that makes eating certain animals seem natural and largely invisible as a moral choice, while society treats other animals as beings with a very different moral status. [56] For this article, the concept is useful as a way of examining a cultural norm, not as proof of causation. It brings us back to Sorokin’s question: which forms of harm become invisible simply because culture has declared them normal?
The point extends beyond diet. Nonviolence that exists only in books, resolutions, and job descriptions can easily become a profession without a practice. No one has to be flawless in order to work for peace. But the more loudly we speak about nonviolence, the more honestly we should ask where our own choices can already reduce harm.
Moral purity is not required. What matters is direction: fewer excuses for harm based on habit, convenience, loyalty to our own group, or the phrase “that’s just how the world works.”
Institutions amplify human choices
When the discussion reaches courts, parliaments, police, and international organizations, it is easy to imagine that we have finally left “small” personal ethics behind and entered the world of “real” high politics. In reality, people become judges, ministers, diplomats, soldiers, journalists, entrepreneurs, and heads of state after years of forming beliefs about power, punishment, dignity, outsiders, obedience, cooperation, and acceptable limits on force.
Good upbringing does not guarantee good politics. A family cannot replace a constitution, and a school lesson cannot replace an independent court. But institutions can do what individuals cannot: embed rules in everyday practice, protect the weaker from the stronger, limit arbitrary power, and preserve norms beyond a single human lifetime. Bad institutions can just as powerfully amplify prejudice, impunity, and violence.
The personal and institutional dimensions of peace work in both directions. People build institutions, and institutions then reshape people’s incentives and behavior; neither cancels the other. Peace is built from the inside out — and from the outside in.
Good upbringing does not guarantee good politics. A family cannot replace a constitution, and a school lesson cannot replace an independent court. But institutions can do what individuals cannot: embed rules in everyday practice, protect the weaker from the stronger, limit arbitrary power, and preserve norms beyond a single human lifetime. Bad institutions can just as powerfully amplify prejudice, impunity, and violence.
The personal and institutional dimensions of peace work in both directions. People build institutions, and institutions then reshape people’s incentives and behavior; neither cancels the other. Peace is built from the inside out — and from the outside in.
Sometimes peace is built in very ordinary ways
One lesson is easy to miss if we study only the philosophy of peace. Some of the most convincing evidence for reducing particular forms of violence comes from public health, injury prevention, and criminology. These measures are rarely called “peacebuilding,” although they reduce very real assaults, injuries, and deaths.
Programs to prevent intimate partner violence show small but measurable effects. A review of 26 studies found a small overall effect for programs designed to prevent intimate partner violence; the programs, settings, and quality of evidence varied considerably. [34] Another review combined 18 randomized trials involving almost 23,000 adolescents and found clearer reductions in physical dating violence, while the evidence for sexual violence remained uncertain. [35] The practical lesson is the same: it is not enough to measure whether people give better answers to questions about relationships. We need to ask whether fewer people actually use violence or become victims of it.
Alcohol: a familiar risk we have learned not to notice
Alcohol illustrates the difference between lacking knowledge and failing to act on what we know. WHO describes ethanol — the alcohol contained in alcoholic beverages — as a psychoactive and toxic substance that can cause dependence. According to WHO’s global estimates, alcohol consumption was associated with about 2.6 million deaths in 2019; roughly 700,000 were due to injuries. WHO specifically identifies road traffic crashes, sexual violence, intimate partner violence, suicide, and other intentional and unintentional injuries. [47]
For our purposes, the most important issue is preventable harm. A systematic review of alcohol taxes and pricing found that higher alcohol prices were associated with reductions in a range of harmful outcomes, including violence. [26] In 2026, WHO again listed several of the most effective and cost-effective measures: restricting availability, countering drink-driving, limiting advertising and sponsorship, helping people with harmful alcohol use, and raising prices through tax and pricing policies. [48]
This raises an uncomfortable cultural question. Being legal is not the same as being safe. In many societies, alcohol is woven so deeply into celebrations, business meetings, advertising, and ideas of “normal adult life” that its role in violence and injury fades into the background. WHO also explicitly reports that countries continue to face alcohol-industry interference in policy development. [47] This is not a conspiracy, nor a reason to blame everyone who drinks alcohol. It is an ordinary conflict of interest: the alcohol industry protects its interests, while society decides what restrictions it is willing to accept for the sake of health and safety.
This issue has both personal and institutional dimensions. Governments can regulate availability, advertising, drink-driving, and prices, while providing support and treatment. Individuals can reduce the role of alcohol in their own lives, avoid making it a compulsory social ritual, and seek professional help when use becomes harmful. None of these measures “creates peace” by itself, but reducing the influence of a known risk factor is a concrete way to reduce harm. The strange part is that we know the risk well and still become accustomed to it remarkably quickly.
Police: a tool for safety — and a potential source of violence
Police require especially careful language. The mere presence of police does not make a society peaceful. A security institution can protect people from violence, fail to respond to it, enforce the law selectively, or become a source of unlawful and disproportionate violence itself. The question “more or less policing?” is therefore too crude. The more important questions are: what exactly is being done, what harm is the intervention trying to reduce, by what means, under whose oversight, and what happens when violence is committed by the very institutions meant to provide security?
Some narrowly targeted policing strategies do reduce specific forms of local violence. A systematic review of hot spots policing finds, on average, reductions in crime, including violent crime, without necessarily displacing all of it to neighboring streets. [24] Focused deterrence — concentrating attention on a relatively small number of groups and individuals linked to the most serious violence — also shows favorable results, although almost all of the evidence comes from the United States and much of it from studies without random assignment. [25] These are arguments for particular methods, not for policing as a universal solution to violence.
Policing also has costs of its own. A 2023 systematic review brought together research on the direct and indirect health effects of police violence in the United States and found substantial harm, along with pronounced racial disparities in exposure to such violence. [49] This literature is US-based and cannot simply be generalized to every country. But it challenges the comforting assumption that violence stops being violence when it is carried out by someone in uniform.
Respectful treatment, an opportunity to be heard, neutrality, and clear reasons for decisions improve trust, satisfaction, and willingness to cooperate. That is the broad picture from a systematic review of procedural justice in policing — whether people are treated fairly, respectfully, and given a voice. Effects on criminal behavior itself are more modest. [27] Peaceful security therefore requires not only the capacity to stop an attack, but accountability, proportionality, legal limits, external oversight, and recognition of human dignity even when coercion is being used against someone.
Coercion can restrain one form of violence and create another. It should not be called peaceful merely because it is legal, institutional, or exercised in the name of security. We have to evaluate the consequences, the proportionality of the means, and the accountability of those who use force.
Some forms of restorative justice also show cautiously encouraging results. A series of randomized trials of restorative justice conferences in Australia and the United Kingdom found reduced reoffending in some groups, especially in offenses involving direct victims, and improvements in some psychological outcomes for some victims, including post-traumatic symptoms. Results varied by offense type and participants. [28] Once again, the word “restorative” guarantees nothing; what matters is how the program is actually designed and delivered.
Of course, a peaceful civilization cannot be reduced to taxes, patrols, alcohol regulation, or prevention programs. But these prosaic measures matter for a simple reason: violence can often be reduced in very specific places — wherever the actual probability of harm changes. Sometimes the lever is a worldview; sometimes a rule, the availability of a substance, the design of a street, or the way a representative of the state speaks to a person. Science does not have to be poetic to save a life. The more precisely we ask what kind of violence we are trying to reduce — and who is responsible for any harm caused by our method — the more useful the evidence becomes.
Programs to prevent intimate partner violence show small but measurable effects. A review of 26 studies found a small overall effect for programs designed to prevent intimate partner violence; the programs, settings, and quality of evidence varied considerably. [34] Another review combined 18 randomized trials involving almost 23,000 adolescents and found clearer reductions in physical dating violence, while the evidence for sexual violence remained uncertain. [35] The practical lesson is the same: it is not enough to measure whether people give better answers to questions about relationships. We need to ask whether fewer people actually use violence or become victims of it.
Alcohol: a familiar risk we have learned not to notice
Alcohol illustrates the difference between lacking knowledge and failing to act on what we know. WHO describes ethanol — the alcohol contained in alcoholic beverages — as a psychoactive and toxic substance that can cause dependence. According to WHO’s global estimates, alcohol consumption was associated with about 2.6 million deaths in 2019; roughly 700,000 were due to injuries. WHO specifically identifies road traffic crashes, sexual violence, intimate partner violence, suicide, and other intentional and unintentional injuries. [47]
For our purposes, the most important issue is preventable harm. A systematic review of alcohol taxes and pricing found that higher alcohol prices were associated with reductions in a range of harmful outcomes, including violence. [26] In 2026, WHO again listed several of the most effective and cost-effective measures: restricting availability, countering drink-driving, limiting advertising and sponsorship, helping people with harmful alcohol use, and raising prices through tax and pricing policies. [48]
This raises an uncomfortable cultural question. Being legal is not the same as being safe. In many societies, alcohol is woven so deeply into celebrations, business meetings, advertising, and ideas of “normal adult life” that its role in violence and injury fades into the background. WHO also explicitly reports that countries continue to face alcohol-industry interference in policy development. [47] This is not a conspiracy, nor a reason to blame everyone who drinks alcohol. It is an ordinary conflict of interest: the alcohol industry protects its interests, while society decides what restrictions it is willing to accept for the sake of health and safety.
This issue has both personal and institutional dimensions. Governments can regulate availability, advertising, drink-driving, and prices, while providing support and treatment. Individuals can reduce the role of alcohol in their own lives, avoid making it a compulsory social ritual, and seek professional help when use becomes harmful. None of these measures “creates peace” by itself, but reducing the influence of a known risk factor is a concrete way to reduce harm. The strange part is that we know the risk well and still become accustomed to it remarkably quickly.
Police: a tool for safety — and a potential source of violence
Police require especially careful language. The mere presence of police does not make a society peaceful. A security institution can protect people from violence, fail to respond to it, enforce the law selectively, or become a source of unlawful and disproportionate violence itself. The question “more or less policing?” is therefore too crude. The more important questions are: what exactly is being done, what harm is the intervention trying to reduce, by what means, under whose oversight, and what happens when violence is committed by the very institutions meant to provide security?
Some narrowly targeted policing strategies do reduce specific forms of local violence. A systematic review of hot spots policing finds, on average, reductions in crime, including violent crime, without necessarily displacing all of it to neighboring streets. [24] Focused deterrence — concentrating attention on a relatively small number of groups and individuals linked to the most serious violence — also shows favorable results, although almost all of the evidence comes from the United States and much of it from studies without random assignment. [25] These are arguments for particular methods, not for policing as a universal solution to violence.
Policing also has costs of its own. A 2023 systematic review brought together research on the direct and indirect health effects of police violence in the United States and found substantial harm, along with pronounced racial disparities in exposure to such violence. [49] This literature is US-based and cannot simply be generalized to every country. But it challenges the comforting assumption that violence stops being violence when it is carried out by someone in uniform.
Respectful treatment, an opportunity to be heard, neutrality, and clear reasons for decisions improve trust, satisfaction, and willingness to cooperate. That is the broad picture from a systematic review of procedural justice in policing — whether people are treated fairly, respectfully, and given a voice. Effects on criminal behavior itself are more modest. [27] Peaceful security therefore requires not only the capacity to stop an attack, but accountability, proportionality, legal limits, external oversight, and recognition of human dignity even when coercion is being used against someone.
Coercion can restrain one form of violence and create another. It should not be called peaceful merely because it is legal, institutional, or exercised in the name of security. We have to evaluate the consequences, the proportionality of the means, and the accountability of those who use force.
Some forms of restorative justice also show cautiously encouraging results. A series of randomized trials of restorative justice conferences in Australia and the United Kingdom found reduced reoffending in some groups, especially in offenses involving direct victims, and improvements in some psychological outcomes for some victims, including post-traumatic symptoms. Results varied by offense type and participants. [28] Once again, the word “restorative” guarantees nothing; what matters is how the program is actually designed and delivered.
Of course, a peaceful civilization cannot be reduced to taxes, patrols, alcohol regulation, or prevention programs. But these prosaic measures matter for a simple reason: violence can often be reduced in very specific places — wherever the actual probability of harm changes. Sometimes the lever is a worldview; sometimes a rule, the availability of a substance, the design of a street, or the way a representative of the state speaks to a person. Science does not have to be poetic to save a life. The more precisely we ask what kind of violence we are trying to reduce — and who is responsible for any harm caused by our method — the more useful the evidence becomes.
What happens when the “other” stops being an abstraction
For decades, social psychology has studied contact between people from different groups as a way of reducing mutual hostility. The idea is simple: a group known only through rumors, propaganda, or caricatures is easier to demonize. A living person is almost always more complicated than a stereotype.
Research usually associates such contact with lower prejudice. That was the overall result of the classic meta-analysis by Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp, which combined evidence from more than 500 studies. [11]
When researchers tightened the quality criteria, the conclusions became more cautious. A stricter reassessment found only 27 studies in which participants had been randomly assigned and outcomes measured after some time. The overall finding that contact can help remained, but effects were much weaker for racial and ethnic prejudice, and important areas — including prejudice among adults — were understudied. [12] In 2026, a re-analysis of 21 studies that followed participants over time produced an even more cautious picture. When the analysis better accounted for stable differences between people and other unmeasured factors, the statistically significant relationship between contact and later attitudes toward the other group disappeared. The authors therefore concluded that these data do not yet allow us to say confidently that contact itself changed attitudes. [33]
Another problem is whether an effect carries beyond the specific setting in which it was observed. In an experiment in post-ISIS Iraq, Christians who played on the same football team as Muslims became more tolerant toward Muslim teammates. Outside that setting, however, the changes were much weaker — both in other social settings and in attitudes toward unfamiliar Muslims. [13]
A 2024 meta-analysis points to an uncomfortable asymmetry as well: negative contact with members of another group may strengthen prejudice more than positive contact weakens it. [22]
The advice “we just need to talk to each other more” is too simple. Put more precisely, well-structured, sufficiently sustained contact in which people cooperate often helps reduce prejudice, although the strength and durability of the effect depend on the conditions and on how the research is designed. Familiarity by itself does not erase power imbalances, propaganda, discrimination, or political interests. Peace needs relationships — and rules within which those relationships exist.
Research usually associates such contact with lower prejudice. That was the overall result of the classic meta-analysis by Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp, which combined evidence from more than 500 studies. [11]
When researchers tightened the quality criteria, the conclusions became more cautious. A stricter reassessment found only 27 studies in which participants had been randomly assigned and outcomes measured after some time. The overall finding that contact can help remained, but effects were much weaker for racial and ethnic prejudice, and important areas — including prejudice among adults — were understudied. [12] In 2026, a re-analysis of 21 studies that followed participants over time produced an even more cautious picture. When the analysis better accounted for stable differences between people and other unmeasured factors, the statistically significant relationship between contact and later attitudes toward the other group disappeared. The authors therefore concluded that these data do not yet allow us to say confidently that contact itself changed attitudes. [33]
Another problem is whether an effect carries beyond the specific setting in which it was observed. In an experiment in post-ISIS Iraq, Christians who played on the same football team as Muslims became more tolerant toward Muslim teammates. Outside that setting, however, the changes were much weaker — both in other social settings and in attitudes toward unfamiliar Muslims. [13]
A 2024 meta-analysis points to an uncomfortable asymmetry as well: negative contact with members of another group may strengthen prejudice more than positive contact weakens it. [22]
The advice “we just need to talk to each other more” is too simple. Put more precisely, well-structured, sufficiently sustained contact in which people cooperate often helps reduce prejudice, although the strength and durability of the effect depend on the conditions and on how the research is designed. Familiarity by itself does not erase power imbalances, propaganda, discrimination, or political interests. Peace needs relationships — and rules within which those relationships exist.
Peace is also a matter of the rules of the game
Imagine a society made up of two large groups with a history of mistrust. In one version, both groups know that losing an election does not mean losing their civil rights. The courts do not belong to the winner, the police do not serve only one community, political participation remains open, and the minority has real ways to defend its interests without weapons.
In the other version, defeat means exclusion from power. One group controls the security services. The other is systematically cut off from resources and reliable protection. A peaceful transfer of power is almost impossible.
Even if the people in both versions are psychologically identical, the risk of political violence will differ.
Individual psychology is no longer enough. One of the most consistent findings in research on civil conflict concerns the political exclusion of groups. Data from the Ethnic Power Relations project show that politically relevant ethnic groups are more likely to enter armed conflict with the state when they are excluded from central power, especially if they have recently lost influence and are able to mobilize a substantial share of their supporters. [14]
Researchers call these horizontal inequalities. The issue is not ordinary economic inequality between individuals, but situations in which economic, political, and social inequalities line up with group boundaries — ethnic, religious, or regional — and become part of collective identity.
Research consistently associates such horizontal inequalities with the risk of conflict organized around ethnic or national identity. The association is strong, but it comes from observing real societies rather than from experiments; we cannot assume that the same causal relationship operates in every context. [15]
The popular phrase “poverty causes wars” also needs qualification. Poverty can create vulnerability, and economic shocks can intensify tension, but the relationship between economic conditions and armed conflict varies greatly by context. Political exclusion, institutional weakness, a group’s capacity to mobilize, and the extent to which economic differences overlap with identity are especially important. [14,15,32]
The more precise conclusion is that peaceful societies do not need institutions that are merely “strong.” They need three qualities — capacity, accountability, and inclusion. Capacity without accountability can slide into repression; inclusion without the capacity to uphold rules can become hollow.
The opposite mistake is to turn institutions into new saviors. A capable and fair court can keep a conflict from becoming violent, but a court alone cannot create a culture of respect. An accountable security system can reduce some forms of harm; an unaccountable one can multiply them. Institutions can set boundaries on behavior, but people still have to give those boundaries meaning.
In the other version, defeat means exclusion from power. One group controls the security services. The other is systematically cut off from resources and reliable protection. A peaceful transfer of power is almost impossible.
Even if the people in both versions are psychologically identical, the risk of political violence will differ.
Individual psychology is no longer enough. One of the most consistent findings in research on civil conflict concerns the political exclusion of groups. Data from the Ethnic Power Relations project show that politically relevant ethnic groups are more likely to enter armed conflict with the state when they are excluded from central power, especially if they have recently lost influence and are able to mobilize a substantial share of their supporters. [14]
Researchers call these horizontal inequalities. The issue is not ordinary economic inequality between individuals, but situations in which economic, political, and social inequalities line up with group boundaries — ethnic, religious, or regional — and become part of collective identity.
Research consistently associates such horizontal inequalities with the risk of conflict organized around ethnic or national identity. The association is strong, but it comes from observing real societies rather than from experiments; we cannot assume that the same causal relationship operates in every context. [15]
The popular phrase “poverty causes wars” also needs qualification. Poverty can create vulnerability, and economic shocks can intensify tension, but the relationship between economic conditions and armed conflict varies greatly by context. Political exclusion, institutional weakness, a group’s capacity to mobilize, and the extent to which economic differences overlap with identity are especially important. [14,15,32]
The more precise conclusion is that peaceful societies do not need institutions that are merely “strong.” They need three qualities — capacity, accountability, and inclusion. Capacity without accountability can slide into repression; inclusion without the capacity to uphold rules can become hollow.
The opposite mistake is to turn institutions into new saviors. A capable and fair court can keep a conflict from becoming violent, but a court alone cannot create a culture of respect. An accountable security system can reduce some forms of harm; an unaccountable one can multiply them. Institutions can set boundaries on behavior, but people still have to give those boundaries meaning.
How wars end: negotiation, mediation, and power-sharing
Between peacetime and the arrival of peacekeepers after escalation lies a field that is easy to overlook: conflict settlement itself. War is not only something to explain or survive; it also has to be brought to an end. The parties have to stop fighting, agree on rules, and believe that disarmament will not become an invitation to be destroyed.
Negotiation and mediation seem like obvious tools, but evaluating their effectiveness is harder than it looks. Mediators are not assigned randomly. Sometimes they are invited into the hardest conflicts; sometimes they arrive when the parties are already ready to compromise. A simple question such as “Do mediated conflicts end more successfully?” can therefore confuse the effect of mediation itself with the kinds of conflicts in which mediation is used.
Kyle Beardsley’s research describes what he calls the mediation dilemma: an active mediator with leverage may help parties reach an agreement more quickly, but concessions accepted under outside pressure do not always produce durable peace over the longer term. [29] This is not an argument against mediation. It simply means that ending violence in the short term and sustaining an agreement are different outcomes.
After civil war, another problem appears: can former enemies trust each other’s commitments? A side that lays down its weapons has to believe that its opponent will not exploit its vulnerability tomorrow. This is why researchers study different forms of power-sharing — political, territorial, economic, and security arrangements between former adversaries. Hartzell and Hoddie found that, in their sample, agreements containing more of these mechanisms were associated with more durable peace. [30] There is a cost, however: institutions designed to protect groups can also freeze wartime divisions and entrench elites that emerged from the conflict.
The better question is not “Does power-sharing work?” but which problem of mistrust it solves, whether the agreement is implemented in practice, whether a temporary security guarantee becomes a permanent political cage, and what incentives to preserve peace remain once the immediate fear has faded.
This leads to the question of women’s participation in peace processes. Jana Krause, Werner Krause, and Piia Bränfors found a robust statistical association between agreements signed by women delegates and more durable peace; such agreements also contained more provisions for political reform and were more likely to be implemented. [31] This is an important finding, but not an experiment: women are not randomly assigned to negotiating tables, and more open processes may already differ from closed ones before women participate.
Popular figures such as 20% or 35% should not be presented as proof of causation. The stronger and more honest claim is narrower: meaningful participation by women is consistently associated with higher-quality and more durable peace processes. The possible explanations deserve attention, but we still do not know how much of the outcome can be attributed specifically to women’s participation.
A peace agreement is not a magic signature at the bottom of a war. It is a system of rules designed to make keeping commitments a more rational choice than returning to arms.
Negotiation and mediation seem like obvious tools, but evaluating their effectiveness is harder than it looks. Mediators are not assigned randomly. Sometimes they are invited into the hardest conflicts; sometimes they arrive when the parties are already ready to compromise. A simple question such as “Do mediated conflicts end more successfully?” can therefore confuse the effect of mediation itself with the kinds of conflicts in which mediation is used.
Kyle Beardsley’s research describes what he calls the mediation dilemma: an active mediator with leverage may help parties reach an agreement more quickly, but concessions accepted under outside pressure do not always produce durable peace over the longer term. [29] This is not an argument against mediation. It simply means that ending violence in the short term and sustaining an agreement are different outcomes.
After civil war, another problem appears: can former enemies trust each other’s commitments? A side that lays down its weapons has to believe that its opponent will not exploit its vulnerability tomorrow. This is why researchers study different forms of power-sharing — political, territorial, economic, and security arrangements between former adversaries. Hartzell and Hoddie found that, in their sample, agreements containing more of these mechanisms were associated with more durable peace. [30] There is a cost, however: institutions designed to protect groups can also freeze wartime divisions and entrench elites that emerged from the conflict.
The better question is not “Does power-sharing work?” but which problem of mistrust it solves, whether the agreement is implemented in practice, whether a temporary security guarantee becomes a permanent political cage, and what incentives to preserve peace remain once the immediate fear has faded.
This leads to the question of women’s participation in peace processes. Jana Krause, Werner Krause, and Piia Bränfors found a robust statistical association between agreements signed by women delegates and more durable peace; such agreements also contained more provisions for political reform and were more likely to be implemented. [31] This is an important finding, but not an experiment: women are not randomly assigned to negotiating tables, and more open processes may already differ from closed ones before women participate.
Popular figures such as 20% or 35% should not be presented as proof of causation. The stronger and more honest claim is narrower: meaningful participation by women is consistently associated with higher-quality and more durable peace processes. The possible explanations deserve attention, but we still do not know how much of the outcome can be attributed specifically to women’s participation.
A peace agreement is not a magic signature at the bottom of a war. It is a system of rules designed to make keeping commitments a more rational choice than returning to arms.
Sometimes peace has to be physically held in place
Peaceful World consistently advocates nonviolence, which is precisely why it cannot ignore evidence on United Nations peacekeeping. The history of peacekeeping includes failures, scandals, and tragedies; Rwanda and Srebrenica became symbols of a hard truth: international presence guarantees nothing. But those failures do not show that peacekeeping fails in general.
On the contrary, comparative research over recent decades has fairly consistently found that, under certain conditions during and after civil conflicts, international peacekeeping reduces the risk of renewed war, while larger deployments of armed UN peacekeepers in active conflicts are associated with fewer battlefield deaths. [16,17]
The evidence forces us to distinguish two tasks: stopping violence and building peace. Peacekeepers may physically separate armed parties and reduce killings, but their presence does not by itself create fair institutions, trust, or reconciliation.
The fact that such a tool works under some conditions does not amount to ethical approval of every use of force. For Peaceful World, these are separate questions. We distinguish peaceful methods from limited coercion used only in extreme circumstances to save lives and stop violence already under way. Even when such coercion reduces immediate violence, Peaceful World treats it as a tragic sign that peace mechanisms have failed, not as a model for a peaceful society. The long-term task is to make such situations less likely and to develop forms of protection that require the least possible coercion.
Sometimes the first task is so urgent that without it, the space for everything else collapses. In such crises the priority is clear: keep people alive and stop the killing. Stabilization, institutional recovery, and work on coexistence can proceed in parallel, but without basic security what they can achieve is limited.
On the contrary, comparative research over recent decades has fairly consistently found that, under certain conditions during and after civil conflicts, international peacekeeping reduces the risk of renewed war, while larger deployments of armed UN peacekeepers in active conflicts are associated with fewer battlefield deaths. [16,17]
The evidence forces us to distinguish two tasks: stopping violence and building peace. Peacekeepers may physically separate armed parties and reduce killings, but their presence does not by itself create fair institutions, trust, or reconciliation.
The fact that such a tool works under some conditions does not amount to ethical approval of every use of force. For Peaceful World, these are separate questions. We distinguish peaceful methods from limited coercion used only in extreme circumstances to save lives and stop violence already under way. Even when such coercion reduces immediate violence, Peaceful World treats it as a tragic sign that peace mechanisms have failed, not as a model for a peaceful society. The long-term task is to make such situations less likely and to develop forms of protection that require the least possible coercion.
Sometimes the first task is so urgent that without it, the space for everything else collapses. In such crises the priority is clear: keep people alive and stop the killing. Stabilization, institutional recovery, and work on coexistence can proceed in parallel, but without basic security what they can achieve is limited.
Nonviolence: moral choice and effectiveness are different questions
For Peaceful World, this is an especially sensitive issue. The work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan made one finding widely known: in the data they assembled for 1900–2006, mass nonviolent campaigns achieved their stated political goals more often than armed campaigns. [46] This later became the popular claim that nonviolence is “twice as effective.” The subsequent story became more complicated.
The updated NAVCO 2.1 dataset covers almost 400 mass nonviolent and armed campaigns between 1945 and 2013. It confirms that success rates for nonviolent campaigns have declined since the start of the twenty-first century, that nonviolent campaigns involved more people, and that deaths relative to population size were substantially lower than in armed campaigns. [18]
There has also been serious criticism of the methods behind the claim that nonviolence itself causes this advantage. Christoph Dworschak’s re-analysis shows that the famous nonviolent advantage depends heavily on whether failed campaigns are included, which statistical method is used, and which factors are left out of the analysis. He does not argue that violence is more effective. He shows that the grounds for treating nonviolence itself as the cause of the advantage are weaker than is often assumed. [19]
None of this makes the original research useless; it simply means that a statistical pattern should not be turned into a law of nature. We cannot honestly promise that nonviolence is always more effective, or that the famous 3.5% threshold guarantees a movement’s victory. On one point, however, there is much less disagreement: deaths relative to population size are substantially lower in nonviolent campaigns than in armed ones. [18]
The ethical case for nonviolence stands apart from the question of strategic effectiveness. Historical evidence may support it, but does not determine its value. Nonviolence does not need a myth of guaranteed victory in order to have moral force.
For Peaceful World, nonviolence remains an ethical priority even where victory is not guaranteed. If its value depends only on a guarantee of success, then we are no longer talking about ethics but about a wager. Research is needed to make nonviolent methods more effective in practice — and to keep us from confusing conviction with outcomes.
The updated NAVCO 2.1 dataset covers almost 400 mass nonviolent and armed campaigns between 1945 and 2013. It confirms that success rates for nonviolent campaigns have declined since the start of the twenty-first century, that nonviolent campaigns involved more people, and that deaths relative to population size were substantially lower than in armed campaigns. [18]
There has also been serious criticism of the methods behind the claim that nonviolence itself causes this advantage. Christoph Dworschak’s re-analysis shows that the famous nonviolent advantage depends heavily on whether failed campaigns are included, which statistical method is used, and which factors are left out of the analysis. He does not argue that violence is more effective. He shows that the grounds for treating nonviolence itself as the cause of the advantage are weaker than is often assumed. [19]
None of this makes the original research useless; it simply means that a statistical pattern should not be turned into a law of nature. We cannot honestly promise that nonviolence is always more effective, or that the famous 3.5% threshold guarantees a movement’s victory. On one point, however, there is much less disagreement: deaths relative to population size are substantially lower in nonviolent campaigns than in armed ones. [18]
The ethical case for nonviolence stands apart from the question of strategic effectiveness. Historical evidence may support it, but does not determine its value. Nonviolence does not need a myth of guaranteed victory in order to have moral force.
For Peaceful World, nonviolence remains an ethical priority even where victory is not guaranteed. If its value depends only on a guarantee of success, then we are no longer talking about ethics but about a wager. Research is needed to make nonviolent methods more effective in practice — and to keep us from confusing conviction with outcomes.
Even good peace ideas can cause harm
Words such as “reconciliation,” “dialogue,” and “healing” usually sound positive, but peace research cannot judge a program by the beauty of its name. A particularly revealing example is the randomized study of the Fambul Tok reconciliation program in Sierra Leone after the civil war.
In 200 villages, people gathered for community meetings. Victims spoke about what they had experienced; former perpetrators acknowledged what they had done and asked for forgiveness. Researchers then tracked the effects. The program increased willingness to forgive, strengthened social ties, and increased participants’ contributions to shared community needs, but it also worsened psychological well-being: depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress increased. Some positive and negative effects persisted at later follow-ups. [20] The same program helped the community while causing additional pain for some individuals.
That does not make reconciliation a bad idea. The study shows something more important: good intentions do not guarantee good results. A peacebuilding program should be judged not by how beautiful its mission sounds, but by what happens to real people.
For people working on peace, this should be a basic professional standard. A noble goal too easily becomes a shield from criticism, and a method that causes harm should not gain immunity simply because its name contains the word peace.
In 200 villages, people gathered for community meetings. Victims spoke about what they had experienced; former perpetrators acknowledged what they had done and asked for forgiveness. Researchers then tracked the effects. The program increased willingness to forgive, strengthened social ties, and increased participants’ contributions to shared community needs, but it also worsened psychological well-being: depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress increased. Some positive and negative effects persisted at later follow-ups. [20] The same program helped the community while causing additional pain for some individuals.
That does not make reconciliation a bad idea. The study shows something more important: good intentions do not guarantee good results. A peacebuilding program should be judged not by how beautiful its mission sounds, but by what happens to real people.
For people working on peace, this should be a basic professional standard. A noble goal too easily becomes a shield from criticism, and a method that causes harm should not gain immunity simply because its name contains the word peace.
Words can bring violence closer
Discussions of propaganda often rely on a simple image of “brainwashing”: someone is told a lie, believes it, and becomes aggressive. In Rwanda, the mechanism was more complicated.
During the 1994 genocide, residents of different Rwandan villages received RTLM (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines) broadcasts with varying signal strength because of the terrain. David Yanagizawa-Drott used this variation to better distinguish the influence of radio propaganda from other factors. The study found that broadcasts substantially affected participation in violence, with effects spreading into neighboring communities. The author estimated that the station may have drawn roughly 50,000 additional people into violence — about one-tenth of the participants in genocidal violence accounted for in the study. [21]
The mechanism is especially revealing: the radio did not only persuade individuals. It also helped coordinate action, create a sense of mass support, and establish a new social norm — violence was not merely permitted; it was expected of members of the group.
People may participate in violence not only because they sincerely hate the victim. They may inhabit a world in which every signal says: “others are doing it,” “this is what our people do,” “the authorities approve,” “refusal is dangerous.” A culture of violence then lives not only inside individual minds, but between people — in expectations, norms, and systems of coordination.
Rwanda does not support a universal formula such as “disinformation causes wars,” much less the claim that “if everyone learns to fact-check, wars will disappear.” Between a false post on social media and organized mass killing lies a long chain of causes and conditions. The information environment matters, but it is only one part of the system.
During the 1994 genocide, residents of different Rwandan villages received RTLM (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines) broadcasts with varying signal strength because of the terrain. David Yanagizawa-Drott used this variation to better distinguish the influence of radio propaganda from other factors. The study found that broadcasts substantially affected participation in violence, with effects spreading into neighboring communities. The author estimated that the station may have drawn roughly 50,000 additional people into violence — about one-tenth of the participants in genocidal violence accounted for in the study. [21]
The mechanism is especially revealing: the radio did not only persuade individuals. It also helped coordinate action, create a sense of mass support, and establish a new social norm — violence was not merely permitted; it was expected of members of the group.
People may participate in violence not only because they sincerely hate the victim. They may inhabit a world in which every signal says: “others are doing it,” “this is what our people do,” “the authorities approve,” “refusal is dangerous.” A culture of violence then lives not only inside individual minds, but between people — in expectations, norms, and systems of coordination.
Rwanda does not support a universal formula such as “disinformation causes wars,” much less the claim that “if everyone learns to fact-check, wars will disappear.” Between a false post on social media and organized mass killing lies a long chain of causes and conditions. The information environment matters, but it is only one part of the system.
How culture makes violence feel normal
Rwanda is an extreme case of how an information environment can do more than reflect violence: it can help coordinate and normalize it. The cultural problem is broader than propaganda. Violence appears in political language, historical myths, entertainment, and ideas about courage, heroism, and victory. We cannot claim that a violent film, book, or game necessarily makes a person more violent; such a direct conclusion would be scientifically irresponsible. The better question is which ways of resolving conflict a culture makes familiar, and which forms of strength it teaches us to admire.
The existing order often looks neutral simply because we are used to it. Popular culture repeatedly tells stories of strength through defeating an enemy, revenge, and destruction. The relationship between such stories and real violence is more complicated than “see it, copy it.” This is not an accusation against art. A more useful question is how consistently we teach other ways of acting in conflict — mediation, de-escalation, protection without dehumanization, the ability to stay in a conflict without setting out to destroy the other side. What matters most is which cultural skills a society makes visible and familiar.
Culture can also work in the opposite direction. It can normalize not only revenge and domination, but courage without cruelty, strength without humiliation, protection without hatred, and cooperation without demanding sameness. Religious traditions, philosophy, literature, education, and civic movements have created such images for centuries. Modern science can test particular mechanisms without dismissing this entire cultural inheritance simply because it predates randomized trials.
It is worth returning to Sorokin. His concept of “sensate culture” was much broader and more complex than a critique of consumption, markets, or entertainment; reducing it to those things would be a caricature. But his question helps us formulate our own. If large parts of culture strongly reward status-seeking, competition, and displays of strength while leaving altruism and self-restraint mainly to private conscience, what should we expect from people in a real conflict? [38,39] If culture can normalize violence, then culture can also be deliberately shifted in another direction — without promises of guaranteed results, but with genuine room for action.
The existing order often looks neutral simply because we are used to it. Popular culture repeatedly tells stories of strength through defeating an enemy, revenge, and destruction. The relationship between such stories and real violence is more complicated than “see it, copy it.” This is not an accusation against art. A more useful question is how consistently we teach other ways of acting in conflict — mediation, de-escalation, protection without dehumanization, the ability to stay in a conflict without setting out to destroy the other side. What matters most is which cultural skills a society makes visible and familiar.
Culture can also work in the opposite direction. It can normalize not only revenge and domination, but courage without cruelty, strength without humiliation, protection without hatred, and cooperation without demanding sameness. Religious traditions, philosophy, literature, education, and civic movements have created such images for centuries. Modern science can test particular mechanisms without dismissing this entire cultural inheritance simply because it predates randomized trials.
It is worth returning to Sorokin. His concept of “sensate culture” was much broader and more complex than a critique of consumption, markets, or entertainment; reducing it to those things would be a caricature. But his question helps us formulate our own. If large parts of culture strongly reward status-seeking, competition, and displays of strength while leaving altruism and self-restraint mainly to private conscience, what should we expect from people in a real conflict? [38,39] If culture can normalize violence, then culture can also be deliberately shifted in another direction — without promises of guaranteed results, but with genuine room for action.
How do we know whether we are becoming more peaceful?
If peace is a system, it cannot honestly be measured with a single number. A country may reduce interstate war while still having high levels of homicide, domestic violence, or repression. A ceasefire may be reached, and civil war may return three years later. Survey measures of trust may improve without any change in real behavior.
The first layer is direct violence: killings, assaults, deaths in war, violence against children and partners, and the frequency with which civilians become victims. This layer should not be dismissed as “too narrow”: it is about human lives. WHO’s global estimates, for example, still show that nearly one in three women has experienced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner, or sexual violence by someone else, at least once in her life. [2] A society without war but with widespread violence at home is difficult to call fully peaceful.
The second layer is durability. We need to ask not only whether an armed conflict ended, but whether it returns, whether agreements are implemented, and whether nonviolent channels for resolving disputes remain after mediators or peacekeepers leave.
The third layer concerns institutional risks: systematic political exclusion, unequal security for different groups, lack of accountability, and the inability of courts or the state to resolve conflicts without arbitrary power. This comes closer to the broader concerns of the positive peace tradition. But a risk indicator is not the same as a proven cause, and removing it does not guarantee less violence.
The fourth layer is relationships and norms: trust, prejudice, willingness to cooperate across groups, and beliefs about when violence is acceptable. These measures are useful, but they are intermediate outcomes. Better survey answers after a training program do not mean that a person will behave differently in a real conflict a year later.
Any peace program should be able to answer five almost boring questions: what specific outcome were we trying to change; what was it before the program; what happened afterward; what would likely have happened without the program; and were there side effects? This language protects the peace field from a noble but dangerous habit — treating good intentions as evidence of results.
If we cannot define what “better” means, we will almost inevitably end up measuring our own conviction instead of peace.
The first layer is direct violence: killings, assaults, deaths in war, violence against children and partners, and the frequency with which civilians become victims. This layer should not be dismissed as “too narrow”: it is about human lives. WHO’s global estimates, for example, still show that nearly one in three women has experienced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner, or sexual violence by someone else, at least once in her life. [2] A society without war but with widespread violence at home is difficult to call fully peaceful.
The second layer is durability. We need to ask not only whether an armed conflict ended, but whether it returns, whether agreements are implemented, and whether nonviolent channels for resolving disputes remain after mediators or peacekeepers leave.
The third layer concerns institutional risks: systematic political exclusion, unequal security for different groups, lack of accountability, and the inability of courts or the state to resolve conflicts without arbitrary power. This comes closer to the broader concerns of the positive peace tradition. But a risk indicator is not the same as a proven cause, and removing it does not guarantee less violence.
The fourth layer is relationships and norms: trust, prejudice, willingness to cooperate across groups, and beliefs about when violence is acceptable. These measures are useful, but they are intermediate outcomes. Better survey answers after a training program do not mean that a person will behave differently in a real conflict a year later.
Any peace program should be able to answer five almost boring questions: what specific outcome were we trying to change; what was it before the program; what happened afterward; what would likely have happened without the program; and were there side effects? This language protects the peace field from a noble but dangerous habit — treating good intentions as evidence of results.
If we cannot define what “better” means, we will almost inevitably end up measuring our own conviction instead of peace.
Why good ideas do not work automatically
One of the most persistent mistakes in discussions of peace is turning something that helps under some conditions into a universal rule. If education helps some children, we conclude that more education must mean fewer wars. If contact reduces prejudice, it seems enough to put adversaries around a table. If the economy grows, conflict is supposed to disappear. If the state becomes stronger, society is assumed to become safer. The evidence is usually more complicated.
Education can strengthen cooperative skills while also reproducing exclusion, hostile versions of history, and inequality. Contact between groups can weaken stereotypes, while a bad experience of such contact can strengthen them. Cohesion within a community can support mutual aid, yet a highly cohesive group can be just as united in hostility toward those it treats as outsiders. The right question is therefore not “Is this generally good?” but “What exactly works, for whom, under what conditions, and what actually changes as a result?” [10–13,22,33,36]
Economics offers a similar lesson. Poverty and insecurity matter, but recent reviews of local economic shocks and conflict find mixed results, along with signs that studies reporting stronger effects are more likely to be published. After statistical adjustment, some expected relationships disappear or persist only for particular kinds of shocks and industries. [32] Prosperity matters, but “raise incomes and get peace” is far too crude a formula for reality.
The state presents the same problem. State capacity can reduce opportunities for some forms of violence, but without constraints it can also enable repression. “A strong state creates peace” is therefore not enough. We return to the same three qualities: capacity, accountability, and inclusion. A state must be able to uphold rules — and must itself be bound by rules.
Even a peace process cannot be evaluated by whether it uses the right words. “Dialogue,” “reconciliation,” “participation of different groups,” “education,” and “community cohesion” describe areas of work, not certificates of effectiveness. Behind each label may be very different programs, implemented very differently in practice, in different settings, with different side effects.
In peacebuilding that takes evidence seriously, there are no sacred methods: there are hypotheses, mechanisms, conditions, and consequences. A good idea deserves to be tested precisely because it is a good idea.
Skepticism is not meant to devalue effort; it is meant to make effort stronger. A peace movement that can admit failure, measure harm, and change its methods is more threatening to an order built on violence than a movement that protects every habit by calling it “good.”
Education can strengthen cooperative skills while also reproducing exclusion, hostile versions of history, and inequality. Contact between groups can weaken stereotypes, while a bad experience of such contact can strengthen them. Cohesion within a community can support mutual aid, yet a highly cohesive group can be just as united in hostility toward those it treats as outsiders. The right question is therefore not “Is this generally good?” but “What exactly works, for whom, under what conditions, and what actually changes as a result?” [10–13,22,33,36]
Economics offers a similar lesson. Poverty and insecurity matter, but recent reviews of local economic shocks and conflict find mixed results, along with signs that studies reporting stronger effects are more likely to be published. After statistical adjustment, some expected relationships disappear or persist only for particular kinds of shocks and industries. [32] Prosperity matters, but “raise incomes and get peace” is far too crude a formula for reality.
The state presents the same problem. State capacity can reduce opportunities for some forms of violence, but without constraints it can also enable repression. “A strong state creates peace” is therefore not enough. We return to the same three qualities: capacity, accountability, and inclusion. A state must be able to uphold rules — and must itself be bound by rules.
Even a peace process cannot be evaluated by whether it uses the right words. “Dialogue,” “reconciliation,” “participation of different groups,” “education,” and “community cohesion” describe areas of work, not certificates of effectiveness. Behind each label may be very different programs, implemented very differently in practice, in different settings, with different side effects.
In peacebuilding that takes evidence seriously, there are no sacred methods: there are hypotheses, mechanisms, conditions, and consequences. A good idea deserves to be tested precisely because it is a good idea.
Skepticism is not meant to devalue effort; it is meant to make effort stronger. A peace movement that can admit failure, measure harm, and change its methods is more threatening to an order built on violence than a movement that protects every habit by calling it “good.”
What can be done today — without permission from above
After all this discussion of institutions, wars, negotiations, and statistics, it is easy to feel like a spectator. As if real history happens in offices, while ordinary people can only support the right organizations and hope the professionals know what they are doing. For Peaceful World, that is too narrow a view of human responsibility.
Peace cannot be outsourced. Not everyone can stop a war, reform a court, or change public policy. But most of us already have a sphere in which much more depends on us: our language, relationships, habits, profession, how we handle information, how we raise children, the boundaries of our moral concern, and how we respond to conflict.
Peaceful World calls this practical map the Circles of Responsibility, or the Holarchy of Peace: Self → Us → Work → Society → Planet. It is neither a scientific scale nor a hierarchy in which one circle matters more than another. It is a way not to get lost between personal ethics and global politics: begin with the circle where you have real influence, then connect personal choices to relationships, service through our work, public institutions, and care for the living world. The movement also runs in the opposite direction: culture and institutions shape the conditions in which personal choices are made.
Peaceful responses can be trained
In discussions of culture and institutions, it is easy to forget one more thing: our own reactions can also be trained. The first surge of anger, fear, or the urge to answer humiliation with humiliation does not always arise by choice. But an impulse does not have to become a word or an action immediately. The practical principle is simple: an impulse is a signal, not a command. We can learn to notice it earlier, pause briefly, and choose our response more deliberately.
Some modern research supports practices of this kind. A 2025 meta-analysis brought together 118 studies of mindfulness practices. On average, experimental studies found reductions in anger and aggression. The effect was larger when the comparison group received no specific alternative practice, so the result should be interpreted cautiously. Another meta-analysis of 154 studies found that practices that lower physiological arousal — including slow breathing, meditation, and mindfulness — reduced anger and aggressive responses on average. This is nowhere near a method for preventing wars. But it supports a narrower and more practical conclusion: some of the skills involved in not reacting on autopilot can be trained. [59,60]
One ancient form of such training is metta, or loving-kindness meditation: a practice in which the circle of care is gradually extended from oneself and loved ones to strangers, difficult people, and other living beings. A recent meta-analysis of 23 randomized studies found improvements in several outcomes, including compassion and positive emotions. The advantage was clearest when these practices were compared with groups receiving no alternative practice; compared with other practices, the data no longer showed a clear advantage. Metta is therefore interesting as an accessible way to cultivate goodwill and attention, not as a proven route to peace. [61]
This kind of training does not end with meditation. It can take the form of a very small action: genuinely wishing someone well; letting someone finish before answering; saying thank you; buying no more than we need; sharing something still useful instead of throwing it away; using water and energy more carefully and caring for the surrounding environment; noticing what we repeatedly allow into our attention. None of these actions will prevent a war by itself. The point is more modest: these can become regular ways of training attention, moderation, care, and the refusal to cause harm automatically.
This is why personal and systemic levels should not be set against one another. Personal action does not replace a good law, court, school, or international institution; institutions, in turn, operate through human choices, habits, and norms. The Circles of Responsibility are not meant to reduce politics to personal virtue. They are meant to help people see where they can act first. Alongside “What should humanity do?” comes a second question: “What can I do differently in my next conversation, conflict, or choice?”
In practice, this suggests five directions that are available to almost anyone today.
First: do not deny another person’s humanity. Do not assign collective guilt to entire groups. Do not compress millions of people into one caricature. Do not use degrading language simply because the target of our hatred supposedly “deserves it.” Do not share a message that confirms our side’s righteousness until we have checked whether it is true. And remember: recognizing another person as human does not cancel condemnation of a crime, responsibility, or the need to protect a victim.
Second: learn to move through conflict without sliding into humiliation or violence. In family life, friendship, work, and community, this means setting boundaries without humiliation, admitting when we are wrong, refusing to reduce disagreement to a clash between “us” and “them,” and not using power when conversation is enough. For parents and teachers, it also means noticing what children learn from our example every day: what the strong do to the weak, how adults respond to mistakes, and what happens when someone is “not one of us.”
Third is less obvious: revisit what we have learned to treat as normal even when it causes harm. For one person, that may mean giving up alcohol or reducing its role in life. For another, it may mean changing diet and consumption to reduce support for practices that cause suffering to sentient animals. For someone else, it may mean rejecting forms of entertainment, habits of speech, or workplace practices that seem incompatible with their own ethics. We are not proposing one universal checklist of moral purity. The more important habit is to ask: what harm may be hidden behind what I consider normal, and can I reduce some of it today?
Fourth: use your profession to reduce harm. A teacher can change classroom culture. A journalist can refuse to use people as props in a political story. A manager can build rules in which dignity does not depend on status. An engineer can consider how a technology may be abused. A doctor can recognize signs of violence and addiction. A lawyer can defend the right to a fair process even for an unpopular person. A police officer or soldier can remember that an order and legal authority do not erase personal moral responsibility. A civil servant can avoid confusing the legality of an instruction with its moral soundness.
Fifth: turn personal choices into collective action. Vote and organize. Support independent institutions, nonviolent movements, and programs with evidence of effectiveness. Demand accountability from those in power. Fund research and education. Help knowledge about mediation, nonviolence, humanization, and conflict prevention move out of academic journals and into schools, families, media, and everyday life.
For people who work professionally on peace, the standard should be higher. The point is not perfection, but consistency between words and practice. It is difficult to teach dignity convincingly if one’s own practice is built on humiliation. It is difficult to speak of nonviolence as a principle for how society should live if it never reaches one’s own habits and comforts. Peacebuilding is not an identity or a job title; it is a discipline.
Personal responsibility also has limits. A person is not guilty of a system’s existence simply because they were born inside it. Not everyone can safely protest, refuse an order, change jobs, change their diet, or publicly resist propaganda. Risks and opportunities are distributed unequally. A nonviolent ethic that ignores coercion and the cost of resistance quickly becomes moral arrogance.
The limits of responsibility do not mean the absence of responsibility. Large changes often become visible only after thousands of smaller decisions have already accumulated: what to teach a child, which joke not to repeat, which politician not to excuse “because they are ours,” which habit to reconsider, which organization to support, which order to question, and which person to continue treating as a person when the group asks us to see an enemy.
Not everything begins with the individual. But every human system ultimately passes through human hands.
Peace cannot be outsourced. Not everyone can stop a war, reform a court, or change public policy. But most of us already have a sphere in which much more depends on us: our language, relationships, habits, profession, how we handle information, how we raise children, the boundaries of our moral concern, and how we respond to conflict.
Peaceful World calls this practical map the Circles of Responsibility, or the Holarchy of Peace: Self → Us → Work → Society → Planet. It is neither a scientific scale nor a hierarchy in which one circle matters more than another. It is a way not to get lost between personal ethics and global politics: begin with the circle where you have real influence, then connect personal choices to relationships, service through our work, public institutions, and care for the living world. The movement also runs in the opposite direction: culture and institutions shape the conditions in which personal choices are made.
Peaceful responses can be trained
In discussions of culture and institutions, it is easy to forget one more thing: our own reactions can also be trained. The first surge of anger, fear, or the urge to answer humiliation with humiliation does not always arise by choice. But an impulse does not have to become a word or an action immediately. The practical principle is simple: an impulse is a signal, not a command. We can learn to notice it earlier, pause briefly, and choose our response more deliberately.
Some modern research supports practices of this kind. A 2025 meta-analysis brought together 118 studies of mindfulness practices. On average, experimental studies found reductions in anger and aggression. The effect was larger when the comparison group received no specific alternative practice, so the result should be interpreted cautiously. Another meta-analysis of 154 studies found that practices that lower physiological arousal — including slow breathing, meditation, and mindfulness — reduced anger and aggressive responses on average. This is nowhere near a method for preventing wars. But it supports a narrower and more practical conclusion: some of the skills involved in not reacting on autopilot can be trained. [59,60]
One ancient form of such training is metta, or loving-kindness meditation: a practice in which the circle of care is gradually extended from oneself and loved ones to strangers, difficult people, and other living beings. A recent meta-analysis of 23 randomized studies found improvements in several outcomes, including compassion and positive emotions. The advantage was clearest when these practices were compared with groups receiving no alternative practice; compared with other practices, the data no longer showed a clear advantage. Metta is therefore interesting as an accessible way to cultivate goodwill and attention, not as a proven route to peace. [61]
This kind of training does not end with meditation. It can take the form of a very small action: genuinely wishing someone well; letting someone finish before answering; saying thank you; buying no more than we need; sharing something still useful instead of throwing it away; using water and energy more carefully and caring for the surrounding environment; noticing what we repeatedly allow into our attention. None of these actions will prevent a war by itself. The point is more modest: these can become regular ways of training attention, moderation, care, and the refusal to cause harm automatically.
This is why personal and systemic levels should not be set against one another. Personal action does not replace a good law, court, school, or international institution; institutions, in turn, operate through human choices, habits, and norms. The Circles of Responsibility are not meant to reduce politics to personal virtue. They are meant to help people see where they can act first. Alongside “What should humanity do?” comes a second question: “What can I do differently in my next conversation, conflict, or choice?”
In practice, this suggests five directions that are available to almost anyone today.
First: do not deny another person’s humanity. Do not assign collective guilt to entire groups. Do not compress millions of people into one caricature. Do not use degrading language simply because the target of our hatred supposedly “deserves it.” Do not share a message that confirms our side’s righteousness until we have checked whether it is true. And remember: recognizing another person as human does not cancel condemnation of a crime, responsibility, or the need to protect a victim.
Second: learn to move through conflict without sliding into humiliation or violence. In family life, friendship, work, and community, this means setting boundaries without humiliation, admitting when we are wrong, refusing to reduce disagreement to a clash between “us” and “them,” and not using power when conversation is enough. For parents and teachers, it also means noticing what children learn from our example every day: what the strong do to the weak, how adults respond to mistakes, and what happens when someone is “not one of us.”
Third is less obvious: revisit what we have learned to treat as normal even when it causes harm. For one person, that may mean giving up alcohol or reducing its role in life. For another, it may mean changing diet and consumption to reduce support for practices that cause suffering to sentient animals. For someone else, it may mean rejecting forms of entertainment, habits of speech, or workplace practices that seem incompatible with their own ethics. We are not proposing one universal checklist of moral purity. The more important habit is to ask: what harm may be hidden behind what I consider normal, and can I reduce some of it today?
Fourth: use your profession to reduce harm. A teacher can change classroom culture. A journalist can refuse to use people as props in a political story. A manager can build rules in which dignity does not depend on status. An engineer can consider how a technology may be abused. A doctor can recognize signs of violence and addiction. A lawyer can defend the right to a fair process even for an unpopular person. A police officer or soldier can remember that an order and legal authority do not erase personal moral responsibility. A civil servant can avoid confusing the legality of an instruction with its moral soundness.
Fifth: turn personal choices into collective action. Vote and organize. Support independent institutions, nonviolent movements, and programs with evidence of effectiveness. Demand accountability from those in power. Fund research and education. Help knowledge about mediation, nonviolence, humanization, and conflict prevention move out of academic journals and into schools, families, media, and everyday life.
For people who work professionally on peace, the standard should be higher. The point is not perfection, but consistency between words and practice. It is difficult to teach dignity convincingly if one’s own practice is built on humiliation. It is difficult to speak of nonviolence as a principle for how society should live if it never reaches one’s own habits and comforts. Peacebuilding is not an identity or a job title; it is a discipline.
Personal responsibility also has limits. A person is not guilty of a system’s existence simply because they were born inside it. Not everyone can safely protest, refuse an order, change jobs, change their diet, or publicly resist propaganda. Risks and opportunities are distributed unequally. A nonviolent ethic that ignores coercion and the cost of resistance quickly becomes moral arrogance.
The limits of responsibility do not mean the absence of responsibility. Large changes often become visible only after thousands of smaller decisions have already accumulated: what to teach a child, which joke not to repeat, which politician not to excuse “because they are ours,” which habit to reconsider, which organization to support, which order to question, and which person to continue treating as a person when the group asks us to see an enemy.
Not everything begins with the individual. But every human system ultimately passes through human hands.
The essentials in brief: seven common questions
Is war part of human nature?
Human biology makes aggression possible, but current evidence does not support the idea that war is genetically programmed or that any particular level of violence is inevitable. Humans have capacities for both aggression and cooperation; social environments, institutions, and circumstances strongly affect how likely each is to be expressed. [3,4]
Does peace education work?
Some educational programs improve outcomes we can measure directly: social and emotional skills, behavior, school aggression, trust, and some relations between groups. [7–10] The evidence is not strong enough to claim that peace education by itself prevents wars. But the absence of such proof does not show that peace education is useless: long-term effects on whole societies are extremely difficult to study. It is reasonable to treat peace education as one part of a larger system while demanding much stronger long-term research.
Why is dehumanization so dangerous?
Explicit dehumanization — refusing to regard another group as fully human — is associated with support for violence between groups, while the feeling that “they do not see us as human” can trigger reciprocal dehumanization. [50–52] But dehumanization does not explain everything: people can also use violence against those they fully recognize as human if they believe the harm is morally right. [53] The practical lesson is to resist both the language of “they are not human” and the language of “anything we do to them is justified.”
Is simply talking more with people from another group enough?
No. Well-structured positive contact between groups often reduces prejudice, especially when people cooperate and interact more than once. [11–13,33] But improvements may remain limited to particular people and situations, while negative contact can reinforce old stereotypes. Dialogue can help, but it does not remove unequal power, threats, or institutional discrimination.
Is nonviolence really more effective than violence?
Historical data show that mass nonviolent campaigns have often achieved impressive results and involved far fewer deaths relative to population size. [18] But how much of that advantage is caused specifically by the campaigns’ nonviolent character remains disputed. [19] Success rates for nonviolent campaigns have also declined in the twenty-first century. [18] “Nonviolence always wins” is therefore a myth; the ethical case for nonviolence does not need that promise.
What makes a society more peaceful?
No single factor works alone. Peace is supported by skills and norms that reduce personal violence and dehumanization, upbringing and education, nonviolent channels for resolving disputes, measures aimed at specific risk factors, capable and accountable institutions, reduced political exclusion, and mechanisms for stopping armed escalation. We do not have to choose between “good people” and “good institutions”: people create institutions, and institutions then shape the conditions under which people make choices.
What can one person realistically do?
Start with what is genuinely within your reach. Do not spread dehumanizing labels or propaganda. Learn to handle conflict without humiliation. Raise children without teaching that violence is normal. Reduce your own participation in avoidable harm, including by reconsidering your relationship to alcohol and to sentient animals. Use your profession to reduce harm and connect personal choices to collective action. One person does not control the whole system. But the system does not exist apart from human choices either.
Human biology makes aggression possible, but current evidence does not support the idea that war is genetically programmed or that any particular level of violence is inevitable. Humans have capacities for both aggression and cooperation; social environments, institutions, and circumstances strongly affect how likely each is to be expressed. [3,4]
Does peace education work?
Some educational programs improve outcomes we can measure directly: social and emotional skills, behavior, school aggression, trust, and some relations between groups. [7–10] The evidence is not strong enough to claim that peace education by itself prevents wars. But the absence of such proof does not show that peace education is useless: long-term effects on whole societies are extremely difficult to study. It is reasonable to treat peace education as one part of a larger system while demanding much stronger long-term research.
Why is dehumanization so dangerous?
Explicit dehumanization — refusing to regard another group as fully human — is associated with support for violence between groups, while the feeling that “they do not see us as human” can trigger reciprocal dehumanization. [50–52] But dehumanization does not explain everything: people can also use violence against those they fully recognize as human if they believe the harm is morally right. [53] The practical lesson is to resist both the language of “they are not human” and the language of “anything we do to them is justified.”
Is simply talking more with people from another group enough?
No. Well-structured positive contact between groups often reduces prejudice, especially when people cooperate and interact more than once. [11–13,33] But improvements may remain limited to particular people and situations, while negative contact can reinforce old stereotypes. Dialogue can help, but it does not remove unequal power, threats, or institutional discrimination.
Is nonviolence really more effective than violence?
Historical data show that mass nonviolent campaigns have often achieved impressive results and involved far fewer deaths relative to population size. [18] But how much of that advantage is caused specifically by the campaigns’ nonviolent character remains disputed. [19] Success rates for nonviolent campaigns have also declined in the twenty-first century. [18] “Nonviolence always wins” is therefore a myth; the ethical case for nonviolence does not need that promise.
What makes a society more peaceful?
No single factor works alone. Peace is supported by skills and norms that reduce personal violence and dehumanization, upbringing and education, nonviolent channels for resolving disputes, measures aimed at specific risk factors, capable and accountable institutions, reduced political exclusion, and mechanisms for stopping armed escalation. We do not have to choose between “good people” and “good institutions”: people create institutions, and institutions then shape the conditions under which people make choices.
What can one person realistically do?
Start with what is genuinely within your reach. Do not spread dehumanizing labels or propaganda. Learn to handle conflict without humiliation. Raise children without teaching that violence is normal. Reduce your own participation in avoidable harm, including by reconsidering your relationship to alcohol and to sentient animals. Use your profession to reduce harm and connect personal choices to collective action. One person does not control the whole system. But the system does not exist apart from human choices either.
What we still do not know
Intellectual honesty requires room not only for conclusions, but for uncertainty. We do not yet know how far the skills and attitudes learned in peace education programs carry beyond school. We do not know how much of that learning persists for ten or twenty years. We do not know how reliably contact between people from different groups changes relations across entire societies rather than only among direct participants. And we do not know whether there is any universally effective political design for deeply divided societies.
We also cannot precisely estimate how much women’s participation itself contributes to the quality and durability of peace agreements, although the association is promising. We do not know how well the historical advantage of nonviolent campaigns will hold in an era of digital surveillance, targeted repression, and authoritarian systems adapting to new conditions. We have no universal method for creating public trust. And we do not know how far laboratory findings and survey evidence on dehumanization can be generalized to real mass conflicts.
Nor do we know whether including other animals within the moral circle changes how people relate to human groups perceived as outsiders. Psychological research finds associations and some interesting experimental results, but these do not show that expanding the moral circle prevents wars. [43,54] Likewise, evidence on alcohol does not mean that changing alcohol use by itself will solve violence: it is one risk factor among many, not a universal cause.
There is another question we cannot yet answer: what would the world look like if peace education and conflict prevention had received stable funding and systematic study for decades, while a culture of nonviolence had been consistently supported and widely promoted? We have no controlled historical experiment at that scale. This is not evidence for the outcome we would like to see. But a gap in evidence is not proof that there is nothing left to investigate.
Scientific uncertainty is better than confident guesswork, but it does not tell us to do nothing. We do not need a complete answer to every question before reducing harms we already understand, testing new approaches, measuring consequences, and abandoning methods that do not work.
We also cannot precisely estimate how much women’s participation itself contributes to the quality and durability of peace agreements, although the association is promising. We do not know how well the historical advantage of nonviolent campaigns will hold in an era of digital surveillance, targeted repression, and authoritarian systems adapting to new conditions. We have no universal method for creating public trust. And we do not know how far laboratory findings and survey evidence on dehumanization can be generalized to real mass conflicts.
Nor do we know whether including other animals within the moral circle changes how people relate to human groups perceived as outsiders. Psychological research finds associations and some interesting experimental results, but these do not show that expanding the moral circle prevents wars. [43,54] Likewise, evidence on alcohol does not mean that changing alcohol use by itself will solve violence: it is one risk factor among many, not a universal cause.
There is another question we cannot yet answer: what would the world look like if peace education and conflict prevention had received stable funding and systematic study for decades, while a culture of nonviolence had been consistently supported and widely promoted? We have no controlled historical experiment at that scale. This is not evidence for the outcome we would like to see. But a gap in evidence is not proof that there is nothing left to investigate.
Scientific uncertainty is better than confident guesswork, but it does not tell us to do nothing. We do not need a complete answer to every question before reducing harms we already understand, testing new approaches, measuring consequences, and abandoning methods that do not work.
So, is a more peaceful world possible?
Science gives us no basis for promising that humanity will one day defeat violence once and for all. History is too unpredictable, and recent years remind us how quickly societies can slide back toward war and tensions between states can spiral into dangerous escalation. [1] But we have no basis for the opposite promise either — the promise of eternal war.
We know too little to guarantee peace. But we already know too much to justify helplessness.
We know that war is not simply a biological inevitability. Violence in childhood is associated with later violence, and some programs reduce harsh parenting. Some educational programs change skills and behavior; explicit dehumanization is associated with support for violence between groups; and propaganda can, under some conditions, contribute to mass violence. Alcohol use is linked to enormous avoidable harm; political exclusion is linked to the risk of civil conflict; and some peacekeeping mechanisms reduce immediate violence. We also know that even the noblest programs need to be tested for harm. [5–10,14–21,26,47–53]
We know something else too: an institution has no conscience. Conscience and fear, prejudice and compassion, the courage to refuse and the habit of obedience — all of these exist in particular people. A good institution makes better choices easier and helps them endure. A bad one can turn harm into a norm, a procedure, and a career. The question “Which matters more, the person or the system?” takes us in the wrong direction. We need people capable of building better systems, and systems that do not require people to become worse.
This is not enough for utopia. It is more than enough for work.
Hope, in this sense, is not a forecast or a promise of a happy ending. It is an active refusal of the idea that the existing order is natural and inevitable. The existing order was built by people too, which means it can be built differently.
A more peaceful society will not emerge from one ideology, one course, one organization, or one good habit. It is built through many changes: violence stops being an automatic response to conflict; children are less likely to learn strength through humiliation; people seen as outsiders remain inside the moral circle; familiar forms of harm stop being invisible. Institutions constrain arbitrary power instead of spreading and amplifying it, while people retain nonviolent ways to defend their interests. And all of this has to face one uncomfortable question: do our favorite methods actually reduce suffering — or do we simply want to believe they do?
Peace is not a state humanity will someday reach and then rest. It is better understood as a capacity: the ability of people, communities, and institutions to handle inevitable conflict in ways that make violence less likely. That capacity can be developed, measured, lost, and rebuilt.
And that may be the most practical reason for hope. We do not need to wait for humanity to become perfect. Today we can refuse to repeat a dehumanizing label, refuse to pass on a lie, avoid preventable harm, show a child another way to be strong, reconsider a habit, support a person or organization that makes violence less likely. Tomorrow, some of these actions may become a norm, a school practice, a law, a professional standard, or an institution.
Peace cannot be outsourced. Not to governments. Not to the United Nations. Not to police. Not to schools. Not to activists. Not to people who call themselves peacebuilders. Institutions are necessary precisely because one good person is not enough. But no institution frees a person from the question: what am I strengthening in the world today — violence, or our capacity to live without it?
We cannot promise peace. But we can stop treating violence as an unchangeable fact of life. Peace by peaceful means.
Peace Education — for Everyone.
We know too little to guarantee peace. But we already know too much to justify helplessness.
We know that war is not simply a biological inevitability. Violence in childhood is associated with later violence, and some programs reduce harsh parenting. Some educational programs change skills and behavior; explicit dehumanization is associated with support for violence between groups; and propaganda can, under some conditions, contribute to mass violence. Alcohol use is linked to enormous avoidable harm; political exclusion is linked to the risk of civil conflict; and some peacekeeping mechanisms reduce immediate violence. We also know that even the noblest programs need to be tested for harm. [5–10,14–21,26,47–53]
We know something else too: an institution has no conscience. Conscience and fear, prejudice and compassion, the courage to refuse and the habit of obedience — all of these exist in particular people. A good institution makes better choices easier and helps them endure. A bad one can turn harm into a norm, a procedure, and a career. The question “Which matters more, the person or the system?” takes us in the wrong direction. We need people capable of building better systems, and systems that do not require people to become worse.
This is not enough for utopia. It is more than enough for work.
Hope, in this sense, is not a forecast or a promise of a happy ending. It is an active refusal of the idea that the existing order is natural and inevitable. The existing order was built by people too, which means it can be built differently.
A more peaceful society will not emerge from one ideology, one course, one organization, or one good habit. It is built through many changes: violence stops being an automatic response to conflict; children are less likely to learn strength through humiliation; people seen as outsiders remain inside the moral circle; familiar forms of harm stop being invisible. Institutions constrain arbitrary power instead of spreading and amplifying it, while people retain nonviolent ways to defend their interests. And all of this has to face one uncomfortable question: do our favorite methods actually reduce suffering — or do we simply want to believe they do?
Peace is not a state humanity will someday reach and then rest. It is better understood as a capacity: the ability of people, communities, and institutions to handle inevitable conflict in ways that make violence less likely. That capacity can be developed, measured, lost, and rebuilt.
And that may be the most practical reason for hope. We do not need to wait for humanity to become perfect. Today we can refuse to repeat a dehumanizing label, refuse to pass on a lie, avoid preventable harm, show a child another way to be strong, reconsider a habit, support a person or organization that makes violence less likely. Tomorrow, some of these actions may become a norm, a school practice, a law, a professional standard, or an institution.
Peace cannot be outsourced. Not to governments. Not to the United Nations. Not to police. Not to schools. Not to activists. Not to people who call themselves peacebuilders. Institutions are necessary precisely because one good person is not enough. But no institution frees a person from the question: what am I strengthening in the world today — violence, or our capacity to live without it?
We cannot promise peace. But we can stop treating violence as an unchangeable fact of life. Peace by peaceful means.
Peace Education — for Everyone.
Key sources
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24. Braga, A. A., Turchan, B. S., Papachristos, A. V., & Hureau, D. M. (2019). Hot spots policing and crime reduction: an update of an ongoing systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 15, 289–311. Source
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