What do peaceful societies have in common?
Little research has been done on this but some have as reported in the Greater Good Magazine where a multidisciplinary team of researchers is discovering what makes some societies more peaceful than others.
They discovered, that peace systems tend to share these certain commonalities:
- Overarching common identities, such as shared national or regional identities (like Africans, Latin Americans, or Christians) that emphasize commonalities between different ethnic groups.
- Greater positive interconnectedness and independence in the realms of economics, ecology, and security. In other words, they have public spaces, institutions, and activities that bring members of different groups together and help them realize that their fates are closely linked.
- Stronger non-warring norms, values, rituals, and symbols, like commemorations of successful peacemakers and monuments that celebrate the prevention of war. In fact, using a machine learning technique called Random Forest, we discovered that the single most important contributor to peace is non-warring norms, followed in decreasing importance by non-warring rituals, non-warring values, mutual security dependencies, superordinate institutions, and economic interdependence. This suggests that developing norms that are supportive of positive reciprocal social relationships may be more important for peace than previously assumed.
- Peace language in the press. We have been developing a technique to help us measure and track the power of peace speech—peaceable language for building and maintaining more peaceful communities. Our preliminary findings are promising, suggesting that the distinct qualities of conflict vs. peace words in our lexicons are related to the relative “tightness/ordered,” versus “looseness/creative” nature of the terms. In other words, journalism in peaceful places seems to employ the language of a looser, more open, playful nature, while reporting from non-peaceful societies reflects tighter, more closed, or bureaucratic language.
- A greater degree of peace leadership from politicians, corporations, clergy, and community activists who help establish a vision and set a course toward peace. Peace leadership occurred, for instance, when the Iroquois peace prophet unified five warring tribes and replaced the weapons of war with dialogue and consensus-seeking. Other bastions of peacefulness like Costa Rica and the E.U. have evidenced similar visionary leadership for peace.
Peter Coleman and Douglas Fry are quoted, “Ultimately, we have found that when these different peace variables align and reinforce one another, virtuous cycles are often created that become more resistant to changing conditions. This, we suggest, is the essence of sustainability.”
Peace is possible and research and science based on those trends that seem to be working in areas of the world in helpful information.
Best,
Manal
