Positive Peace Conference
To all leaders working to promote peace, we would like to extend an invitation to the 2018 Positive Peace Conference: Envisioning a Positive Peace Agenda for the Americans organized by IEP, Mercy Corps and the Stanford Center for Latin American Studies. Positive Peace offers a new way to approach violence reduction, sustainable development, and resilience. The conference brings together leading practitioners, policymakers, academics, media, and experts from around the world to explore new opportunities for strengthening the drivers of peace in the Americas.
Positive Peace provides a new way of conceptualizing development by placing the emphasis on whatcreates a thriving society, reframing our focus towards what works. There are tremendous benefits -economic, political, social and beyond - to making sound investments in building peace rather thanmerely preventing and mitigating conflict.
The 2018 Positive Peace Conference will build upon two successful conferences, bringing together leading experts in Positive Peace: the attitudes, institutions and structures that prevent violence. Practitioners, policymakers, members of the media, corporate leaders, and representatives of fields like conflict prevention and sustainable development, will come together to discuss new opportunities and challenges for strengthening Positive Peace.
What Creates Peace?
The tools for prevention exist, but we too rarely use them. Positive Peace can help change the conversation. The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) has sought to better understand the drivers of peaceful societies through the development of an empirical framework that identifies the optimum environment in which peace can flourish. This is termed Positive Peace. The main contribution has been the development of a framework of inter-related factors, identified by analyzing over 9,000 different indices, datasets and attitudinal surveys. The eight pillars of Positive Peace identified by IEP that are associated with peaceful environments are:
Well-functioning government
Sound business environment
Equitable distribution of resources
Acceptance of the rights of others
Good relations with neighbors
Free flow of information
High levels of human capital
Low levels of corruption