Sustainable Peace Lab conceptualizes “the sustainable peace process as a transformative process of mutual recognition of the complexities of identity dynamics and their functions in achieving peace and justice in post-conflict societies. This approach concentrates on local agency and promotion of local voices in defining peace processes and societal transformation in societies affected by asymmetric and protracted conflicts.” (Korostelina, K.V. The role of identity in brokering peace agreements. In Korostelina, K.V. et al, Identity and Religion in peace processes. Routledge, 2024, P. 17-18). Comprehensive and inclusive strategies of addressing and incorporating key factors of social identity and intergroup relations lead to a more just and sustainable peace.
The Sustainable Peace Lab (subtitle: Reconciling Conflicts and Intergroup Divisions (RCID)) works to empower conflict resolution and reconciliation practitioners with evidence-based tools and approaches for addressing identity-based conflicts and societal divisions. It emphasizes the diversity of views on just peace within the society and the need to account for all positions in the production of a common language of peace.
The identities of the parties involved should be recognized, respected, and accounted for as a crucial part of a peacebuilding through a transformative process that involves improvements in relationships between conflicting groups and changes to the social identities of each group, including their values, norms, and behaviors, to promote a peaceful and just society. We do this by focusing primarily on five thematic areas: social boundary, threat perception, social norms, multiplicity of collective memories, and difficult heritage.
More specifically, we see building sustainable peace as the transformation of conflicting intergroup relations to reduce violence and promote peaceful, equal, and constructive interactions. Sustainable peace requires intragroup changes on all sides of the conflict, from values, norms, and attitudes about engagement with outgroups, to unconstructive, hostile, or violent ideologies rooted in radicalized narratives about the past. It also requires changes in intergroup relations, including the alteration or removal of social boundaries, reduction in perceptions of outgroup threat, and shifts in the intergroup axiological balance and collective generality. This process may involve various types of activities and mechanisms, such as trust-building, forgiveness, trauma healing, restoration of justice, and cooperative collective action.
Main Products
The BRIDGE framework
BRIDGE Framework systemically describes strategies that create a foundation for sustainable peace. Bonding strategies create mutuality, the interdependency of positive change, and the ability to find common ways forward. Through Reassuring strategies, the identities of the parties involved become recognized, respected, and accounted for as a crucial part of a peace process. Involving strategies stress the importance of involving a wide array of actors and activities of all sectors of society.
Determining Guides strategy concentrates on the core issues of identity dynamics within each party and between parties involved, emphasizing the diversity of views on just peace within the society and the need to account for all positions in the production of a common language of peace. Equalizing strategies address not only power differences between parties but also a variance between conflict sides’ perspectives on what justice might entail.
To get more information on practices, and tactics related to each of the five strategies, please click HERE.
Integrated Contact Theory
Intergroup contact is a continuum of different forms of programs that are based on the interaction of people from various social groups, including horizontal contact (between racial, ethnic, religious, and/or national groups) and vertical contact (between communities, civic society government, police and representatives of other institutions).
Integrated contact theory provides tools and practices in four main areas:
- Improving the process of the contact programming, including the four conditions for contact, and the 3Ts: trust building, threat reduction, and trauma healing.
- Improving dynamics of horizontal contacts (between ethnic, religious groups, victims/ former paramilitary, and communities), including deep work, different forms of identity work, and the 3-stage categorization process.
- Improving dynamics of vertical contacts (between communities and government, police, etc.), including radical storytelling and bridging conceptual barriers.
- Improving project management, including theories of change (TOCs), inclusion, sustainability, and improvement in communication.
Early warning system for identity-based conflicts
The dynamics of identity-based conflict are outlined in the 4-C model, consisting of four stages: Comparison, Competition, Confrontation, and Counteraction (Korostelina, 2007). Members of interactive communities possess multiple identities leading to the formation of stereotypes, biases, and prejudices even in peaceful and cooperative societies. Unfavorable perceptions of outgroups stem from various psychological processes, including a need to be both different from others and included in a group, favorable group comparisons and intergroup prejudice, relative deprivation, and the global attribution error. In conflicts of interests, negative intergroup perceptions and ingroup favoritism can transform into active hostility toward the outgroup. This collective angst is based on perceived threats from outgroups, even among those who did not directly experience violence. Thus, social identity is employed to make sense of the situation of competition, exclusion, and marginalization. Once a society is divided into antagonistic groups, social identities become central to the conflict, creating moral boundaries and collective axiology that dehumanizes and demonizes outgroup members as well as prescribes actions against the outgroup.
Our Areas of Research & Practice
The Sustainable Peace Lab seeks to advance evidence-based practice primarily in the five thematic areas identified in the image below. The questions outlined in this agenda provide a basis for the development of theories of change and other resources for reconciliation practitioners.
Theories of change provide a useful tool for operationalizing scholarly theory in practice. Too often, however, theories of change in conflict resolution and reconciliation consist of simple “if-then” statements that are not rooted in theory or evidence and do not adequately account for contextual assumptions and risks. The Sustainable Peace Lab seeks to fill this gap by developing narrative theories of change, rooted in rigorous scholarship and evidence, that provide a basis for the design of innovative and effective approaches for reconciling societal divisions and contested histories.
Sustainable Peace Lab Hypothesis of Change
