The Sustainable Peace Lab works with practitioners, researchers, subject-matter experts, and students to implement research and practical interventions focused on the reconciliation of identity-based conflicts and social divisions.
The Sustainable Peace Lab primarily focuses on five core thematic areas of work that are social boundaries, threat perception, multiplicity of collective memories, and social norms.
The following blocks contain specific descriptions on these themes, our ongoing projects, past and upcoming events.
Select a theme or specific project below to learn more about it.
Our Projects
Current Projects
Methodology for Climate Displacement: Conflict, Climate Change, and Decisions to Migrate
To advance understanding of how people’s wartime experiences influence their positions toward peace agreements requiring territorial concessions, this project seeks to uncover the social psychological processes and wartime experiences informing the dispositions of ordinary Ukrainians toward peace. Existing literatures suggest divergent impacts of war experience on attitude towards the costs of peace. For example, direct exposure to violence and destruction at the hands of Russian forces may increase Ukrainians’ perception of immediate threat, which may in turn increase their willingness to support territorial concessions as a means to end violent hostilities. On the other hand, anger at the invader, threats to Ukrainian identity and values, and desire to honor the sacrifice of those who died defending Ukrainian land, may have hardened attitudes toward territorial compromises. War may have made all Ukrainian territory a ‘sacred value’ to ordinary Ukrainians, reducing the possibility of territorial compromise, and making any settlement a potentially unstable one. Using multiple research methods, this study will explore the complex factors that come into play as people work to resolve these dilemmas. The project will begin with collection and quantitative analysis of survey data from 1800 Ukrainians, including locals and internally displaced people, across three towns close to the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, and Kharkiv where active fighting is taking place. Based on the survey findings, the team will engage three groups of ten citizens across the same three towns in discussions about how they make sense of and assess tradeoffs associated with a potential peace agreement. Integrated analysis of the survey and group discussion results will inform the development of theoretical and practical implications for scholars, policymakers and practitioners focused on peace agreements.
Methodology for The Costs of Peace: War Experience, Territorial Loss, and Peace Agreement Consensus in Ukraine
Past Projects
Methodology for Tolerance Development & Conflict Resolution in Serbia
Methodology for Contact Theory in Democracy, Human Rights & Governance
Methodology for Exploring the Role of Norm Perception in the Production of Intergroup Threat Perception.