Sustaining Peace Project
Website showcasing a research project about sustainable peace at Columbia University
Showcase website of Sustaining Peace Project, a research carried out at Columbia’s Earth Institute. Through the observation of peaceful societies existing on Earth today, researchers extrapolated a causal loop diagram with the aim to guide other nations towards a more sustainable, conflict-free future.
VISUALIZING SUSTAINABLE PEACE
The above map illustrates internally peaceful societies, or societies characterized by very little physical aggression among community members and beliefs in nonviolence; nonwarring societies, or communities that do not engage in armed combat; and peace systems, defined as groups of neighboring societies that do not make war with each other.
To model these complex dynamics, the SSP team used a method called causal loop diagramming.
By mapping out the core factors and dynamics which impact peace, and then mapping broader elements which influence that core, we are able to visualize how different factors create dynamics that influence sustaining peace.