3 Ways Peacebuilders Can Evolve in the Age of Global Disruption
TL;DR:
As disruption is shifting global systems, peacebuilders are poised to build smarter, broader, and more lasting solutions. This article outlines three key adaptations: integrating peacebuilding across sectors, attracting new forms of capital by making the business case for peace, and redefining success through a positive peace approach. If we want peace to scale and endure, we need to change what we do, how we fund it, and how we measure impact.
We have an opportunity here…
We’re living through a period of profound disruption.
Old systems are breaking down. New alliances and technologies are emerging. The global order is shifting fast—and with it, the landscape for peacebuilding.
In the midst of all this upheaval, one thing is very clear: we can’t keep doing things the way we always have.
Conflicts are rising. Forever wars are becoming more of the norm rather than the exception. If peacebuilders want to stay relevant—and actually shift the tides of conflict—we need to evolve. Fast.
Here are three ways the peacebuilding field can use this age of global disruption as an opportunity to adapt and improve:
1. Change what we do: Integrate peacebuilding into every sector
Peacebuilding can’t stay in a silo.
Conflict affects every sector: Health, climate, education, infrastructure, business, agriculture, food, public safety, technology…all of it. If there are issues in these sectors, conflict exacerbates them. Conflict is the force that ties polycrises into Gordian knots.
Let’s take countering violent extremism as a case study in how peacebuilding gets distorted when siloed. When countering violent extremism emerged during the Obama administration, it reshaped development funding priorities. Suddenly, programs across the development spectrum were rebranded as countering violent extremism. Not because they’d changed, but because the funding winds had. It sparked years of debate over what counted as “real” countering violent extremism versus development programming.
Today, we know that a lot of violent extremism is perpetuated by breakdowns in the social contract, either because of deficits of the state to provide basic services or state violence against citizens. When these are the causes, then addressing violent extremism actually does just look like development. But because we believed violent extremism was sui generis, we built an entirely new field to respond to it and in so doing, we missed the opportunity to address the deeper systemic issues in the places where it was taking root.
Peace is a force multiplier.
Peace creates the conditions that allow every other sector to function and thrive. Research from organizations like Catholic Relief Services shows that when peacebuilding is integrated—into health, education, livelihoods—outcomes improve across the board. Peacebuilding isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the foundational layer that makes change stick.
What could it look like to stop treating peace as a specialized niche? To me, the answer to that question is only limited by the limits of our imagination, but here are three ideas. First, we could make peacebuilding tools core competencies across sectors. Second, just like every organization has Chief Financial Officers, we could have Chief Conflict Resolution Officers or Chief Peace Officers. Third, for every organizational or project team goal, we could include peace positive goals and indicators (more on this below).
In practice, this could look like training frontline staff to analyze conflict risks, building partnerships that include peace actors, and designing systems that anticipate and mitigate—not just react to—tension. Imagine if every business venture added a conflict assessment to its financial risk analysis, or every Sahelian agriculture program included conflict resolution between farmers and herders, or every school system taught nonviolent problem-solving. That’s how we integrate peace.
This disruption era provides an opportunity to integrate peacebuilding as a core competency and modus operandi.
2. Change how we fund what we do: Bring peace to the investment table
For decades, peacebuilding has relied on government funding.
But that model is under strain—and it’s not built for scale. We need new funding streams that enable integration and working at scale. That means making the business case for how peace aligns to the strategic goals of actors who have not traditionally funded peacebuilding.
The good news is that we already have a lot of evidence of peace’s returns. Investing in peace and prevention tends to yield better returns, lower risk, and increase long-term value. Reports from PeaceNexus, Mercy Corps, the IMF, and others back this up. The challenge is packaging the evidence in ways that will persuade investors, philanthropists, and the private sector. And building the evidence base in ways that shift the narrative from proving a negative (absence of violence) to peace positive outcomes (more on this below).
Peace is not just a moral and public good—it’s a strategic advantage. It behooves us to start communicating it that way. That means speaking the language of investors, aligning with the incentives of philanthropy, and designing initiatives that demonstrate value across multiple bottom lines.
If you’re a mere mortal peacebuilder like me, that also means upskilling.
To convince new sources of finance of the business case for peace, we have to understand how capital flows, how investment decisions get made, and how peace fits into the equation. We need to become fluent in ROI, ESG, impact investing, blended finance, and catalytic capital—not to abandon our values, but to amplify them.
We don’t have to become financiers overnight. But we do need to learn how to talk with them, partner with them, and build peace projects that meet their standards for evidence and accountability. That might mean bringing new people onto our teams—finance folks, business strategists, philanthropy specialists—or getting ourselves on their teams. It might mean co-designing approaches with investors or learning to write a pitch deck alongside a theory of change. It definitely means seeing peace not only as a moral imperative, but as an investable outcome.
That’s how we shift the funding landscape. That’s how we grow our ability to do our good work. And that’s how we start building peace at the scale the world actually needs.
Let’s use this disruption as an opportunity to learn these skills so we can make the case for why peace is the ultimate investment.
3. Change how we define success: Reorient toward positive peace
As long as I’ve been in this field, we’ve struggled with the problem of proving the negative: “We intervened and then there was no violence.”
That’s a losing game. It’s really hard to prove that our intervention alone was the thing that caused no violence to take place. This approach has kept us on the defensive, even when an intervention actually does prevent catastrophe (because how can we ever know if the catastrophe wouldn’t have happened anyway—It’s maddening).
We need to move from measuring negative peace—the absence of violence—to measuring positive peace: the presence of justice, inclusion, opportunity, and resilient systems. The positive peace frame gives us more proactive tools for tracking the impact of peacebuilding work. We can count, for example, how many people use nonviolent dispute resolution methods. We can measure shifts in public trust, perceptions of fairness, or how often communities resolve conflict without external intervention. And we can align peacebuilding with broader goals like economic development, climate resilience, mental health, and democratic governance that all contribute holistically to improving life.
That shift doesn’t just help us communicate impact. It also helps us improve our work. Because when we measure what makes peace durable, we learn and can build more of it.
Here again, we may consider taking this time of disruption to upskill and hone our success message.
We need to become fluent in frameworks that track peace as something observable—not an absence in violence. The Positive Peace Index from the Institute for Economics and Peace is one example: it includes eight measurable pillars, from good governance and human capital to low corruption and acceptance of rights. Learning how to apply tools like these—alongside methods like participatory research, trust surveys, and systems mapping—will help us better equip ourselves to demonstrate impact and design for enduring peace.
Many of us were trained to track outputs—how many workshops were held, how many participants attended, etc.—but not to capture the deeper systems change that peacebuilding requires. Shifting to positive peace metrics pushes us to ask different questions:
Are people resolving conflict without violence?
Is trust increasing across identity groups?
Are institutions becoming more inclusive and responsive?
These are harder to measure but are far more meaningful indicators of success. And they’re easier to conceive if done alongside point #1 about integrating peacebuilding into other sectors.
We all know peace isn’t just the absence of violence. But to better communicate what it is we do and why it’s worth investing in requires a shift in how we measure and communicate about what it is. By starting to count what counts, we can clarify for ourselves and the world what success looks like.
The better we define success and back it with evidence (not just quantitative), the easier it becomes to fund it, scale it, and sustain it.
Let us see this for what it is
This era of disruption is an opportunity.
By adapting what we do, how we fund it, and how we define success, peacebuilders can usher into a new era of conflict transformation. But we can’t wait. The future of peacebuilding depends on how we evolve today.