Scaling Peace Isn’t Replicating a Single Innovation. It’s a Stack.
Inspired by Jim McKelvey’s The Innovation Stack
Most peacebuilding efforts start with a good, well-intentioned idea.
A reintegration model that supports former fighters.
A community dialogue that rebuilds trust.
A youth employment initiative to prevent radicalization.
But most peacebuilding efforts don’t scale. They remain local, time-bound, and heavily dependent on outside funding.
These aren’t bad ideas. They have been the bread and butter of peacebuilding for decades and peacebuilders have produced a lot of positive local impact through these interventions (two of my favorite publicly available examples are the Women’s Action Peace Network in Liberia and Fambul Tok in Sierra Leone). They are also typically positioned, as the two examples illustrate, to respond to violence in specific communities rather than prevent it at scale.
If we think about peacebuilding as a preventative measure that can reach the scale necessary to address the level of need, then just doing more of these traditional peacebuilding interventions is not sufficient.
Prevention and scale require a different way of working. While many describe this as a systems approach, we don’t often explain what we mean by “systems”. Today, I want to illustrate what a systems approach to peacebuilding is, by drawing from Jim McKelvey’s book The Innovation Stack.
The Innovation Stack is a book about how world-changing solutions don’t come from a single invention, but from a stack of interconnected innovations that, together, make something truly resilient and hard to copy.
McKelvey learned this while co-founding Square, the mobile payments company. The company succeeded not because of a clever and convenient credit card reader, but because it built an entire stack of innovations: hardware, fraud protection, transparent pricing, elegant design, accessible customer service, and more. It was this whole system—not any one part—that allowed Square to succeed.
What does this have to do with peace?
Everything.
Why peace doesn’t scale (and why that’s a problem)
Traditional peacebuilding is project-based: design a pilot, secure funding, deliver a set of activities, report on outputs, and somehow this will solve super complex, wicked problems in 3 to 5 years.
Some projects do well, others don’t, but almost none reach systemic scale or sustained impact. That’s a huge problem. Because the drivers of conflict—resource competition, social exclusion, disinformation, climate shocks, and repression—are scaling fast.
And if peace is going to prevail, it has to scale faster.
But peacebuilding has been held back by the myth of the singular innovation – the idea that “peace” can be proven as a sort of minimally viable product (MVP) and then scaled. This myth perpetuates the projectization of work that is fundamentally is not a product or service. And fails to contend with the wicked nature of conflict.
Peace, like Square, needs an innovation stack.
What’s an Innovation Stack?
In McKelvey’s terms, an “innovation stack” is what happens when you’re solving a truly novel problem—something no one has solved before, at least not in your context.
You don’t just invent once, you invent again and again, each time to solve a new problem created by the last solution. At Square, that meant solving for how to take card payments without traditional merchant accounts, but doing that meant solving for fraud, pricing, design, hardware, and more. Each innovation required another until they were stacked together to create a system that even Amazon couldn’t replicate—and it did try.
The same logic applies to peace.
What might a peace innovation stack look like?
If you’re working to build sustainable peace there are a few interlocking innovations we already know we need.
1. Vision Innovation
First, we need to redefine what peace is.
Peace is more than the absence of violence. It’s more like interlocking systems (or stacks) that generate belonging, dignity, shared prosperity, resilience, and social cohesion. Our definition of peace needs to be richer to help us imagine new ways of working in peacebuilding.
This generative definition helps break us out of the perpetual loop of reacting to symptoms, and start building conditions that make peace self-sustaining.
2. Model Innovation
We also need to rethink what forms peacebuilding can take.
As I’ve written here, one of the most powerful forms of peace innovation is integration: building peace into other sectors. This involves designing interventions that intentionally strengthen social cohesion, reduce exclusion, and foster dignity through the services people use every day. In this way, model innovation is about creating the structures and delivery mechanisms through which peace is built as a byproduct of how other systems operate.
It’s what I explored in “What Milk Can Teach Us About Peace”: When peace becomes part of how people get jobs, access land, receive healthcare, shop for food, or send their kids to school, it stops being confined to a single intervention and starts becoming part of the societal infrastructure.
3. Finance Innovation
We also need to change how peace efforts are financed.
As I wrote in Peace Is a Smart Investment, peacebuilding is a high-leverage, systems-level investment with incredible returns. But seizing the profit potential of peace requires financial tools built for the work, such as patient capital, catalytic grants, and blended finance instruments. These funding models align better with the complexity and time horizon of building lasting peace.
Good ideas can’t scale without the right capital behind them.
4. Measurement Innovation
Another huge innovation stack that’s needed for peace is changing how we define and measure progress.
Current metrics often focus on proving that violence didn’t occur, rather than capturing what was actually strengthened or valued. A better approach is to create a value proposition of tangible and intangible outcomes like trust, inclusion, and the ability of institutions and communities to manage tensions before they escalate. These are harder to quantify, but far more useful for understanding whether peace is taking root.
Focusing measurement and evaluation systems on the value for investment in peace helps us unlock this part of the innovation stack.
5. Technology Innovation
We also need to think differently about how technology supports peace.
Digital tools won’t solve conflict on their own, but they can help us listen better, respond faster, and extend reach in places where institutions are weak or absent. That includes early warning systems, remote service delivery, tools for coordination, documentation digitization, or even basic access to trusted information. Used responsibly, technology can become part of the infrastructure that helps peace efforts stick.
In fragile environments, technology can extend reach, reduce cost, and deliver services even when institutions can’t.
6. Policy Innovation
Policy often sets the boundaries for what peacebuilders can and can’t do.
Yet in many cases, peace isn’t designed into the systems that govern land, contracts, services, or security. When policies reinforce exclusion or entrench power imbalances, even the best peace efforts struggle to gain traction. But when rules and incentives are aligned with inclusion and accountability, peace has room to grow.
Policy isn’t the whole answer but it is often a necessary component to shape the playing field.
7. Talent & Culture Innovation
Scaling peace also depends on who’s doing the work and how they see their role.
Peacebuilders are often asked to implement predefined activities, but scaling systems requires people who have political acumen and can navigate complexity, build coalitions, and adapt in real time. It also means creating space for people outside the traditional peace field—like technologists, organizers, creatives, healthcare providers, and entrepreneurs—to contribute. And it calls for shifting internal organizational cultures from compliance and delivery to learning, experimentation, and collaboration.
Without shifting the who and how of peacebuilder talent and the organizations that employ them, even well-designed strategies won’t get very far.
What to do next: Building your own stack
For peacebuilders:
Start mapping your stack. Ask:
What innovation is needed to begin?
What problem(s) arises after I implement the first innovation?
What innovation(s) is needed to address the arising problem(s)?
Repeat until you have interlocking innovation stacks that are functioning at scale.
For funders and investors:
Stop asking “what’s the intervention?” Peace is not an MVP.
Start asking:
What stack of innovations makes peace possible?
What invisible infrastructure needs funding?
How do we fund for systems, not pilots?
Stack-aware funds change systems.
A Final Thought
Inspired by Jim McKelvey’s The Innovation Stack, one might say: “If your peace project is easy to replicate, it probably won’t scale. If your peace stack is hard to replicate, it probably will.”
Scaling peace isn’t about better programs. It’s about building durable systems that make peace self-sustaining, hard to disrupt, and resilient across time and space. Those systems aren’t built all at once, they’re build stack by stack.
Let’s get to work.