Announcing the Impact:Peace Initiative, a New Program of the Kroc School's Institute for Peace and Justice

The world is experiencing a 30-year high in violent conflict. Battle deaths worldwide have increased 340% over the last 10 years. Efforts to limit violent conflict are fragmented and inadequate, with insufficient hard evidence about where best to allocate resources. To reverse these negative trends, it is crucial to create smarter, more effective, better-funded ways to reduce violent conflict and build peaceful societies. The Impact:Peace initiative is being launched to create the breakthrough we need.

While there are existing efforts designed to translate research into policy-relevant findings, no initiative currently exists to leverage evidence to accelerate the most important change processes in the peacebuilding field. Impact:Peace will fill this gap. We will collaborate with partners to synthesize the most rigorous research available, produce original research, and develop innovative ways to connect that evidence with those driving positive change.

We will work with advocates, practitioners, and policymakers to identify the policy and advocacy processes within the peacebuilding field that have the most potential for real impact on the ground. These could include global processes like the work to achieve SDG16, legislative processes like the Global Fragility Act, US government processes like the Strategic Prevention Project, and others as well. Impact:Peace will create a powerful, agile, evidence infrastructure to accelerate and amplify these change processes. The ultimate goal — Impact:Peace will significantly reduce violent conflict worldwide.

The Launch:

This exciting new initiative will kick off with a launch convening at USD, May 20-22. The convening will bring together world-class experts to provide answers to questions like: What are the current policy and advocacy processes that have the potential to reduce violence worldwide? What evidence do policymakers, practitioners, advocates and other influencers need most to drive those processes forward? How might we build an innovative platform at USD to provide the evidence needed to those driving these processes forward and create real impact?

The Impact:Peace initiative is made possible through the generous gift of $1 million in seed funding by Milt Lauenstein. USD has established a challenge to raise additional funding beginning with a $1 million match. The Impact:Peace initiative will be housed at the Kroc School’s Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego and is being launched in partnership with The Stanley Foundation and the + Peace Coalition.

To learn more about Impact:Peace, or to get involved, contact Andrew Blum, Executive Director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, andrewblum@sandiego.edu.