The Program on Urban Peacebuilding leverages interdisciplinary research and practice to support efforts to prevent and respond to violence in urban areas and to bolster innovative approaches to city-wide peacebuilding.
Connecting community members, academics, policymakers, and practitioners from various fields, the program creates cutting-edge community-based learning experiences that support communities in building on their knowledge and creative potential to more effectively influence social change. The Program’s approach to urban peacebuilding focuses on partnering with stakeholders to lay the groundwork for more integrated and dynamic city-wide peacebuilding models.
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The Need: Cities as Sites of Conflict
According to the United Nations, approximately 55% of the world’s population lived in urban areas in 2018, a figure that is projected to increase to 68% by 2050. At their best, cities offer complex social spaces that amplify the creative and cultural capital of residents and serve as crossroads for people from a wide array of backgrounds. In a rapidly urbanizing world, vibrant cities are at the core of ensuring the health and wellbeing of people.
While cities can be places of connection, collaboration, and exchange, they can also be deeply divided along economic, racial, ethnic, religious, and other lines of social difference. As highlighted by the UN Habitat report in 2016, 75% of the world’s cities have higher levels of income inequality than two decades ago. The promises of mobility, creativity, and innovation are not shared by all residents in cities, and deep divisions in cities breed pervasive and systematic exclusion and intensify violent social dynamics in urban areas.
As a result of these dynamics, millions of people living in cities globally experience the far-reaching impacts of persistent violence. Additionally, some of the world’s highest homicide rates occur not in countries that are experiencing war, but instead in nations where elevated rates of inequality prompt violence in urban communities. There is a pressing need to better understand and respond to these challenges which are growing both in scope and complexity.
While there is research on the underlying complex dynamics of crime, deviance, and violence in cities, the majority of these studies focus narrowly on public policy concerns about crime in poor urban communities (Akom, Ginwright, and Camma, 2008). Additionally, policy makers too often explain crime, delinquency, and violence as individual pathological behavior, especially when it comes to young people in the city. There is a growing body of research that explores social bonds, prosocial behavior, neighborhood networks, and a host of other key areas that can be more effectively leveraged to shift the dynamics of violence in cities. Indeed, these axes of urban peacebuilding highlight the key role that urban residents are playing in working to make lasting changes in their communities.
The Opportunity: Strengthening Peacebuilding Communities of Practice in Cities
Globally, cities provide an excellent space in which to understand how emerging peacemaking practices can be used in complex social environments to prevent violence and generate more equitable and thriving communities. Given that cities are crossroads for people of many different backgrounds, they provide an opportunity to understand how peacemaking can be adapted to the local context and “go viral” within regional and global networks interested in influencing social change. Cities provide a hub where local peacebuilding practitioners convene, connect across lines of difference, innovate, and communicate more broadly with other networks of concerned stakeholders.
What We Do: Bridging Urban Peacebuilding Scholarship and Practice
Education and Training
Our education and training programs focus on linking theory and practice in urban peacebuilding. We build on the knowledge and experiences of everyday urban peacebuilders and connect that knowledge with existing research on effective approaches to peacebuilding. We identify urban peacebuilders and their allies and support their work in the violence-affected communities where they live and work. Drawing on experiential education, educational theater, simulations, and other cutting-edge approaches, these programs draw on emerging research about the most effective ways to learn about and respond to destructive conflict. In addition to advancing knowledge about urban peacebuilding and the skills needed to respond to these challenges, these educational programs provide opportunities to convene a broad array of stakeholders and further develop peacebuilding networks within and across cities.
Research
Our goal is to conduct cutting-edge research with a diverse array of partners and to make that research accessible and widely available. Our approach is focused on understanding, amplifying, and bridging knowledge across epistemic communities in the city utilizing complexity theory, network theory, systems theory, and other interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks that allow for better understanding the generation, diffusion, and uptake of knowledge about peacemaking in urban environments.
The past several decades of research on violence prevention clearly demonstrates that violence in cities is the result of multiple overlapping risk factors and deeper underlying cycles that produce the conditions whereby deprivation, anti-social behavior, and violence are all too likely. However, there are still too few studies that examine approaches that foster pro-social behavior, resilience, collective-efficacy, creative resistance to injustice, and other community-driven processes of change. To address this gap, we draw on an interdisciplinary approach to engaged scholarship that is grounded in the co-production of knowledge, bringing together stakeholders from various backgrounds, formal and informal actors, and academics to develop models that link theory and practice.
The Program makes this knowledge accessible and useful outside the academy through partnerships with grassroots organizations and dialogue with policymakers, as well as creative projects exploring themes with key grassroots influencers. We also disseminate this knowledge within the academy, highlighting the need for more research on urban peacebuilding through conferences focused on these themes while generating outstanding academic publications that ground us as an academic center for excellence in engaged research.
Technical Assistance
We leverage our research to provide technical assistance to communities of practice. Technical assistance involves the development of tools and resources for practitioners and policymakers in order to improve a specific set of practices. This includes using data to assist practitioners and policymakers in exploring new approaches to key challenges, articulating and refining their theory of change, and developing approaches for implementing specific policies or procedures. Our strengths in this area are grounded in over 25 years of building expertise in bridging theory and practice at the Carter School and within our network of Visiting Scholars with specific expertise in cities.
Ongoing Projects
Community Led Projects
Restorative Justice and Conflict Transformation in Urban Schools
Police De-Escalation and Conflict Resolution Training and Law Enforcement Professional Development
Shared and Participatory Governance
Building Bridges Across Lines of Difference in the City