We looked at how peace is defined across research, policy, and practice. We found three things every idea of peace has in common. The paper is peer-reviewed and available open access.
There are hundreds of definitions of peace. Academics, governments, NGOs, and communities all use the word differently — and that creates real problems. Without shared language, organisations cannot compare their work, measure progress, or build on each other's results.
So we asked: is there anything all these different definitions have in common? Not to replace any of them, but to find the shared ground underneath.
Across hundreds of definitions, these three elements appear without exception.
Peace is always about how people — or groups, or nations — interact with each other. It lives between us, not inside us.
Peace involves beings who can feel and experience life. It is about creatures that matter to themselves.
Peace points toward people being able to live well. It supports, enables, or creates the conditions for flourishing.
What this paper does
Published in a peer-reviewed journal in 2023, this paper examines what philosophers call the ontology of peace — what peace fundamentally is, beneath the differences in how it is defined. Using analysis across academic, policy, and practice traditions, it identifies three structural elements present in every definition, and shows why that matters for the field as a whole.
This framework does not replace any existing approach to peace — it reveals what every approach already shares. The same way the IPCC gave climate science a shared conceptual anchor, and the SDGs gave development work common goals, this is designed to do something similar for peace. Here is what that changes for each part of the field.
When every organisation defines peace differently, evaluating and comparing them is nearly impossible. This framework gives a shared lens — so you can see how diverse grantees contribute to the same underlying problem and make more confident allocation decisions.
Whether you work on conflict resolution, community dialogue, or ecological restoration, this framework shows precisely how your approach connects to the foundations of peace — making it easier to explain your value to funders and find complementary partners.
Peace processes often stall when parties hold incompatible ideas of what peace requires. This framework identifies conceptual common ground that persists across political, cultural, and institutional differences — a foundation for agreements that can hold.
Four steps. We are currently on steps one and two.