Focus areas

Peace, Security & Social Cohesion

Peace holds or fails on more than institutions and flashpoints. It rests on trust, on how unequal things are, on what information people receive, and on whether a society can absorb change without turning to violence or exclusion. Those conditions move slowly and then quickly, and never at the same rate for every place, group or generation.

Cohesion depends on the conditions people actually live with

Insecurity takes many forms, and reading it requires attention to governance, legitimacy, social and political strain, local relationships and the information people use to make sense of change. The single-cause explanation is usually the one to distrust, and the people living with the risk usually already know a good deal about their own options. Careful inquiry recovers perspectives that responses designed from a distance, or framed around the latest incident, routinely miss.

What we read in a context

  • Trust and social cohesion

    Examining the relationships, inequalities and forms of participation that can strengthen or weaken the capacity to manage difference constructively.

  • Prevention and resilience

    Considering how evidence, local peace infrastructures and institutional learning can inform conflict-sensitive policy or programming before pressures escalate.

  • Information and legitimacy

    Exploring misinformation, disinformation and information integrity where they affect trust, public debate or the legitimacy of institutions.

  • Connected risks

    Looking at how climate pressure, governance failure and uneven opportunity interact with insecurity in a particular context.

Questions of peace and cohesion can be closely connected to public institutions, climate pressures, technology and young people’s futures.

Context first

Describe the context and the relationships in it. We will say what evidence would help and what it will not settle.

Discuss this area