Achieving Peace in an Age of Chaos: Solutions for a Sustainable Future

Peace in an Age of Chaos

Humanity is nearing a tipping point and facing challenges unparalleled in history.

Finding solutions requires fundamentally new ways of thinking about peace, in order to achieve the levels of trust, cooperation and inclusiveness necessary to solve these challenges, let alone empower international institutions and organisations necessary to address them.

Understanding what creates sustainable peace cannot be found in the study of violence alone. Without an understanding of the factors that create and sustain peaceful societies, it will not be possible to develop programmes and policies, or mobilise the resources required to build peaceful and resilient societies.

Leading voices on peace and poverty research and measurement, explore why we need a new understanding of peace in the 21st century; how Positive Peace provides an overarching framework for increasing the level of global peacefulness, as well as economic progress and social advancement.

Participants:

Steve Killelea is a global philanthropist focused on peace and sustainable development. Over the last two decades, Steve has applied his business skills to his many global philanthropic activities, including the establishment of a private family charity, The Charitable Foundation, which now has over three million direct beneficiaries and is one of Australia's largest donors of private foreign aid. He is also the founder of the Institute for Economics and Peace, a non-profit research institute known for its innovative analysis of the relationship between business, peace and economic development, used by many international organisations including the UN, OECD and World Bank. Steve is also the creator of the Global Peace Index, the world's leading measure of peace that ranks 163 countries by their relative levels of peacefulness each year. Steve's deep commitment to peace has earned him the Luxembourg Peace Prize, two Nobel Peace Prize nominations, and seen him named one of the Top 100 most influential people in Armed Violence Reduction by the UK group Action on Armed Violence.

Sabina Alkire directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), a research centre within the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. Together with Professor James Foster, Sabina developed a flexible method for measuring multidimensional poverty, that can incorporate different dimensions, or aspects of poverty, to create measures tailored to purpose. With colleagues at OPHI this has been applied empirically to produce a global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) as well as dozens of bespoke MPIs used as official national statistics. Any MPI offers a tool to identify who is poor by considering the range of deprivations they experience jointly. It is used to report a headline figure of poverty (the MPI), which is then unpacked into a detailed information platform for policy design showing how people are poor nationally, and how they are poor by areas, groups, and by each indicator.  Alkire, who previously worked at George Washington University, Harvard, the Human Security Commission and the World Bank, holds a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford.

Dr Mary Martin is director of the UN Business and Human Security Initiative. Her research focuses on the role of the private sector in conflict and peacebuilding and private security in the international system. She was co-ordinator of the Human Security Study Group 2006-1010, reporting to the High Representative of the European Union. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Cambridge.