Chapter 7 is titled “Peace Data, Peace Finance, and Peace Engineering: Advancing the Design of Respectful Spaces and Sustainable Development Goals.” In it, authors Aniek van Kersen, Joseph B. Hughes, Margarita Quihuis, and Mark Nelson discuss ways that new ideologies and methodologies that promote peace can be incorporated into new fields. They particularly focus on engineering, data science, and finance, as well as the synergies they find between these three disciplines.
This chapter highlights the 17 Sustainable Development Goals created in 2016 by the UN. These goals are extremely ambitious, and cannot be addressed by one group or nation alone. The authors of this chapter highlight how their ideas of Peace Engineering, Peace Data, and Peace Finance, integrate with many of the SDG goals like eliminating poverty, reducing inequality, and protecting the environment. They also note how many of the SDGs are written from a colonial perspective, expecting western nations to take the lead. This colonialist perspective can lead to these goals being addressed uncreatively and ineffectively.
Just as empathy is a necessary central theme in Design Thinking, empathy needs to be included in the design workflows for data science, finance, and engineering projects (van Kersen et al., 2022, pg. 110).
A major connecting theme between the three peace fields they discuss is the concept of positive peace. In general, the normative way of thinking about peace is to reduce or eliminate violence and conflict. This framework is called negative peace, not because it is bad, but because it focuses on removing or preventing something. Positive peace, on the other hand, is a bit more creative and also more difficult to define. Rather than preventing violence, positive peace seeks new solutions to promote empathy, cooperation, and behaviors that facilitate a peaceful environment. Thinking about elements of positive peace can be beneficial in many areas.
Peace Engineering as the chapter defines it, involves expanding and evolving principles of design to better serve the needs of a space and population. “Peace Engineering includes human-centered and ecology-centered design principles, ethics, and harm reduction/detection to connect fields in engineering to social sciences and enhance the innovation process,” (van Kersen et al., 2022, pg. 114). This is a more democratized vision of construction and engineering education, that involves centering the context of the creation within the plans and design.
Peace Data is a conceptual framework and an accompanying methodology that utilizes passively collected sensor data about social behavior, especially value-creation and value distribution behavior, from the real world—not a controlled lab environment (van Kerse et al., 2022, pg. 115).
Context is also a key tenant of Peace Data. As the authors write, “too often, our research studies and samples are WEIRD [Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic]” (van Kerse et al., 2022, pg. 120). Creating standards or a norm in research creates many problems, including overlooked data and populations, bias, overgeneralization, and inaccurate conclusions. Ensuring that the context of research and the people in a study, as well as the context and reasoning behind research questions and interests, is imperative in combating the colonial influences that still significantly impact all areas involved with data collection and dissemination, especially in academia.
Peace Finance steps beyond current ethical and impact finance, to consider the entire Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment framework through the lens of value creation behavior, specifically measured by episodes of engagement behavior across difference boundaries. The practice of Peace Finance creates peace capital as an output. Peace capital is a new, investable asset class (van Kersen et al., 2022, pg. 114).
Finally, Peace Finance takes the context and framework of our financial systems into consideration. The goal is to create less exclusion and competition while promoting investment in areas that serve the common good. Peace Finance seeks to retool capitalist mechanisms in more mutually beneficial ways and increase access and participation in this reworked system. While I see the potential positives in shaping the power of capitalism to be less harmful, I do not see a way to divorce capitalistic systems from their imperialist colonial roots, nor their reliance on inequality and violence to survive.
Beyond the specific merits of Peace Engineering, Peace Data, and Peace Finance, the idea of incorporating greater examinations of context, positive peace, and creative and empathetic planning and innovation could go a long way toward fulfilling many of the SDGs. I also find these concepts valuable on their own. They can be incorporated into many fields in a way that could significantly benefit the world including education, city design, housing, health care, the justice and prison system, and even the travel industry. Acknowledging the impact and continued influence of colonialism is an often overlooked but ever-important first step in creating a world that is equal and peaceful.
About the Author:
Stella Hudson is a Graduate Assistant with the Baha’i Chair for World Peace. She graduated from the College of William and Mary in 2021 with a B.A. in English. She is attending the University of Maryland and pursuing a Master’s of Library and Information Science.