Our Story
The problems of war and violence urgently require the concerted efforts of donors, policy makers, practitioners, and scholars in the peacebuilding community. Such efforts must be guided by informed understandings of what works effectively to prevent wars and resolve conflict.
To that end, at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, with the generous support of Milt Lauenstein, the idea for the Better Evidence Project resulted from a meeting of leading academics, practitioners, and funding organizations held at Point of View, the Carter School’s academic retreat center in February 2020.
The Better Evidence Project is focused on evidence from two high priority areas, based on indicators of change that reflect:
1) success in conflict resolution, war prevention, and sustainable peacemaking efforts, and
2) lessons from local peacebuilding successes.
As a key program in the Carter School’s Center for Peacemaking Practice, the Better Evidence Project curates, makes available and promotes the expertise of scholars, local peacemakers, global practitioners, donors, and policy makers, together seeking maximum practical impact in improving conflict resolution practice.
In this way, the team recognized that integrating both a comprehensive repository of resources and a robust network of peacebuilders and organizations dedicated to peacebuilding could significantly contribute to our overarching objective: fostering a dynamic community of practice. This community, comprising practitioners and grassroots leaders, will actively contribute to local initiatives aimed at effectively promoting stability and resolving conflicts.
What Makes Us Unique?
– Strengthening impact through evidence-based efforts to improve conflict resolution practice.
– Bridging theory and practice: EVIDENCE TO ACTION FOR PEACE
Priority Areas
- Curating a diverse collection of open source documents, resources, and materials from around the world that will enable better-informed decisions, projects and priorities to strengthen initiatives to build peace and prevent war.
- Promoting indicators of change that reflect success in peacebuilding and conflict resolution and prevention efforts while also highlighting what has not worked.
- Learning from local peacebuilding successes.
- Creation of a peacebuilding hub, and connecting peacebuilders around the world.
The combination of a repository of resources and a network of peacebuilders and peacebuilding organizations can help achieve the ultimate goal to create a vibrant community of practice comprised of practitioners and grassroots leaders who contribute to local efforts at stability and conflict resolution.
Vision
· The Resource Center will include high quality resources already created by other practitioners, organizations, etc. and will work to secure rights to post relevant content within the Resource Center collection.
· BEP will curate hundreds of cases of attempts to reduce armed conflict, and relevant resources for each case.
· The categories of resources include: datasets; case studies; impact assessments and project evaluations; multimedia sources (videos and podcasts); policy briefs; government reports; organizational studies and monographs; white papers; journal articles; research and scholarship; and grant reports.
· BEP will continue to work to develop partnerships with relevant organizations to enrich the resource Center and also promote the usage and dissemination of the materials by these organizations, including Conciliation Resources, CDA, USIP, Berghof Foundation, International Peace Institute, and many others.
· BEP will bring to the site reports, research, impact assessments, and evaluations that are generated by local practitioners in conflict-affected societies—with the goal of giving voice to research and perspectives not usually heard.
· The Better Evidence Project will encourage requests and connections from local to international organizations working on peacemaking and conflict prevention for resources, guidance, and relevant expertise to help them devise strategies and enhance the tools they can apply to their peacemaking and war prevention efforts.
Learning Cycle
The philosophy behind the Resource Center is a continuous learning cycle. The search engine software enables the system to learn from previous searches in order to detect links and connections between topics, tags, queries and the documents themselves while also discerning patterns and common themes around the searches. By doing so, the system will consistently revise the process based on what the system learns from how it is being used, thus making the searches more robust with better outcomes. The Resource Center, complemented with the Hub to connect Peacebuilders will be a means to connect and bring together local peacemakers, researchers, donors, and practitioners while also providing useful evidence to guide peacemaking practice.
This network will embody a cycle of continuous learning and sharing while amplifying local voices and lived experiences of local peacebuilders, local researchers and scholars, youth leaders, and those from at-risk communities so that they can inform the peace and security processes at local, national, regional and international levels. Helping local peacebuilders reach and connect to a wider audience of other peacebuilders will enable a community of practice to emerge that will contribute to stronger social cohesion, promotion of non-violent strategies for social, political and economic change, countering hate speech, prevention of violent extremism, more effective management of conflicts, and greater societal resilience. The Better Evidence Project team envisions a continuous and reciprocating cycle in which lessons are gathered and produced from peacemaking and armed conflict prevention efforts in the field as well as from peacebuilding and conflict resolution experiences and research.
While the Carter School will promote the work of the peacebuilders and create a platform through which they can bring their own new and fresh ideas to share with a community of practice, it is critical for the success of the project that the peacebuilders feel a sense of agency and their voices are heard as they wish to be heard, and they are supported in their work to create peacemaking activities and projects that are relevant to the needs of their respective communities.
Get Involved
Presenting Useful Evidence to Inform Peacemaking Practice
BEP invites partners to join us in harnessing useful research to prevent and end war. Submit your research or suggest other materials for peer review for our Resource Library. Join our pool of reviewers who help discern sound evidence to add to the Resource Library. Help us help peacemakers to be more effective.