Future of Peace

Summary

Challenge

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the United Nations in September 2020, the UN Department of Peacebuilding Affairs Innovation Lab and Design Futures Initiative hosted a "Futuring Peace" competition, calling for designers and futurists to create speculative pieces on conflict prevention, peace mediation, and peacebuilding. I worked with a team of people from across the world to develop many ideas and two final concepts: the Wellness & Struggling Index and Peace Pals. We were a semi-finalist for the competition.

Outcome

Two future of peace concepts, one of which was chosen as a semi-finalist for the competition.

Role

I worked with an international, interdisciplinary team of people who met through the a futures Slack group. We had one month to create our concept and proposal. Our efforts were highly collaborative, and I ended up focusing more on strategy and research.

Problem

With the scale and weapons available today and increasing resource instability, today's conflicts are more complex, destructive, and difficult to resolve than any other time in human history. Drawn-out conflicts have also reversed progress on political and human rights gains.

Futuring Peace asked us to look ahead and consider new solutions and tools to be leveraged by the UN focused on conflict prevention, peace mediation, and peacebuilding. Priority topics included meaningful participation of women in peacekeeping, how emerging technologies might aid in peace, and how peace ceremonies might look.

Process

We explored different ideas around each of the three areas (conflict prevention, peace mediation, and peacebuilding), working on idea generation, refining into top themes, turning them into how might we statements, then generating more ideas (and questions) related to each statement during our first two ideation sessions.

Research

We each went off to research independently on the background of peacekeeping. I was especially interested in the role of women in peacekeeping and discovered that:

• inclusion of women's organizations in peace negotiations makes them 64% less likely to fail

• higher levels of gender equity are associated with a lower propensity for conflict

• the Iriquois Nation maintained decades of peace due to the meaningful involvement of women

We were also interested in the ideas of resource scarcity and the commons (communal vs. privatized resources), as climate change will present new challenges with access to basic needs and conflicts over resources. Based on a recent project with a Somali health organization, I was also interested in the storytelling and psychological effects of drawn-out conflicts, and how that affects people's views and ideas of the future (or propensity to think towards the future).

Through my research, I discovered an analysis from Dr. Judith Hand which determined six factors for enduring peace:

Ideation

We brought these in to evaluate our ideas against. The top ideas which emerged:

• Wellness & Struggling Index (WSI), to replace traditional measures of GDP which encourage a one-dimensional view of prosperity and encourage patterns of hoarding and conflict

• Global Citizen/Peace Pals, where people's loyalty and identity were tied not just to local communities and their country, but to the earth and "sister citizens" they would be connected to as their own location-agnostic community

• The Conflict Record, a library of people's history which would record stories and help uncovered patterns and warning systems around conflicts. People who grow up in areas with drawn-out conflicts may know nothing other than war and stories of the victors of conflicts, so this record would present alternative histories.

• Future Histories, a collaborative and ceremonial history of the future to bring more voices to the peace process and help negotiating parties within each conflict understand the true opportunities lost due to war

Solution

We mapped out a timeline for the next 75 years of the UN and created a speculative timeline back from our desired future and focused on the first two ideas. I wrote out an initial idea draft and the team turned it into a narrative and visuals.

Impact

One of our submissions was chosen as semi-finalist for the competition. Exploring the different complex systems at play in peace and global conflicts was fascinating to me, especially as someone who used to participate in Model UN conferences in high school. I would have loved for the team to have been able to dedicate more time into building out a more tangible future world around our concepts!