Building Peaceful Societies Evidence Gap Map
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Government performance
This includes all indicators of how well state institutions are functioning (e.g. indicators of how consistent or high-quality a service is), or perceived to be functioning, corruption, strength of democratic practices, and government capacity.
Civic participation
This includes all indicators for participation or inclusion in civil society, State organisations, and decision-making, including capacity for collective action.
Access to justice, rights, and public services
This includes all indicators of access to justice and rights, including protection of human rights (including access to documentation), and equitable access to public services (including health, education, etc.).
Equality and empowerment
This includes all measures of social equality and empowerment outcomes, particularly for marginalised groups, including gender equality, sense of self-efficacy and inclusion. It does not include equal access to rights and services, captured elsewhere.
Intergroup relations and social norms
This includes indicators of social norms around intergroup relations, and (re)integration and reconciliation processes, including perceptions of other groups (social stigma, discrimination), and frequency of, and attitudes towards, interactions with other groups.
Peace-positive behaviours
This includes individual-level measures of peace-positive attitudes, values and behaviours (pro-social, associative, cooperative), inclusive perceptions of community, and behavioural intentions.
Trust and public confidence
This includes all indicators of trust in institutions and government, within communities, between conflict groups, of local leaders, and of security apparatuses.
Sexual and gender-based violence
This comprises any indicator that measures incidence levels, attitudes, or norms related to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). SGBV "refers to any act that is perpetrated against a person’s will and is based on gender norms and unequal power relationships. It encompasses threats of violence and coercion. It can be physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual in nature, and can take the form of a denial of resources or access to services. It inflicts harm on women, girls, men and boys." (UNHCR, n.d.)
Instances of violence and displacement due to violence
This includes reported violence (except for specific measures of SGBV), crime rates, accessibility of weapons, casualties of conflict, self-reported use of violence, and measurements of the frequency, and levels, of displacement due to violence.
Social norms regarding violence
This includes norms and behaviours surrounding violence, including support for political violence or armed groups, and attitudes towards the use of violence.
Cost-Effectiveness Analysis
This includes all analyses that use primary cost and effectiveness data to produce a cost-effectiveness analysis. This includes analysis at the intervention, activity, or strategic level.
Economic Situation
This includes all indicators of employment status and household financial resilience (income, assets, savings, etc.).
Physical and psychological health security
This includes indicators of key health outcomes, such as psychological wellbeing (e.g. levels of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, etc.), incidences of disease, vaccination rates, and life expectancy. This does not cover access to health services (which appears under governance).
Food Security and Nutrition
This includes all indicators of access to sufficient and diverse food. This can include direct measures of access to food or measures of nutritional status such as BMI, z-scores for weight, etc.
Sustainable and equitable resource management
This includes indicators related to the economic and environmental sustainability and equity of resource management.
Perceptions of political security
This includes perceptions of the state of peace and conflict vulnerability in a community or country, and perceptions of police and security apparatuses capacity to ensure safety.
Perceptions of personal and community safety
This includes measures of perceived safety in the home, in the community, and freedom of movement.
Dispute resolution
This encompasses all indicators related to the peaceful resolution of disputes, including accessibility of dispute resolution mechanisms, the capacity of communities to resolve disputes, frequency with which conflict is resolved peacefully, etc.
Peace education
Peace education interventions promote the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that shape the social environment to both prevent conflict from occurring and help people to resolve it peacefully. These interventions can be run at many scales (i.e. local vs. national), and often involve promoting a community dialogue. They usually cover a range of topics including nonviolent conflict resolution techniques, human rights, democracy, disarmament, gender equality, tolerance, and communication skills.
Peace messaging and media
These interventions focus on the capacity building of media organisations and supporting them to provide peace messaging to their local community, among other content.
Dispute resolution
These are interventions that emphasise handling disputes through informal means, including specific programmes dedicated to dispute resolution, traditional councils, and cultural means of dispute resolution.
Mental health and psychosocial support
These interventions aim to provide psychosocial support to victims and/or perpetrators to address the psychological and psychosocial problems caused, or exacerbated, by situations of violence (ICRC, 2016). This can include trauma healing, psychosocial support groups, individual therapy (sometimes for specific groups, such as torture survivors, or ex-combatants), arts-based therapies, and building community-awareness around mental health. This support aims to help individuals and communities heal the psychological wounds and rebuild social structures (UNICEF, n.d.).
Social inclusion / reintegration initiatives
These interventions include efforts to engage marginalised groups into the social fabric of communities, including the reintegration of non-combatants affected by violence. This can include building relationships between vulnerable individuals and potential mentor figures, their families, and the wider community. This can also be formal or informal efforts to minimise social isolation. This does not cover reintegration of ex-combatants, captured elsewhere.
Gender equality behavioural-change communications
These interventions aim to change behaviours, attitudes and beliefs around gender equality and the role of women society.
Intergroup dialogues
These interventions aim to increase dialogue and social interaction between different groups, including different ethnic groups, displaced and host community groups, and people of different faiths. They are not part of formal peace processes, but rather processes that use engagement with key community leaders to bring different groups together. They may include purely dialogue-focused interventions or bring groups together through activities, such as arts or sports.
Support for peace processes and negotiation
A peace process is often thought of as "a political process in which conflicts are resolved by peaceful means" and consist of a mixture of "politics, diplomacy, changing relationships, negotiation, mediation, and dialogue in both official and unofficial arenas" (Saunders, 2001). These interventions, therefore, encompass not only support to political institutions, but work with key actors to establish the preconditions for peace processes, establishing national and community dialogues, and ensuring that marginalised groups (such as women, youth, and ethnic minorities) participate in the process (Berghof Foundation, 2015).
Support for peace agreement implementation and oversight
This includes efforts to facilitate the implementation of a finalised peace agreement and neutral third-party oversight to ensure compliance amongst all parties to the agreement.
Transitional justice processes
These interventions offer stand-alone (outside the standard justice system), formal and informal (or judicial and non-judicial) measures to address the legacy of human rights abuses in a country and address past injustices. These often include truth commissions (or simple truth telling by both victims and perpetrators), programmes for reparations, and actual prosecutions.
Peace policy influencing
This includes interventions to support civil-society-led efforts to influence policies to end violence and promote sustainable peace, including through advocacy campaigns, conflict assessments and mass movements / collective civic action.
Peacekeeping missions
This specifically covers the deployment of UN Peacekeepers into countries in a post-conflict setting. This involves the deployment of international troops and police, who work with local civilian peacekeepers to provide security to an area (UN Peacekeeping, n.d.).
Disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) and gang drop-out programmes
Disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration is a complex program for ex-combatants that brings together reconciliation, security, and socioeconomic dimensions. The process typically involves removing weapons from combatants' hands, taking individuals out of militarised structures, providing them with training for a new livelihood, and psychosocial support (UN DDR Resource Centre, 2019). This also captures programs to reintegrate former gang members into their communities, which follow similar theories of change.
Conflict-focused early warning systems
This includes interventions that aim to create early warning systems that track fragile situations and aim to identify conflict, or potential conflict, as soon as, or just before, it breaks out, such as through tracking the use of hate speech in traditional and public social media.
Countering violent extremism
CVE is a security-focused approach to dealing with violent extremism based on anti-/counter-terrorism tools and entry points, rooted in a hard power approach (Austin and Geissmann, 2018)
Demining
This is the process of removing mines and other unexploded ordinance from an area.
Civilian police reform
These interventions work within the system of traditional civilian police forces to restructure, reform, and improve access to police services. These interventions include higher-level and governmental reform of police forces and local level efforts, such as Community policing interventions, which aim to build ties between the formal police force and the community, such as through neighbourhood watches, as well as encouraging civil organisations to be involved in promoting security.
Civil society capacity building
This encompasses a fairly broad range of interventions that work with civil society organisations (CSOs) to develop their capacity as a force of change (i.e. capacity building of CSOs to advocate for and engage with citizens and the government). This can include the establishment of community interest groups, such as women and youth committees.
Civic engagement initiatives
These are interventions that aim to empower individuals, often marginalised groups or youth, by providing them with formal and/or informal opportunities to make their voices heard through engaging in politics, civilian participation, and oversight of public institutions and other civil society activities.
Justice and human rights support
This includes interventions that aim to enable access to justice and human rights for individuals and groups through strengthening support from the demand-side. This can include programs to provide pro-bono legal aid to vulnerable individuals or groups, information campaigns to improve people's knowledge of theirs and others' rights, and advocacy programs to increase awareness of human rights abuses or injustices.
Support for foundational state design processes
This includes efforts to support the design and drafting of legal foundations (e.g. constitutions), political system design, and State institutional design (e.g. drawing boundaries, decentralisation, federalism, or division of territory into districts).
Public sector governance and institutionalisation
These interventions work with public institutions at all levels (national, subnational and local), including both core government bodies and public service institutions. They aim to build capacities and processes to strengthen governance, including through improving the accountability, transparency, responsiveness, efficiency, and equity of access to government and public services. Whilst public services, e.g. health and education, are usually thought of as being provided by the government, they may also be provided by non-governmental organisations, though this is usually envisioned as an intermediary step whilst capacity is built in the government. These interventions also may include efforts to build linkages between civilians and State officials, to strengthen State legitimacy.
Security sector reform
These interventions work to help governments improve their provision of safety, security, and justice through actors in the security sector (SS), which includes all levels of military and civilian organisations, governmental bodies providing oversight to such organisations, and actual state security providers (including police, customs, military forces, correction officers). This can include interventions to reform armed forces, improve national security planning, and provide oversight and transparency to justice, police and corrections actors.
Justice system support/reform
These interventions work within the formal justice sector, the "supply-side" of justice, to improve court systems and access. This can include integrating human rights into the legal framework, capacity building for courts and lawyers, and reforming the criminal penal code to strengthen equal protection for human rights under national laws.
Land reform
These interventions work with the government to develop or reform and implement laws to improve the equity of land distribution for vulnerable community members, such as indigenous groups, the ultra-poor, or displaced persons.
Support for elections
Trusted elections help to establish the legitimacy of the government, and election support interventions typically work with both international actors (who often come into monitor elections) and local CSOs (and NGOs) to ensure that electoral law is followed, eligible citizens are able to freely vote, and the election results are more trustworthy. Elections support also comprises interventions to increase access to information about election processes and candidates.
Academic catch-up
These programmes aim to address the school years lost by children due to conflict and displacement (Amal for Education, 2019). They are particularly important when attempting to reintegrate refugee and child soldier populations. Typically they will cover all academic areas to ensure the children have broad capacity.
Life skills and employment training
This category provides training programmes primarily for jobs and livelihoods, but can also include programmes such as music instruction for youth that may have less obvious monetary reward but aim to provide skills and an alternative to violence. Importantly this category does not include the development of peace skills (such as conflict management).
Financial inclusion
This typically comprises microcredit, microinsurance, and microsaving interventions, including establishing village saving and loan associations (VSLAs), as well as, financial literacy support.
In-kind transfers and food assistance
This covers in-kind transfers that directly provide goods and assistance, and specifically includes food assistance (where it is being given directly to the community).
Infrastructure development and reconstruction
This covers all interventions that build, or re-build, infrastructure outside of CDD/CDR processes, with the aim of stimulating the economy through both short-term employment and ensuring the infrastructure necessary for economic development exists.
Market development
This includes interventions that aim to develop the wider economic market and provide increased opportunities at the macro-level of the economy. This includes work on trade, foreign and national investment, and business, cooperative or association formation and oversight.
Community-based natural resource management
These interventions aim to strengthen community-level management of natural resources, including water, rangelands, and forests. This may include participatory management of irrigation systems, water user associations, or rangeland/forestry user associations. These interventions aim to decentralise control over resource management and benefits to a local level. Interventions to support CBNRM groups often comprise elements of conflict resolution training.
Transboundary water sharing
This includes support for (re)negotiation of transboundary water agreements (e.g. treaties) and management, to improve the equity and sustainability of water use.
National natural resource benefits sharing
This includes efforts to shape the sharing of natural resource benefits, particularly in the extractives sector, such as to increase the provision of benefits to local communities or reduce risks of violent conflicts over control of resources.
Preventative protection measures
Non-police or security force-based efforts to reduce incidences of violence or criminal activity, including through making the physical environment less conducive to such acts and through minimising the exposure of vulnerable groups to risky situations. This can include crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) interventions, a multi-disciplinary approach that aims to reduce criminal activity by making the physical environment less conducive for it (9) through efforts such as putting in lighting in public spaces, removing obstacles so there is better line of sight, and reclaiming spaces for positive community activities. This may also include interventions that reduce the risk of vulnerable groups to exposure to violence, such as through providing firewood or alternative fuel sources to women in refugee camps.
Jobs creation
These interventions include all job creation programmes, including support for the private sector.These interventions include all job creation programmes, including support for the private sector.
