Make Peace a Practice
Peace: creating the conditions that allow people to reach their full potential to thrive
The Peacebuilding Toolkit is built on the belief that individuals can be architects and accomplices in creating a more peaceful world. By practicing active peace through restorative justice, healthy relationship and friendship skills, and equipping communities with the skills to manage conflict themselves, we can create conditions where we protect ourselves and imagine realities outside of the structural violence of the carceral state.
The Peacebuilding Toolkit invites individuals and communities to believe that we do not need to wait for peace to be handed down to us, drawing on John Paul Lederach’s grassroots peacebuilding model. Instead, we can create peace from the bottom up by transforming the messy, real-life conflicts of our everyday lives into starting points for conversation, growth, and stronger relationships.
Conflict: multiple realities or beliefs trying to coexist in the same space
When we talk about peace, we often default to what scholar Johan Galtung calls “Negative Peace,” or the absence of direct physical violence or war. But for a community to truly thrive, we need Positive Peace. This isn't just the absence of the “bad” (like bullets and bombs), but the presence of the “good” forces like social justice, equity, and the removal of structural and cultural violence. To do this, we must move beyond managing conflict to transforming it by working to make sure that the fabric of our everyday, from systems to our kitchen tables, is based in recognition and redistribution rather than hierarchy (Nancy Fraser).
