Positive Peace as a Tool

A free public session from the Global Governance Fellowship workshop series, led by the Institute for Economics and Peace.

• Monday, October 5, 2026
• 3:00 to 5:00 PM ET (19:00 UTC / 21:00 Berlin)
• Online via Zoom
• Free to attend
• Speaker: Michael Collins, Executive Director, The Americas, Institute for Economics and Peace

Violence cost the world US$21.81 trillion in 2025, equivalent to 10.5 percent of global GDP, and global peacefulness has now declined for twelve consecutive years. Numbers on that scale get filed under international news, a long way from anything one person can act on. This session closes that distance.

Each fall, CGS runs a five-week workshop series for the Global Governance Fellowship, a two-semester program for undergraduates at Trinity Washington University in Washington, DC. Fellows learn directly from practitioners, then spend the spring semester as delegates at the UN Commission on the Status of Women and presenting a policy brief on Capitol Hill. “Positive Peace as a Tool” is part of that curriculum. This year we are opening it to everyone.

Peace is more than the absence of violence. The Institute for Economics and Peace has spent over a decade measuring what actually holds peaceful societies together. To build the Positive Peace Index, IEP analyzed more than 24,700 data series, indices and survey variables, then isolated the eight factors with the strongest statistical relationship to peacefulness. Those eight are the Pillars of Positive Peace: well-functioning government, sound business environment, equitable distribution of resources, acceptance of the rights of others, good relations with neighbors, free flow of information, high levels of human capital, and low levels of corruption.

The pillars scale down. The same conditions that make a country resilient make a city, a campus, or a single neighborhood resilient. IEP deliberately does not prescribe interventions pillar by pillar, because what is appropriate in one country may be wrong in another, which means the framework is built to be adapted by the people who live somewhere rather than applied to them from outside. Two hours is enough to learn to read your own community through it and decide where to push first.

Your speaker

Michael Collins is Executive Director, The Americas at the Institute for Economics and Peace. Since 2019 he has built IEP’s institutional and grassroots partnerships across the United States, the Americas and the United Nations, with particular focus on expanding the Positive Peace framework as a training tool and an evidence-based metric for peace-centered development. Before IEP he oversaw education, job creation and economic development programs in countries recovering from natural disasters, working frequently in communities affected by poverty and gang violence.

What you will take away

• A working definition of peace, and why the distinction between negative and positive peace changes what you do next
• How peace gets measured across 163 countries, through the Global Peace Index and the Positive Peace Index
• All eight pillars in detail, including the indicators behind each one
• A systems view of why movement in one pillar pulls the others with it
• A concrete starting point for applying the framework where you live

Who it is for

No background in peace and conflict studies is required. The material is built for researchers, diplomats, teachers and students, and equally for anyone who wants to become more involved in peacebuilding. If you run a CGS student club or chapter, come with your own community in mind. The framework is designed to be re-taught, and this session gives you one you can run yourself.

About the research

IEP is a global think tank with offices in Sydney, New York, The Hague, Harare and Mexico. Its publications, including the Global Peace Index, the Positive Peace Report, the Ecological Threat Report and the Global Terrorism Index, are free to download. Anyone who wants to go further afterward can take the IEP Peace Academy, a free short course available in over 50 languages.

Citizens for Global Solutions works on the problems no single country can solve alone. This session covers the other half of that work: what any of us can build at home while the institutions catch up.