Positive Peace in Northern Ireland: A Northern Irish Peace Index

This project generates the first ever Northern Irish Peace Index (NIPI): an empirical, data-led, quantitative measurement of negative and positive peacefulness in Northern Ireland over time. Using the NIPI, we will conduct workshops with The Executive Office of Northern Ireland (TEO), the civil service, and non-government organisations to integrate positive peace into Northern Irish peacebuilding strategies. After 10 years of operation, the TEO has recently decided that the government's principal peacebuilding programme, “Together: Building a United Community” (T:BUC), should move beyond an emphasis on “good community relations” and towards developing new approaches. Thanks in part to the existing work of the proposed project team, the TEO agrees that “positive peace” should become a cornerstone of future peacebuilding strategies. Many other third sector organisations are also seeking to move away from a focus on "reconciliation" and "social cohesion" in their peacebuilding activities towards a more positive forward-focused outlook. There now exists an extraordinary opportunity for us to transform the way the Government, civic organisations, and researchers conceptualise and analyse peace, design peacebuilding strategies, and monitor and evaluate progress. By presenting a new, holistic approach to peacebuilding in Northern Ireland, our NIPI offers stakeholders including the TEO, the civil service, local government councils, researchers, NGOs, and the public an evidence-based rather than outcomes-based approach to peace. Working with the Institute for Economic and Peace (IEP), we will build a composite index of negative and positive peacefulness in Northern Ireland. Preliminary scoping confirms the availability of data that is historically comprehensive, conceptually valid, and reliable across the 11 district councils of Northern Ireland. We will collate and analyse this publicly available data, including but not limited to crime statistics, attitudinal information, data on economic and government performance, and socioeconomic data to produce: A publicly available tool for empirically measuring and assessing changes in negative and positive peacefulness over time and for comparing scores across counties and cities nationally and internationally that will contribute to monitoring and evaluation of the wider impact of different peacebuilding activities, A statistical methodology and a collaborative approach to identify drivers of peacefulness that can aid in the design of policy interventions A data-led, independent statistical assessment of how positive peace is interrelated to other positive societal factors, such as economic development, health and education, political participation, and other measures of personal wellbeing. We will employ an evidence-based methodology to identify drivers of peacefulness based on two approaches. The first is based on “systems thinking”, and tracks interactions within a given system to offer a complex understanding of their causality. The second approach uses the contents of the NIPI to develop our collective understanding of positive peace in Northern Ireland. Through workshops with key stakeholders, we will engender a shared language around positive peace, explore how positive peace interrelates to other societal areas, and identify how positive peace can be fostered more effectively. This high-impact, policy and practitioner-relevant research extends beyond this funding award. Following the construction of the NIPI, we aim to produce updated reports every two to four years and work with key beneficiaries towards achieving a more peaceful society in Northern Ireland and beyond.