Can peace be measured?
Co-founded by a Rotary Peace Fellow, one research group is trying to do just that
by Clara Germani
01 Nov 2025Loading component...
Colombian 20-something Yuliana Andrea David Hidalgo’s life has been defined by the crossfire in her nation’s decades-long war between government and rebel forces, complicated by the violence of drug cartels and criminal gangs.
While a 2016 peace accord has taken tenuous hold, her country still ranks among the least peaceful places on earth in the Institute for Economics and Peace’s 2025 Global Peace Index, based on nationwide indicators like numbers of deaths from conflict, incarceration rates, military spending, and public perceptions of criminality.
And yet, to listen to Yuliana and others in her village of Las Cruces, there are more immediate, quotidian ways to measure peace. Like kids hiding. “Before when you heard gunshots, everyone would run to hide under the bed or in some safe place in the house,” she says. “Now kids hide under the bed or in safe places because they’re playing hide-and-seek.”
Peacebuilders in Atiak, Uganda, help Everyday Peace Indicators pilot its approach.
Courtesy of Pamina Firchow
Her neighbors and compatriots have picked up on similar signals of returning stability and peace, such as being able to safely hold a traditional dayslong funeral; well-maintained roads; the humane treatment of stray animals; and not needing to sleep with boots on (once a reasonable precaution in case the need arose to flee in a hurry).
An innovative new approach to measuring and fostering peace is built around the insight that such everyday habits and behaviors can tell you as much — maybe more — about the peacefulness of a place than high-level statistics on crime rates and arms imports.
Everyday Peace Indicators, a pioneering nonprofit organization, has started gathering hundreds of these seemingly ordinary and unremarkable data points in an attempt to better capture difficult-to-measure concepts of peace, reconciliation, and governance in areas affected by conflict. With this fuller picture of peace at a community level, the group hopes, people in power can make better decisions.
“We see ourselves as trying to be vessels, communicating everyday people’s priorities to policymakers and to decision-makers,” explains Pamina Firchow, EPI founding executive director and Brandeis University associate professor. She and professor Roger Mac Ginty from Durham University incubated the EPI concept after she completed a Rotary Peace Fellowship in 2005.
A participant in an EPI project in California displays written peace indicators.
Courtesy of Pamina Firchow
EPI’s work is part of a “grounded accountability” movement that brings power, ownership, and decision making for peacebuilding to the communities most affected by conflict, says Carl Stauffer, a former United States Institute of Peace expert. “You can persuade people to sign [peace accords],” he says. “But if you haven’t transformed relationships at multiple levels in society, more than likely that agreement is going to fall apart.”
Firchow recognized the need for EPI early in her career when she worked in arms control policy far from the field and felt frustrated. “Recommendations on what were do’s and don’ts in arms control came from the Global North without much, or sometimes any, consultation,” she says, noting that a more bottom-up approach could have prevented mistakes. For example, in some disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs, she explains, ex-combatants returned only broken guns and kept working ones but still received benefits; or ex-combatants who gave up their arms were targeted and killed because sufficient protection wasn’t offered.
Instead of allowing outside experts to determine the terms of peace, wouldn’t it be better, Firchow wondered, to ask people in areas affected by conflict what peace looked like to them?
Over the past decade and a half, Firchow — often collaborating with other Rotary Peace Fellows — has done just that, bringing this “everyday peace” approach of community-level assessment to countries such as Colombia, Sri Lanka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, South Africa, Uganda, South Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Afghanistan. EPI, formally incorporated as a nonprofit in 2018, has also worked in Oakland, California, on public safety reform. The body of indicators collected, says Firchow, “really tells you a story that peace is not just the end of violence. Peace is so much more.”
EPI partners with peacebuilding groups looking to design effective projects. The organization’s data gathering is an intimate process with community members in small groups generating long lists of how people measure peacefulness for themselves. Working with a wider group of people, EPI refines and ranks items on the lists. Then those data points are used to help design programming that will sustain and build the peace envisioned by local people. The same data is then used to measure the effectiveness of the programming — whether it worked or needs refinement.
EPI’s work can help funders drill down to community-defined needs for safety and social cohesion, like clean water, safety for motorcycle taxis, or secure education for girls.
This zoomed-in approach adds to the higher-level data analysis by groups like the Institute for Economics and Peace, which has produced its annual Global Peace Index rankings of countries since 2007. It also builds on work that the institute, Rotary, and others have done to promote Positive Peace, the concept that sustainable peace requires conditions like good relations with neighbors and more equitable distribution of resources, not just the absence of violence.
Source: Global Peace Index 2025
Some of the EPI’s most defining work is in Colombia. The group’s executive director for that country, Eduardo González, says findings there have “revolutionized” the understanding of peace from a policy perspective. He points to EPI’s recent report to the magistrates hammering out the nation’s war reparations process. Thousands of indicators were gathered across dozens of communities giving nuanced definitions of reparation, truth, and justice.
Based on such findings, war victims don’t necessarily want international tribunals or even prison for perpetrators. Sometimes restorative justice can be more useful to them. “Day-to-day knowledge, wisdom, and experience” related to the violence of war, González says, reveals a yearning for “a more expansive vision of truth … emotional truth,” beyond just the “little bit of reality” of forensic truth in traditional retributive justice proceedings.
The EPI team poses for a photo in 2023 in Sumapaz, Colombia. The organization has done some of its most defining work there, including a report to magistrates hammering out the nation’s war reparations process.
Courtesy of Pamina Firchow
He describes feeling moved by some people’s definition of justice for those who committed war crimes in their village. They told him they wanted to see the perpetrators “sweat.” “They wanted to see people doing actual works in the community, where these things happened,” González explains, “so they will build a school; they will build a road; they will build a hospital.”
In Colombia, EPI has adapted a research method known as photovoice in which participants use photography to identify and discuss community issues. Yuliana, the young woman from Las Cruces, captured a haunting image of two little kids peering out from under a bed. Its ambiguous depiction — fun or fear — illustrated the peace indicator she identified of whether people need to hide for safety.
In Nepal, Rotary Peace Fellow Yvette Selim’s research echoed a core EPI principle: Real understanding of peace comes from listening to those living it every day. On one occasion, an upper-caste interpreter suggested to Selim that the “poor, simple” Nepalese she was interviewing about peace and post-conflict justice would not understand her questions. That turned out to be far from true. “I believed that people, whether they were illiterate, educated, or otherwise, would have opinions on these matters, all of which were valuable and valid,” she says.
Selim, who is now EPI’s research and communications adviser, says Rotary members, too, can incorporate the EPI approach into the community needs assessments clubs carry out before designing service projects. It puts the community at the center of solutions. “Community members are experts in what matters to them,” she says. “Finding ways to understand peace at a local level ensures that top-down and bottom-up efforts complement each other.”
This story originally appeared in the November 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.