What humanity has accomplished over this past century is truly impressive. We're flying further, connecting faster, and building higher. We're finding new and distant worlds. We're harnessing mountain, sea, and shore. We're accessing masses of knowledge with ease, and curing disease with accelerating pace.
There are so many areas of life for which we have accomplished quite a lot. While this has oftentimes been to our detriment, nevertheless, it's evidence of what we can achieve when we set our minds to a cause. And yet, when it comes to peace, where do we stand?
Peacebuilding is our next frontier.
The field of Peacebuilding is wide-ranging. It addresses issues of conflict, disharmony, violence, crime and war by identifying their underlying causes and implementing systemic strategies and solutions that build an infrastructure for sustainable peace. Peacebuilding:
- Provides tools for parents to better nurture their kids towards productive adulthoods.
Research has indicated that investing early to prevent conflicts from escalating into violent crises is, on average, 60 times more cost effective than intervening after violence erupts. And yet, the world spends just $1 on conflict prevention for every $1,885 it spends on military budgets. In the U.S., less than 2 percent of income tax goes to civilian foreign affairs agencies; while, 39 percent goes to the military. On average, the annual cost of violence solely for police, justice, corrections and the productivity effect of violent crime, homicide and robbery is $3,257 for each U.S. taxpayer or $460 billion for the United States economy. Altogether, the total U.S. Violence Containment Costs are over $1.7 Trillion.
Sadly, the investments we make to deal with the consequences of conflict, violence and crime are far more than what we invest in prevention and intervention despite evidence showing they are much less effective than peacebuilding approaches.
It's time for us to come together and shift our priorities to make the work of peacebuilding a national and global priority.
Learn more about this work, how effective it is, and how you can get involved with The Peace Alliance in making it a priority. Let's make peacebuilding our next great frontier.