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- People assume the use of military force is the last resort.
- When aware of nonviolent alternatives to war, people believe the price of war is too high.
- When aware of nonviolent alternatives to war, people are less likely to tolerate casualties and to support war.
- When political leaders unanimously support war, the public is less sensitive to the number of casualties.
- In high life-opportunity societies, people are more accepting of socially tolerant values:
- Divorce-3x higher
- Abortion-5x higher
- Homosexuality-10x higher
- When people experience higher life opportunity, they become less willing to give their lives in service to their countries’ wars.
- Oil importing countries are 100 times more likely to intervene in civil wars of oil exporting countries.
- The more oil produced or owned by a country, the higher the likelihood of third-party interventions.
- Oil is a motivating factor for military interventions in civil wars
- The pressures of reelection force democratic leaders to avoid difficult wars.
- Democratic leaders spend more on war than autocratic leaders, leading to a greater percentage of democratic victories.
- Increasing the number of democracies in the world does not affect the number of wars until democracies reach 60% of the global governments
- The introduction of mobile phones only benefit groups organizing in areas with middle to high standards of living.
- Access to mobile phones only provides measurable assistance to organize for violence in groups under 600,000 people.
- Violent conflict is much more common in areas with low-tech communication capabilities (characterized by fewer than 34 landlines per 100 people).
- Violence is likely to occur when a regime fails to address the economic grievances of a unified, ideologically motivated opposition movement.
- The conflict-oil link can be partly explained by three main triggers: motive, opportunity & vulnerability.
- The economic advantage of controlling the access and supply of a state or region’s natural resources has been proven to cause conflict.
- In oil-rich nations, governments have the upper hand when opposition groups use violent forms of protest.
- In oil-rich states, opposition groups have the upper hand when they use nonviolent forms of protest.
- Violent conflict can be avoided through negotiating with opposition groups; who often don’t act with the goal of regime change but rather to encourage some sort of policy change or larger political representation.
- Participation in some opposition groups can be non-ideological. In many developing countries joining an opposition group is the best or only economic opportunity, especially when the group has access to oil revenue.
- In resource-scarce countries, agricultural dependence and poverty contribute to violent conflict.
- In resource-scarce countries, agricultural independence decreases the likelihood of violent conflict.
- In resource-scarce countries, low attendance levels in higher education contributes to violent conflict.
- In resource-scarce countries, high attendance levels in higher education decreases the likelihood of violent conflict.
- There is more evidence to suggest that an excess of resources can lead to conflict, than too little resources.
- Armed conflict is likely to increase resource dependence since political leaders can use the profit from the resources to fund their militaries or continue oppression.
- Every conflict needs to be examined within its own dynamic social context in order to understand the role natural resources play.
- Peace agreements mediated with credibility leverage last over twice as long as agreements without credibility leverage.
- Capability leverage is most effective to facilitate the signing of a peace agreement.
- Credibility leverage is most effective at generating durable and longer lasting peace after the agreement.
- Direct participation of community leadership in civil resistance increases the likelihood of success.
- National and local peace initiatives are mutually influential. The success of one increases the chances of success in the other.
- Groups seeking to develop peace zones must understand the important role of local participation, the ties to local resistance forces, and the role played by external actors.
- Knowledge of successful resistance movements increases the effectiveness and strength of new peace movements.
- Manufacturing enables the creation of interconnected social networks by bringing together groups of people with diverse backgrounds.
- An increase in manufacturing increases the likelihood of nonviolent resistance campaigns.
- As countries continue to modernize, social conflict is more likely to become nonviolent.
- Countries with a larger percentage of their GDP from the manufacturing industry are more likely to experience nonviolent conflict than violent conflict.
- Organized labor bridges social divides, allowing for mass mobilization and nonviolent collective action utilizing economically derived leverage as a means of social resistance
- Peacekeepers with the ability to enforce peace agreements are better able to build norms of trust and cooperation compared to the absence of peacekeepers or peacekeepers with only monitoring capabilities.
- Peacekeeping can enhance pro-social norms by deterring spoilers to the peace process.
- Once peacekeepers are pulled out of a recovering conflict area, opportunists and spoilers are very likely to undermine collective gains achieved during the peace process.
- Countries with geographically concentrated ethnic communities are more likely to experience terrorism.
- The likelihood of terrorism increases when a country’s ethnic communities have close family ties in other countries.
- Diaspora communities can play a large role in the financial and logistical support of terrorist groups.
- Technology-based programs, as simple as text message reporting, have been proven to aid in conflict monitoring and prevention.
- The costs required to collect conflict data via crowd seeding projects is significantly less than traditional methods of information gathering.
- Development aid provided though the crowd seeding project reduced the occurrence of violent conflict.
- Individuals are more likely to turn to violence when they believe they are responding to aggressive governments.
- Individuals are more likely to choose nonviolent methods as a means to improve living conditions.
- Individuals are more likely to choose nonviolent methods in response to unacceptable consequences of violence.
- Individuals use nonviolent methods with the knowledge that violence would make reaching their goals impossible.
- Religion is not a significant motivating factor behind violent activity against a government.
- Shifting focus from post-conflict protection to pre-conflict prevention is more effective and less costly.
- Once violent conflict is underway, political barriers and high social and economic costs limit constructive options of violence prevention.
- Political exclusion on the basis of ethnicity fuels domestic terrorism
- A country’s proportion of the politically excluded ethnic populations is a more important predictor to domestic terrorism than the level of political participation or of economic discrimination.
- When people are excluded from government power or representation, they are more likely to resort to acts of terror to address or avenge their grievances.
- Peace education programs are a successful way to educate on and overcome social inequality.
- Peace education programs can be adapted to address different social, political and economic systems of injustice and inequality.
- Peace education programs adjusted to their context can connect analysis, education, and action for social change.
- Peace educators connect what they teach to how they teach, indicating the methods used are in and of themselves part of the substance of peace education.
- As a field already accustomed to addressing difficult issues in proactive ways, peace education is capable of addressing even the most contracted problems.
- Peace educators at all levels can help address contemporary important social and environmental issues by creating a sense of ‘grounded optimism’.
- Quality peace education programs should help participants identify existing inequalities and provide them with the tools and encouragement to address these issues once the program has ended.
- Quality encounter programs help participants critically question their environment during and after the program.
- Dominant groups of society have a greater opportunity to examine their role in a conflict and how their beliefs and action affects the more marginalized groups.
- Quality encounter programs increase the likelihood of participants to become advocates for social change.
- Peace education can challenge historical narratives which justify and normalize past and present forms of oppression and violence.
- Oral histories and futures visioning make peace education more socially relevant beyond the classrooms.
- Futures visioning and oral histories in peace education provide opportunities to re-humanize “the other” and acknowledge collective complicity in violence.
- Everyday peace connects individual understandings of peace to global structures.
- Everyday peace encourages co-creation and collaboration of participants.
- Everyday peace moves beyond limited understandings of direct violence to include forms of everyday violence.
