Peace Science Digest

The Peace Science Digest by the War Prevention Initiative aims to strengthen the Global Peace System by making the most significant peace and conflict research accessible, understandable and useful. The Digest provides access and useful analysis to the top research in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies. PJSA membership includes a free digital subscription to online issues as well as a discounted option for print issues.

The Digest aims to provide a mutually beneficial link between the field’s academic community and its practitioners, the media, activists, public policy-makers, and other possible beneficiaries. It is formulated to enhance awareness of research addressing the key peace and conflict issues of our time by making available an organized, accessible, and relevant analysis—creating a resource for the practical application of the field’s academic knowledge.

The contributions from Peace Science include relevant theories and practices guiding peace workers to produce more enduring and positive peace. Here’s why this matters: First, Peace Science is most often tucked away in subscription-based scientific journals and therefore not accessible to people outside of the walls of academia. And even within those walls, research suggests that the readership of peer-reviewed scientific studies is too low to have any measurable impact. Second, scientific research methodology and language is filled with jargon that is at best overly complicated and difficult to understand, and at worst completely incomprehensible. If the purpose of Peace Science is to guide peace workers, then those impediments make that research useless.

With the Peace Science Digest, we seek to bridge the communication gap between research and practice. In challenging political times and with uncertainties in U.S. foreign and domestic policy, it becomes even more important to proactively challenge war and violence-prone rhetoric and actions by pointing to demonstrably more effective and less costly alternatives. We hope that the Digest is a useful tool in your respective contexts as researchers, educators, students, peacebuilders, activists, public servants, the media, funders, and any other audiences.