The Institute for Economics and Peace is a think tank dedicated to developing metrics to analyse peace and to quantify its economic value. It does this by developing global and national indices, calculating the economic cost of violence, analysing country level risk and understanding positive peace.
There is much that collectively we do not know about peacebuilding, what works and what does not, let alone the activities that broadly define it. At a time when the international community’s resources to international development and aid are under strain due to tightened national budgets and stress from humanitarian action, the need to understand and invest in building peace is more crucial than ever. While the world lost US$ 742 billion to violent conflict in 2015, it spent only a corresponding 2% of that on building and keeping peace.