Everyday Peace Indicators: Launching a new AGORA project at the CCDP
The Swiss National Science Foundation supports initiatives that foster dialogue between science and society by enabling researchers to share their work directly with a wider audience. This year, 2025, the CCDP received a new grant to share the 17,000 indicators collected by the Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) team. The goal: to create spaces for dialogue that inform global practice and sparks more grounded, meaningful conversations about peacebuilding and conflict resolution. In this short blog series, I want to share a behind-the-scenes look at this project. This first post offers some context.
A bit of history… What is EPI?
You’ll find a wealth of information on their website and in the many academic publications that reference their work – they’re well worth reading – and you may have even come across the initiative already, for example during the 2023 Geneva Peace Week. But in brief: EPI is, above all, a new way of doing research. It’s a method for understanding and tracking change in complex, often abstract concepts such as peace, reconciliation, governance, or violent extremism. Rather than relying on outside experts to define what matters, EPI begins with communities themselves, inviting them to define their own everyday indicators of peace.
I remember being surprised when we first drafted our funding application – wasn’t it obvious that people affected by conflict should be consulted directly? My studies at the Graduate Institute had already made that seem self-evident. But as I spoke with Eliza Urwin, Head of Research at the Centre on Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding (CCDP) – who has been involved in this initiative from the start and has gathered hundreds of indicators in Afghanistan – and as I delved deeper into the literature, I began to see just how rare and significant this approach still is in a field often dominated by top-down methodologies. Initiatives like EPI are helping to shift these power dynamics, and I feel fortunate to be part of that.
A participatory methodology
EPI’s methodology has refined over time, but it stays rooted in participatory research. Through focus groups, community members generate the indicators they use to make sense of peace and conflict in their own lives. These indicators can then shape how interventions are designed, monitored, and evaluated. What emerges is a sharper view of local priorities and of how people interpret the world around them. As the project’s founders put it: without a concrete sense of what these concepts mean on the ground, it’s hard to design relevant responses, and even harder to tell if they’ve made a difference.
Beyond their practical use, EPI is part of a broader effort to challenge how we measure complex ideas. Its approach doesn’t reject traditional, top-down metrics; it complements them with grounded, community-led insights. That word – complementarity – feels key to me. Standard tools have their place, but they often miss something: the nuances, silences, and lived realities that formal indicators often miss. The Grounded Accountability Model (GAM) Project follows this trend: it aims to shift programming and funding in the peacebuilding community to better meet the needs and priorities of communities in conflict affected environments by adapting and testing the development and use of community-defined indicators of impact for peacebuilding programming. We’ll be adding some of these indicators to the dashboard as well.
What’s next
At the CCDP, we’ll be working in collaboration with the EPI team and Interactive Things, a Zurich-based design studio specialized in human data interaction. We have two goals: first, to make the indicators accessible through a digital platform; and second, to bring them to life through an exhibition, notably planned for the 2026 Geneva Peace Week.
In the next post, I’ll share some early reflections on the process of visualizing the indicators: the decisions that need to be made and what we need to have in mind; the care and emotional investment researchers have in these traces of everyday peace.
Learn More
- Learn more about this ongoing project here
- Learn more about EPI here: https://everydaypeaceindicators.org