Peace can be measured through statistics on violence, political agreements or institutional change. But people living in communities affected by conflict and insecurity often recognise peace through much more immediate signs: whether they feel safe walking home after dark, whether a local market is open, or whether neighbours who had stopped speaking have begun greeting one another again.
These everyday observations are at the heart of Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI), a participatory research approach that asks communities themselves to identify the signs they use to understand changes in peace, security and justice.
Since 2013, EPI and its partners have worked with communities across the world to document these indicators in their own words. The resulting collection now includes more than 20,000 community-generated indicators from 21 countries.
From community knowledge to a public resource
The new Voices of Peace Portal brings this extensive body of community-generated knowledge together in a public digital platform. Developed through a collaboration between the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP), Everyday Peace Indicators and Zurich-based data visualisation studio Interactive Things, the platform enables users to search, explore and compare indicators across different contexts.
The initiative is supported by an SNSF Agora grant, which promotes dialogue between researchers and the wider public.
Rather than beginning with externally defined measures of peace, the project starts with the experiences and language of communities themselves. In doing so, it offers researchers, practitioners, policymakers and the public an opportunity to examine how understandings of peace vary across places and populations, and what becomes visible when local knowledge is placed alongside more conventional ways of measuring conflict and peace.
Turning a digital archive into a physical experience
This October, Voices of Peace will move beyond the screen as part of the Geneva Peace Forum 2026.
From 12 to 15 October, thousands of indicators will be suspended within the Espace Ruth Dreifuss at the Centre International de Conférences de Genève (CICG), creating a walk-through installation that visitors can physically explore.
The exhibition has been conceived as an analogue counterpart to the digital portal. Instead of searching and filtering indicators on a screen, visitors will move among them, lifting and turning pieces of paper and encountering one community voice after another.
The physical installation invites audiences to slow down and engage directly with the words people use to describe peace in their own lives. In bringing these perspectives into an international peacebuilding forum, the exhibition also creates a bridge between community-generated knowledge and the researchers, policymakers and practitioners who shape peacebuilding policy and practice.
Connecting research and public engagement
The project is led at the Geneva Graduate Institute by Eliza Urwin, Head of Research at the CCDP, in collaboration with Pamina Firchow, Associate Professor at Brandeis University, Founding Executive Director of Everyday Peace Indicators and a Research Associate at the CCDP.
The Institute team also includes Apolline Foedit, PhD candidate in International History and Politics and Research Assistant at the CCDP, who has been closely involved in developing the portal and its presentation at the Geneva Peace Forum, and Jennifer Thornquest, Researcher and Communications Consultant at the CCDP.
Together with Everyday Peace Indicators and Interactive Things, the team is developing the project as both a research resource and a platform for wider public engagement with a deceptively simple question:
What does peace look like to the people experiencing it?
By making thousands of answers to that question visible, searchable and tangible, Voices of Peace offers a different way of approaching the measurement of peace: one that begins not with predefined categories, but with the everyday experiences of communities themselves.
Visit Voices of Peace
12–15 October 2026
Geneva Peace Forum 2026
Espace Ruth Dreifuss, ground floor
Centre International de Conférences de Genève (CICG)
Voices of Peace is a collaborative project by the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP), Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) and Interactive Things, supported by an SNSF Agora grant.
About the Project
- Timeline: 2025-2028
- Funding organisation: SNSF Agora Grant
- Associated websites:
- https://everydaypeaceindicators.org/
- https://www.interactivethings.com