Every year, on September 21, the International Day of Peace invites us to reflect on one of humanity’s most difficult challenges: how can societies move from conflict and division towards peaceful coexistence?
Peace is often associated with ceasefires, peace agreements and negotiations between governments or armed groups. These are essential elements of peacebuilding. But peace is also built much closer to everyday life: in the relationships between people who belong to groups that have learned to distrust, fear or discriminate against one another.
Recent social science research offers an encouraging insight: relationships between groups are not necessarily fixed. They can change when people are given opportunities to meet, cooperate and interact under the right conditions.
One recent example comes from northern Mozambique, a region severely affected by an Islamic insurgency and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. The arrival of displaced populations created new tensions with host communities, which were themselves living with limited resources and insecurity. Researchers tested a relatively simple intervention: structured community dialogues that brought displaced people and members of host communities together. The results were positive. The intervention increased trust and tolerance between the groups, reduced discriminatory attitudes towards displaced people and strengthened their sense of social integration. Some of these effects were still visible several months after the intervention. The findings suggest that creating spaces where people can meet and interact may do more than facilitate communication: it can change how members of different groups perceive and relate to one another (Pita Barros, H, 2025).
Similarly, an experimental study in India offers another case in the same approach. Hindu and Muslim women participated in vocational training that required them to learn and work together. The programme was not primarily designed as a peacebuilding intervention. Yet sustained cooperation in a shared activity reduced prejudice and improved attitudes towards members of the other religious group. This finding points to an important possibility: sometimes, people change their perceptions of one another not because they are explicitly encouraged to overcome their differences, but because they experience, through everyday cooperation, that they can work together towards a common goal. In other words, peacebuilding may sometimes begin with doing things together rather than talking about peace (Surya Nath Maiti, et. al., 2022)
Finally, research from Nigeria focused on communities affected by conflict between farmers and pastoralists to evaluate an intervention designed to promote intergroup contact and cooperation. The intervention led to more positive attitudes towards the other group, greater voluntary intergroup contact and stronger perceptions of physical security. Particularly interesting was that some of these changes extended beyond the people directly involved in the intervention, suggesting that changes in intergroup relations can potentially influence wider community norms (Grady, C., et al., 2023).
Taken together, these studies point towards an important sociological insight. Peace is not only the absence of violence. It also involves the presence of social relationships that make peaceful coexistence possible: trust, cooperation, recognition, tolerance and the capacity to see members of another group as people with whom we can share a community.
This is perhaps one of the most hopeful contributions that social science can make to the International Day of Peace: providing scientific evidence to citizens, to support them when building their futures, of existing cases which have obtained successful results in processes of peacemaking. We often think of peace as something that only involves political leaders negotiating after violence has occurred. But peace can also be understood as something societies learn to practice: learning to encounter people who are different from us, learning to cooperate with them, and eventually learning to see them not as an opposing group but as part of a shared social world.
If relationships between groups can change, then peace is not only something we hope to achieve at the end of a conflict. It is also something we can begin to build in the ways we live together every day.
References
Henrique Pita Barros. (2025) The Power of Dialogue: Forced Displacement and Social Integration amid an Islamist Insurgency in Mozambique. Journal of Development Economics. Journal of Development Economics, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2025.103457
Surya Nath Maiti, Debayan Pakrashi, Sarani Saha, Russell Smyth, (2022). Don’t judge a book by its cover: The role of intergroup contact in reducing prejudice in conflict settings, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 202, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2022.08.030.
Christopher Grady, Rebecca Wolfe, Danjuma Dawop, Lisa Inks. (2023) How contact can promote societal change amid conflict: An intergroup contact field experiment in Nigeria. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 24;120(43). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2304882120
Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Barcelona