PURDUE Written by Purdue Peace Project Staff
In 2018, the Purdue Policy Research Institute became the host institute for the Purdue Peace Project (PPP), a university-based political violence prevention initiative that does peacebuilding work in areas threatened by such violence. It conducts engaged research to prevent political violence and advance knowledge about such violence at the local, community level. The program is directed by Stacey Connaughton (Director of Purdue Policy Research Institute and Associate Professor in The Brian Lamb School of Communication) with the assistance of Elis Vllasi (Associate Director of PPP), and graduate research assistants, Jessica Eise, Meghana Rawat, and Tiwaladeoluwa Adekunle, along with numerous past graduate and undergraduate students. PPP has engaged in peacebuilding initiatives in Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and El Salvador.
With the leadership of country directors and volunteers in West Africa, PPP has convened everyday citizens to help them address immediate threats of violence in their communities. PPP is committed to peacebuilding through its data-driven and locally-led approach. In this approach, the people involved in, and most affected by, violent conflict work together to create and enact their own solutions to prevent, reduce, and/or transform the conflict, with the support they desire from outsiders. PPP relies on evidence-based results to prevent political violence and seeks to impact the practice of peacebuilding in addition to scholastic research. It fosters local solutions to conflict, as data and experience have shown that: 1) local citizens can design, lead, and implement actions to prevent escalation of disputes in their communities into armed conflict; 2) dialogue can lead to effective action toward preventing violence; and 3) peacebuilding efforts stand the best chance of being effective if they originate from individuals local to the conflict.
Since its founding in 2012, PPP, with the generous financial support of Milton Lauenstein and others, has supported a total of 16 locally-led peacebuilding initiatives that have addressed issues arising from: election related violence (Ghana and Liberia); intra-/inter-ethnic divisions (Ghana); land disputes (Ghana and Nigeria); chieftaincy disputes (Ghana); tensions around natural resources (Liberia and El Salvador); Ebola (Liberia); and other issues.
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