Attracted to Peace: Modeling the Core Dynamics of Sustainably Peaceful Societies

Since the United Nations (UN) began a review of their peacebuilding architecture in 2014 with the aim of reorganizing around the goal of sustaining peace, the international community has come to recognize that sustainably peaceful societies are not well understood. This article builds on research on such societies to offer a basic theoretical model of sustainable peace, which conceptualizes their core variables and offers a set of propositions specifying their dynamic relations. The model approaches sustainable peace in terms of attractor dynamics, or strong, emergent, multiply determined patterns that resist change. This allows for a general view of these dynamics that is highly complex but ultimately simple, emphasizing the role of basic dynamics. Ultimately, the model offers both a qualitative platform for visualizing the dynamic relations between a large array of variables relevant to sustaining peace, as well as a framework for mathematical modeling and empirical testing.