By Professor Daniel Richard, President and Director, Intercontinental Open University for Global Change
A World That Needs This Research More Than Ever
The numbers make uncomfortable reading. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace’s 2026 Global Peace Index, global peacefulness has now declined for twelve consecutive years running, with nearly three-quarters of countries less peaceful today than when the Index began. The economic cost of violence worldwide has climbed to over US$21 trillion a year — roughly a tenth of global GDP — while conflict deaths remain at historic highs. Perhaps most tellingly, the same report notes that peacebuilding receives only a fraction of one percent of what the world spends on militaries.
These are not abstract statistics. They represent displaced families, disrupted economies, and generations growing up inside conflict rather than beside it. They are also a quiet but urgent argument for why peace studies deserves serious academic attention — not as a soft or peripheral subject, but as a rigorous, evidence-based field with direct bearing on how humanity chooses to live together.
What Peace Studies Actually Is
Peace studies is an interdisciplinary field that draws on political science, sociology, psychology, history, theology, and international relations to understand the root causes of violence and to design nonviolent pathways toward more just and stable societies. Leading centres in the field, such as Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute, frame it as research and practice aimed at building sustainable peace at every level of society — from interpersonal relationships to international diplomacy — by examining what drives conflict and how structural, cultural, and institutional change can reduce it.
Crucially, peace studies does not treat conflict as an aberration to be wished away. It treats conflict as a normal feature of human life, and asks a more useful question: how can conflict be transformed through nonviolent means rather than left to escalate into violence?
Where Religion Enters the Picture
Much of the world’s most persistent conflict has a religious dimension, whether as a root cause, a contributing fault line, or simply the language in which grievance and identity are expressed. This is precisely why interreligious studies — sometimes called interfaith studies — has grown alongside peace studies as a related but distinct academic field, researching interfaith dialogue, diplomacy, and development cooperation without engaging in proselytism.
Peacebuilding researchers increasingly argue that agreements which ignore the religious dimension of a conflict tend to be fragile, because they leave the deepest grievances unaddressed. Treating faith communities as partners rather than bystanders in peace processes allows mediators to turn religion from a source of division into a resource for reconciliation. This is not a fringe idea: the importance of interfaith dialogue has been formally recognised at the highest levels of international governance, including the United Nations General Assembly’s 2010 resolution establishing the first week of February as World Interfaith Harmony Week.
Research from the ground reinforces this. Studies of faith-based educational institutions — for instance, work examining peace-building programmes at a Hindu Dharma college in Central Java — have found that structured interfaith activities such as youth exchanges and community service consistently build tolerance and social solidarity across religious lines. These are small, local findings, but they are exactly the kind of evidence base that scales into national and international policy over time.
Why This Matters Beyond the Academy
It would be easy to assume this is a niche concern for scholars and diplomats. It is not. The Global Peace Index’s own data shows that peace and economic wellbeing move together: countries suffering the most from violence lose, on average, close to a quarter of their GDP to its consequences, compared to a small fraction of a percent in the most peaceful nations. Every dollar spent managing the aftermath of conflict is a dollar not spent on healthcare, education, or infrastructure — the very things that constitute wellbeing in the first place.
Interfaith harmony, in this light, is not a “nice to have” alongside economic development — it is one of the load-bearing walls underneath it. Societies fractured along religious lines struggle to sustain the trust, cooperation, and institutional stability that broader wellbeing depends on. Conversely, societies that invest in genuine interfaith understanding tend to be more resilient to the kind of polarisation that peace researchers have identified as a precursor to conflict.
This is also where the distinction between “negative peace” (the mere absence of active violence) and a more durable, structural peace becomes important. A ceasefire enforced by fear is not the same as a society that has actually resolved the tensions beneath it. Peace studies research exists precisely to help societies move from the former to the latter — and interfaith harmony is one of the clearest, most measurable pathways for doing so.
What This Means for New Researchers
For a doctoral candidate entering this space, the opportunity is significant. Peace and conflict studies remains a young enough field that foundational questions are still open: which interfaith interventions actually change attitudes and behaviour, as opposed to simply producing goodwill events? How do we measure “harmony” in a way that is rigorous rather than aspirational? How do structural factors — economic inequality, political representation, media narratives — interact with religious identity to either dampen or inflame conflict?
These are exactly the kinds of questions that reward patient, well-designed doctoral research: questions with real-world stakes, genuine gaps in the literature, and enormous room for a new scholar to make a distinctive contribution. A well-executed thesis in this area does not just add a line to a CV — it adds, however incrementally, to a body of evidence that policymakers, faith leaders, and communities can actually use.
A Closing Thought
Global wellbeing is often discussed in the language of GDP, health indicators, and infrastructure. Peace studies research is a reminder that none of these are secure without a deeper kind of stability — the ability of people from different faiths and worldviews to live, trust, and build alongside one another. That stability does not happen by accident. It is studied, understood, and built, one piece of careful research at a time. For anyone beginning a PhD in this space, that is precisely the work ahead.
If you are interested to study this domain as a PhD (Liberal Studies) Major through online education, you may write to us at info@iougc.im or iougc@aol.com
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