HELP US AVERT WARS, END VIOLENCE & SAVE LIVES
On Giving Tuesday, support local and small peacebuilding organizations to join the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s powerful network.
While conflict exists everywhere, violent conflict does not, and building peace is possible in faraway places and in neighborhoods just down the street. But peace doesn’t just happen; we have to build it. AfP is a membership network of 200+ organizations working in 181 countries to strengthen and advance the peacebuilding field, enabling peacebuilding organizations to achieve greater impact—tackling issues too large for any one organization to address alone.
This Giving Tuesday, a $400 tax-deductible donation sponsors small and local peacebuilding organizations' membership to join AfP. Peacebuilding is more effective when locally-led because local peacebuilders are critical to understanding the needs and values of communities most impacted by conflict, violence, and fragility. Small and locally-led peacebuilding organizations' membership in AfP strengthens and advances the peacebuilding field in the U.S. and globally.
AfP members engage with cross-sectoral experts, participate in exclusive events like AfP’s annual PeaceCon, and gain access to practical and actionable resources to improve the field. Small and local organizations can also elevate their visibility and impact by amplifying their events, news, and publications through AfP’s influential platforms, solidifying a position at the forefront of global peacebuilding efforts.
This is a time when peacebuilding is needed most—and your generous contribution helps AfP puts peacebuilding at the forefront of global solutions to conflict & violence and COVID-19 response & recovery.
Why AfP? The sheer diversity of peacebuilding actors – ranging from development, humanitarian, and human rights organizations to mediation, capacity building, and educational institutions – demands leadership to unify a dynamic yet disparate field. For 15+ years, AfP has seized and expanded this unique leadership role by breaking silos within the peacebuilding community; building bridges to national security decision makers, the private sector, and the public at large; and raising the bar of peacebuilding practices towards shared learning, evidence-based approaches, and greater impact. AfP is uniquely positioned to lead globally in this regard, having been named the world’s most influential peacebuilding change agent by Porticus Foundation and FAS Research in December 2019.
Currently, two billion people live in countries where development is affected by fragility, conflict, and violence, and the numbers are increasing. Deaths from organized violence have risen over 230 percent globally in the past 10 years. There were ten times as many battle-related deaths in 2016 as 2005. This surge in wars and violence has triggered the worst displacement and refugee crisis ever recorded, displacing more than 70 million people. Violent conflict also fuels violent extremism. Conflict remains the primary driver of terrorism, with over 95% of deaths from terrorism occurring in countries already in conflict. When combined with countries with high levels of political terror, the statistic jumps to over 99%.
The cascading impact of the ongoing global pandemic threatens to worsen an already dire global conflict outlook. As the UN Secretary-General recently assessed, the COVID-19 pandemic represents the greatest challenge to humanity since World War II. COVID-19 is essentially stabilization in reverse -- upending economies, fueling societal divisions, and exacerbating drivers of conflict that cost the global economy $14.5 trillion in 2019.
While no nation is immune to this pandemic’s disruptive impact, it poses an acute danger in conflict-affected and fragile states. Already, we have witnessed worldwide COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on women and minority populations, authoritarian moves to suppress civil society and democratic norms under the pretext of pandemic response, and economic dislocation fueling polarization, displacement, and violence. All the while, armed conflicts, from the Sahel region and Syria to Yemen and Myanmar, flourish unabated.
