About

The portal holds a growing collection of indicators: short statements or stories that take concepts which are notoriously hard to define or measure from outside and describe what they, or their absence, look like in everyday life in ways that can be observed and, in some contexts, counted.

For example, a community member might say:

“Seeing children playing outside after dark”
“People from different groups sharing meals together”
“Police respond when people call for help”
“Markets stay open after sunset”

Each of these observations is an indicator. It can be counted, compared, and grouped with others, and the portal provides ways of doing all three. Read on its own, it is a micronarrative of how peace and the concepts that sit close to it are lived and experienced by people going about their day.

The indicators were collected through the Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI) methodology, the Grounded Accountability Model (GAM), and related participatory approaches adapted from EPI. Learn more on the Methodology page.

Most data on peace and conflict comes from expert assessments, national statistics, or records of violent events. These sources are valuable, but they rarely capture how ordinary people experience peace and conflict in their daily lives.

The Voices of Peace Portal fills that gap. It brings together over 20,000 indicators from communities across the world, collected since 2013. Because these indicators come directly from people living in conflict-affected and post-conflict settings, they offer a perspective that other datasets do not. The portal does not replace existing peace and conflict datasets, but complements them by showing how people recognize peace and social change in everyday life.

Each indicator in the portal comes with background information, including:

1. 01

   Where

   it was collected (country, region, community).
2. 02

   When

   it was collected (year).
3. 03

   What question or concept

   prompted it (for example, peace, justice, security).
4. 04

   The indicator itself

   — the observation that community members identified.

Many indicators also include additional details, such as:

5. 05

   Thematic categories

   that researchers have used to organize and compare indicators.
6. 06

   Votes or rankings

   showing which indicators community members considered most important when they voted on them.
7. 07

   Breakdowns by demographic group

   (for example, by gender, age, or community).

You can search and browse the portal by location, theme, or keyword. The Summaries page lets you move between themes and countries in either direction, showing how many indicators a given theme holds and where they came from, or which themes the indicators from a particular country fall into. Both views rely on a portal-wide thematic structure that groups the 20,000-plus indicators into a small number of top-level themes.

These portal-level themes are tools for exploration. They are not community-generated categories, and indicators grouped together should not be assumed to have the same meaning in different contexts. Return to the original wording and available contextual information before drawing conclusions from similarities or patterns across the collection.

The portal is designed for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, educators, and anyone interested in how communities experience peace and social change. You can use it to:

• Explore how people in different places understand peace, justice, safety, and related concepts
• Compare community perspectives across countries and regions
• Find patterns across thousands of community observations
• Support research design, program evaluation, or policy analysis with community-level evidence
• Bring real community voices into classroom and dinnertime discussions about peace and social wellbeing

The portal does not rank countries or communities. It does not try to produce a single number or score for peace. It should not be used as a ranking system, benchmark, or measure of national performance.

The indicators reflect how specific communities described their experiences at a specific point in time. They are context-specific and locally meaningful, and that is their strength. They are meant to complement other forms of data, not to replace national statistics or expert assessments.

The portal was designed and developed by Interactive Things in partnership with the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP) at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI), and collaborating researchers. The portal and its accompanying exhibition were supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s AGORA program and developed for presentation at the Geneva Peace Forum 2026.

The portal provides open access to indicators and their associated background information, where ethical considerations allow.

You can:

• Browse and explore indicators through the portal
• Download the EPI dataset
• Use the data for research, teaching, or policy work
• Cite the data in publications

When using the data, please keep in mind:

• Indicators reflect what specific communities observed at a particular moment. They are not designed to represent an entire country or population.
• Context matters. An indicator that makes immediate sense in one setting may need further background to interpret in another. Always consult the metadata (additional details) alongside the indicator text and, where available, project or community summaries.

To keep the portal accessible and easy to navigate, we limited the amount of information included in each community description. Their primary purpose is to help readers understand that the indicators are drawn from specific local communities rather than entire countries. As such, they should not be interpreted as representative of national populations, but as reflecting highly contextualized local experiences.

Users interested in learning more about a particular community or indicator are encouraged to contact the relevant research teams who collected it (check the metadata to see who it was collected by), or browse the related publications. They provide additional information on the contributors and the contexts in which many of the indicators were developed.

The research behind this portal follows strict ethical principles. All participants gave informed consent. Sensitive information and community privacy are protected. Indicators are carefully reviewed before being made public, and communities have a say in what information is shared.

In some cases, indicators or details remain restricted to protect participants and their communities.

The research process also includes a step where findings are brought back to participating communities, so that people can review, clarify, and respond to the data before it is published. This helps ensure that the research relationship is transparent and accountable.

If you use data from the Everyday Peace Indicators portal, please cite the dataset using its DOI: 10.18742/pub01-272. Citing the source helps others find the data and credits the work behind it.