 Why is it that we spend billions and yet these policies keep failing? Just providing the economic conditions. It's not enough. We haven't broken the code. We haven't found the right solutions. Around two billion people live in fragile and conflict-affected countries and the increase of almost one-third in the last decade. Peace matters for its own sake, but it is also connected to poverty. Poverty is reducing everywhere except in conflict-affected countries. By 2030, most of the world's poor will live in conflict-affected countries. Conflicts, peace and development are closely interlinked and we really cannot solve the problem of one without solving the problem of the others. UNU Wider is bringing together research from economists, political scientists, data scientists and conflict experts looking at how to build sustainable, lasting peace. Most interventions assume that conflict-affected countries are places to be soft and are such a blank slate. Usually these interventions fail because the conflict was not understood. To create and sustain peace, we must understand conflict. We need to understand war-time governance because the challenges and opportunities for peace and for development are different depending on how people experience the war, depending on the type of ruler they had in their local communities. How do conflicts happen? How do they transform societies and economies? How do their legacies endure across time? And what can be done to support state-building efforts in societies emerging out of war? Civilian victimization affects political attitudes and political behavior. That occurs both in the short term and in the long term. The question is not just about the transition to peace, but also the puzzle of how you get to cohesive peace. In this project we bring together research from several disciplines. Most of it embedded in communities where conflict has taken place in order to understand better opportunities for policy intervention. When people think about war they usually think about destruction and anarchy. And if you look at conflict zones what you find is that that is often not true. There is a new form of order and that order is structured or influenced by armed groups and the civilian populations they interact with. Trust is a very central component in understanding what makes the state work effectively. In the public discourse, the United Nations in terms of peace operation seems a waste of money, seems that are ineffective. Actually UN peace operation are cost-effective and they stop the fighting. External intervention is important. Countries emerging from conflict need aid, technical support, they need knowledge. But ultimately is about understanding what the citizens of the countries want, are willing to fight for and need. How can we better understand the picture they have? Their puzzle and participate in that in a more constructive and less interventionist way. Prevention of conflict means trying to understand what the underlying factors are the structural drivers of armed conflict and we know quite a bit of that. There are two things that are important. The first one is to improve the lives of people and them feeling included in the society and part of the society. And the second thing is to really increase the legitimacy of the state and the legitimacy of democracy itself. So that people feel they can really change conditions through their participation. One of the biggest challenges is to use the end of a war in order to create better institutions than those that existed and sometimes even led to the war beforehand. We need to understand what can be done in policy and on the ground to reduce the risk and impact of violence. We have a very little understanding of what is actually happening on the ground, what people want, what they need and how the experience of war has shaped their understanding of the world and of politics. Post-conflict environments are highly politicized and everybody is trying to figure out the intentions of their former enemies. We need to highlight the importance of working with the communities affected by conflict. During peace negotiations or the victory of one of the sides of the conflict it's very important that it includes all the groups of society such that nobody feels left behind. This cannot be done without democracy. The project is trying to take advantage of new research, researchers that are mostly embedded in the field. I have a very deep understanding of these processes in order to map entry points for successful interventions. Very often destruction unlocks new energy. It destroys very often relationships and institutions that were not necessarily optimal and allows people to create new ones. I would argue that human nature is much more peaceful than we give it credit for and the exception is conflict. People find very creative ways of getting around horrendous situations and through these creative ways there are pockets of resilience and resistance that emerge by tapping in some of these dynamics sustainability of peace may be possible in the future.