 UNU-Wider is bringing together research from economists, political scientists, data scientists and conflict experts looking at how to build sustainable lasting peace. This project aims to understand how conflict dynamics affects processes of state building and peace building. And the point we're trying to make in this project is what has happened. The reasons that led to this conflict, what has happened during the conflict are what needs to be understood in order to design better interventions. For me, the question is not just about the transition to peace, but also the puzzle of how you get to cohesive peace as a particular variety of peace. So in some countries, peace is sustained because of high trust and high levels of cooperation between states and citizens in other kinds of states. What looks like peace is really only a veneer over repressive society. Our track record in terms of building states and sustaining peace in post-conflict situations is pretty dire and we need to do better. And in order to do better, we need to understand what entry points might there be that actually matter to the people that have lived through the conflict and want to reconstruct their countries and need that support. The puzzle of peace is essentially why is it that we spend billions of euros on sustaining peace, building states in conflict-affected countries, and yet these policies keep failing? What can we do to improve this? What we're trying to do this project is use research and accumulation of new knowledge about trying to pinpoint entry points for better policy interventions.