Making Peace Visible25 Nov 2025

The antidote to polarization may be hiding in plain sight

In the last decade, the field of peace-building has turned its eye toward the United States, as polarization has gotten worse, and political violence has increased. Our guest Peter T. Coleman is a part of that movement to bring peace-building or bridge-building to Americans. Coleman is a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, and a renowned expert on conflict resolution and sustainable peace. He first appeared on Making Peace Visible in January 2023 to discuss his book The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.

The bad news is polarization efforts in the United States haven’t been very successful, according to an analysis of 77 interventions aimed at decreasing partisan animosity, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It showed that while interventions can briefly reduce animosity, their effects are small and short-lived.

But Coleman’s not giving up - he's just changing tactics.

In this episode, we discuss some of the most recent findings from Coleman’s lab at Columbia University Teachers’ College, which he says is part of a “radical new science of peace.” In their latest study, Coleman and colleagues focus on the media: using AI to comb through 700,000 news reports from a diverse group of 18 countries, including the United States. What they found points to a new way to understand what makes a society more peaceful – or more polarized.

LEARN MORE:

Peter T. Coleman’s research lab: The Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution

Coleman’s Medium post on classifying peace in global media, “A Radical New Science of Peace.”

AI for Good? AI Finds Lasting Peace in Unexpected Places in Psychology Today, by Peter T. Coleman and Larry S. Liebovitch.

Take the Polarization Detox Challenge

Listen to our December 2022 episode with Peter Coleman.

Follow Peter T. Coleman on Bluesky

ABOUT THE SHOW

The Making Peace Visible podcast is hosted by Jamil Simon and produced by Andrea Muraskin. Our associate producer is Faith McClure. Learn more at makingpeacevisible.org

Support our work

Connect on social:

Instagram @makingpeacevisible

LinkedIn @makingpeacevisible

Bluesky @makingpeacevisible.bsky.social

We want to learn more about our listeners. Take this 3-minute survey to help us improve the show!

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(102)

Disrupting Peace: What leads people to (and away from) violent white supremacy?

The MPV team is currently hard at work on Beyond Polarization, a limited series where we talk to people who are finding solutions to the increasing polarization we face in the United States. In the me...

2 Jun 45min

Why US democracy needs 'futures' thinking

Suzette Brooks Masters is a thought leader, political strategist and Senior Fellow at the Democracy Funders Network. She says that for American democracy to thrive, it's not enough to defend the exist...

28 Apr 31min

A negotiator's perspective on the Iran war

The world is missing the perspective of peacebuilders at a critical moment, as we live through this time of one war after another. We need skilled negotiators and mediators who know how to listen to b...

31 Mar 36min

How one Iranian content creator is fighting the information war

For her whole life, Iranian-American actor and activist Nazanin Nour has been calling attention to the distinction between the Islamic Republic – the face of Iran in the news – and the Iranian people....

24 Feb 33min

A mediator's story of making peace against the odds in Mozambique

"I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."This aphorism from political philosopher and journalist Antonio Gramsci is one of our guest Neha Sanghrajka’s favorite quotes...

10 Feb 37min

AI diplomacy: Can 'peace tech' make the world less violent?

Public funding for peace efforts took a massive hit with the gutting of USAID last year, and other donor countries have ramped down aid as well, in a world that feels increasingly less safe for many. ...

27 Jan 36min

Venezuela: Where's human rights in the narrative?

It’s hard to keep up with the number of unprecedented actions the second Trump administration has taken, but what happened on January 3 – when the US military extracted Venezuela’s president and first...

13 Jan 30min

Making Peace “Possible” with William Ury

William Ury is one of the world’s most influential peacebuilders and experts on negotiation. He advised Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos in the lead up to that country's historic 2016 peace agre...

23 Des 202544min