What does ending mass incarceration have to do with peace?

After the end of the Cold War, many academics and policymakers believed that a global state of peace was achievable. People talked about a “peace dividend”: A long-term benefit. as budgets for military spending would be redirected to social programs or returned to citizens in the form of lower taxes.

Our guest this episode, Bridget Conley, started her career in peacebuilding in the 1990s. At that time, Western academics and politicians spelled out a formula for creating peaceful nations. You would hold elections, convert the economy to a free market, pursue human rights, and prosecute bad actors. But the post 9/11 years showed that the militarized world order was not going away.

There’s been a push in recent years to localize peace efforts – meaning fund them and run them based on direction from people in the effected countries. But to a considerable extent, peacebuilding still revolves around that formula from the 1990s.

That’s why Conley launched Disrupting Peace, a podcast that explores why peace hasn’t worked, and how it could.

Bridget is the research director at the World Peace Foundation, a research organization affiliated with Tufts University. Her research is currently focused on mass incarceration in the United States, and she teaches college classes inside the prison system in Massachusetts as part of the Tufts University Prison Initiative. For Conley, prison abolition and international peacebuilding are all about creating societies that solve problems through debate and discussion, not through coercion.

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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

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