Peace Engineering

The Drexel University Model: A New Frontier

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Peace is often treated as the absence of war, or worse, a soft add-on to realpolitik. But what if we treated peace like we treat infrastructure, designed, built, maintained, and engineered? That’s the radical premise behind a new frontier gaining traction in both academia and global policy spaces: “Peace Engineering”.

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Leading the challenge in 2019, with support from the PeaceTech Lab and the Dornsife School of Public Health, the College of Engineering at Drexel University developed a paradigm-shifting new curriculum for graduate students. Designed for engineers and technical professionals who want to apply systems thinking and technical innovation to peacebuilding, it was not just "build better bridges," but build the conditions for lasting peace through equitable systems, data-driven tools, and local, grass-roots development.

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Using a whole systems lens to understand the root causes of conflict, the heart of “Peace Engineering” is to train engineers in the moral and societal implications of their work in fragile pre-conflict and post-conflict regions. Students work toward a Master of Science in Peace Engineering, doing field work as they test and apply their courses with boots on the ground.

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The Drexel model is a fusion of disciplines that can think and feel at the same time, with one foot in structural engineering and the other in the architecture of emotion. Young engineers are taught to imagine the future of peacebuilding that includes the missing ingredients in technical recovery efforts that ignore the need for deep inner repair.

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Traditional engineering solves technical problems. But technical fixes can backfire if they’re not embedded in a broader system of foresight thinking, empathy, and inclusion. Peace Engineering responds to this challenge with a systems-level mindset, reframing engineering as a tool for conflict prevention, resilience in the face of ongoing global warming, and adaptive regenerative design.

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In the rubble of warzones like Gaza or Ukraine, rebuilding isn’t just about restoring infrastructure—it’s about restoring coherence, trust, and the capacity to relieve trauma by rebuilding hope.  Roads and water facilities and power lines won’t hold if communities are fractured. Housing will collapse again if the future it shelters is soaked in fear and continued violence.

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We are living through a time when the boundaries between war, climate crisis, migration, and inequality have collapsed. As governments and NGOs scramble to respond, Peace Engineers are already thinking ahead, building the neural networks of a future determined not to repeat the failures of the past.

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TAP Dialogues at the Center for Emergent Diplomacy

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At the Center for Emergent Diplomacy, our NGO based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, we team with humanitarian initiatives and engineers to take the next step. While Peace Engineering builds from systems thinking and tech innovation, our diplomatic peacebuilding methods build from deep listening, sharing stories, and nonlinear dialogue and negotiations. We train grass-roots leaders to facilitate the kinds of conversations that help shattered communities leap over broken systems and envision futures that haven’t been tried yet. 

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We call these futures “TAP”, The Adjacent Possibles waiting to be discovered, imagined, designed, and built.

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The future isn't a single road stretching toward the horizon. It's a mycelial web of potential that is nonlinear and alive though hidden beneath our feet. Peace Engineering is mapping part of that web with new tools and intentions. But tools alone don’t reveal new strategies for renewal we haven’t yet imagined.

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That’s where TAP dialogues come in. We join grass-roots community leaders not to plan the future, but to listen for it, to catch the signal in the noise, to notice strategic solutions to unresolved conflict hiding just outside of view. Together, with gifted peace engineers, TAP dialogues don’t pave a road. They reveal the terrain.

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Our Center trains TAP dialogue facilitators to become part of engineering teams, all of us experienced in working on projects in post-conflict areas like Gaza or Ukraine. Together we bring back basic infrastructure, at the same time assisting in trauma relief and training skilled workers on the ground to take on the task of rebuilding--hopefully with a nod to the looming climate threats to security so the new housing, water, food, and energy systems can be robust in the face of hotter temperatures.  

The Adjacent Possible isn’t a road—it’s a field of emergent creativity, shaped by new stories that we dare to imagine, to tell, and to believe are still possible on a planet altered by endless war and consuming heat. Peace Engineering builds the structures of survival. TAP dialogues awaken the collective imagination required to move us beyond survival into a regenerative, spirit-driven and hopeful future.

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Weaving the Technical and the Relational

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Imagine a Peace Engineering Team on the ground. Before the final plans are drawn by the engineers, a TAP dialogue gathers survivors, engineers, and local leaders in sharing stories. Not to hash out logistics, but to understand the felt reality of the survivors and outside engineers, both groups confronting the grief, the memory, the longing, to surface the latent visions for what could be, what’s next?

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In these conversations, new possibilities emerge—not dictated by donors or blueprints but revealed in the imagination of those who’ve experienced the trauma of war. This ensures the rebuild isn’t a replica of the past, but a portal to something completely new.