The People’s Peace

The people made peace in Northern Ireland. After 30 years of failure the peace process there was a great success. Dr. Irwin's contribution to that achievement was to work with the parties on a program of independent public opinion research and public diplomacy that allowed the people to be consulted and brought into the process at each critical stage of the negotiations. He has spent the past 25 years applying those lessons in the Balkans, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Israel and Palestine, Sudan, and Syria. Then with the UN in Yemen, Libya and Bolivia developing AI to complete the same analysis in 'real time'.

In all these cases peace polling has made a positive contribution to peace making but the ultimate goal of peace, all too frequently, has not been achieved. This book explains why and how such failures might now be turned into success with the introduction of global polling to monitor the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and make the resolution of conflict a normative part of all global diplomacy.