About the Lab

Who We Are

The Peace Innovation Lab (PIL) at Stanford grew out of the Persuasive Technology Lab in 2009, when we began asking a new question:
“How good can we be to each other?”

We are an interdisciplinary research and design group that treats peace as a behavior—something that can be observed, measured, designed for, and scaled.

Our Vision

We believe peace is more than the absence of war. It is the presence of positive interactions: trust, cooperation, kindness, and mutual value creation across social, cultural, and political boundaries.

Our work reimagines peace not as an aspiration, but as a designable, investable, and measurable outcome.

Our Approach

We bring together behavior science, design, data, and systems thinking to intentionally create the conditions where positive peace emerges.

• Peace Innovation: designing new products, services, and systems that increase pro-social engagement.

• Peace Engineering: embedding peace outcomes as explicit design criteria in infrastructures, technologies, and policies.

• Peace Tech: building tools that don’t just reduce conflict but actively augment human and planetary flourishing.

• Peace Finance: pioneering metrics and instruments that allow investors, companies, and communities to recognize, measure, and reward peace outcomes—much like carbon markets helped value emissions reduction.

Our Story

Since 2009, we have run experiments at the intersection of technology and peace:

• Peace Dot & peace.facebook.com: the first platform to measure friendships across conflict boundaries in real time.

• Manor Labs (Texas): a municipal testbed for civic innovation and mass participation.

• Citizen Diplomacy campaigns like Israel Loves Iran and Romancing the Border.

• The Hague Peace Data Standard: a first step toward measurable, auditable peace credits for individuals, companies, and investors.

• Cultural transformation with global partners: from gender equity in tech to ESG-aligned finance.

Today

PIL is a global hub for research, entrepreneurship, and collaboration. Through our City Lab Network, executive education programs, and venture collaborations, we continue to test how emerging technologies—from social media to AI—can be reimagined to unlock mass collaboration and measurable peace at scale.