Pax Labs

Pax Populi Peace Labs (Pax Labs) Launched with Announcement of the Pax Populi English Tutoring Program

The Pax Populi Peace Labs, or “Pax Labs” for short, is dedicated to innovations in peacemaking. Pax Labs is not a place, but a designation for Pax Populi initiatives under development that draw on new technologies and methods to advance peace.

The sources of conflict today are as old as humankind. And yet, we are living in a new world in which there are unprecedented opportunities for creative approaches to resolve difficult and seemingly intractable problems. In this spirit, we are seeking new ways to advance peace by carefully and systematically launching initiatives that can be monitored and improved over time.

Thus, Pax Populi programs can be divided into two types: those which are well-established and those which are more innovative and experimental. We consider the Pax Populi Educational Outreach program through which we are bringing students from Afghanistan to study in the USA to be a core program based on a well-established model. We at Pax Populi had much to learn to make this program fit the particular conditions for our participants, but we were building on a model with a firm foundation. By contrast, the first example of a Pax Labs initiative has been the Pax Populi English Tutoring (PET) program, planning for which began in late 2009, with the pilot project launched in September 2010. With the PET program, by contrast, we were dealing with something that, as far as we know, had never been done before. We developed methodologies to draw on new technologies to help the program to succeed. Our PET program, for example, would not have been possible without 21st century tools such as Skype and wikis. Although we have been at work on PET for over a year and a half it will remain “in the labs” until we feel the systems are so well established that it no longer needs to be considered a program in “beta.”

At Pax Populi we are dedicated to joining the spirit of creativity and entrepreneurship to the compassionate heart of peacemaking. We believe that many of the tried and true methods of peacemaking are as valuable and applicable today as they were a millennium ago. However, we also recognize that there are great opportunities to exercise creativity and innovation in peacemaking and that is what we seek to do at Pax Labs. It is our hopes that the Pax Populi English Tutoring will be the first of many programs that will enable us to make new contributions in the effort to build a more peaceful world.

For more on the Pax Populi English Tutoring program please click here.