A scan of emerging initiatives at the intersection of peace, risk, and investment and why standardisation may be the missing link.

Across peacebuilding, finance, climate, and ethical banking circles, a common realisation is emerging: peace already underpins economic performance, but it is still poorly articulated in financial language. As a result, peace and stability remain undervalued, underpriced, and rarely designed into investment decisions in a deliberate way.

Several current initiatives point to this gap from different angles. Taken together, they show momentum, but also fragmentation. What follows below is not a comprehensive mapping exercise, but a look at several cutting-edge ideas and live experiments that are beginning to reshape how peace, risk, and investment relate to one another.

Reframing risk, not selling peace

A growing strand of thinking argues that the problem is not whether peace creates value, but whether financial systems know how to recognise and price it.

This is the core insight in the work of Tracy Dusabimana, whose recent article on peace-informed investing challenges conventional risk narratives in African markets. Rather than treating fragility as an external veto, her argument is that many ventures actively produce stability through predictable pricing, operational continuity, and local embeddedness. These qualities reduce volatility and strengthen cash-flow reliability, yet are rarely recognised in underwriting models.

What is notable here is not the use of peace language, but its absence. The argument speaks squarely to investors, reframing peace as a source of risk reduction and performance, not as a moral add-on.

Evidence catches up with intuition: the “peace premium”

This reframing is reinforced by recent research from LSE IDEAS. The report Unlocking the Peace Premium, authored by Jason Miklian, Mark van Dorp, and John Katsos with the support of Marcel Smits, synthesises decades of evidence on how private sector activity can contribute to peace across three dimensions: safety and security, social cohesion, and political peace.

Its conclusions are both enabling and cautionary. Businesses can generate peace-positive outcomes, but these effects are conditional, contextual, and never automatic. What matters is not the sector or scale of investment, but how economic activity is designed and implemented: conflict-sensitive practices, inclusive participation, community trust, and accountable governance.

Crucially, the report shows that these peace-positive effects are economically material — reducing volatility and strengthening legitimacy — yet remain largely financially illegible. Peace is produced, but rarely measured, priced, or verified in ways that resonate with investors. The report, commissioned with support from Interpeace through the Finance for Peace initiative, therefore stops short of offering a ready-made investment solution. Instead, it clarifies why new forms of market infrastructure are needed to make peace investable without inviting peace-washing.

From curiosity to coordination: peace economies at ecosystem level

At the ecosystem level, the Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP) has made this translation challenge explicit through its Building Peace Economies at Scale initiative. AfP positions itself as a convener rather than a service provider, seeking to bridge peacebuilding evidence with market logic.

Its 2026 strategic priorities acknowledge a persistent language and metrics gap between peace and finance, and the fact that peace is still not perceived as something businesses will pay for unless a concrete return on investment can be demonstrated. AfP’s value lies in naming the problem clearly and creating space for experimentation.

Complementing this, The Peace Room, initiated by Kris Inman, and its Peace Economies Map are beginning to surface the diversity of actors operating at the edges of this emerging field. These efforts do not yet map a market; they map pre-market experimentation, revealing both momentum and fragmentation.

Ethical finance: values without peace intentionality

In parallel, ethical and value-based finance has continued to grow largely outside the peace discourse. A Report on Ethical Finance in Europe from European Federation of Ethical and Alternative Banks and Financiers, FEBEA – an international non-profit organisation that brings together 32 financial institutions from 17 European countries with the aim of developing ethical and social finance in Europe – show that ethical banks often outperform conventional peers in stability, inclusion, and long-term resilience.

Yet peace remains almost entirely implicit. Ethical finance produces outcomes highly relevant to peace – social cohesion, local economic participation, trust-based banking – but these effects are rarely framed, measured, or verified as peace-positive outcomes. Peace is generated, but not named, making it difficult to connect ethical finance systematically to fragile or conflict-affected settings.

Place-based experimentation: investment hubs in fragile settings

Beyond discourse and frameworks, a small number of place-based initiatives are testing whether peace considerations can be embedded into the coordination of investment on the ground. One example is the Mozambique Peace & Security Investment Hub, established under the RISE-PS (Resilient Investment for Socio-Economic Empowerment, Peace & Security) programme.

Supported by the African Development Bank, and implemented in partnership with Interpeace and UNDP, the initiative combines job creation, community infrastructure, skills development, and SME support with an explicit peace and security framing. Early targets include approximately 24,000 jobs, with a strong focus on youth and women, alongside community facilities and local enterprise development.

What makes this relevant is not scale or replication, but design intent. The hub treats peace and security not as downstream social benefits, but as enabling conditions for sustained investment performance in a highly fragile setting.

Climate, peace, and finance: testing the limits

Climate finance has become one of the most active entry points for peace-related investment conversations. The Baku Climate and Peace Action Hub, launched around COP29, reflects growing recognition that climate risks, conflict dynamics, and investment performance are deeply intertwined.

Its significance lies less in what it has already solved and more in what it exposes. As climate finance scales rapidly, the absence of clear peace-related criteria, safeguards, and performance measures becomes increasingly visible. The hub therefore functions as a stress test: can peace considerations be integrated into large-scale financial flows without being diluted into vague resilience language?

Early operational testing: peace finance at fund level

One of the few concrete attempts to operationalise peace-informed investment at fund level is the Humanitarian Development and Peace Fund, being developed by Shuraako Capital, Human Planet Ventures, and Interpeace.

Recent case studies compiled by Convergence rightly focus on how blended finance can be scaled in fragile and displacement-affected contexts. However, peace itself largely remains implicit assumed to follow from resilience, inclusion, or service delivery. This is a critical limitation. In conflict-affected and highly unequal settings, scale depends not only on capital mobilisation, but on stability, legitimacy, and social cohesion. Without explicitly addressing these dynamics, scaling risks amplifying exclusion and reinforcing existing power imbalances.

What the HDP Fund seeks to test is a different premise: that scaling blended finance in fragile settings requires peace to be treated as a core design variable, not an assumed outcome. This includes applying a standardised, peace-intentional approach to investment eligibility, risk assessment, and performance management – so that peace considerations are applied consistently across transactions, rather than relying on ad-hoc judgement or goodwill.

In this sense, the HDP Fund functions as a live test case: exploring whether peace-intentional and standardised design can provide the stability and predictability needed for scale, while ensuring that investment actually reaches – and benefits – the populations it is intended to serve.

PeaceTech as enabling infrastructure

Alongside funds and hubs, a quieter but increasingly important layer of innovation is emerging around PeaceTech. Recent reflections – including a South Asian lens on PeaceTech highlighted in The Diplomatic Insight  – usefully show how digital tools can support dialogue, inclusion, and conflict prevention in fragile environments. However, PeaceTech should not be understood as technology only for peacebuilders as the PeaceTech Alliance mentioned in the article argues.

One thing is key: for PeaceTech to genuinely support peacebuilding outcomes at scale, it cannot rely on intent or innovation alone. PeaceTech actors must apply core peacebuilding principles that ensure technical solutions actually strengthen the conditions for peace rather than inadvertently exacerbating tensions or exclusion. Involving peacebuilders in design and deployment provides an important safeguard, but this also points to the need for a more common, recognised standard so that peace-supporting practice is applied consistently, transparently, and credibly across different technologies, contexts, and users.

Platforms such as B-Ventures are supporting early-stage PeaceTech ventures, with initiatives led by Shane Ray Martin sitting at the intersection of technology, conflict sensitivity, and investment readiness. Their focus is not on replacing peacebuilding practice, but on translating peace-relevant capabilities into systems that can be embedded into business operations and investment models.

This is where the Peace Finance Standard becomes a critical bridge. For PeaceTech ventures seeking to engage with investors, enterprises, or financial institutions, the standard offers a common reference point for what it means to be peace-intentional, conflict-sensitive, and outcome-oriented in practice. Rather than leaving “peace” to be interpreted differently by each technology provider or funder, the standard helps align PeaceTech innovation with investment requirements around risk management, accountability, and performance – making peace-supporting design verifiable, comparable, and scalable.

What this tells us

Across these initiatives, a consistent pattern emerges:

• Peace is increasingly recognised as economically relevant
• Risk reduction, trust, and predictability are repeatedly cited as value drivers
• Yet peace remains under-specified and under-systematised in financial and technological practice

Many current efforts either speak convincingly to peacebuilders but not investors, or to investors without explicitly naming peace. As a result, peace is often treated as implicit, assumed, or context-specific rather than as a design variable that must be applied consistently if scale is to be sustainable.

What this article points to is not a lack of activity, but a lack of shared market infrastructure. Without common reference points, scaling blended finance or PeaceTech in fragile settings risks reproducing instability and inequality, even when intentions are good. Making peace investable therefore requires more than capital mobilisation or innovation; it requires clear standards that translate peacebuilding principles into operational, comparable, and verifiable practice

Final note

Many of the actors referenced here are experimenting at the edges of their own fields, hence testing new ways to link peace, investment, technology, and scale. This reflection is not offered as a definitive map or a claim of maturity, but as an invitation to compare notes across practice, evidence, and investment logic.

If peace is to become a credible and investable dimension of financial decision-making, it cannot remain implicit or bespoke. Stability, legitimacy, and social cohesion are not optional externalities; they are prerequisites for sustainable scale in fragile settings. The challenge now is to move from experimentation to coherence by grounding innovation, finance, and technology in shared standards that make peace intentional, accountable, and scalable.

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