Recent growth in violent conflict across the world means that philanthropy has little choice but to address it. While the world’s media are focused on Ukraine and the Middle East, other regions including Sudan, Ethiopia, and Yemen to name a few are also in the midst of civil war.

The Global Peace Index reports increased violence in 79 countries over the past decade. There are clear links between such conflict and the rise of authoritarianism across the world that now poses an existential threat to philanthropy and civil society everywhere. It is now abundantly clear that violent conflict is an integral feature of the global polycrisis we face, and the philanthropic community can no longer be missing in action.   These themes are brought out in the two surveys that examine philanthropy’s role in conflict transformation.

This article compares emerging results from a survey ‘Philanthropy for a Safe, Healthy, and Just World’ with a similar survey conducted five years ago.  The results tell us how philanthropy is evolving to address ever-increasing violent conflict in our world.

The survey conducted in 2019/20 showed that philanthropy was little engaged with the processes of conflict transformation. Despite a growing commitment to social justice – for example by funding issues of gender equality, human rights and environmental sustainability – the question of violent conflict was largely overlooked. The authors were surprised that funders often seemed unaware of the link between social injustice and the outbreak of violent conflict.  Supporting peace was typically seen as too political, too difficult to engage with and too hard to measure.