Peace Engineering Minor: Actionable Knowledge

Peace Engineering is an emerging area of study. Peace Engineering is defined as the intentional application of system-level science, technology, culture, and engineering principles to directly promote and support conditions for peace. It works directly towards a world where prosperity, sustainability, social equity, entrepreneurship, transparency, community voice and engagement, ethics, equity, and a culture of quality thrive. Engineers have the power to play a vital role in creative solutions that can radically transform and improve the wellbeing of people and other living systems. At the core of Peace Engineering is our planet’s sustainable future, which is calling leaders to act in concert from a systems mindset. It is a call to develop solutions differently: that is, collaboratively; integrating transdisciplinary expertise and education programs; simultaneously applying technology solutions while supporting ethics, policy and living systems. Peace Engineering uses, and acts upon, verifiable trusted data. In November of 2018, the University of New Mexico (UNM) School of Engineering (SOE) hosted the First Global Peace Engineering Conference from which the description of the field presented above was developed. As an outcome of the conference, UNM created a Peace Engineering Minor. While aimed primarily towards students majoring in Engineering Bachelor of Science (BS) degree programs, the Minor is open to students of all majors. Peace Engineering is inherently interdisciplinary and doesn’t rely solely on engineering content. Rather it includes relevant courses taught by faculty across different disciplines.