Middle East Peace Incubator
An Innovation Hub for Peacebuilding Startups
The Middle East Peace Incubator represents a new frontier in the field of conflict resolution. This creative, innovative, businesslike, citizen diplomacy enterprise is being formed outside the region to support the launch, growth, stabilization, and long-term success of several start-up and early stage Middle East peacebuilding initiatives and institutions. Operating in partnership with selected Middle Eastern universities, which in turn will be paired with several American universities, these bold, well-organized, and well-funded initiatives are to be launched on multiple fronts in the battle for Israeli–Palestinian peace. They are all integrated into a single peace campaign that is geared to reweaving the fabric of both Israeli and Palestinian societies with new threads of peace and setting up the necessary conditions of reconciliation across the conflict divide.
The Middle East Peace Incubator will engage in the following five “battlefronts,” or tracks, each representing a different approach to peace:
- Public and civic life
- Economics and business
- Activism in interfaith dialogue
- Communications and media
- Education and culture
Listed in the same order are the specific peacebuilding initiatives:
- Dialogue and Friendship Development Initiative
- Business and Economic Development Initiative
- Jewish–Muslim Reconciliation Initiative
- Communication for Peace Initiative
- Peace through Education Initiative
The Middle East Peace Incubator aims to monitor, support, nurture, and facilitate the five peacebuilding initiatives and to help them grow into mature peacebuilding institutions.
The underlying assumption at the basis of this enterprise is that for the five peacebuilding initiatives to be effective in the Middle East, and for the outgrowing institutions to be successfully established as fully functioning organizations within that region, there will be a need for a preliminary incubation process outside of the region with a Chicago-based hub to coordinate and monitor the process. Such a process includes predesigned stages that ensure the successful implementation of all the peacebuilding initiatives and their final institutionalization.
The ultimate goal is that the five peacebuilding institutions will develop the core organizational strengths needed to succeed in a region that is plagued by instability and violence. When these institutions reach a self-sustainable state of growth, they will be transferred to permanent places in the Middle East, where they will serve as integral components and essential drivers of MEPN’s strategic campaign, entitled the Israeli–Palestinian Peacebuilding Initiative (IPPI).
No doubt, the peacebuilding initiatives led by the Middle East Peace Incubator outside the region and the subsequent IPPI inside the region are ambitious private diplomacy ventures. They seem to be politically unfeasible against the background of the never-ending, intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the dominant culture of violence in the region, and particularly the new cycle of bloodshed in Israel/Palestine and across the Middle East. But together we can face any challenge. This is why your participation is so critical. Click here to find out the Ways to Participate.
