New client: the Alliance for Peacebuilding asks Buena to rebrand peace

Peace has a branding problem, and the people who build it for a living know it. This month Julia Roig, board chair of the Alliance for Peacebuilding, brought Buena a brief with two words at its heart: rebrand peace. It would take 18 months, a creative summit in Chicago and a lot of borrowed military swagger, and it became the Peace Force.

Ask Americans about peace and they picture a yoga mat

The Alliance for Peacebuilding is a network of more than 150 organizations whose mission is to avert wars, end violence and save lives. Its members work in conflict zones around the world. Almost nobody in America knows that work exists.

Starting in 2019, the Alliance and PartnersGlobal, where Roig had been president, commissioned the FrameWorks Institute to find out why. FrameWorks interviewed peacebuilders and members of the public in depth, then tested ways of talking about the work.²¹

What they found was sobering. Across demographic and political lines, Americans think of peace in passive terms, as the absence of conflict or a state of inner calm. They widely think of violent conflict as an inevitable product of human nature. And when a peace policy sounds like it belongs to the other party, people reject it on reflex.¹

The brief, in one sentence: peace is boring

The campaign brief didn’t dress it up. Peace, it said, sounds soft, worn out and faintly hippie, and to some ears it sounds like a call to keep things as they are. Conflict, meanwhile, has everything a brand could want: urgency, uniforms, villains and a story every night on the news.

The research didn’t only diagnose. It pointed to what might work, and those findings became the rules of the road for everything Buena made next.

• Make peace active

  Peace is something you build and keep building, not a mood or a pause between wars.

• Do it together

  Peacebuilding is a group effort, not a lone hero’s act, and what happens to one of us affects us all.

• Be hopeful

  Dwelling on division breeds fatalism. Show that peace is possible, and specific.

The brief also leaned on social science. We are social creatures who copy what we think our group does, so the question became how peace turns into a norm. We believe we are more divided, and more disliked by the other side, than we really are. And asking divided people to sit down and be civil isn’t enough, because the pull of identity is too strong. Whatever we made had to give people a group worth belonging to.

Roig was the right person to bring that brief. Before chairing the Alliance’s board, she led PartnersGlobal, co-founded The Horizons Project, lived in Bogotá and Belgrade, and worked in more than 50 countries. She had seen peace built by hand. She wanted Americans to see it too.

Peace didn’t need another dove. It needed teeth.

A campaign you can watch being made

The idea Roig brought was bigger than an ad. The plan was to build a national movement for peace and film the whole thing: top creatives, social scientists and peace activists in one room, arguing their way toward an idea big enough for Americans of every stripe.

Directing the film is CJ Crim, whose first feature, Resisterhood, followed six Americans through two years of activism that began at the 2017 Women’s March. Her documentary, Rebranding Peace, follows Roig and Buena founder Doug Burnett as they set out to give peace teeth.³

The first pitch went out under a working title, The Great Unhate. It opened like a trailer: hate is buzzworthy, chaos is clickbait, we’re all addicted to outrage and exhausted by it. By December there was a teaser film, and students at New York’s School of Visual Arts were pitching ideas of their own.

From a deck to a recruiting office

The breakthrough came from looking hard at what conflict does well. In June 2022, Buena presented its creative brief to the Alliance. The objective: build a recruitment campaign for peacebuilding. The approach: repurpose the tools of conflict to make propaganda for peace. The message: build peace by enlisting now.

That flipped the problem. If conflict wins because it has a recruiting office, a uniform and a cause you can join today, then peace should have all three.

The stakes kept rising while the work took shape. In August 2022, a YouGov poll found that 43% of Americans thought a civil war was at least somewhat likely within ten years.⁴

For a campaign about choosing peace, that number was the whole argument. People weren’t short on worry. They were short on something to do about it.

What started as two words in a brief ended as a force with a badge, a uniform and a mission. Peace got its recruiting office.