Heeding prophetic counsel—whether in your personal life, family, or profession—is always a sound practice. And it’s marvelous how initial sparks of inspiration can be magnified to produce brilliant efforts.
During the April 2023 general conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, President Russell M. Nelson urged peacemaking and “dignified dialogue” in his address “Peacemakers Needed.” For many people, this provided the encouragement they needed to act on thoughts already simmering in their minds or to pursue personal efforts in a more formal way. Take Kirk Hawkins, a political science professor. Hawkins realized his research on populism was focused on what undermines democracy and a productive, peaceful community. As a result, he turned his research agenda toward reducing polarization, one of the consequences of populism. This led him to organizations that teach techniques for constructive conversations across differences of opinion.
At the same time, Mirabella Keogh, a student from Australia studying Arabic and the Middle East, and her husband, Alexander Keogh, a psychology major from Arkansas, were frustrated by how quickly conversations with peers could shut down or turn tense. President Nelson’s call for peacemakers gave language to that frustration. Alex describes it as a shared recognition that many students wanted better conversations but did not know how to create them. Finally, Jay Goodliffe, Political Science Department chair, was working to secure a grant from the President’s Innovation Fund at the university for an initiative on peacemaking. He’d been inspired by both President Nelson’s talk and BYU President C. Shane Reese’s inaugural response identifying peacemaking as a natural strength of the university. Goodliffe saw the Political Science Department as a natural fit for supporting research on peacemaking and civil discourse across the wider academic discipline; many political science faculty study conflict from a variety of perspectives—internationally, within nation-states, and in group dynamics. Goodliffe approached Hawkins for feedback on the proposal, and the first collaboration was born.
When the Keoghs approached Hawkins with the idea of an academic association to help students practice staying in difficult conversations instead of avoiding them, he quickly recognized potential for a student arm of the initiative. That arm could expand the initiative’s scope from researching peacemaking to also promoting it across campus. The Initiative for Peacemaking received seed funding from the university, and the Peacemaker Project student association found a home in the Political Science Department. Both began formal efforts in fall 2024.
“I really keenly felt the need to do more to be a peacemaker and to try to contribute to that effort in some way,” says Hawkins. “And what more natural and meaningful way to do that than by not only helping with research but also helping other students and faculty at the university to collaborate and make this a part of our campus life?”
Building a Foundation for Peacemaking
During that first year, the initiative and student association stayed busy. The Peacemaker Project hosted the Debate Like a Peacemaker event, where a sizable room filled wall to wall with students eager to hear and share perspectives on the issue of immigration. But the topic of debate was secondary to the rules guiding engagement. Mirabella recalls that after the event, one student remarked how they had failed to be a peacemakers at a few points. That was discouraging for Mirabella to hear. However, she soon realized the win in how the student was thinking about the event.
“Framing their success by whether or not they are a peacemaker—that is really going to be the thing that helps change the world like President Nelson inspired us to do,” says Mirabella. Student participation grew quickly, and Peacemaker Project members visited 15 universities to study how other campuses were approaching civil discourse. They used that research to organize a National Student Conference for Peacemaking, where about 25 students from across the country met in August 2025 to discuss social issues and draft a shared declaration on peacemaking.
At the first Initiative for Peacemaking Conference, hosted on campus in May 2025, academics from a variety of universities, practitioners representing US nonprofits, and BYU faculty and students gathered for several discussion sessions on civil discourse. A second conference in May 2026 with elites (an academic term referring to those who influence public opinion) hosted 24 guests, including Bret Stephens, opinion columnist for The New York Times, who delivered the keynote “Mitigating Polarization: Understanding and Shaping Elite Behavior.” “At the conferences, we got to share our light with people outside of BYU who are also concerned about polarization,” says Hawkins, who directs the Initiative for Peacemaking. “They sometimes worry there aren’t enough allies out there, and they are grateful to have an opportunity to work on something in common. They’ve expressed that it’s inspiring to them and they’re glad to see BYU leading out.”
On the research side, political science Professors Lisa Argyle (now at Purdue University), Ethan Busby, and Josh Gubler collaborated with Thomas Howe and David Wingate from the BYU Computer Science Department, a researcher at Duke University, and former BYU graduate students to see how artificial intelligence can be used to improve online interactions. In an experiment where participants with opposing viewpoints on a specific topic chatted online, AI offered rephrasing suggestions to make messages more friendly or polite without changing the content. Participants could adopt, modify, or ignore the suggestions.
“We found the more often the [AI-recommended] rephrasings were used, the more likely participants were to feel like the conversation wasn’t divisive and that they felt heard and understood,” said Wingate in a BYU news release.
Gubler, Busby, and Wingate have dubbed their research lab for ongoing projects SAIL—Social Science and AI Lab—and are focusing on the application of large language models in everyday contexts to examine how these technologies can foster development of democratic skills and deliberative capacities.
Expanding the Initiative with an External Grant
President Reese shared in his January 13, 2026, BYU devotional that President Oaks’s guidance to him at his inaugural dinner was that “students today need models of civil dialogue and disagreement.” As Reese put it, “There are too few examples of this in the public square, [President Oaks] observed, and it is incumbent upon BYU and other campuses to model it in our classrooms and throughout university life.”
BYU faculty and students are indeed making a deliberate effort to approach disagreement differently and share what they find works best. The goal is not to eliminate or avoid disagreement. Instead the focus is on how people engage with each other and what happens in the moment when conversation can either break down or move forward. Rather than treating civil discourse as a side topic, campus groups are continually connecting their efforts to actively design, test, implement, and share research-based interventions. That approach is positioning BYU as a leader in a broader national effort to address polarization.
The university’s endeavors recently received a thumbs-up from the US Department of Education in the form of a $3.7 million grant. This significant funding supports campus collaborations to build on the momentum that formally began with the Initiative for Peacemaking.
Having the initiative in place as a foundation was instrumental in being able to submit a highly competitive application for the grant in record time. The opportunity appeared unexpectedly on November 10, 2025, just days before Thanksgiving, with a deadline set for December 3.
“We were trying to do a six-month process in two weeks,” Brittany Roueche, research development specialist for the college, explains. “We gathered everyone together—instead of having separate applications—to build something stronger and more impactful as a team.”
Faculty, staff, and administrators worked through the Thanksgiving break, refining ideas and aligning their goals under significant time pressure. Not every idea could be included. Individuals had to put their own peacemaking skills to the test as they willingly set aside proposals they valued to prioritize a unified direction that could move forward. Unity won out as BYU’s proposal received a score of 118 out of 120.
“Seeing the collaboration across campus was amazing because all of these departments were already doing meaningful work, and now they could build something even bigger as they worked together,” Roueche shares.
For the Benefit of the World
With the US Department of Education grant, the Initiative for Peacemaking now pulls together faculty and students from different corners of campus—various colleges, leadership and research centers, student associations, and more. Each group funded by the grant is involved in building courses and workshops where students can practice communication skills designed to depolarize conversations and find common ground.
Goodliffe, who was the founding director of the Initiative for Peacemaking and lead investigator on the grant proposal, describes the initiative’s work in practical terms: “studying civil discourse, trying ideas to identify what works, and then teaching those ideas.”
Instead of walking away when a conversation gets uncomfortable, students learn to stay in the room. They focus on the mechanics of the exchange—how to state a position without causing a shutdown, ask questions that invite answers, and listen to those answers.
The grant also supports efforts to share those tools beyond BYU and make resources publicly available so that other institutions can adopt similar approaches.
More and more, Hawkins can see that BYU isn’t alone. “You begin to realize just how many people there are who, even if they still have important disagreements about real policy issues, don’t like the tenor of our political conversation today,” says Hawkins. “And they want to see that improve in a way that makes our country better and also better reflects what we should be doing as disciples of Jesus Christ.”