Seeds of Peace Leader Eva Armour on Why the U.S. Feels Like a Conflict Zone

Conflict is often treated as something distant-associated with war zones, geopolitical rivalries and crises unfolding overseas. But Eva Armour, executive director of Seeds of Peace, a nonprofit focused on conflict resolution and youth leadership, has spent more than two decades working in communities shaped by conflict. And those same forces are now playing out much closer to home.

"We've worked with young people from the U.S. since our founding," Armour told Newsweek in a recent interview with Senior Editor Jenni Fink. In the U.S., she added, the level of division has intensified to the point where the same tools used in areas of active conflict are now needed domestically.

Speaking with Newsweek, Armour cited a 2021 poll in which more than half of Americans said "other people" were the country's biggest problem-ranking ahead of the economy, foreign threats and even natural disasters.

For an organization built on bringing together young people from opposing sides of long-standing conflicts through dialogue and shared experience, that sort of sentiment is, unfortunately, not surprising. It reflects not just disagreement, but a deeper breakdown in how people see and engage with one another.

Seeds of Peace was founded in 1993 to address that problem directly, creating spaces where young people from regions in conflict-Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, among others-could meet face-to-face. In the decades since, the model has remained largely intact: immersive, in-person experiences that combine shared daily activities-living together, playing sports and eating meals-with structured dialogue about the issues dividing them.

Over the years, Armour said, the organization has learned that the formula itself doesn't need to change-even as the context in which it operates has become more urgent.

"The work is strong. The work works. The problem is we don't have enough of it," she said.

In places long defined by conflict, participants often arrive with deeply entrenched views shaped by history, education and personal loss. But Armour said similar patterns are now emerging in the U.S., where polarization has made it harder for people to engage across differences without escalating into hostility or disengagement.

At its core, Seeds of Peace's approach is a simple but demanding idea: curiosity.

Participants are encouraged not to abandon their beliefs, but to test them-actively seeking out perspectives that challenge their assumptions.

"I used to say to my campers at camp, take the thing that you hold most sacred… and then try to find anything that you can to counter that," Armour said.

The goal is not agreement. It is understanding.

That distinction matters most in environments defined by competing narratives. Armour recalled one participant from Pakistan who, after meeting peers from India, realized for the first time that they had been taught entirely different versions of the same history. The experience led him and others to create a project placing those narratives side by side-not to reconcile them, but to acknowledge that multiple truths can coexist.

That kind of recognition, Armour said, is often the first step toward reducing conflict.

Sustaining that level of engagement is increasingly difficult. Social media, she noted, tends to flatten interactions and strip away the human cues that make empathy possible. In contrast, the organization's programs emphasize in-person dialogue, where participants must confront not just ideas, but the people behind them.

The work is not easy. Conversations can become emotional, messy and, at times, feel unproductive. Avoiding that discomfort, Armour said, is part of what allows divisions to deepen.

"If you want to avoid conflict, the surest way to hit it is by avoiding it," she said, warning that attempts to sidestep difficult conversations can often deepen divisions.

In that sense, the challenge facing parts of the United States is not fundamentally different from the one Seeds of Peace was originally created to address. The scale and visibility may differ, but the underlying dynamics-fear, misunderstanding and the tendency to retreat into familiar perspectives-are the same.

Armour remains cautiously optimistic that those patterns can be reversed, pointing to growing interest in spaces designed for real-world interaction and dialogue, from classrooms and community programs to tech-free environments that encourage people to engage face-to-face.

But change, she said, depends on people being willing to re-engage-not just with ideas, but with each other.

"Once we glimpse that, once we taste that, it makes it impossible to accept the world as it is," she said.

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This story was originally published April 16, 2026 at 7:33 AM.