The Central Thesis: Polarization is not a single psychological variable but an interconnected ecosystem of six interacting dimensions. Existing models, built almost entirely on WEIRD populations, fail to capture how these dimensions configure differently in identity-contested, post-colonial, multi-ethnic societies. This planning grant builds the first cross-culturally validated Multi-Dimensional Polarization Ecosystem Mapping (PEMA) framework, validated in Nigeria and Ghana, designed for global scalability.

The science of polarization has a geography problem. The overwhelming preponderance of foundational models, measurement instruments, and intervention evidence derives from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) political systems, principally the United States and Europe. Yet the world's most acute polarization crises unfold in ethnoreligious, multi-identity, non-electoral contexts across the Global South, where Western constructs may misfit, partial construct validity may mislead, and the architecture of division may differ in fundamental ways from partisan politics.

Beyond Conflict proposes a nine-month planning grant to design, pilot, and validate the Polarization Ecosystem Mapping Architecture (PEMA): a six-dimensional theoretical framework that reconceptualizes polarization as an interdependent system of affective, epistemic, meta-perceptual, normative, institutional, and structural constructs. Crucially, the PEMA framework foregrounds listening and epistemic openness not as one ancillary construct but as the linchpin mechanism connecting all six dimensions: reduced epistemic closure and heightened intellectual humility are proposed as the primary psychological levers through which individuals move from polarization maintenance to depolarization.

Nigeria serves as the scientific anchor, a society of extraordinary complexity, with over 250 ethnic groups, and an ongoing farmer-herder conflict claiming more lives than any contemporary African crisis. A nationally representative survey infrastructure already built by Beyond Conflict and the National Population Commission, and a cadre of 60 rigorously trained research practitioners drawn from a competitive pool of 676 applicants across all six geopolitical zones. Ghana provides the first cross-national validation node, enabling rigorous testing of cross-cultural measurement equivalence. Together, they generate the first non-WEIRD multi-country PEMA dataset.

The planning period produces four scientific deliverables: (1) a fully specified PEMA theoretical model; (2) a validated, cross-culturally harmonized measurement battery; (3) a pilot dataset from Nigeria (N = 1,200) and Ghana (N = 400) testing dimensionality, measurement invariance, and cross-zone variation; and (4) a governance, pre-registration, and open-science architecture for a Phase 2 ($2.5M) global mapping study across five countries. This planning grant positions Beyond Conflict and its consortium as architects of a new scientific infrastructure for understanding global polarization, not merely as contextual adapters of Western models.