peace long essay

Essay on Peace

500 words essay peace.

Peace is the path we take for bringing growth and prosperity to society. If we do not have peace and harmony, achieving political strength, economic stability and cultural growth will be impossible. Moreover, before we transmit the notion of peace to others, it is vital for us to possess peace within. It is not a certain individual’s responsibility to maintain peace but everyone’s duty. Thus, an essay on peace will throw some light on the same topic.

Importance of Peace

History has been proof of the thousands of war which have taken place in all periods at different levels between nations. Thus, we learned that peace played an important role in ending these wars or even preventing some of them.

In fact, if you take a look at all religious scriptures and ceremonies, you will realize that all of them teach peace. They mostly advocate eliminating war and maintaining harmony. In other words, all of them hold out a sacred commitment to peace.

It is after the thousands of destructive wars that humans realized the importance of peace. Earth needs peace in order to survive. This applies to every angle including wars, pollution , natural disasters and more.

When peace and harmony are maintained, things will continue to run smoothly without any delay. Moreover, it can be a saviour for many who do not wish to engage in any disrupting activities or more.

In other words, while war destroys and disrupts, peace builds and strengthens as well as restores. Moreover, peace is personal which helps us achieve security and tranquillity and avoid anxiety and chaos to make our lives better.

How to Maintain Peace

There are many ways in which we can maintain peace at different levels. To begin with humankind, it is essential to maintain equality, security and justice to maintain the political order of any nation.

Further, we must promote the advancement of technology and science which will ultimately benefit all of humankind and maintain the welfare of people. In addition, introducing a global economic system will help eliminate divergence, mistrust and regional imbalance.

It is also essential to encourage ethics that promote ecological prosperity and incorporate solutions to resolve the environmental crisis. This will in turn share success and fulfil the responsibility of individuals to end historical prejudices.

Similarly, we must also adopt a mental and spiritual ideology that embodies a helpful attitude to spread harmony. We must also recognize diversity and integration for expressing emotion to enhance our friendship with everyone from different cultures.

Finally, it must be everyone’s noble mission to promote peace by expressing its contribution to the long-lasting well-being factor of everyone’s lives. Thus, we must all try our level best to maintain peace and harmony.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Peace

To sum it up, peace is essential to control the evils which damage our society. It is obvious that we will keep facing crises on many levels but we can manage them better with the help of peace. Moreover, peace is vital for humankind to survive and strive for a better future.

FAQ of Essay on Peace

Question 1: What is the importance of peace?

Answer 1: Peace is the way that helps us prevent inequity and violence. It is no less than a golden ticket to enter a new and bright future for mankind. Moreover, everyone plays an essential role in this so that everybody can get a more equal and peaceful world.

Question 2: What exactly is peace?

Answer 2: Peace is a concept of societal friendship and harmony in which there is no hostility and violence. In social terms, we use it commonly to refer to a lack of conflict, such as war. Thus, it is freedom from fear of violence between individuals or groups.

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December 2, 2021

Peace Is More Than War’s Absence, and New Research Explains How to Build It

A new project measures ways to promote positive social relations among groups

By Peter T. Coleman , Allegra Chen-Carrel & Vincent Hans Michael Stueber

PeopleImages/Getty Images

Today, the misery of war is all too striking in places such as Syria, Yemen, Tigray, Myanmar and Ukraine. It can come as a surprise to learn that there are scores of sustainably peaceful societies around the world, ranging from indigenous people in the Xingu River Basin in Brazil to countries in the European Union. Learning from these societies, and identifying key drivers of harmony, is a vital process that can help promote world peace.

Unfortunately, our current ability to find these peaceful mechanisms is woefully inadequate. The Global Peace Index (GPI) and its complement the Positive Peace Index (PPI) rank 163 nations annually and are currently the leading measures of peacefulness. The GPI, launched in 2007 by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), was designed to measure negative peace , or the absence of violence, destructive conflict, and war. But peace is more than not fighting. The PPI, launched in 2009, was supposed to recognize this and track positive peace , or the promotion of peacefulness through positive interactions like civility, cooperation and care.

Yet the PPI still has many serious drawbacks. To begin with, it continues to emphasize negative peace, despite its name. The components of the PPI were selected and are weighted based on existing national indicators that showed the “strongest correlation with the GPI,” suggesting they are in effect mostly an extension of the GPI. For example, the PPI currently includes measures of factors such as group grievances, dissemination of false information, hostility to foreigners, and bribes.

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The index also lacks an empirical understanding of positive peace. The PPI report claims that it focuses on “positive aspects that create the conditions for a society to flourish.” However, there is little indication of how these aspects were derived (other than their relationships with the GPI). For example, access to the internet is currently a heavily weighted indicator in the PPI. But peace existed long before the internet, so is the number of people who can go online really a valid measure of harmony?

The PPI has a strong probusiness bias, too. Its 2021 report posits that positive peace “is a cross-cutting facilitator of progress, making it easier for businesses to sell.” A prior analysis of the PPI found that almost half the indicators were directly related to the idea of a “Peace Industry,” with less of a focus on factors found to be central to positive peace such as gender inclusiveness, equity and harmony between identity groups.

A big problem is that the index is limited to a top-down, national-level approach. The PPI’s reliance on national-level metrics masks critical differences in community-level peacefulness within nations, and these provide a much more nuanced picture of societal peace . Aggregating peace data at the national level, such as focusing on overall levels of inequality rather than on disparities along specific group divides, can hide negative repercussions of the status quo for minority communities.

To fix these deficiencies, we and our colleagues have been developing an alternative approach under the umbrella of the Sustaining Peace Project . Our effort has various components , and these can provide a way to solve the problems in the current indices. Here are some of the elements:

Evidence-based factors that measure positive and negative peace. The peace project began with a comprehensive review of the empirical studies on peaceful societies, which resulted in identifying 72 variables associated with sustaining peace. Next, we conducted an analysis of ethnographic and case study data comparing “peace systems,” or clusters of societies that maintain peace with one another, with nonpeace systems. This allowed us to identify and measure a set of eight core drivers of peace. These include the prevalence of an overarching social identity among neighboring groups and societies; their interconnections such as through trade or intermarriage; the degree to which they are interdependent upon one another in terms of ecological, economic or security concerns; the extent to which their norms and core values support peace or war; the role that rituals, symbols and ceremonies play in either uniting or dividing societies; the degree to which superordinate institutions exist that span neighboring communities; whether intergroup mechanisms for conflict management and resolution exist; and the presence of political leadership for peace versus war.

A core theory of sustaining peace . We have also worked with a broad group of peace, conflict and sustainability scholars to conceptualize how these many variables operate as a complex system by mapping their relationships in a causal loop diagram and then mathematically modeling their core dynamics This has allowed us to gain a comprehensive understanding of how different constellations of factors can combine to affect the probabilities of sustaining peace.

Bottom-up and top-down assessments . Currently, the Sustaining Peace Project is applying techniques such as natural language processing and machine learning to study markers of peace and conflict speech in the news media. Our preliminary research suggests that linguistic features may be able to distinguish between more and less peaceful societies. These methods offer the potential for new metrics that can be used for more granular analyses than national surveys.

We have also been working with local researchers from peaceful societies to conduct interviews and focus groups to better understand the in situ dynamics they believe contribute to sustaining peace in their communities. For example in Mauritius , a highly multiethnic society that is today one of the most peaceful nations in Africa, we learned of the particular importance of factors like formally addressing legacies of slavery and indentured servitude, taboos against proselytizing outsiders about one’s religion, and conscious efforts by journalists to avoid divisive and inflammatory language in their reporting.

Today, global indices drive funding and program decisions that impact countless lives, making it critical to accurately measure what contributes to socially just, safe and thriving societies. These indices are widely reported in news outlets around the globe, and heads of state often reference them for their own purposes. For example, in 2017 , Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, though he and his country were mired in corruption allegations, referenced his country’s positive increase on the GPI by stating, “Receiving such high praise from an institute that once named this country the most violent in the world is extremely significant.” Although a 2019 report on funding for peace-related projects shows an encouraging shift towards supporting positive peace and building resilient societies, many of these projects are really more about preventing harm, such as grants for bolstering national security and enhancing the rule of law.

The Sustaining Peace Project, in contrast, includes metrics for both positive and negative peace, is enhanced by local community expertise, and is conceptually coherent and based on empirical findings. It encourages policy makers and researchers to refocus attention and resources on initiatives that actually promote harmony, social health and positive reciprocity between groups. It moves away from indices that rank entire countries and instead focuses on identifying factors that, through their interaction, bolster or reduce the likelihood of sustaining peace. It is a holistic perspective.  

Tracking peacefulness across the globe is a highly challenging endeavor. But there is great potential in cooperation between peaceful communities, researchers and policy makers to produce better methods and metrics. Measuring peace is simply too important to get only half-right. 

World Peace Essay: Prompts, How-to Guide, & 200+ Topics

Throughout history, people have dreamed of a world without violence, where harmony and justice reign. This dream of world peace has inspired poets, philosophers, and politicians for centuries. But is it possible to achieve peace globally? Writing a world peace essay will help you find the answer to this question and learn more about the topic.

In this article, our custom writing team will discuss how to write an essay on world peace quickly and effectively. To inspire you even more, we have prepared writing prompts and topics that can come in handy.

• ✍️ Writing Guide
• 🦄 Essay Prompts
• ✔️ World Peace Topics
• 🌎 Pacifism Topics
• ✌️ Catchy Essay Titles
• 🕊️ Research Topics on Peace
• 💡 War and Peace Topics
• ☮️ Peace Title Ideas
• 🌐 Peace Language Topics

🔗 References

✍️ how to achieve world peace essay writing guide.

Stuck with your essay about peace? Here is a step-by-step writing guide with many valuable tips to make your paper well-structured and compelling.

1. Research the Topic

The first step in writing your essay on peace is conducting research. You can look for relevant sources in your university library, encyclopedias, dictionaries, book catalogs, periodical databases, and Internet search engines. Besides, you can use your lecture notes and textbooks for additional information.

Among the variety of sources that could be helpful for a world peace essay, we would especially recommend checking the Global Peace Index report . It presents the most comprehensive data-driven analysis of current trends in world peace. It’s a credible report by the Institute for Economics and Peace, so you can cite it as a source in your aper.

Here are some other helpful resources where you can find information for your world peace essay:

• United Nations Peacekeeping
• International Peace Institute
• United States Institute of Peace
• European Union Institute for Security Studies
• Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

2. Create an Outline

Outlining is an essential aspect of the essay writing process. It helps you plan how you will connect all the facts to support your thesis statement.

To write an outline for your essay about peace, follow these steps:

• Determine your topic and develop a thesis statement .
• Choose the main points that will support your thesis and will be covered in your paper.
• Organize your ideas in a logical order.
• Think about transitions between paragraphs.

Here is an outline example for a “How to Achieve World Peace” essay. Check it out to get a better idea of how to structure your paper.

• Definition of world peace.
• The importance of global peace.
• Thesis statement: World peace is attainable through combined efforts on individual, societal, and global levels.
• Practive of non-violent communication.
• Development of healthy relationships.
• Promotion of conflict resolution skills.
• Promotion of democracy and human rights.
• Support of peacebuilding initiatives.
• Protection of cultural diversity.
• Encouragement of arms control and non-proliferation.
• Promotion of international law and treaties.
• Support of intercultural dialogue and understanding.
• Restated thesis.
• Call to action.

You can also use our free essay outline generator to structure your world peace essay.

3. Write Your World Peace Essay

Now, it’s time to use your outline to write an A+ paper. Here’s how to do it:

• Start with the introductory paragraph , which states the topic, presents a thesis, and provides a roadmap for your essay. If you need some assistance with this part, try our free introduction generator .
• Your essay’s main body should contain at least 3 paragraphs. Each of them should provide explanations and evidence to develop your argument.
• Finally, in your conclusion , you need to restate your thesis and summarize the points you’ve covered in the paper. It’s also a good idea to add a closing sentence reflecting on your topic’s significance or encouraging your audience to take action. Feel free to use our essay conclusion generator to develop a strong ending for your paper.

4. Revise and Proofread

Proofreading is a way to ensure your essay has no typos and grammar mistakes. Here are practical tips for revising your work:

• Take some time. Leaving your essay for a day or two before revision will give you a chance to look at it from another angle.
• Read out loud. To catch run-on sentences or unclear ideas in your writing, read it slowly and out loud. You can also use our Read My Essay to Me tool.
• Make a checklist . Create a list for proofreading to ensure you do not miss any important details, including structure, punctuation, capitalization, and formatting.
• Ask someone for feedback. It is always a good idea to ask your professor, classmate, or friend to read your essay and give you constructive criticism on the work.
• Note down the mistakes you usually make. By identifying your weaknesses, you can work on them to become a more confident writer.

🦄 World Peace Essay Writing Prompts

Looking for an interesting idea for your world peace essay? Look no further! Use our writing prompts to get a dose of inspiration.

How to Promote Peace in the Community Essay Prompt

Promoting peace in the world always starts in small communities. If people fight toxic narratives, negative stereotypes, and hate crimes, they will build a strong and united community and set a positive example for others.

In your essay on how to promote peace in the community, you can dwell on the following ideas:

• Explain the importance of accepting different opinions in establishing peace in your area.
• Analyze how fighting extremism in all its forms can unite the community and create a peaceful environment.
• Clarify what peace means in the context of your community and what factors contribute to or hinder it.
• Investigate the role of dialogue in resolving conflicts and building mutual understanding in the community.

How to Promote Peace as a Student Essay Prompt

Students, as an active part of society, can play a crucial role in promoting peace at various levels. From educational entities to worldwide conferences, they have an opportunity to introduce the idea of peace for different groups of people.

Check out the following fresh ideas for your essay on how to promote peace as a student:

• Analyze how information campaigns organized by students can raise awareness of peace-related issues.
• Discuss the impact of education in fostering a culture of peace.
• Explore how students can use social media to advocate for a peaceful world.
• Describe your own experience of taking part in peace-promoting campaigns or programs.

How Can We Maintain Peace in Our Society Essay Prompt

Maintaining peace in society is a difficult but achievable task that requires constant attention and effort from all members of society.

We have prepared ideas that can come in handy when writing an essay about how we can maintain peace in our society:

• Investigate the role of tolerance, understanding of different cultures, and respect for religions in promoting peace in society.
• Analyze the importance of peacekeeping organizations.
• Provide real-life examples of how people promote peace.
• Offer practical suggestions for how individuals and communities can work together to maintain peace.

Youth Creating a Peaceful Future Essay Prompt

Young people are the future of any country, as well as the driving force to create a more peaceful world. Their energy and motivation can aid in finding new methods of coping with global hate and violence.

In your essay, you can use the following ideas to show the role of youth in creating a peaceful world:

• Analyze the key benefits of youth involvement in peacekeeping.
• Explain why young people are leading tomorrow’s change today.
• Identify the main ingredients for building a peaceful generation with the help of young people’s initiatives.
• Investigate how adolescent girls can be significant agents of positive change in their communities.

Is World Peace Possible Essay Prompt

Whether or not the world can be a peaceful place is one of the most controversial topics. While most people who hear the question “Is a world without war possible?” will probably answer “no,” others still believe in the goodness of humanity.

To discuss in your essay if world peace is possible, use the following ideas:

• Explain how trade, communication, and technology can promote cooperation and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.
• Analyze the role of international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union in maintaining peace in the world.
• Investigate how economic inequality poses a severe threat to peace and safety.
• Dwell on the key individual and national interests that can lead to conflict and competition between countries.

✔️ World Peace Topics for Essays

To help get you started with writing, here’s a list of 200 topics you can use for your future essTo help get you started with writing a world peace essay, we’ve prepared a list of topics you can use:

• Defining peace
• Why peace is better: benefits of living in harmony
• Is world peace attainable? Theory and historical examples
• Sustainable peace: is peace an intermission of war?
• Peaceful coexistence: how a society can do without wars
• Peaceful harmony or war of all against all: what came first?
• The relationship between economic development and peace
• Peace and Human Nature: Can Humans Live without Conflicts ?
• Prerequisites for peace : what nations need to refrain from war?
• Peace as an unnatural phenomenon: why people tend to start a war?
• Peace as a natural phenomenon: why people avoid starting a war?
• Is peace the end of the war or its beginning?
• Hybrid war and hybrid peace
• What constitutes peace in the modern world
• Does two countries’ not attacking each other constitute peace?
• “Cold peace” in the international relations today
• What world religions say about world peace
• Defining peacemaking
• Internationally recognized symbols of peace
• World peace: a dream or a goal?

🌎 Peace Essay Topics on Pacifism

• History of pacifism: how the movement started and developed
• Role of the pacifist movement in the twentieth-century history
• Basic philosophical principles of pacifism
• Pacifism as philosophy and as a movement
• The peace sign: what it means
• How the pacifist movement began: actual causes
• The anti-war movements: what did the activists want?
• The relationship between pacifism and the sexual revolution
• Early pacifism: examples from ancient times
• Is pacifism a religion?
• Should pacifists refrain from any kinds of violence?
• Is the pacifist movement a threat to the national security?
• Can a pacifist work in law enforcement authorities?
• Pacifism and non-violence: comparing and contrasting
• The pacifist perspective on the concept of self-defense
• Pacifism in art: examples of pacifistic works of art
• Should everyone be a pacifist?
• Pacifism and diet: should every pacifist be a vegetarian ?
• How pacifists respond to oppression
• The benefits of an active pacifist movement for a country

✌️ Interesting Essay Titles about Peace

• Can the country that won a war occupy the one that lost?
• The essential peace treaties in history
• Should a country that lost a war pay reparations?
• Peace treaties that caused new, more violent wars
• Can an aggressor country be deprived of the right to have an army after losing a war?
• Non-aggression pacts do not prevent wars
• All the countries should sign non-aggression pacts with one another
• Peace and truces: differences and similarities
• Do countries pursue world peace when signing peace treaties?
• The treaty of Versailles: positive and negative outcomes
• Ceasefires and surrenders: the world peace perspective
• When can a country break a peace treaty?
• Dealing with refugees and prisoners of war under peace treaties
• Who should resolve international conflicts?
• The role of the United Nations in enforcing peace treaties
• Truce envoys’ immunities
• What does a country do after surrendering unconditionally?
• A separate peace: the ethical perspective
• Can a peace treaty be signed in modern-day hybrid wars?
• Conditions that are unacceptable in a peace treaty

🕊️ Research Topics on Peace and Conflict Resolution

• Can people be forced to stop fighting?
• Successful examples of peace restoration through the use of force
• Failed attempts to restore peace with legitimate violence
• Conflict resolution vs conflict transformation
• What powers peacemakers should not have
• Preemptive peacemaking: can violence be used to prevent more abuse?
• The status of peacemakers in the international law
• Peacemaking techniques: Gandhi’s strategies
• How third parties can reconcile belligerents
• The role of the pacifist movement in peacemaking
• The war on wars: appropriate and inappropriate approaches to peacemaking
• Mistakes that peacemakers often stumble upon
• The extent of peacemaking : when the peacemakers’ job is done
• Making peace and sustaining it: how peacemakers prevent future conflicts
• The origins of peacemaking
• What to do if peacemaking does not work
• Staying out: can peacemaking make things worse?
• A personal reflection on the effectiveness of peacemaking
• Prospects of peacemaking
• Personal experience of peacemaking

💡 War and Peace Essay Topics

• Counties should stop producing new types of firearms
• Countries should not stop producing new types of weapons
• Mutual assured destruction as a means of sustaining peace
• The role of nuclear disarmament in world peace
• The nuclear war scenario: what will happen to the world?
• Does military intelligence contribute to sustaining peace?
• Collateral damage: analyzing the term
• Can the defenders of peace take up arms?
• For an armed person, is killing another armed person radically different from killing an unarmed one? Ethical and legal perspectives
• Should a healthy country have a strong army?
• Firearms should be banned
• Every citizen has the right to carry firearms
• The correlation between gun control and violence rates
• The second amendment: modern analysis
• Guns do not kill: people do
• What weapons a civilian should never be able to buy
• Biological and chemical weapons
• Words as a weapon: rhetoric wars
• Can a pacifist ever use a weapon?
• Can dropping weapons stop the war?

☮️ Peace Title Ideas for Essays

• How the nuclear disarmament emblem became the peace sign
• The symbolism of a dove with an olive branch
• Native Americans’ traditions of peace declaration
• The mushroom cloud as a cultural symbol
• What the world peace awareness ribbon should look like
• What I would like to be the international peace sign
• The history of the International Day of Peace
• The peace sign as an accessory
• The most famous peace demonstrations
• Hippies’ contributions to the peace symbolism
• Anti-war and anti-military symbols
• How to express pacifism as a political position
• The rainbow as a symbol of peace
• Can a white flag be considered a symbol of peace?
• Examples of the inappropriate use of the peace sign
• The historical connection between the peace sign and the cannabis leaf sign
• Peace symbols in different cultures
• Gods of war and gods of peace: examples from the ancient mythology
• Peace sign tattoo: pros and cons
• Should the peace sign be placed on a national flag?

🌐 Essay Topics about Peace Language

• The origin and historical context of the word “peace”
• What words foreign languages use to denote “peace”
• What words, if any, should a pacifist avoid?
• The pacifist discourse: key themes
• Disintegration language: “us” vs “them”
• How to combat war propaganda
• Does political correctness promote world peace?
• Can an advocate of peace be harsh in his or her speeches?
• Effective persuasive techniques in peace communications and negotiations
• Analyzing the term “world peace”
• If the word “war” is forbidden, will wars stop?
• Is “peacemaking” a right term?
• Talk to the hand: effective and ineffective interpersonal communication techniques that prevent conflicts
• The many meanings of the word “peace”
• The pacifists’ language: when pacifists swear, yell, or insult
• Stressing similarities instead of differences as a tool of peace language
• The portrayal of pacifists in movies
• The portrayals of pacifists in fiction
• Pacifist lyrics: examples from the s’ music
• Poems that supported peace The power of the written word
• Peaceful coexistence: theory and practice
• Under what conditions can humans coexist peacefully?
• “A man is a wolf to another man”: the modern perspective
• What factors prevent people from committing a crime?
• Right for peace vs need for peace
• Does the toughening of punishment reduce crime?
• The Stanford prison experiment: implications
• Is killing natural?
• The possibility of universal love: does disliking always lead to conflicts?
• Basic income and the dynamics of thefts
• Hobbesian Leviathan as the guarantee of peace
• Is state-concentrated legitimate violence an instrument for reducing violence overall?
• Factors that undermine peaceful coexistence
• Living in peace vs living for peace
• The relationship between otherness and peacefulness
• World peace and human nature: the issue of attainability
• The most successful examples of peaceful coexistence
• Lack of peace as lack of communication
• Point made: counterculture and pacifism
• What Woodstock proved to world peace nonbelievers and opponents?
• Woodstock and peaceful coexistence: challenges and successes
• Peace, economics, and quality of life
• Are counties living in peace wealthier? Statistics and reasons
• Profits of peace and profits of war: comparison of benefits and losses
• Can a war improve the economy? Discussing examples
• What is more important for people: having appropriate living conditions or winning a war?
• How wars can improve national economies: the perspective of aggressors and defenders
• Peace obstructers: examples of interest groups that sustained wars and prevented peace
• Can democracies be at war with one another?
• Does the democratic rule in a country provide it with an advantage at war?
• Why wars destroy economies: examples, discussion, and counterarguments
• How world peace would improve everyone’s quality of life
• Peace and war today
• Are we getting closer to world peace? Violence rates, values change, and historical comparison
• The peaceful tomorrow: how conflicts will be resolved in the future if there are no wars
• Redefining war: what specific characteristics today’s wars have that make them different from previous centuries’ wars
• Why wars start today: comparing and contrasting the reasons for wars in the modern world to historical examples
• Subtle wars: how two countries can be at war with each other without having their armies collide in the battlefield
• Cyber peace: how cyberwars can be stopped
• Information as a weapon: how information today lands harder blows than bombs and missiles
• Information wars: how the abundance of information and public access to it have not, nonetheless, eliminated propaganda
• Peace through defeating: how ISIS is different from other states, and how can its violence be stopped
• Is world peace a popular idea? Do modern people mostly want peace or mainly wish to fight against other people and win?
• Personal contributions to world peace
• What can I do for attaining world peace? Personal reflection
• Respect as a means of attaining peace: why respecting people is essential not only on the level of interpersonal communications but also on the level of social good
• Peacefulness as an attitude: how one’s worldview can prevent conflicts
• Why a person engages in insulting and offending: analysis of psychological causes and a personal perspective
• A smile as an agent of peace: how simple smiling to people around you contributes to peacefulness
• Appreciating otherness: how one can learn to value diversity and avoid xenophobia
• Peace and love: how the two are inherently interconnected in everyone’s life
• A micro-level peacemaker: my experiences of resolving conflicts and bringing peace
• Forgiveness for the sake of peace: does forgiving other people contribute to peaceful coexistence or promote further conflicts?
• Noble lies: is it acceptable for a person to lie to avoid conflicts and preserve peace?
• What should a victim do? Violent and non-violent responses to violence
• Standing up for the weak : is it always right to take the side of the weakest?
• Self-defense, overwhelming emotions, and witnessing horrible violence: could I ever shoot another person?
• Are there “fair” wars, and should every war be opposed?
• Protecting peace: could I take up arms to prevent a devastating war?
• Reporting violence: would I participate in sending a criminal to prison?
• The acceptability of violence against perpetrators: personal opinion
• Nonviolent individual resistance to injustice
• Peace is worth it: why I think wars are never justified
• How I sustain peace in my everyday life

Learn more on this topic:

• If I Could Change the World Essay: Examples and Writing Guide
• Ending the Essay: Conclusions
• Choosing and Narrowing a Topic to Write About
• Introduction to Research
• How the U.S. Can Help Humanity Achieve World Peace
• Ten Steps to World Peace
• How World Peace is Possible
• World Peace Books and Articles
• World Peace and Nonviolence
• The Leader of World Peace Essay
• UNO and World Peace Essay
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A very, very good paragraph. thanks

Peace and conflict studies actually is good field because is dealing on how to manage the conflict among the two state or country.

Keep it up. Our world earnestly needs peace

A very, very good paragraph.

United States Institute of Peace

Winning essays, 2013 national winning essays.

First Place: Molly Nemer of Henry Sibley High School in Mendota Heights, MN

• Grounded in Peace: Why Gender Matters

Second Place: Anna Mitchell of Plymouth, MI (Homeschool)

• Up and Out: Women’s Peacebuilding from the Ground Up in Liberia and Afghanistan

Third Place: Bo Yeon Jang of the International School Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

• Womanhood in Peacemaking: Taking Advantage of Unity through Cultural Roles for a Successful Gendered Approach in Conflict Resolution

2012 national winning essay, “ Awakening Witness and Empowering Engagement: Leveraging New Media for Human Connections ,” by Emily Fox-Penner of the Maret School in Washington, D.C., addressed the essay topic of new media and peacebuilding by examining its role in Egypt in 2011 and Kenya in 2007  (link is the same as it is now from last year)

2011 national winning essay, "Mimes for Good Governance: The Importance of Culture and Morality in the Fight Against Corruption," by Kathryn Botto from the Liberal Arts and Science Academy in Austin, Texas discusses the role of society and culture in dealing with curruption, using Colombia and Kyrgyzstan as case studies.

2010 national winning essay, " Fighting for Local publications in a Globalized World: Unity, Strategy, and Government Support " , by Margaret E. Hardy from Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco, California, discusses necessary conditions for nonviolent movement to successfully control local publications.

2009 national winning essay, "Responding to Crimes against Humanity: Prevention, Deployment, and Localization" , by Sophia Sanchez from Ladue Horton Watkins High School in Saint Louis, Missouri, discusses the role of international actors in protecting civilians from crimes against humanity.

2008 national winning essay , "Resolving Water Conflicts Through the Establishment of Water Authorities, " by Callie Smith from Girls Preparatory School in Chatanooga, Tennessee, discusses how natural publications can be managed to build peace, using case studies from Central Asia and Yemen.

2007 national winning essay , " Reintegrating Children, Building Peace: Interaction, Education, and Youth Participation ," by Wendy Cai from Corona Del Sol High School in Tempe, Arizona, discusses the reintegration of child soldiers into society, using Sierra Leone and Uganda as case studies.

2006 national winning essay , " Defusing Nuclear Tensions Through Internationally Supported Bilateral Collaborations ," by Kona Shen from The Northwest School in Seattle, Washington, compares the decision of Argentina and Brazil to forego nuclear arms development with the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan.

2005 national winning essay , " Finding Peace: Japan and Cambodia ," by Jessica Perrigan from the Duchesne Academy in Omaha, Nebraska, explores how education is the key to democracy.

2004 national winning essay , " Establishing Peaceful and Stable Postwar Societies Through Effective Rebuilding Strategy ," by Vivek Viswanathan from Herricks High School in New Hyde Park, New York explores the lessons of the Marshall Plan and international efforts in Somalia in an examination of the challenges of post-conflict reconstruction.

2003 national winning essay , " Kuwait and Kosovo: The Harm Principle and Humanitarian War ," by Kevin Kiley from Granite Bay High School in Granite Bay, California, examines the 1990 Gulf War and NATO's intervention in Kosovo to see how they measure up against the criteria of just war.

2002 national winning essay , " Safeguarding Human Rights and Preventing Conflict through U.S. Peacekeeping ," by David Epstein from Pikesville High School in Baltimore, Maryland, cites several examples of appropriate use of American power aimed at putting a stop to crimes against humanity and ending conflict.

2001 national winning essay , " Somalia and Sudan: Sovereignty and Humanitarianism ," by Stefanie Nelson from Bountiful High School in Bountiful, Utah, examines the dynamics of the competing philosophies of sovereignty and humanitarianism in third-party intervention found in civil conflicts in the Sudan and Somalia.

2000 national winning essay , " Promoting Global and Regional Security in the Post-Cold War World ," by Elspeth Simpson from Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas, looks at the U.S. policies that led to intervention in Colombia and North Korea and considers the effectiveness of actions based on humanitarian assistance and national and global security.

1999 national winning essay , " Preventive Diplomacy in the Iraq-Kuwait Dispute and in the Venezuela Border Dispute ," by Jean Marie Hicks of St. Thomas More High School in Rapid City, South Dakota, explores the cases of preventive diplomacy seen in disputes between Iraq and Kuwait and in border disputes involving Venezuela.

1998 national winning essay , " How Should Nations be Reconciled ," by Tim Shenk from Eastern Mennonite High School in Harrisonburg, Virginia, uses South Africa and Bosnia as examples to examine the manner in which war crimes should be accounted for to ensure stable and lasting peace.

1997 national winning essay , " A Just and Lasting Peace ," by Joseph Bernabucci from St. Alban's School in Washington, D.C., examines the steps that can be taken to support successful implementation of a peace agreements and addresses causes of the conflicts by exploring what can be done to discourage renewed violence.

1996 national winning essay , " America and the New World Order ," by Richard Lee from Irmo High School in Columbia, South Carolina, defines U.S. national security interests and gives his criteria for U.S. intervention by examining past cases of intervention.

Beyond Intractability

The Hyper-Polarization Challenge to the Conflict Resolution Field: A Joint BI/CRQ Discussion BI and the Conflict Resolution Quarterly invite you to participate in an online exploration of what those with conflict and peacebuilding expertise can do to help defend liberal democracies and encourage them live up to their ideals.

Follow BI and the Hyper-Polarization Discussion on BI's New Substack Newsletter .

Hyper-Polarization, COVID, Racism, and the Constructive Conflict Initiative Read about (and contribute to) the  Constructive Conflict Initiative  and its associated Blog —our effort to assemble what we collectively know about how to move beyond our hyperpolarized politics and start solving society's problems. 

By Michelle Maiese

September 2003  

What it Means to Build a Lasting Peace

It should be noted at the outset that there are two distinct ways to understand peacebuilding. According the United Nations (UN) document An Agenda for Peace [1], peacebuilding consists of a wide range of activities associated with capacity building, reconciliation , and societal transformation . Peacebuilding is a long-term process that occurs after violent conflict has slowed down or come to a halt. Thus, it is the phase of the peace process that takes place after peacemaking and peacekeeping.

Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), on the other hand, understand peacebuilding as an umbrella concept that encompasses not only long-term transformative efforts, but also peacemaking and peacekeeping . In this view, peacebuilding includes early warning and response efforts, violence prevention , advocacy work, civilian and military peacekeeping , military intervention , humanitarian assistance , ceasefire agreements , and the establishment of peace zones.

In the interests of keeping these essays a reasonable length, this essay primarily focuses on the narrower use of the term "peacebuilding."  For more information about other phases of the peace process, readers should refer to the knowledge base essays about violence prevention , peacemaking and peacekeeping , as well as the essay on peace processes  which is what we use as our "umbrella" term.

In this narrower sense, peacebuilding is a process that facilitates the establishment of durable peace and tries to prevent the recurrence of violence by addressing root causes and effects of conflict through reconciliation , institution building, and political as well as economic transformation.[1] This consists of a set of physical, social, and structural initiatives that are often an integral part of post-conflict reconstruction and rehabilitation.

It is generally agreed that the central task of peacebuilding is to create positive peace, a "stable social equilibrium in which the surfacing of new disputes does not escalate into violence and war."[2] Sustainable peace is characterized by the absence of physical and structural violence , the elimination of discrimination, and self-sustainability.[3] Moving towards this sort of environment goes beyond problem solving or conflict management. Peacebuilding initiatives try to fix the core problems that underlie the conflict and change the patterns of interaction of the involved parties.[4] They aim to move a given population from a condition of extreme vulnerability and dependency to one of self-sufficiency and well-being.[5]

To further understand the notion of peacebuilding, many contrast it with the more traditional strategies of peacemaking and peacekeeping. Peacemaking is the diplomatic effort to end the violence between the conflicting parties, move them towards nonviolent dialogue, and eventually reach a peace agreement. Peacekeeping , on the other hand, is a third-party intervention (often, but not always done by military forces) to assist parties in transitioning from violent conflict to peace by separating the fighting parties and keeping them apart. These peacekeeping operations not only provide security, but also facilitate other non-military initiatives.[6]

Some draw a distinction between post-conflict peacebuilding and long-term peacebuilding. Post-conflict peacebuilding is connected to peacekeeping, and often involves demobilization and reintegration programs, as well as immediate reconstruction needs.[7] Meeting immediate needs and handling crises is no doubt crucial. But while peacemaking and peacekeeping processes are an important part of peace transitions, they are not enough in and of themselves to meet longer-term needs and build a lasting peace.

Long-term peacebuilding techniques are designed to fill this gap, and to address the underlying substantive issues that brought about conflict. Various transformation techniques aim to move parties away from confrontation and violence, and towards political and economic participation, peaceful relationships, and social harmony.[8]

This longer-term perspective is crucial to future violence prevention and the promotion of a more peaceful future. Thinking about the future involves articulating desirable structural, systemic, and relationship goals. These might include sustainable economic development, self-sufficiency, equitable social structures that meet human needs, and building positive relationships.[9]

Peacebuilding measures also aim to prevent conflict from reemerging. Through the creation of mechanisms that enhance cooperation and dialogue among different identity groups , these measures can help parties manage their conflict of interests through peaceful means. This might include building institutions that provide procedures and mechanisms for effectively handling and resolving conflict.[10] For example, societies can build fair courts, capacities for labor negotiation, systems of civil society reconciliation, and a stable electoral process.[11] Such designing of new dispute resolution systems is an important part of creating a lasting peace.

In short, parties must replace the spiral of violence and destruction with a spiral of peace and development, and create an environment conducive to self-sustaining and durable peace.[12] The creation of such an environment has three central dimensions: addressing the underlying causes of conflict, repairing damaged relationships and dealing with psychological trauma at the individual level. Each of these dimensions relies on different strategies and techniques.

The Structural Dimension: Addressing Root Causes

The structural dimension of peacebuilding focuses on the social conditions that foster violent conflict. Many note that stable peace must be built on social, economic, and political foundations that serve the needs of the populace.[13] In many cases, crises arise out of systemic roots. These root causes are typically complex, but include skewed land distribution, environmental degradation, and unequal political representation.[14] If these social problems are not addressed, there can be no lasting peace.

Thus, in order to establish durable peace, parties must analyze the structural causes of the conflict and initiate social structural change. The promotion of substantive and procedural justice through structural means typically involves institution building and the strengthening of civil society .

Avenues of political and economic transformation include social structural change to remedy political or economic injustice, reconstruction programs designed to help communities ravaged by conflict revitalize their economies, and the institution of effective and legitimate restorative justice systems.[15] Peacebuilding initiatives aim to promote nonviolent mechanisms that eliminate violence, foster structures that meet basic human needs , and maximize public participation .[16]

To provide fundamental services to its citizens, a state needs strong executive, legislative, and judicial institutions.[17] Many point to democratization as a key way to create these sorts of peace-enhancing structures. Democratization seeks to establish legitimate and stable political institutions and civil liberties that allow for meaningful competition for political power and broad participation in the selection of leaders and policies.[18] It is important for governments to adhere to principles of transparency and predictability, and for laws to be adopted through an open and public process.[19] For the purpose of post-conflict peacebuilding, the democratization process should be part of a comprehensive project to rebuild society's institutions.

Political structural changes focus on political development, state building , and the establishment of effective government institutions. This often involves election reform, judicial reform, power-sharing initiatives, and constitutional reform. It also includes building political parties, creating institutions that provide procedures and mechanisms for effectively handling and resolving conflict, and establishing mechanisms to monitor and protect human rights . Such institution building and infrastructure development typically requires the dismantling, strengthening, or reformation of old institutions in order to make them more effective.

It is crucial to establish and maintain rule of law, and to implement rules and procedures that constrain the powers of all parties and hold them accountable for their actions.[20] This can help to ease tension, create stability, and lessen the likelihood of further conflict. For example, an independent judiciary can serve as a forum for the peaceful resolution of disputes and post-war grievances.[21]

In addition, societies need a system of criminal justice that deters and punishes banditry and acts of violence.[22] Fair police mechanisms must be established and government officials and members of the police force must be trained to observe basic rights in the execution of their duties.[23] In addition, legislation protecting minorities and laws securing gender equality should be advanced. Courts and police forces must be free of corruption and discrimination.

But structural change can also be economic. Many note that economic development is integral to preventing future conflict and avoiding a relapse into violence.[24] Economic factors that put societies at risk include lack of employment opportunities, food scarcity, and lack of access to natural resources or land. A variety of social structural changes aim to eliminate the structural violence that arises out of a society's economic system. These economic and social reforms include economic development programs, health care assistance, land reform, social safety nets, and programs to promote agricultural productivity.[25]

Economic peacebuilding targets both the micro- and macro-level and aims to create economic opportunities and ensure that the basic needs of the population are met. On the microeconomic level, societies should establish micro-credit institutions to increase economic activity and investment at the local level, promote inter-communal trade and an equitable distribution of land, and expand school enrollment and job training.[26] On the macroeconomic level, the post-conflict government should be assisted in its efforts to secure the economic foundations and infrastructure necessary for a transition to peace.[27]

The Relational Dimension

A second integral part of building peace is reducing the effects of war-related hostility through the repair and transformation of damaged relationships. The relational dimension of peacebuilding centers on reconciliation , forgiveness , trust building , and future imagining . It seeks to minimize poorly functioning communication and maximize mutual understanding.[28]

Many believe that reconciliation is one of the most effective and durable ways to transform relationships and prevent destructive conflicts.[29] The essence of reconciliation is the voluntary initiative of the conflicting parties to acknowledge their responsibility and guilt. Parties reflect upon their own role and behavior in the conflict, and acknowledge and accept responsibility for the part they have played. As parties share their experiences, they learn new perspectives and change their perception of their "enemies." There is recognition of the difficulties faced by the opposing side and of their legitimate grievances, and a sense of empathy begins to develop. Each side expresses sincere regret and remorse, and is prepared to apologize for what has transpired. The parties make a commitment to let go of anger , and to refrain from repeating the injury. Finally, there is a sincere effort to redress past grievances and compensate for the damage done. This process often relies on interactive negotiation and allows the parties to enter into a new mutually enriching relationship.[30]

One of the essential requirements for the transformation of conflicts is effective communication and negotiation at both the elite and grassroots levels . Through both high- and community-level dialogues , parties can increase their awareness of their own role in the conflict and develop a more accurate perception of both their own and the other group's identity .[31] As each group shares its unique history, traditions, and culture, the parties may come to understand each other better. International exchange programs and problem-solving workshops are two techniques that can help to change perceptions, build trust , open communication , and increase empathy .[32] For example, over the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the main antagonists have sometimes been able to build trust through meeting outside their areas , not for formal negotiations, but simply to better understand each other.[33]

If these sorts of bridge-building communication systems are in place, relations between the parties can improve and any peace agreements they reach will more likely be self-sustaining.[34] (The Israeli-Palestinian situation illustrates that there are no guarantees, however.) Various mass communication and education measures, such as peace radio and TV , peace-education projects , and conflict-resolution training , can help parties to reach such agreements.[35] And dialogue between people of various ethnicities or opposing groups can lead to deepened understanding and help to change the demonic image of the enemy group.[36] It can also help parties to overcome grief, fear, and mistrust and enhance their sense of security.

A crucial component of such dialogue is future imaging , whereby parties form a vision of the commonly shared future they are trying to build. Conflicting parties often have more in common in terms of their visions of the future than they do in terms of their shared and violent past.[37] The thought is that if they know where they are trying to go, it will be easier to get there.

Another way for the parties to build a future together is to pursue joint projects that are unrelated to the conflict's core issues and center on shared interests. This can benefit the parties' relationship. Leaders who project a clear and hopeful vision of the future and the ways and means to get there can play a crucial role here.

But in addition to looking towards the future, parties must deal with their painful past. Reconciliation not only envisions a common, connected future, but also recognizes the need to redress past wrongdoing.[38] If the parties are to renew their relationship and build an interdependent future, what has happened must be exposed and then forgiven .

Indeed, a crucial part of peacebuilding is addressing past wrongdoing while at the same time promoting healing and rule of law.[39] Part of repairing damaged relationships is responding to past human rights violations and genocide through the establishment of truth commissions , fact-finding missions, and war crimes tribunals .[40] These processes attempt to deal with the complex legal and emotional issues associated with human rights abuses and ensure that justice is served. It is commonly thought that past injustice must be recognized, and the perpetrators punished if parties wish to achieve reconciliation.

However, many note that the retributive justice advanced by Western legal systems often ignores the needs of victims and exacerbates wounds.[41] Many note that to advance healing between the conflicting parties, justice must be more reparative in focus. Central to restorative justice is its future-orientation and its emphasis on the relationship between victims and offenders. It seeks to engage both victims and offenders in dialogue and make things right by identifying their needs and obligations.[42] Having community-based restorative justice processes in place can help to build a sustainable peace.

The Personal Dimension

The personal dimension of peacebuilding centers on desired changes at the individual level. If individuals are not able to undergo a process of healing, there will be broader social, political, and economic repercussions.[43] The destructive effects of social conflict must be minimized, and its potential for personal growth must be maximized.[44] Reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts must prioritize treating mental health problems and integrate these efforts into peace plans and rehabilitation efforts.

In traumatic situations, a person is rendered powerless and faces the threat of death and injury. Traumatic events might include a serious threat or harm to one's family or friends, sudden destruction of one's home or community, and a threat to one's own physical being.[45] Such events overwhelm an individual's coping resources, making it difficult for the individual to function effectively in society.[46] Typical emotional effects include depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. After prolonged and extensive trauma, a person is often left with intense feelings that negatively influence his/her psychological well-being. After an experience of violence, an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, helpless, and out of control in a world that is unpredictable.[47]

Building peace requires attention to these psychological and emotional layers of the conflict. The social fabric that has been destroyed by war must be repaired, and trauma must be dealt with on the national, community, and individual levels.[48] At the national level, parties can accomplish widespread personal healing through truth and reconciliation commissions that seek to uncover the truth and deal with perpetrators. At the community level, parties can pay tribute to the suffering of the past through various rituals or ceremonies, or build memorials to commemorate the pain and suffering that has been endured.[49] Strong family units that can rebuild community structures and moral environments are also crucial.

At the individual level, one-on-one counseling has obvious limitations when large numbers of people have been traumatized and there are insufficient resources to address their needs. Peacebuilding initiatives must therefore provide support for mental health infrastructure and ensure that mental health professionals receive adequate training. Mental health programs should be adapted to suit the local context, and draw from traditional and communal practice and customs wherever possible.[50] Participating in counseling and dialogue can help individuals to develop coping mechanisms and to rebuild their trust in others.[51]

If it is taken that psychology drives individuals' attitudes and behaviors, then new emphasis must be placed on understanding the social psychology of conflict and its consequences. If ignored, certain victims of past violence are at risk for becoming perpetrators of future violence.[52] Victim empowerment and support can help to break this cycle.

Peacebuilding Agents

Peacebuilding measures should integrate civil society in all efforts and include all levels of society in the post-conflict strategy. All society members, from those in elite leadership positions, to religious leaders, to those at the grassroots level, have a role to play in building a lasting peace. Many apply John Paul Lederach's model of hierarchical intervention levels to make sense of the various levels at which peacebuilding efforts occur.[53]

Because peace-building measures involve all levels of society and target all aspects of the state structure, they require a wide variety of agents for their implementation. These agents advance peace-building efforts by addressing functional and emotional dimensions in specified target areas, including civil society and legal institutions.[54] While external agents can facilitate and support peacebuilding, ultimately it must be driven by internal forces. It cannot be imposed from the outside.

Various internal actors play an integral role in peacebuilding and reconstruction efforts. The government of the affected country is not only the object of peacebuilding, but also the subject. While peacebuilding aims to transform various government structures, the government typically oversees and engages in this reconstruction process. A variety of the community specialists, including lawyers, economists, scholars, educators, and teachers, contribute their expertise to help carry out peacebuilding projects. Finally, a society's religious networks can play an important role in establishing social and moral norms.[55]

Nevertheless, outside parties typically play a crucial role in advancing such peacebuilding efforts. Few peacebuilding plans work unless regional neighbors and other significant international actors support peace through economic development aid and humanitarian relief .[56] At the request of the affected country, international organizations can intervene at the government level to transform established structures.[57] They not only provide monetary support to post-conflict governments, but also assist in the restoration of financial and political institutions. Because their efforts carry the legitimacy of the international community, they can be quite effective.

Various institutions provide the necessary funding for peacebuilding projects. While international institutions are the largest donors, private foundations contribute a great deal through project-based financing.[58] In addition, regional organizations often help to both fund and implement peacebuilding strategies. Finally, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) often carry out small-scale projects to strengthen countries at the grassroots level. Not only traditional NGOs but also the business and academic community and various grassroots organizations work to further these peace-building efforts. All of the groups help to address "the limits imposed on governmental action by limited resources, lack of consensus, or insufficient political will."[59]

Some suggest that governments, NGOs, and intergovernmental agencies need to create categories of funding related to conflict transformation and peacebuilding.[60] Funds are often difficult to secure when they are intended to finance preventive action. And middle-range initiatives, infrastructure building, and grassroots projects do not typically attract significant funding, even though these sorts of projects may have the greatest potential to sustain long-term conflict transformation.[61] Those providing resources for peacebuilding initiatives must look to fill these gaps. In addition, external actors must think through the broader ramifications of their programs.[62] They must ensure that funds are used to advance genuine peacebuilding initiatives rather than be swallowed up by corrupt leaders or channeled into armed conflict.

But as already noted, higher-order peace, connected to improving local capacities, is not possible simply through third-party intervention.[63] And while top-down approaches are important, peace must also be built from the bottom up. Many top-down agreements collapse because the ground below has not been prepared. Top-down approaches must therefore be buttressed, and relationships built.

Thus, an important task in sustaining peace is to build a peace constituency within the conflict setting. Middle-range actors form the core of a peace constituency. They are more flexible than top-level leaders, and less vulnerable in terms of daily survival than those at the grassroots level.[64] Middle-range actors who strive to build bridges to their counterparts across the lines of conflict are the ones best positioned to sustain conflict transformation. This is because they have an understanding of the nuances of the conflict setting, as well as access to the elite leadership .

Many believe that the greatest resource for sustaining peace in the long term is always rooted in the local people and their culture.[65] Parties should strive to understand the cultural dimension of conflict, and identify the mechanisms for handling conflict that exist within that cultural setting. Building on cultural resources and utilizing local mechanisms for handling disputes can be quite effective in resolving conflicts and transforming relationships. Initiatives that incorporate citizen-based peacebuilding include community peace projects in schools and villages, local peace commissions and problem-solving workshops , and a variety of other grassroots initiatives .

Effective peacebuilding also requires public-private partnerships in addressing conflict and greater coordination among the various actors.[66] International governmental organizations, national governments, bilateral donors, and international and local NGOs need to coordinate to ensure that every dollar invested in peacebuilding is spent wisely.[67] To accomplish this, advanced planning and intervention coordination is needed.

There are various ways to attempt to coordinate peace-building efforts. One way is to develop a peace inventory to keep track of which agents are doing various peace-building activities. A second is to develop clearer channels of communication and more points of contact between the elite and middle ranges. In addition, a coordination committee should be instituted so that agreements reached at the top level are actually capable of being implemented.[68] A third way to better coordinate peace-building efforts is to create peace-donor conferences that bring together representatives from humanitarian organizations, NGOs, and the concerned governments. It is often noted that "peacebuilding would greatly benefit from cross-fertilization of ideas and expertise and the bringing together of people working in relief, development, conflict resolution, arms control, diplomacy, and peacekeeping."[69] Lastly, there should be efforts to link internal and external actors. Any external initiatives must also enhance the capacity of internal resources to build peace-enhancing structures that support reconciliation efforts throughout a society.[70] In other words, the international role must be designed to fit each case.

[1] Boutros-Ghali, Boutros. An Agenda for Peace. New York: United Nations 1995 .

[1a] SAIS, "The Conflict Management Toolkit: Approaches," The Conflict Management Program, Johns Hopkins University [available at: http://www.sais-jhu.edu/resources/middle-east-studies/conflict-management-toolkit

[2] Henning Haugerudbraaten, "Peacebuilding: Six Dimensions and Two Concepts," Institute For Security Studies. [available at: http://www.iss.co.za/Pubs/ASR/7No6/Peacebuilding.html ]

[3] Luc Reychler, "From Conflict to Sustainable Peacebuilding: Concepts and Analytical Tools," in Peacebuilding: A Field Guide , Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 12.

[4] Reychler, 12.

[5] John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies . (Washington, D.C., United States Institute of Peace, 1997), 75.

[6] SAIS, [available at: http://www.sais-jhu.edu/resources/middle-east-studies/conflict-management-toolkit ]

[7] Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis. "Building Peace: Challenges and Strategies After Civil War," The World Bank Group. [available at: http://www.chs.ubc.ca/srilanka/PDFs/Building%20peace--challenges%20and%20strategies.pdf ] 3.

[8] Doyle and Sambanis, 2

[9] Lederach, 77.

[11] Doyle and Sambanis, 5.

[13] Haugerudbraaten

[14] Haugerudbraaten

[16] Lederach, 83.

[19] Neil J. Kritz, "The Rule of Law in the Post-Conflict Phase: Building a Stable Peace," in Managing Global Chaos: Sources or and Responses to International Conflict , eds. Chester A. Crocker and Fen Osler Hampson with Pamela Aall. (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1996), 593.

[20] Kritz, 588.

[21] Kritz, 591.

[22] Kritz, 591.

[25] Michael Lund, "A Toolbox for Responding to Conflicts and Building Peace," In Peacebuilding: A Field Guide , Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 18.

[27] These issues are discussed in detail in the set of essays on development in this knowledge base.

[28] Lederach, 82.

[29] Hizkias Assefa, "Reconciliation," in Peacebuilding: A Field Guide , Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 342.

[30] Assefa, 340.

[33] Kathleen Stephens, "Building Peace in Deeply Rooted Conflicts: Exploring New Ideas to Shape the Future" INCORE, 1997.

[34] Reychler, 13.

[35] Lund, 18.

[37] Lederach, 77.

[38] Lederach, 31.

[39] Howard Zehr, "Restorative Justice," In Peacebuilding: A Field Guide , Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 330.

[41] Zehr, 330.

[42] Zehr, 331.

[44] Lederach, 82.

[45] Hugo van der Merwe and Tracy Vienings, "Coping with Trauma," in Peacebuilding: A Field Guide, Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 343.

[46] van der Merwe, 343.

[47] van der Merwe, 345.

[48] van der Merwe, 343.

[49] van der Merwe, 344.

[51] van der Merwe, 347.

[52] van der Merwe, 344.

[53] John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, Chapter 4.

[56] Doyle and Sambanis, 18.

[59] Stephens.

[60] Lederach, 89.

[61] Lederach, 92.

[62] Lederach, 91.

[63] Doyle and Sambanis, 25.

[64] Lederach, 94.

[65] Lederach, 94.

[66] Stephens.

[67] Doyle and Sambanis, 23.

[68] Lederach, 100.

[69] Lederach, 101.

[70] Lederach, 103.

Use the following to cite this article: Maiese, Michelle. "Peacebuilding." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: September 2003 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/peacebuilding >.

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Defining the Concept of Peace » Positive & Negative Peace

In this excerpt from our IEP Peace Academy, learn why understanding the different definitions of peace is crucial for peacebuilders.

Learn why understanding the concept of peace from both a negative peace and positive peace perspective is crucial for peacebuilders.

Defining the Concept of Peace: Positive and Negative Peace

There are two common conceptions of peace — Negative Peace, or actual peace, and Positive Peace.

What is Negative Peace?

IEP’s definition of Negative Peace is understood as ‘the absence of violence or fear of violence — an intuitive definition that many agree with, and one which enables us to measure peace more easily.

Measures of Negative Peace are the foundation of the IEP’s flagship product, the Global Peace Index .

However, while the Global Peace Index tells us how peaceful a country is, it doesn’t tell us what or where we should be investing in to strengthen or maintain levels of peace.

This leads us to Positive Peace , derived from the data contained within the Global Peace Index . Positive Peace provides a framework to understand and address the many complex challenges the world faces.

What is Positive Peace?

Positive Peace is defined as the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies.

It provides a framework to understand and then address the multiple and complex challenges the world faces. Positive Peace is transformational in that it is a cross-cutting factor for progress, making it easier for businesses to sell, entrepreneurs and scientists to innovate, individuals to produce, and governments to effectively regulate.

Difference between Negative and Positive Peace

In addition to the absence of violence, Positive Peace is also associated with many other social characteristics that are considered desirable, including better economic outcomes, measures of well-being, levels of inclusiveness and environmental performance.

A parallel can be drawn with medical science; the study of pathology has led to numerous breakthroughs in our understanding of how to treat and cure disease.

However, it was only when medical science turned its focus to the study of healthy human beings that we understood what we needed to do to stay healthy. This could only be learned by studying what was working.

Are you interested in learning more about peace? Sign up for the free, online Positive Peace Academy

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Essay Samples on Peace

Phenomenon of peace in the world.

Everyone in this world seeks peace. But what is Peace? Peace “is when people can resolve their conflicts without violence and can work together to improve the quality of their lives”.We are all fighting a war amongst ourselves to achieve utmost peace, and to win...

The Significance And Outcomes Of The First Hague Peace Conference

In order to understand and summarise the significance of The First Hague Peace conference, it is imperative to locate it not only within the twentieth-century, but as a derivative of nineteenth-century political events. One segment of World War 1 historians who focused on diplomacy either...

• Disarmament
• Nuclear Weapon

Comparison Of Jimmy Carter And Elie Wiesel Achievements In The Fight For Peace

Former President Jimmy Carter and Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel are both notable and knowledgeable men, who, through experience have their different ideations of how to achieve peace during a time where war seems inevitable. Carter’s, Just War or a Just War and Wiesel’s, Peace isn’t...

• Elie Wiesel
• Jimmy Carter

Search for Peace in the Just War Theory

In the article, “Does Peace Have a Chance?” that was printed by Slate on August 4, 2009, the author, John Horgan, evaluates the notion whether the actions and behaviour of mankind leads to antagonism and enmity which is the main cause of war and assesses...

• Just War Theory

Comparison of the Subject of Peace in Christianity and Islam

“There exist three forms of peace: interior peace, by which man is at peace with himself; the peace whereby man is at peace with God, submitting himself fully to God's dispositions; and the peace relative to one's neighbor, by which we live in peace with...

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The Definiton of Peace in Religion and Overall

Everyone in this world seeks peace. But what is Peace? Peace “is when people are able to resolve their conflicts without violence and can work together to improve the quality of their lives». We are all fighting a war amongst ourselves to achieve utmost peace,...

• Religious Beliefs

The Implementation of Peace with Peace Enforcement

Peace enforcement involves the application of a range of coercive measures, including the use of military force. It requires the explicit authorization of the Security Council. It is used to restore international peace and security in situations where the Security Council has decided to act...

• American Government
• Social Security

Extinction of Peace and Constant Presence of Conflict

Peace and conflict have always been joined at the hip since the beginning of mankind. The first peaceful era of human beings can be traced to Adam and Eve, and their stay at the garden of Eden. However, peace cannot go on unchecked for long....

Ways To Be Happy & To Live A Peaceful Life

Life is not all about having a lot of money. It doesn’t obligate you to always give. Or something that will always come out from you. Sometimes it is better to be silent. And in our life there will be a point that we will...

The Role Of Ethics In Peace And Conflict Research

The devastating violent conflicts experienced in Africa have raised numerous questions about their nature, causes, participants and ways to amicably end their intractableness. Other questions that require satisfactorily answers include why conflict actors like the political leaders, militias, extremists and suicide bombers, pirates, child soldiers,...

• Conflict Management

Best topics on Peace

1. Phenomenon Of Peace In The World

2. The Significance And Outcomes Of The First Hague Peace Conference

3. Comparison Of Jimmy Carter And Elie Wiesel Achievements In The Fight For Peace

4. Search for Peace in the Just War Theory

5. Comparison of the Subject of Peace in Christianity and Islam

6. The Definiton of Peace in Religion and Overall

7. The Implementation of Peace with Peace Enforcement

8. Extinction of Peace and Constant Presence of Conflict

9. Ways To Be Happy & To Live A Peaceful Life

10. The Role Of Ethics In Peace And Conflict Research

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Is World Peace Possible?

Peace may be closer than we think..

Posted December 24, 2020 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

Peace is a timeless and universal vision belonging to all, and it has forever been a multidisciplinary interest. The great ideals and perennial values of the world’s religions serve not only as beacons to better times, when all will live together in harmony and good will, but they are also designed, when put into practice and lived by, to represent a promise of what humanity is capable of, maybe even created for.

The Golden Rule can be seen as a foundation for a principle of justice that, when extended from the individual to the global level, becomes the basis for the fulfillment of the promise of peace on earth.

At the end of the 18th century, philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed in his essay Perpetual Peace a program to be implemented by governments that would abolish standing armies, eliminate interference of one state with another, and prevent national funds from being used to create friction with other nations. These steps and more, including the rights of all people, as citizens of the world, to experience universal hospitality, would be the foundation on which to build a lasting peace. This essay influenced not only European thought and political practice but was also well represented in the formation of the United Nations.

The founder of experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, who also founded folk psychology— what became cultural psychology—wrote in 1912 of how the psychological and cultural development of humanity has evolved through stages toward a consciousness of “mankind as a unity,” when national affiliations give way to world-wide humanistic concerns. This evolutionary stage can now be seen as where we are headed, and as a prerequisite to world peace.

World unity seems to be where the evolutionary flow is heading, favoring cooperation over competition . But is world peace a promise to be fulfilled, or one that will never be kept? Is it possible that world peace is an inevitable outcome of our collective evolution?

As Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith makes clear in his chapter “Is World Peace Possible?” in Our Moment of Choice: Evolutionary Visions and Hope for the Future , “peace isn’t something that only a group of world leaders will achieve, no matter how good their intentions. When peace erupts on Earth, it will come from individuals everywhere who have entered a new state of consciousness.”

He believes peace is inherent in our species, that it is now exerting itself on an increasingly global scale, and that it is the people who know they are facing a daunting task and work at it anyway who are making a significant difference. This is the way it has always been. When faced with a problem that seems intractable, people find a way around it instead of resigning themselves to it. People have always brought about change in this way, whether it was fighting the challenges of seemingly incurable diseases or achieving civil rights. Those who have won against great odds have pioneered paradigm shifts. This is what makes global peace possible.

It helps a great deal to know what peace really means. It’s not just an absence of conflict. Beckwith says, “peace is the dynamic of harmonizing good. It is a quality within us.” This understanding opens up so many options, not only to be a peace-builder, but also to live peace from within in everything one does in life. As an inner quality, peace becomes something others can pick up on, notice on an energy level, and emulate in their own actions. This way, peace becomes contagious.

As Beckwith puts it, being able to really see “something from another’s point of view leads to the birth of compassion. With compassion, there is understanding; from understanding comes dialogue. When dialogue emerges, then a way out of no way emerges. With empathy, compassion, understanding, and dialogue, people can see a solution that wasn’t there before; a shift in consciousness happens to enable a new insight.”

War is part of our dysfunction; it’s not a reflection of who we are in our highest form. There are many encouraging signs of a new paradigm emerging, of green markets, solar markets, holistic medicine markets, and more, leading a transformation toward a peaceful world.

As Beckwith reminds us, “peace is in the journey, with every step we take. We carry it with us, and its impact is felt on a much wider scale. We all have to find our own neighborhood, in our own community, where we’re willing to share our gift. Many people don’t realize that small groups of people around the world doing things with compassion have an impact on the mental and emotional atmosphere of the entire world. By having peace within, we build peace all around us.”

The promise of world peace has been there for millennia; it is up to us—now—to bring it into reality.

Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith, "Is World Peace Possible?" in Atkinson, R., Johnson, K., and Moldow, D. (eds.) (2020). Our Moment of Choice: Evolutionary Visions and Hope for the Future. New York: Atria Books. 33-38.

Robert Atkinson, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern Maine and Nautilus Book Award-winning author of The Story of Our Time: From Duality to Interconnectedness to Oneness.

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War & Peace

Peace, love, & happiness, andrew fiala asks if it’s possible to have all three at once..

You’ve seen T-shirts, posters, and even band-aids emblazoned with peace signs, hearts, and smiley faces. Bumper-sticker wisdom, building upon the idealism of the 1960s, affirms what we might call ‘the hippy trinity’: peace, love, and happiness. We suspect that if we were more peaceful and loving, we would be happier. And if we were happy, it would be easier to love others and live in peace with them. One source for this idea may be the Apostle Paul, who said in his New Testament letter to the Galatians that the fruits of the Spirit include love, joy, and peace. A more contemporary source is the blues and hip-hop artist G. Love. One lyric from his song ‘Peace, Love, and Happiness’ is:

“I got no time to worry About troubles or misgivings You got to let it flow, let yourself go ‘Cause if you’re hating, then you sure ain’t living Give me some Peace, Love, and Happiness”

The Beatles made it simpler, asserting that “love is all you need.” John Lennon asked that we “give peace a chance.” Pharell Williams more recently sang that “happiness is the truth.”

Unfortunately, pop poetry can only take us so far. The optimism of San Francisco’s Summer of Love runs aground on the wisdom of Athens, Jerusalem, and Bodh Gaya (where the Buddha is said to have obtained Enlightenment). The world’s major philosophical and religious traditions tell us that life remains tragic and difficult, and that peace, love, and happiness are never easily found. Peace, love, and happiness are also in conflict with other values, such as self-sufficiency, liberty, and justice. Smiles and hugs cannot end war, eliminate religious and ethnic conflict, nor cure psychopathology. Most of the world’s traditions therefore admit that the goal of uniting peace, love, and happiness creates a difficult and chronic, even eternal, project.

One difficulty, perhaps impossible to surmount, is the fact that the conjunction of peace, love, and happiness contains internal contradictions. Consider the fact that love may require violence: love may oblige me to fight to defend my loved ones. Indeed, love of country or of God may inspire war. Love may also lead to unhappiness: for instance, the lover suffers when the beloved dies. To love is to open oneself to grief and loss. And love easily becomes jealous and vengeful. It is no wonder that the Stoics advised equanimity and emotional self-control rather than passionate love. Tranquility is not easily cultivated when love inflames the heart.

Peace may also result in unhappiness. Those who are defeated by cruel oppressors may lay down their arms. But forced submission creates an unhappy peace that conflicts with the value of liberty. Even apart from the ‘peace’ of the pacified slave, there is no denying that peace is often achieved by sacrificing other important values. We may choose to give up on legitimate claims for justice, reparation, or respect in the name of peace. Moreover, Nietzsche argued that peace was merely the pallid dream of the mediocre, while powerful men were inspired by danger, adventure, and war.

Happiness is also complicated. A certain sort of happiness develops from the single-minded pursuit of one’s aims. The creative joy of the artist, inventor, or genius often comes at the expense of those she loves. Although Aristotle thought that happiness included social virtues, he also believed that self-reliant contemplation was the highest form of happiness. The self-reliant individual finds happiness alone: he loves the truth, but does not necessarily love other human beings. And for some people, happiness is linked to competition, victory, and domination. We know for example that victory and domination give men a satisfying boost of testosterone. One source of war, conflict, murder, and misery, is the ugly fact that violence makes some people happy.

Acknowledging Suffering

To resolve these difficulties we need to think deeply and clearly about the meaning of peace, love, and happiness. It may seem mean-spirited to spoil the buzz of the blissfully smiling hippy dreamer whistling Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’. Life is hard, and if people find peace, love, and happiness in a song or a slogan, we ought not begrudge them their slice of heaven. But the demands of ethics should make it difficult to smile in a world of pain and injustice. Common sense reminds us that blissful moments do not last long, and a bit of reflection reminds us that our happiness to an extent rests upon the backs of those who slave in fields and sweatshops. Is anyone entitled to peace, love, and happiness in a world in which children are raped, where slavery continues, and where species go extinct at the hands of humanity?

The problem of the suffering of others is a central concern for both theists and Buddhists. Leszek Kolakowski once asked in an essay, ‘Is God Happy?’ He pointed out that a just and loving God must be incredibly sad to see the suffering of humanity. Kolakowski also argues that the Buddha would be deeply unhappy to know that most of the world remains bound to the wheel of suffering. However, contemporary Western images of Buddhism often portray it as providing a personal path to peace, love, and happiness. For example, Mathieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk of French origin, is touted as the world’s happiest man, and his books are marketed in such a way that they appear to provide a recipe for personal happiness and peace. Ricard himself, however, makes it clear that the key to happiness is practice, discipline, and compassionate concern for the suffering of others. We shouldn’t forget that Buddhism begins with the assumption that life is suffering! Or consider another popular Buddhist author, Thich Nhat Hanh. As Hanh explains, “the mind of love brings peace, joy, and happiness to ourselves and others” ( Wisdom from Peace Is Every Step , 2005). This sounds simple, but it takes years of training to develop a mind of love, inner peace, and joyful compassion. Buddhist practice is not merely selfish navel-gazing. Indeed, it can lead to anguished engagement with an oppressive and violent world – as witnessed by the monks who immolate themselves in protest against repressive regimes in Tibet and elsewhere. The fact that a religion of peace, love, and happiness leads to suicidal protest in the face of oppression gives much food for thought.

Christianity provides a similar source of contemplation. The turmoil, sadness, suffering and cruelty of the cross are an essential part of the Christian story. We noted already that Paul imagined the unity of peace, love, and happiness in the life of the Spirit; but like Jesus himself, Paul was arrested and executed.

For Christians, peace, love, and happiness are ultimately found far beyond the tumult of earthly life, death, and politics. Saint Augustine argued in his book The City of God (426) that happiness and peace cannot be found in this life. He contrasts Christian wisdom with that of the earlier Greek philosophers, the Epicureans, Stoics, and Cynics, who maintained that happiness could be produced in this life by philosophical reflection. Augustine claimed that worldly happiness was insufficient, and that eternal happiness, lasting peace, and true love were only possible in union with God, only fully achievable in the afterlife. For Christians, the path to peace, love, and happiness passes through and beyond this world of wickedness, sin, and suffering.

Is A World Of Peace, Love & Happiness Possible?

The Greeks criticized by Augustine thought otherwise. Epicurus (341-270 BC), for example, taught that a simple life, withdrawn from the tumult of politics, and spent in the company of loving friends, could be peaceful and happy. Epicurus also maintained that to enjoy peace and happiness you must cultivate justice, since injustice produces social conflict. But, Epicurus added, if you want to be happy and find peace, you should avoid political life and its stressful and dangerous entanglements.

There are clear Epicurean elements in the hippy dream – especially in the idea that simple living apart from the mainstream is the key to peace, love, and happiness. The problem, however, is that Epicureans can be accused of free-riding. Is it right to retreat to your garden while the outside world is plagued by war, hate, and sorrow?

In response to this problem, the Stoics maintained that we have a duty to serve society. So Stoics sacrifice their own peace, love, and happiness for the good of the many. For instance, the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor from 161-180 AD, would have preferred to stay home with his loved ones and develop himself as a philosopher, but his political obligations led him to sacrifice his health and tranquility for the good of Rome.

Building upon the political perspective, we might note – as Steven Pinker has argued recently in his book, The Better Angels of our Nature (2011) – that peace, love, and happiness are the result of civilizing processes, including military and police power. In other words, Westerners can enjoy peace, love, and happiness because our borders are secure, our homes are comfortable, our economies run smoothly, and our institutions are stable. Sadly, the same cannot be said for many others across the globe.

The peace, love, and happiness celebrated in counter-cultural songs and bumper-stickers may rest upon European and American military, economic, and social power. Nonetheless, many advocates of the peace-love-happiness trinity are critical of police power, military force, and obedience and conformity. Some argue that the structures of imperialistic and militaristic civilization are internally contradictory – that they create the very ills they claim to solve. So peace is undermined by preparation for war. Love is destroyed by oppressive hierarchies. Happiness is subverted by the demands of work, conformity, and bureaucracy. But it may be that military power, obedience, hierarchy, and conformity are essential for peace, love, and happiness. It may be that best place to find peace, love, and happiness is in Epicurean gardens nestled safely in the heartland of an empire.

These and other disquieting thoughts arise when we begin thinking about peace, love, and happiness. While a simplistic faith or naïve fantasy can satisfy some, the moment you begin thinking, you wonder whether the beautiful dream of peace, love, and happiness is ever a real possibility for fragile, mortal, thinking beings who live in a cruel and tragic world. It might therefore be that those who philosophize recognize that peace, love, and happiness are nearly impossible to achieve. And yet one can’t help but imagine that John Lennon was on to something when he sang of his dream of “living life in peace”:

“You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will be as one.”

© Dr Andrew Fiala 2014

Andrew Fiala is a Professor of Philosophy, Chair of the Philosophy Department, and Director of the Ethics Center at California State University, Fresno. He has published a number of books on ethics and political philosophy, and is co-author with Barbara MacKinnon of the 8th edition of Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues (Cengage Publishing). He also writes a regular column for the Fresno Bee .

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Article Contents

Introduction, the perennial problem of speaking about peace, the obligation to write about war, traditions of international thinking, funder information.

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What Do We Learn about War and Peace from Women International Thinkers?

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Glenda Sluga, What Do We Learn about War and Peace from Women International Thinkers?, Global Studies Quarterly , Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2023, ksad018, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksad018

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The aim of this essay is to ask what can we learn about war and peace from women international thinkers? As I will show, new and old historical evidence of women thinkers points us in directions that suggest, first, the privations women regularly faced in order to make their arguments against the background of actual war, addressing both the more conventional “women's” topic of peace and the often masculinized controversies of the nature of violence. This same history sounds out the range and changing (gendered) registers of international thought, including the diminished tones of peace as a defining objective. Then there are the diverse locations of specifically women's international thought, from manifestos to pamphlets and newspaper articles to published tomes. These lead us to the intersecting political and intellectual networks of activism and influence that colored the intertextual referentiality that thinking generated. Finally, I will argue that the evidence at hand, and the related examples it connects to, underscores the broad transnational European settings of the texts that specifically address war and peace. It even suggests, as I suggest, that the borders of that transnationalism extended not only across the Atlantic, but also through the entangled continental political histories of Western Europe and Russia. In the twenty-first century, these contours of the history of women's international thought remain relevant, not least because they pose the question for us, what difference have women thinkers made?

Cet article traite de la question suivante: que peut-on apprendre sur la guerre et la paix grâce aux penseuses internationales ? Je montrerai que les nouvelles données issues des penseuses, mais aussi les plus anciennes et historiques, révèlent d'abord les privations auxquelles ont été régulièrement confrontées les femmes quand il s'agissait de présenter leurs idées en temps de guerre. Elles rejoignent le sujet « féminin » plus habituel de paix et les polémiques souvent masculinisées autour de la nature de la violence. Cette même histoire nous donne une idée de l'ampleur et de l’évolution des registres (genrés) de la pensée internationale, notamment la perte de vitesse de la présentation de la paix comme objectif ultime. Ensuite, la pensée internationale spécifiquement féminine s'exprime sur différents supports, des manifestes aux volumes publiés en passant par les pamphlets et articles de journal. Nous constatons ainsi l'intersection des réseaux politiques et intellectuels de militantisme et d'influence qui ont faussé l'intertextualité et la référentialité générées par cette pensée. Enfin, je soutiendrai que les données à disposition, et les exemples connexes, soulignent le large cadre européen transnational des textes qui traitent précisément de la guerre et de la paix. Elles indiquent aussi, comme je le montrerai, que les frontières de ce transnationalisme non seulement s’étendaient par-delà l'Atlantique, mais traversaient aussi l'enchevêtrement des théories politiques continentales de l'Europe occidentale et de la Russie. Au 21e siècle, ces contours de l'histoire de la pensée internationale des femmes conservent toute leur pertinence, notamment parce qu'ils s'interrogent sur l'importance du rôle des penseuses.

El objetivo de este artículo es hacernos la siguiente pregunta, ¿qué podemos aprender de las mujeres pensadoras internacionales acerca de la guerra y de la paz? Como demostraremos, tanto la nueva como la antigua evidencia histórica de las mujeres pensadoras nos indican direcciones que sugieren, en primer lugar, las privaciones a las que las mujeres se enfrentaron regularmente para poder presentar sus alegatos contra el contexto de la guerra real, abordando, o bien el tema más convencional de la paz «de las mujeres», o bien las controversias, a menudo masculinizadas, de la naturaleza de la violencia. Esta misma historia tantea tanto el rango como los registros cambiantes (de género) del pensamiento internacional, incluyendo los reducidos matices de la paz como objetivo definitorio. También podemos encontrar los diversos lugares del pensamiento internacional específicamente femenino, desde manifiestos a panfletos y desde artículos periodísticos hasta tomos publicados. Estos nos dirigen a las redes políticas e intelectuales entrecruzadas de activismo e influencia y que dieron color a la referencialidad intertextual que generaba el pensamiento. Por último, argumentaremos que la evidencia disponible, así como los ejemplos relacionados con los que se conecta esta evidencia, recalcan la amplia configuración europea transnacional de los textos que abordan específicamente la guerra y la paz. Esto incluso nos indica, tal como sugerimos, que las fronteras de ese transnacionalismo se extendieron no solo a través del Atlántico, sino a través de las enredadas historias políticas continentales de Europa Occidental y de Rusia. En el siglo XXI, estos perfiles de la historia del pensamiento internacional de las mujeres siguen siendo relevantes, entre otras razones porque nos plantean la siguiente pregunta, ¿cuál es el diferencial que han aportado las mujeres pensadoras?

Through the twentieth century, women have been “at the forefront of geopolitical thinking”; they have written “powerful analyses of war, the organized, reciprocal killing and maiming of people and destruction of things.” And yet, women have been “completely absent from the academic canon of international thought” ( Owens et al. 2022 , 2; Owens and Rietzler 2021 ). 1 This is the paradoxical intellectual setting of Patricia Owens, Katharina Rietzler, Kimberley Hutchings, and Sarah C. Dunstan's Women's International Thought: Towards a New Canon , an anthology that assembles texts by women on the canonical themes of international politics since 1899: imperialism, anticolonialism, world economy, diplomacy, and foreign policy. Many of the women whose voices come through might be well known to feminist historians, even if they have not been read conventionally through the lens of “international thought”—as intellectual historians acknowledge, the field of international thought is (surprisingly) relatively new ( Armitage 2015 , 116–30; Sluga 2015 , 103–15; Huber, Pietsch, and Rietzler 2021 , 121–45). Even as Women's International Thought revolves around (mostly) Western European and trans-Atlantic examples, its enterprise is indicative of the historical breadth and diversity of the fabric of women's international thinking, textured by the warp and weft of its multivocality and inevitably dissonant tendencies. My aim in this essay is to make use of the anthology and these representative strengths to pose a specific historical question: what do we learn about war and peace from women international thinkers ?

In broaching this question by drawing on this anthology, I have preferred to frame women's international texts as manifestations of thinking , a potentially more generous concept than thought in its canonical accommodations. By emphasizing thinking , my intention is not unlike that of the anthology's editors, namely to draw attention to the same “multiple power relations” that have determined the canon of international thought so far and to expand, and possibly even challenge that canon, by incorporating an even wider spectrum of views on war and peace. In practical terms, the preference for thinking over thought allows me to capitalize on the anthology's own approach to its textual landscape, to incorporate a range of genres: manifestos, pamphlets, and newspaper articles as well as published tomes. I also take the opportunity to historically connect complementary thinkers from inside and outside the anthology, not only Bertha von Suttner, F.M. Stawell, Merze Tate, and Hannah Arendt, for example, but also European and Russian thinkers who, in this same period, were connected across the continent through their methods, and across the boundaries of nonfiction and fiction through their concerns. Among those concerns are the tensions between idealism and realism, the diminishing status of peace as a defining political objective, and the distinctive gendering of war. Then there is the history of the challenges women regularly faced in order to make their arguments, often against the backdrop of actual wars. Here, these themes are organized under the headings: “The perennial problem of speaking about peace”; “The obligation to write about war”; “The politics of war”; and “Traditions of international thought.” In positing the prospect of “traditions,” I also take up the question interrogated by Women's International Thought: Whether, given “the multiple intersecting relations of power that shape intellectual production,” there can be “such thing as a women's tradition [my emphasis] of international thought”? The evidence of the anthology itself, I propose, shows that, through the twentieth century, women international thinkers have regularly confronted the significance of their difference, even as they have attempted to reorient their gendered positionality. In particular, tinctured with the darkest events of the past hundred years, the examples collected here suggest that some women themselves fostered a sense of intellectual tradition around the longevity (and persistence) of their gender-inflected political aims. In this essay, their stories and their insights are connected by my overarching claim: in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the long history of women's international thinking speaks to the difference that women's international thinking continues to make ( Sluga 2014 , 65–72).

To the extent that it has existed as a field, “international thought” has often evoked the history of pacifism, and pacifism has been associated with femininity, and even, occasionally, feminism ( Owens and Rietzler 2021 , 17; Sluga 2021 , 226). Historically, women have been well aware of the impact of these associations on any attempt to speak to peace as a legitimate international imperative. At the turn of the twentieth century, Bertha von Suttner—a baroness who founded the Austrian peace movement and eventually impressed the dynamite king Alfred Nobel to fund a peace prize—struggled against the stigma of being both a woman and a pacifist.

Since then, she has remained perhaps the best known of the women associated with turn-of-the-twentieth-century international thinking about war. She has hardly lacked biographers, and she was herself an early publicist of her ideas ( Moyn 2021 , 32). 2 Her autobiography—published in German in 1889 as Die Waffen nieder! , in English in 1892 as Lay down your arms! , and, later, in many other languages—reached at least a million readers in her own lifetime. In 1905, Suttner (like many of the women under discussion in this intellectual history) was even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in part for her role at the 1899 Hague peace congress famously organized by the Russian Tsar Nicholas II to somehow manage the escalating militarization of Europe's imperial powers. This was the tense setting in which Suttner took up as one of her main themes the realism of pacifists.

Suttner's address to the 1899 congress—now reproduced in the Women's International Thought anthology—directly attacks what she saw as a prevailing and disabling misconception: that “members of peace societies imagine under the name of universal peace a condition of general harmony, a world without fighting or divisions, with undisputed frontiers settled for all time, and inhabited by angelic beings, overflowing with gentleness and love.” She attributes this misrepresentation to the enemies of the peace movement, who accuse it of “absurdities … which it has never asserted.” In contrast, Suttner describes pacifism's realism: “[t]he friends of peace do not desire to found their kingdom on impossibilities, nor on conditions that might perhaps prevail thousands of years hence, but on the living present and living humanity” ( von Suttner 1899 , 50–69). The peace movement she leads does not demand the “avoidance of disputes,” as she clarifies, “for that is impossible” ( von Suttner 1899 , 56). Rather, she stresses, it is realistic; what pacifists want is for disputes between states to be settled “by arbitration instead of by force” ( von Suttner 1899 , 56).

In the early twentieth century, despite such protestations of realism, the authority of the peace movement's faith in arbitration remained vulnerable to the derision of its “enemies” and to the impact of the unprecedented scale of the arms race that provoked the 1899 congress in the first place. After war broke out in late 1914, the American economist and pacifist Emily Greene Balch acknowledged an inevitability to the “widespread feeling” “that this is not the moment to talk of a European peace” (Balch would eventually win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1946). In October 1915, she equally insisted that “the psychological moment” for talking about peace was near. It could even be coaxed forth by beginning preparations for peace, through discussion of the terms and principles of a future peace:

In each country there are those that want to continue the fight until military supremacy is achieved, in each there are powerful forces that seek a settlement of the opposite type, one which instead of containing within itself the threats to international stability that are involved in annexation, humiliation of the enemy, and competition between armaments, shall secure national independence all round, protect the rights of minorities and foster international co-operation. ( Balch 1915 , 24)

Earlier that year, as battles raged through the nerve centers of Europe's security alliances, Balch was among the women—three British, some American, and one thousand mostly Dutch delegates—who gathered from April 28 to May 1 in The Hague, not uncoincidentally the site of the 1899 congress. Their aim was precisely to pursue the discussions required for a just and early peace. The Women's International Thought anthology includes texts from many of the women involved in The Hague congress, although not the famous manifesto on which the women agreed ( National Peace Federation 1915 ; Costin 1982 , 301–15; Vellacott 1993 , 23–56).

Hardly a conventional intellectual text, the intellectual authority of the 1915 Hague manifesto rests on its capture of the thinking of well-known American and British feminists such as Balch, Jane Addams, and Helena Swanwick, as well as the Hungarian Rosika Schwimmer ( National Peace Federation 1915 ). On the one hand, the manifesto plainly states the principles that Balch predicted would dominate peacemaking: national independence, minority rights, and international cooperation. Indeed, their international thinking possibly influenced, and certainly anticipated, the eventual terms of peacemaking in 1919, from the creation of international institutions, and the principle of nationality, to the democratic control of foreign policy. On the other hand, as importantly, the manifesto espouses topics that were not acceptable in the delineation of a new international politics: the importance of education and women's suffrage as means by which peace might be permanently maintained. Indeed, the Council of Ten who eventually decided the terms of the postwar peace explicitly and unanimously refused to accommodate the status of women in the peace settlement on the grounds that authority over that question defined national sovereignty and thus could not be put on an international agenda ( Sluga 2005a , 166–83; 2005b , 300–19; 2006 ). For our purposes, the manifesto and the history surrounding it is a vital example of how women's rights and women's political roles were consistently the point of distinction between women's international thinking and international thought more narrowly defined.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the women's Hague congress and its decisions were co-opted into general historical inventories of pacifism and internationalism, particularly as part of the story of the creation of the enduring organization “Women's International League for Peace and Freedom” (WILPF), although its specific peacemaking agenda was as often neglected. Less attention has been paid too to the ways in which these women were targeted by governments for their convictions. We know that some European governments attempted to deter attendance on the grounds that so-called peace propaganda might have undermined strategic wartime patriotic programs. In this same context, social historians have shown the extent of censoring of peace publications as well as unprecedented levels of harassment through raids and surveillance that took place in England. The German government, which overall tried to avoid arrest and prosecution, resorted instead to blocking the circulation of peace activists’ publications and views ( Ewing and Gearty 2001 ). In the United States, there is the example of Balch's activism leading to the loss of her academic position at Wellesley. In Russia, in 1915, Anna Shabanova was forced by police order to dismantle the Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) women's peace society she had established on the Austrian model of Bertha von Suttner ( Cohen 2012 , 184).

The connections between the Russian and other European experiences, events, and ideas ran deep. Before the Hague meeting, in March 1915, Shabanova and other socialist women organized their own anti-war meeting in the (wartime) neutral Swiss capital of Berne. Clara Zetkin, the German Secretary of the International Bureau of Socialist Women and one of the key organizers of this Berne congress, faced the opprobrium of her male peers in the German Socialist Party (SPD), which forbade its members’ attendance. The French women's delegation too suffered the criticism of the (male-dominated) French socialist party. When, regardless, the Berne peace congress went ahead, its participants—twenty-two women from Russia, France, Britain, Italy, Poland, and Sweden—agreed a manifesto that was the work mainly of Zetkin, drawn up in their company. The Berne women shared with the Hague attendees a certain obstinacy and pariah status—and the Hague and Berne women even supported each other's efforts to some extent. However, there were also important differences. The Hague manifesto was intrinsically a liberal document asserting the importance of peace, the intrinsically pacifist nature of women's influence, and the pacific influence of free seas, commerce, and trade routes. The Berne manifesto, in contrast, was oriented toward a socialist rather than liberal critique. It targeted not just arms, but also capitalism, making space for violence in the interests of politics: “Down with capitalism, which sacrifices untold millions to the wealth and power of the propertied! Down with the war! Forward to socialism!,” it proclaimed ( Manifesto of the International Conference of Socialist Women at Berne 1915 ).

The themes of the Berne congress are represented by the Russian socialist Alexandra Kollontai, who contributed her thinking to the congress from a distance. Kollontai had a history of participating in anti-war protests in Sweden, Switzerland, and Belgium; she had been arrested for organizing an anti-war demonstration in Belgium the previous year and was absent from Berne because she could not get permission from the French government to cross its territory. In the circumstances, she wrote her breathless pamphlet, Who Needs the War ?. Echoing the message of the Berne gathering, Kollontai describes the war as “a madness, an abomination, a crime,” and, more specifically, as benefitting only capitalism and a capitalist class ( Kollontai 1916 ; Kollontai [1926] 1994 , 123). On these same grounds, she argues in favor of a different imperative: a workers’ revolution. As we will see, political ideology was a critical theoretical dividing point for some women international thinkers on the question of when war might be justified.

Just as the First World War drew women to reflect on war and peace in a range of political contexts, so too did the end of the war, and the novel postwar international institutional setting ( Stöckmann 2018 , 215–35). The unprecedented intergovernmental body, the League of Nations, was the product of wartime activism. New research by Helen McCarthy, for example, has shown the extent of popular support among women as well as men during the war for a League of Nations that might be equipped to ensure peace in the future ( McCarthy 2011 ). Among those supporters was the Cambridge-based classicist Florence Melian Stawell, whose activism took the form of writing pamphlets and addressing the compatibility of national patriotism and internationalism ( Sluga 2021 , 223–43). After the war, Stawell contributed to the English “Home Library” series a long history of the internationalist basis of peace thinking. Her book, The Growth of International Thought (1927), was meant to educate a broader public in the enduring and universal internationalist values of the newly established League of Nations, as an instrument of world peace ( Stawell 1929 , 7, 18–26). From the viewpoint of intellectual history, The Growth of International Thought is the product of Stawell's classicist expertise, which she shared with so many of the male scholars who led the wartime English League of Nations movement ( Sylvest 2004 , 409–32; Sluga 2006 , chapter 2; Stapleton 2007 , 261–91; McCarthy 2011 ). Like other classicists, she turned to Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian wars, “in which oligarchs fought against democrats, where there was ‘every form of murder and every extreme of cruelty’,” as “one of the strongest indictments against war ever written.” The Peloponnesian wars taught that the causes of belligerence are “the lust for power and gain.” War not only has its origins in the motivations of men, it changes them; once war begins “men are tempted by dire necessity,” and many “grow like the lives they lead” ( Owens and Rietzler 2021 , 41).

Stawell's interest in classical texts also underlines what women's international thinking often added to discussions of war and peace, namely an explicit engagement with the difference women made, such as their gendered investment in peace. Sometimes, the rationale for this difference was biological motherhood. Some of the authors of the 1915 Hague manifesto argued that since women's maternal roles instinctively inclined them to peace, granting women rights would inevitably encourage peace. Mostly, however, arguments for making women's rights a basis for peace were proposed on the grounds of social not biological reasoning: the social forms of masculinity that supported gender inequality also contributed to war. On this same view, conventional forms of femininity were more likely to be associated with pacifist ambitions. Emily Greene Balch understood that women could have the same emotions as men, and be likewise “inflamed by nationalism, intoxicated by the glories of war, embittered by old rancors” ( Balch 1922 , 334–36). However, she ventured that psychologically, women “have a less powerful instinctive pugnacity than men,” and she underlined the sociological fact that women had “in the mass… taken little part in the political life of their peoples.” In war, women “always stood to lose even more than men, as Europe knew” ( Balch 2022 , 493). Stawell turned as well to Euripides’ Trojan Women and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata for lessons about the different roles men and women could take in international thinking ( Owens et al. 2022 , 21; Sluga 2021 , 28; Stawell, 2022, 42). 3 In both plays, women reject men's violence. Most famously, Lysistrata , the eponymous figure (“whose name means ‘the Peacemaker’”) determines to band women from all sides together “in a vow that they will have nothing to do with men until the senseless war between them is ended” (cited in Owens et al. 2022 , 42).

Through the twentieth century, in the face of prevalent episodes of imperial and nation-state-based violence, women have felt an obligation to think and write about the fundamental causes of war. Emily Greene Balch explained that “the great war” revealed human nature to be “a thin crust barely concealing a substratum of explosive passions and interests which may break out in a disastrous eruption at any time.” This same truth made it all the more imperative to ask what could be done “to prevent the calamity?” Virginia Woolf, among the most famous of English writers, arrived at this sense of obligation too, but only belatedly, more than a decade after the First World War or Great War as it was known.

Initially, in the face of the overwhelming tragedy of the First World War, its decimation of a generation of men, Woolf felt that the war could not be spoken about; its suffering was so great that it could not be given words and had to be passed over in silence. In A Room of One's Own (1929), she reflected that feelings that were possible before the First World War—including “the abandonment and rapture” excited by love poetry—“could not be written about after it” ( Caine 2015 , 20; Winter 2019 , 223–35; Beganovic 2020 ). By the 1930s, however, as Woolf contemplated the second year of the conflict of the Spanish Civil War, the ominous onward march of colonial wars and militarism, and accruing refugee crisis, all compounding the threat of another cataclysmic war in Europe, she saw it as her duty to write about war, and to ask how war might be prevented. Her answers took up the themes of A Room of One's Own —the social and political constrictions of gender roles and relations, women's inequality in the professions and in education, the (incomplete promise of) the postwar expansion of the franchise, and the broader social and psychological damage inflicted on individuals by “patriarchy”—and brought them to bear on her understanding of war ( Beganovic 2020 ).

In Three Guineas (1938), published on the eve of the Second World War, Virginia Woolf set out to understand the ways in which middle-class women's exclusion from the corridors of power and influence was tied to predominant forms of masculinity, and masculinity to the causes of war. Observing the powerlessness of middle-class women such as herself, she noted that women could not be members of the stock exchange so they could not use the pressure of force nor the pressure of money to prevent or stop wars. Women could not be diplomats so they could not negotiate treaties to end wars. In England, women could participate in civil service and legal institutions, but they had precarious positions and little authority ( Woolf 1966 , 45). Women could write to the press to voice their views; however, the decision what to print or not was in hands of men. In sum, Woolf declaimed, identifying with her middle-class female subject, “we have no weapon with which to enforce our will”: “all the weapons with which an educated man can enforce his opinion are either beyond our grasp or so nearly beyond it that even if we used them we could scarcely inflict one scratch … educated women [are] even weaker than working class women who can use their labour in the munitions factories to protest” ( Woolf 1966 , 12). Woolf connected the precarity of the public situation of women such as herself to their private circumstances, to “the fear which forbids freedom in the private house. That fear, small, insignificant and private as it is, is connected with the other fear, the public fear, which is neither small nor insignificant, the fear which has led you to ask us to help you to prevent war” ( Woolf 1966 , 129–30). This connection between the private and the public becomes her method of dissecting the origins and prevention of war and illustrating its tragedy.

While Stawell returned to classical texts to understand how men's psychological and material motivations could lead to war, and how war changed men, Woolf dwelt on the contemporary situation, drawing on the evidence of everyday life. In particular, she discusses the photographs sent by the Spanish Government to media outlets “with patient pertinacity about twice a week” as witness to the civil war there, and intended to arouse sympathy: “They are not pleasant photographs to look upon. They are photographs of dead bodies for the most part” ( Woolf 1966 , 10).

This morning's collection contains the photograph of what might be a man's body, or a woman's; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn upon the side; there is still a birdcage hanging in what was presumably the sitting room, but the rest of the house looks like nothing so much as a bunch of spillikins suspended in mid-air. ( Woolf 1966 , 10–11)

The gaze in Woolf's text belongs to women, in this case. She suggests that women's specific social and historical situatedness connects them: “A common interest unites us; it is one world, one life. How essential it is that we should realize that unity the dead bodies, the ruined houses prove. For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual for they are inseparably connected.”

Woolf also uses photographs to dissect the social origins of the gendered dimensions of war as a profession, war sold as a source of happiness and excitement for men, and war as an outlet for manly qualities. In particular, she analyses circulating representations of the masculinity embodied by the orchestrators of the violence erupting across Europe, their portraiture declaiming “[t]he quintessence of virility, the perfect type of which all the others are imperfect adumbrations”:

He is a man certainly, His eyes are glazed; his eyes glare. His body, which is braced in an unnatural position, is tightly cased in a uniform. Upon the breast of that uniform are sewn several medals and other mystic symbols. His hand is upon a sword. He is called in German and Italian Fuhrer or Duce ; in our own language Tyrant or Dictator. And behind him lie ruined houses and dead bodies – men, women and children.

Woolf was not focused on this image, she explained, “in order to excite once more the sterile emotion of hate”. Instead, she wanted to use the photo “to release other emotions such as the human figure, even thus crudely, in a coloured photograph arouses in us who are human beings.” She was interested in the “connection” it suggested, between the public and private worlds: “the tyrannies and servilities of the one, are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.” ( Woolf 1966 , 142).

In using the medium of the photograph to gender and to connect the private figure and the public world, Woolf anticipates later treatments of atrocity photography and humanitarianism, and discussions of the representations of fascism, whether by Susan Sontag or feminist international relations scholars. She shares an interest in patriarchy as an elemental cause of war, and, like other women international thinkers before her, renders women's socially and historically determined difference, “their membership of the ‘society of outsiders,’” “in the historical, social circumstances” they face, “their only weapon in the prevention of war.” For Woolf in particular, women's “outsider” position becomes their means of challenging “whether the new militarization of the society was really inevitable and necessary” ( Woolf 1966 , 115). “Different as we are,” Woolf contends, “as facts have proved, both in sex and education … it is from that difference, as we have already said, that our help can come, if help we can, to protect liberty, to prevent war” ( Owens et al. 2022 , 499).

Significantly, Woolf does not claim that any dimensions of masculinity or women's difference are natural, even if they are normative. They are, instead, she argues, symptomatic of “patriarchy.” They are the product of patriarchal institutions and practices. This same explanation means, she argues, that patriarchal gender norms can be tackled through education: “What kind of society, what kind of human being … should [education] seek to produce?”; What is “the kind of society the kind of people that will help to prevent war”? ( Woolf 1966 , 3). In reply, she posits that instead of the arts of dominating other people, the arts of ruling, of killing, and of acquiring land and capital, education should focus on “medicine, mathematics, music, painting and literature,” and “the arts of human intercourse” ( Woolf 1966 , 34). 4

The gender emphasis of Woolf's argument for how to prevent war, and the writer's obligation to take up that topic, has resonated in the themes of women international thinkers, before and after. Her educational thematic has woven its way in and out of twentieth-century rationales for inventing international institutions, not least the League of Nations Intellectual Cooperation initiative, and the United Nations Education, Science, and Culture Organization. It also underlines the extent to which women's international thinking—with its interest in the intersecting spheres of the private and public, the emotional, intimate relationship between masculinity in the private sphere and militarism in the public sphere, moving across textual/visual sources, and across the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction—has evaded the generic limitations of the existing canon of international thought. Here I want to take up the potential for this same international thinking to link Virginia Woolf to the Nobel literary prizewinner Svetlana Alexievich, writing at the other end of the twentieth century, in the midst of the authoritarian violence of the Russian and Belorussian states in the post–Cold War ( Beganovic 2020 , 28, 33). 5

Born in 1948 in West Ukraine to a Belorussian father and Ukrainian mother, Svetlana Alexievich has been a prominent anti-war voice since the end of the Cold War, convinced that writing about war is an obligation ( Alexievich and Gimson 2018 , 71–72). 6 She is a fiction writer whose novels have been characterized as “attempts to explore human nature through the accounts of war witnesses and to explain more complex social structures in order to understand the causes of wars and prevent them”; “Alexievich says that she wants to show how disgusting wars are, so that even thinking about war would be impossible, even for generals, and so, she does not write a history of war, but the history of feelings or emotional knowledge about wars” ( Novikau 2017 , 320).

In Boys in Zinc (1989), Alexievich’s witness account of the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989), she poses the question, “How can we recover a normal vision of life?”: “After the great wars of the twentieth century and the mass deaths, writing about the modern (small) wars, like the war in Afghanistan, requires different ethical and metaphysical stances” ( Alexievich 2017 , 18–19). Against the background of ongoing Russian imperial wars, her interest lies in reclaiming the specificity of the single human being ( Moorehead 2019 ); “The only human being for someone. Not as the state regards him, but who he is for his mother, for his wife, for his child” ( Alexievich 2017 , 19). Like Stawell and others before her, Alexievich understood that war changed people; she also believed that analyzing postwar time is often more important than analyzing the war itself: “People do not change during war. People change after the war when they look at reality through the lens of their war experience” ( Novikau 2017 , 322).

As we have seen, in these repertoires the diagnosis of war, as often fundamentally associated with masculinity, has made the discussion of war a difficult, if not illegitimate, intellectual terrain for women, while also providing the provocation for women's contributions as different. Is Alexievich an international thinker? She is certainly connected to a tradition of women's international thinking, of women writing about war and peace across its disciplinary confines. Alexievich, like Woolf, works with a “biographical historical method” that aims to dismantle the structures that provoke “the strong emotions which push people, particularly men, to fight” ( Beganovic 2020 ). As writers, Alexievich and Woolf are exemplary of a particular strand of international thinking—characterized by the interplay of fiction, biography, and historical narrative—that can be traced through the twentieth century. As we have seen, in the early twentieth century, the challenge of writing about peace manifested in the ways in which women thought about war, and the way they experienced the costs of that writing, whether social opprobrium, threats, physical attacks, and criminal penalties. While the sociohistorical connections between a middle-class English writer of the interwar years and a female Soviet/post-Soviet intellectual are thinner than those that might connect Alexievich to Anna Shabanova and Alexandra Kollontai, for example, even Woolf bore the brunt of visceral attacks for her “peace propaganda” ( Lee 1997 , 698). In the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Alexievich—like Russian and European women before her engaging the imperative of writing about peace and war— has been accused of “defamation” and “desecration of the soldiers’ honor” ( Sud nad tsinkovimi malchikami 1994 , 130). She has endured vicious political persecution at the hand of Belorussian courts. These have charged her with distorting and falsifying the testimony of Afghan veterans and of offending mothers with portraits of their boys “as soulless killer-robots, pillagers, drug addicts and rapists” ( Sud nad tsinkovimi malchikami 1994 , 130). Facing threats to her personal safety, Alexievich has continued her criticism of Belorussia in the current Ukraine war through her fiction and nonfictional writing, pursued as a kind of obligation ( Belarusian Nobel Laureate Alexievich 2022 ). Just why states object to women's international thinking is clarified by the thinkers themselves, who have detailed the entangled private and public, state and individual interests at stake.

The Politics of War

If we follow the tracks laid by the anthology Women and International Thought , the Second World War leads to other unexpected albeit prominent women thinkers, working across literary and political genres. Some of these women were more enmeshed in the disciplinary landscape of international politics, and yet their status as thinkers was equally neglected. Merze Tate's (1942 ) The Disarmament Illusion —originally a Harvard doctoral thesis—was written as “a transnational intellectual history of debates about war as a mechanism for dispute resolution, about the conflict between state sovereignty and the need for international cooperation, and about the perpetuation of historical power imbalances” ( Savage 2021 , 271). Writing in the context of the Second World War, from the double marginality of her gender and race difference, as an African-American woman, Tate thought about disarmament in the context of the long history of the imperial wars of the previous century: “conflicts fought in the Far East and South Africa”; whether Russia in Manchuria, or “a combined European and American army” avenging “the outrage of the Boxers by sacking Peking”; or England fighting in the Transval, “5000 miles from her base of supplies”; and even the United States, “conquering and holding under military rule conquered possessions an even greater distance from home waters” ( Tate 1942 , 294).

Traversing “economic imperialism” and the state-building military precepts of the late-nineteenth century, Tate does not presume that the prospect of disarmament is an illusion. Rather, she argues that disarmament policies have been ineffective ( Tate 1942 , xi). Disarmament is an issue that stands “for a general simultaneous reduction or non-augmentation of armies and navies or military budgets” ( Tate 1942 , ix). It is not “a matter of mathematics nor of morals but of politics” ( Tate 1942 , 346). By politics, she means the ideological investments of states “seek[ing] to give effect to their national policies through armaments as well as through monetary and immigration policies, tariffs and embargoes”: “armament competition is inextricably interwoven with political tension, and international agreement on armaments is possible only when the national policies of states are not in conflict”; in this same context, an international disarmament process standardizes “the relative diplomatic power of the countries involved and prevents the use of armament competition to upset the political equilibrium” ( Tate 1942 , 27, 246).

The historian Barbara Savage tells us that given the failure of disarmament and the cascade of early twentieth-century wars, Tate had much less confidence than her male mentors, or her female predecessors, that “an educated public might bring pressure to bear on these issues, or that more open diplomacy might yield different results.” In canvassing explanations that acknowledged economic or gender determinism, Tate “resisted the idea that women were early or especially effective advocates of disarmament” and she was skeptical of any “materialistic anti-war impulse.” “Peace would only come from ‘a juster conception of international relations’ and some ‘rational international political system’” ( Savage 2021 , 273). Nevertheless, we also find that when Tate studied past peace congresses, churches, international jurists, interparliamentary groups, and “public opinion,” she reasserted a realist pacifist tradition stretching back to the 1899 Hague peace congress and to Bertha von Suttner.

As we have already seen, the question of realism is a persistent thematic in women's international thinking, defining the reach and limits of reflection on the prevention of wars and the maintenance of peace. When we move (as the anthology does) to Hannah Arendt, among the best-known most often cited women thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century, we return to the predominant concern with the relationship of war to peace, how war changes men and women, and how this fact impacts politics. Writing in the full knowledge of the consequences of the Second World War, and the Holocaust, Arendt's “The Question of War” (1958–1959) takes a lesson from the classical past. Because “military action invalidated the basic equality of citizens … war belongs, as the Greeks saw it, in a non-political sphere” ( Owens 2022 , 114):

What was uniquely wrong about wars of annihilation … was not just the numbers of the dead or the destruction of entire cities, but the destruction of an ‘historical and political reality … that cannot be rebuilt because it is itself not a product … [the] action and speech created by human relationships’ ” (Owens 2002, 83).

Given this understanding of how war undermines politics, as Owens explains, there is only one situation in which Arendt “would have supported the principle of military action,” namely “for the immediate and short-term goal of stopping genocide since it ‘destroys the very possibility of a political world’” ( Owens 2007 , 115). We learn from Arendt that violence is “only rational to achieve immediate and short-term ends, such as ending ethnic cleansing or genocide, not abstract goals of any kind.” Indeed, “all other war should be ruled out if in practice it resulted in a challenge to any ‘actually existing solidarity of mankind’” (Owens 2009, 147). 7

In this same vein, Arendt anticipates that “a future war will not be about a gain or loss of power, about borders, export markets, or Lebensraum, that is, about things that can also be achieved by means of political discussion and without the use of force” ( Owens 2021 , 110). War cannot be understood as “the ultima ratio of negotiations, whereby the goals of war were determined at the point where negotiations broke off”; rather, it is “a continuation of politics by other means,” “the means of cunning and deception” ( Owens 2007 , 91–110; Arendt 2009 , 165).’

Arendt's prognosis resonates with the thinking of women in the past, such as F.M. Stawell, who argues that war not only has its origins in the motivations of men, it changes them; once war begins, “men are tempted by dire necessity,” and many “grow like the lives they lead” ( Committee on the Bureau of International Research in Harvard University and Radcliffe College [n.d. c. 1923] , 41). 8 It also resonates with our present, in which the idea of “new wars”—Mary Kaldor's term—and “forever war” suggests that violence has become its own raison d'etre ( Kaldor 2005 , 491–98). Like women international thinkers before her, Kaldor represents in this “tradition” a woman whose scholarly or theoretical work overlaps with their activist engagement with war and peace. For these same reasons—her gendered relationship to a tradition built on women's difference, and her activism—her thinking can be central to international thought, while she herself has been forced to constantly negotiate a place in a male-dominated canon and discipline.

As women have addressed the realities of war, at times their international thinking has insisted on the links between peace and women's rights as a dimension of the realism of peace itself. It has also referenced an accruing realist/pacifist tradition. In the mid-twentieth century, Merze Tate insisted that her book Disarmament Illusion was “not peace propaganda,” and distinguished her proposals and ideas “for a general, simultaneous reduction or non-augmentation of armies and navies or military budgets” from “the complete abolition of armaments as implied in [Bertha von Suttner's] phrase ‘lay down your arms’” ( Tate 1942 , ix; Savage 2021 , 271). 9 Of course, this was not how Suttner argued the realism of the pacifist cause. Suttner saw herself navigating “that narrow path between fruitless utopianism on the one side and reckless realism on the other, leading to a higher form of international relations” ( Stöcker 2022 , 405). But even as Tate's relatively critical invocation of Suttner's motif anticipated criticisms of the impossibility of disarmament, it inadvertently echoed Suttner's insistence that realism grew out of the ideal; ideals once considered utopian had in fact become real. Suttner noted at the turn of the twentieth century that there was nothing more utopian than the prospect of an “international parliament” and plans for an “International Permanent Tribunal of Arbitration.” “One forgets to contemplate,” she observed in regard to the 1899 Hague peace congress, “the overwhelming fact that such a Conference has been called together by an autocrat in our ultra-military times, and in which every State takes part. Apart from all that will be achieved by speeches, propositions and resolutions ( Suttner 2022 , 375).” She insisted that “the significance and the effect of the event itself must be of the greatest influence, and the first official Peace Conference appears like a miracle in the history of the world.” The conference, in her view, cut through the distinction between ideal and real, because it had created a reality. Half a century later, Merze Tate too presented “the fact of the [1899] Conference itself” (“this wildest dream of the Utopians”) as evidence that governments had taken up debates that are otherwise the concern of philosophers, jurists, and even utopians ( Suttner 2022 , 377).

We can pick up these same threads in 1985, as the Swedish international thinker Alva Myrdal gives her 1985 Nobel Peace Prize lecture. In the fractious landscape of the Cold War's hot conflicts and a nuclear arms race, Myrdal explicitly orients her intellectual journey to disarmament thinking by referencing Suttner's (1899) motif—not uncoincidentally, since Suttner had all but invented the prize ( Sluga 2014 ). Myrdal comments that despite Hiroshima, in the first decade of the post–Second World War, she herself did not really pay much attention to “the problem of ‘atomic weapons’ as they were known.” She was more concerned with reconstruction and “the great historic drama of decolonization”; “I was not from the outset alert to the great risks of an incipient militarization of the word; I was not ready to cry out: Down with weapons”. “My opposition,” she declares, “was directed more against the repression of human rights and the cruelties of war, particularly the bombing of civilians; I personally experienced some of it in London. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons shocked me as it did the rest of the world, but I shared the hope of many that the end of the war also meant the end of nuclear weapons” ( Myrdal 1977 , xxi.).

Which tradition of women's international thinking should we remember? The imperative to write about war, the consequences of writing about peace? The relationship between the private and the public? The role of education and other social institutions? The determinism of patriarchy and/or gender? To be sure, discerning a tradition of women's international thinking offers no simple answers to the question “how to prevent war,” or the challenge of peace, or the difference women's international thinking has made. Instead, that thinking has navigated usefully the difficult path between ideal and real choices by capitalizing on the sociohistorical bases of difference and the possibilities for change. Woolf acknowledges that it is hard to maintain “the recurring dream that has haunted the human mind since the beginning of time, the dream of peace, the dream of freedom” when one has “the sound of the guns in your ears.” In these same circumstances, she ventures that even when the imperative is “how to prevent war,” rather than to consider the nature of peace, women's difference can be put to use:

since we are different, our help must be different … The answer to your question must be that we can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods. We can best help you to prevent war not by joining your society but by remaining outside your society but in cooperation with its aim. That aim is the same for us both. It is to assert “the rights of all-all men and women – to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.” ( Woolf 1966 , 673)

In this tradition of women's international thinking, the tension between realism and idealism has also been converted into a tension between the past—which has to be broken with—and a reimagined future initiated in the present. Here is Arendt on this same theme: “The lifespan of man running towards death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an every-present reminder that men, though they may day, are not born in order to die but in order to begin” ( Arendt [1958] 2019 , 246; Cooper 1991 ; Beckman and D'Amico 1994 ; Sluga 2005b , 2017 , 2021 ).

Whether we consider the status of the international order, our era of artificial intelligence, the changing nature of wars, or the changing position of women themselves, women's difference still matters to international thinking. On the one hand, in many European and trans-Atlantic countries, women now have profiles in the public sphere to the extent that searching for the particularism of gender in analyses of war and peace and women's international thinking seems irrelevant. On the other hand, the gendered nature of women's difference remains relevant, whether in commentary that remarks on the presence of women or, indeed, on the difference that feminist foreign policy itself could make to the prevention of war. In the early twenty-first century, women lead countries and regions, and intergovernmental institutions. They can use the pressure of force and the pressure of money; they can even negotiate treaties. Women, the German press suggests, have been prominent in the commentary field on the war in Ukraine. The Moscow Times talks of the “feminine” face of Russian war protests. Female prime ministers of Finland, Sweden, and Estonia have overseen decisions about membership of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In 2022, the European Union (EU) stateswomen Ursula Van der Leyen and Roberta Metsola were prominent early visitors of the embattled president in Kyiv and supporters of the war against Russia as a just war. Even where women do not lead, “feminist foreign policy” ostensibly guides the thinking and strategy of some of the countries looking on, not least the EU itself. In a prime example of the confluence of these shifts, the green German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock has had to reconcile a new era of German militarization and her commitment to “feminist foreign policy” ( Speech by Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock 2022 ).

We also know, thanks to the anthology, that women's international thinking does not always diverge from the existing canon of international thought dominated by men. Certainly, the Vietnam war and its purpose found its supporters among women international thinkers such as Roberta Wohlstetter, whose 1960 Bancroft winning book Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision argued that “US national security required an assiduously aggressive posture, a willingness to fight and win a nuclear war” ( Speech by Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock 2022 ). In 2022, this is a position that echoes through Anne Applebaum's insistence that democracies should not only have weapons, but also wield them or risk the annihilation of democracy ( Applebaum 2022 ). However, it is also true that individual women have regularly taken up the problems of war and peace by thinking against the grain of ideological gender constraints. If we want to understand the lack of enthusiasm of African and Asian states for the United States and Europe's rallying call against the Russian invasion in Ukraine, we need only look at Women's International Thought’ s examples of writing about the dangers of imperial exceptionalism, not least Mary McCarthy's Cold War “The other war,” which lambasted the moral standing of Washington, DC (the “Athens” of the twentieth century) and its war of “pacification” in Vietnam ( Bessner 2022 ; McCarthy 2022 , 121–26).

Women have always drawn on uncommon examples, arrived at uncommon conclusions, and forged alternative intellectual traditions in the process, even when they themselves did not remember them accurately. The difference that women thinking about war and peace have made should inspire us to further collections and considerations, picking up the remnants we still have, diverse in their historical contexts and languages, incorporating voices imagined as subaltern, or outside Europe, and back in time, picking up echoes we may have forgotten along the way. These remind us too of the importance of international thinking itself. This is the difference that the history of women as international thinkers makes.

I want to thank the editors of that volume, and Ekaterina Abramova for their advice and help with this essay. This essay was originally presented as a keynote at the Women's International Thought conference, LSE, May 2022.

In his recent critique of “forever wars,” and the maintenance of the oxymoronic legal concept “humane war,” Sam Moyn singles out the importance in the history of peace thinking of Suttner's Lay Down Your Arms , or Down with Weapons? Die Waffen nieder!

As the anthology editors note, even Stawell's middle name recognized the conquered inhabitants of Melos, her feminist reading of the “Greeks” prefigures more recent calls for “a Melian security studies.” “Introduction”, Owens et al. 2022 , 28.

I have drawn here from a broader selection of Three Guineas than that included in the anthology Women's International Thought .

This connection is inspired by the work of Velid Beganovic, a Bosnian scholar of Woolf who links her method to that of Alexievich.

All Russian texts here are translated by Ekaterina Abramova.

On these same grounds, in the postwar Arendt supports an international criminal court “to try and punish those responsible.”

“So it goes on till there is nothing but suspicion everywhere. There was no treaty binding enough to reconcile opponents: everyone knew that nothing was secure and therefore he thought only of his own safety; he could not afford to trust another.”

The quote continues “but in the wider significance given to it in popular language as meaning ‘limitation and reduction of armaments.’”

Research for this article has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no 885285).

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Peace and Justice Essay

While conflict, used interchangeably with a clash or violence, refers to a state of opposition between people, views, or objectives, violence “…is any condition that prevents a human being from achieving her or his full potential” (Cortright 7). The issue of conflicts has become a daily subject as cases of killings, bombings, and assassinations continue to occur at an alarming level. Racial, color, religious, tribal and economic differences are the major fuels behind conflicts.

Peace, on the other hand, refers to the prevailing conditions in the absence of conflicts and violence. As clashes continue to persist around the globe, playwrights, among other people, have resolved into addressing the issue, the causes, effects, and the possible solutions. According to Terry George, the director of the famous Hotel Rwanda film, the world is yearning for people who can courageously campaign for peace and justice.

Hotel Rwanda , the fascinating composition of Terry George, brings to light the most horrifying upshots, as contemporary history unfolds. It features both tribal and religious conflicts as they occurred during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

It is a sensitive account of the Hutus of Rwanda, whose genocide campaigns saw the death of thousands of the marginalized Tutsis, upon whom the departed Belgian colonizers had bestowed power. Revolving around a prominent hotel in Kigali, George features Don Cheadle as the manager of the hotel and a representative of the majority Hutus, the wealthy tribe that enjoys majority of the country’s resources.

His wife stands in for the minority Tutsis. She is the least happy as she watches her people suffer harassments and severe beatings. She pleads to her husband to help them despite being a Hutu. As the violence intensifies, killings of the Tutsi begin based on race, religion, and social status. As the European clients and staff force their way out of the country, Paul becomes in charge of the visitor’s hotel.

He cannot tolerate the mass killings anymore and therefore opts to transform the hotel into a refugee camp for the Tutsis, a step that his Hutu people perceive as betrayal. However, from this courageous step, he ends up preserving the lives of at least 1238 Tutsi people. However, the director qualifies in his good way of demonstrating peace and justice, as this is his objective.

The aforementioned subject of conflicts and violence dominates the movie. Nevertheless, efforts of nurturing peace and justice still stand out. The director features both tribal and religious conflicts as observed, not only in Rwanda, but also in the world allover. The majority Hutus clash with the minority Tutsis claiming, “We are the majority. Tutsis are the minority. Hutus must kill all the Tutsis…” (George). From these words, the director brings to light death as one of the many the consequences of conflicts.

The singling out of a Paul from his people, Hutus, to bring salvation to the minority Tutsis is subject to discussion. As Paul struggles to foster peace among the Tutsis, he is welcomes conflicts from the other side, who view him as a traitor, validating Cortright’s words that “Peace does not mean the absence of conflicts” (7). Patriotism is more than love for ones country.

It entails the willingness and sacrifice of ones own people. According to this theory, Paul is a traitor, rather than a patriot and is subject to a stern punishment. However, the director strategically presents Paul’s bold step of going against the majority, who are never right, to picture him as an epitome of the few who are able to stand for peace and justice, not based on gender, tribe, and religion, to quote a few.

Hotel Rwanda qualifies in driving home the point that, if one person could single him/herself out of the action of the majority, the peace, justice, love, and harmony could carry the day. This film will prove relevant in the coming weeks because the students will find it easy to understand the subject about conflicts and violence. This must-watch film presents a good way of demonstrating peace and justice.

Works Cited

Cortright, David. Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas . Cambridge University Press, 2008.

George, Terry, dir. Hotel Rwanda. Lions Gate Films, 2004. Film.

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IvyPanda. (2019, February 20). Peace and Justice. https://ivypanda.com/essays/peace-and-justice/

"Peace and Justice." IvyPanda , 20 Feb. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/peace-and-justice/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Peace and Justice'. 20 February.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Peace and Justice." February 20, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/peace-and-justice/.

1. IvyPanda . "Peace and Justice." February 20, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/peace-and-justice/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Peace and Justice." February 20, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/peace-and-justice/.

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The new book "Peace with Nature: 50 Inspiring Essays on Nature and the Environment" was launched in Singapore

The book is published this month by World Scientific Press. It was edited by Professor Tommy Koh, Professor Lin Heng Lye and Shawn Lum.

The launch of  Peace with Nature: 50 Inspiring Essays on Nature and the Environment, took place on 4 September 2023 at the POD, National Library in Singapore. The event counted with the presence of the editors (Professor Tommy Koh, Professor Lin Heng Lye and Shawn Lum), as well as Desmond Lee (Singapore's Minister for National Development).

This book is a must-read for all who love nature and the environment. It contains 50 inspiring essays written by Singaporeans and friends who share their perspectives, expertise and experience –as scientists, lawyers, economists, engineers, bankers, government officers, and civil society– all linked by a love for nature, for the environment, and for Singapore. The essays focus on the protection and preservation of Singapore's rich biodiversity (primates, colugos, otters, butterflies, dragonflies, stick-insects, birds, coral reefs, mangroves and sea grasses); efforts to save special areas (the Lower Peirce Reservoir, Chek Jawa, Sungei Buloh, the Rail Corridor and the first marine nature reserve); the contributions of NGOs (Nature Society, Herpetological Society, Waterways Watch Society); and the efforts of scholars, the government and the private sector to ensure a clean and green City in Nature, amidst the challenges of limited space and climate change.

All royalties from the purchase of the book will be donated to the Nature Society. More details about the book can be found here: https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/13561#t=aboutBook  

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Can nuclear deterrence preserve the Long Peace between major powers?

• May 5, 2022

Lawrence Freedman

For the past sixty years, the use of nuclear weapons has become unthinkable. But with every conflict there comes a point where the unthinkable becomes possible.

This essay was originally published in  War: Perspectives from the Engelsberg Seminar , Axess, in collaboration with the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation in 2015.

The question of why there has been a Long Peace, a period now of 70 years since the last major war between major powers, has generated as much debate as the question of the origins of the  Great War of 1914 . On the one hand,  John Gaddis,  who first used the term, is clear that it had something to do with nuclear weapons. On the other hand,  Steven Pinker  asserts that this welcome development has little or nothing to do with the prospect of mass destruction but is the result instead of the triumph of the good of our ‘better angels’ in a Manichean struggle with the evil of our ‘inner demons’. The ‘better angels’ connote empathy, self-control and morality and have encouraged a progressive  civilising process.  The ‘inner demons’ lead to instrumental violence, domination, revenge, sadism and ideology. These two approaches can be distinguished as one offering a theory of coercive peace, which assumes that tendencies towards conflict have been suppressed through fear of the consequences of escalation and, the other, a theory of normative peace, which assumes that the major powers have adopted a more civilised approach to conflict and have come to reject violent means to the resolution of disputes.

These two positions are not necessarily exclusive. Few who stress the importance of nuclear deterrence would deny the importance of many other factors, including the nature of the issues in dispute, as well as normative factors. But those who believe in the normative peace do tend to have a problem with the idea that nuclear deterrence might have played a role. They are wary of arguments for maintaining alert nuclear arsenals, instead of proceeding to complete disarmament, and nervous that this is a dangerous basis for peace — for once it ceases to work, the effects could be disastrous. Thus Steven Pinker, in  The Better Angels of our Nature , seeking to defend his thesis of the decline of war, attempts to write them out of post-1945 history, as if they had no discernible effect on behaviour. ‘Thankfully’, he writes, responding to Gaddis’s view, ‘a closer look suggests that the threat of nuclear annihilation deserves little credit for the Long Peace.’ If it were shown that ‘the Long Peace was a nuclear peace’, Pinker remarks, this ‘would be a fool’s paradise’, because of the ease with which a miscommunication or accident could ‘setoff an apocalypse’. His look was not close enough, as the case against the coercive peace is inadequate. Moreover, when we consider the normative basis for the Long Peace, as applied to nuclear weapons (the ‘nuclear taboo’), it exposes the problems of relying on normative restraints. The problem with a coercive peace is not that it is a myth but that it cannot be expected to endure indefinitely.

The  Second World War’s  finale involved the first deployment of nuclear weapons in anger, with the destruction of the Japanese cities of  Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Since then, there have been crises in which there were fears that they might be used again and defence policies that have given a central role to nuclear threats. Although further nuclear use has been avoided, the same combination of technical safeguards and political common sense may not get us through the next seventy years without a disaster of some sort. Nonetheless, the record to date undermines the claim that the only alternative to complete disarmament is complete disaster. If that had been the case, we have no right still to be around. Instead, considerable caution has been introduced into statecraft as a result of the unambiguous awfulness of the weapons. Over time, countries have come to adapt to their existence and, as a result, a sort of nuclear order has been created, with a degree of underlying stability. This means, however, that avoidance of a terrible conflagration depends on a daily act of restraint. Even when governments feel a need to remind others of their  nuclear capabilities , we must rely on them keeping their arsenals under tight control and not getting close to ordering any strikes. The fact that a range of governments, totalitarian as well as democratic, vulnerable as well as confident, anxious as well as relatively secure, have managed this restraint over a number of decades is at least evidence that they understand the risks. They have been reluctant to allow a minor event to trigger a rush to war, or to accept that all inhibition can end, and prudence be forgotten as soon as fighting begins. If the  First World War  had dashed confidence in the old balance of power, which relied on individual states acting to keep the system in a form of stable equilibrium, the nuclear age helped revive it. In one of his last speeches as prime minister, Winston Churchill commented on the ‘sublime irony’ that a stage had been reached ‘where safety will be the sturdy child of terror and survival the twin brother of annihilation’. It was hardly comfortable to rely on a balance of terror to keep the peace but, overtime, as the condition of mutual assured destruction was recognised, it appeared to work.

A number of abolitionists have sought to deny that there has been a valuable deterrent effect.  Ward Wilson , for example, argues that with proof that nuclear deterrence does not work, the case for disarmament is sealed. Without a ‘stronger rationale for keeping these dangerous weapons’, he wrote in a 2008 essay, ‘The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence’, then ‘perhaps they should be banned’. He went so far as to insist that the atomic bombing of August 1945, played no role in Japan’s surrender, suggesting that the  real cause was the Soviet Union’s entry into the war against Japan . This is a dubious claim but can be addressed by reference to the historical evidence. With regard to later deterrent effects, the analysis is even harder because that requires working out conclusively why nothing happened. Ward’s method is to cite cases in which something happened to a nuclear power and to mark that as a failure of deterrence. Thus, he points to America’s two wars with Iraq (1991 and 2003) and NATO’s with  Serbia  over Kosovo in 1999; Britain and the Falklands; and Israel and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. This is poor methodology. In none of these cases was any attempt made to deter, to control events using nuclear threats. There was no reason to suppose that the weapons were in play. The parties to the conflict did not act as if they were. The only possible exception is the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Israel had made no attempt to use nuclear threats to deter Arab invasion because it was confident in its conventional forces, but as Arab attacks began to make progress, the nuclear issue did begin to come into view. In the event, the Egyptian and Syrian armies were pushed back without resort to explicit nuclear threats. At the end of the crisis, there were reminders of high nuclear stakes as the Israelis surrounded the Egyptian Third Army.

Pinker uses a similar method to Wilson. Thus, he finds it telling that Britain’s nuclear capability did not prevent Argentina invading the Falklands in 1982. The Argentinian junta ‘ordered this’, he says, ‘in full confidence that Britain would not retaliate by reducing Buenos Aires to a radioactive crater’. In fact, they launched the invasion confident that Britain would not do anything militarily at all. They had ruled out a British military response in their planning. For its part the British government had not made any attempt to deter the junta because the British government did not realise that the junta needed to be deterred. As news came in that an invasion was taking place, the British government discovered, somewhat to its surprise as well as Argentina’s, that it could send a credible task force to the South Atlantic. This approach, therefore, gets the issue the wrong way round. It is not whether wars take place despite the existence of nuclear weapons, but whether some wars did not happen, or were limited, because of their existence. It is not whether Syria and Egypt discounted the risk of a nuclear riposte to a limited war in October 1973, but whether they understood that this risk could grow if Israel began to face a truly existential threat and whether this affected their readiness to come to  amodus vivendi,  just as in  2002, India and Pakistan stepped back from a full-scale confrontation  as they became aware of where this might lead.

The risk of retaliation was the source of prudence and the basis of deterrence. Anything that might challenge the possibility of retaliation put deterrence at risk because it might render threats incredible. Hence the search for a ‘first strike capability’ that might be able to disarm the enemy in a surprise attack and force the defenceless enemy state to capitulate. Such a capability would link nuclear weapons with classical military theory and the search for a knockout blow. A battle would have been won and the defeated state would be at the mercy of the victor. Once, however, the attacked nation possessed sufficient forces to survive an attempted first strike with retaliatory weapons intact, it would have what was known as ‘second-strike capability’ and prudence would be in order. A first-strike capability offering one side a decisive advantage risked a dangerous edginess developing at times of crisis and even leading to a catastrophic war through miscalculation. If there was no premium in a first strike then both sides should be more cautious and concentrate on diplomacy in a crisis. The calculations of risk might shift very quickly, especially if both sides had sought a first-strike capability. On the other hand, if both sides were confident of their second-strike capabilities, there would be no premium attached to unleashing nuclear hostilities. In the event, technological developments supported the second strike. By the mid-1960s, it was apparent that, for the foreseeable future, each side could eliminate the other as a modern industrial state. The term chosen to describe this condition,  mutual assured destruction , conveyed exactly what it was supposed to convey — destruction would be assured and mutual. Contrary to what had been assumed, therefore, the system tended towards stability. This was not a deliberate policy choice but a condition which confirmed the risks involved in any attempt to achieve a decisive victory through a knockout blow.

There was a paradox. Deterrence required that military preparations be taken seriously, accepting that the prospect of war, even if tiny, was still finite. All this made the task of designing, constructing and sustaining armed forces extremely difficult. It was hard to think through the circumstances that would trigger a war in the first place. So potent were the nightmarish images of a third world war that there really was no good reason why any moderately sane leader would start one deliberately. That helps explain the coercive peace. But others have also argued for the normative nuclear peace, that political leaders have become inhibited from contemplating nuclear use because this would be an appalling thing to do as can be seen in references to a ‘nuclear taboo’ or, in  Nina Tannenwald’s  phrase, a ‘norm of non-use’. Nuclear weapons are seen to be so exceptional and pernicious that no moral person could contemplate their use.

In  The Nuclear Taboo , Nina Tannenwald argues that the taboo takes restraint beyond deterrence. There may be no fear of retaliation, but nuclear use still seems to be unthinkable. She places considerable weight on anti-nuclear movements as a source of the taboo. Yet to the extent that these movements prospered during the Cold War (they have been largely absent since), it was because they were playing on general unease about the implications of such huge power. The idea of a ‘taboo’ was first raised during the 1950s in connection with ‘tactical’ weapons and not the new thermonuclear city-busters and, then, as a worry rather than a relief. The American government was concerned that this would prevent it from taking advantage of its most effective weapons because of a fear of Soviet retaliation. As it became evident that it was meaningless to speak of a victory in any nuclear battle, the ‘nuclear taboo’ came to refer to a sort of institutionalised common sense, reflected in a desire to avoid any situation in which their use might be contemplated.

There are other reasons. Over time, the military purposes that might justify any resort to nuclear weapons have narrowed. During the early stages of the Cold War, they were the only means of destroying some targets. This is no longer the case, because of the accuracy and lethality of conventional munitions. Claims that alternative forms of mass destruction, such as biological or chemical weapons, could only be deterred by nuclear weapons do not withstand scrutiny, although the formal NATO position is that this is a possibility. If such weapons were used, there would be a variety of possible responses in a government’s repertoire short of inflicting some great punishment against civilians. So the routine expectation of the first decades of the nuclear age, that one way or another any future hostilities between nuclear-armed states would escalate to nuclear use, and that escalation would take over as one mega-explosion led to another, may no longer be valid.

At the end of the Second World War, after the  Holocaust , carpet-bombing and V-missiles, the atom bombs seemed to be a logical culmination of what had gone before and also brutally successful in bringing a total war to an end. The simplest, if depressing, assumption was that war had become progressively more murderous, with ever more sophisticated means being found to slaughter people on a large scale. There was no reason to suppose that future wars would not follow the trend. The trend in conventional war since 1945, however, at least in the West, has been to seek more ethical strategies that deliberately avoid civilians and refrain from the sort of raids against centres of population that both sides employed during the Second World War and in later campaigns, such as Korea.

In part, this is because of revulsion at the consequences of city-bombing; in part, it is because of a view that, even at its height, the strategic effects were limited as societies absorbed punishment in preference to surrendering; in part, because targeting has reached levels of precision unimaginable in the past. We have reached the point where the expectation is that only the intended target should be hit and any collateral damage is unacceptable. This could change. Perhaps under the strain of war, attitudes could switch, as they have switched before, into a position where the old arguments about getting at governments through their miserable populations will appear credible again. There may simply be a visceral desire for retribution.  We can see that Russia has made regular reference to its nuclear capability since the start of its intervention in Ukraine , presumably to persuade NATO to stay clear. At the same time, the fact that it has picked on Georgia and Ukraine, neither members of NATO, but only made menacing noises to countries such as  Estonia , a member of NATO, demonstrates that deterrence is far from irrelevant

A social or moral constraint is not the same as a physical constraint. The experience of war will test any taboo. Soldiers can be recruited into an army, have the rules of war explained to them, find the idea of harming innocents repugnant, yet as circumstances change and the conflict becomes more intense, they find themselves engaged in those very acts that would have horrified and shamed them not long before. This can also happen at the governmental level. The international system is one in which individual states are not subject to any higher authority and norms are not universally shared. At desperate moments of existential threat, in a country battling against overwhelming military odds, concerns about breaking taboos may suddenly become less pressing. A number of restraints were in place at the start of the Second World War, including proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons, attacks on merchant shipping and bombardments of civilian populations. Only the one on chemical use held. They all came under pressure as the war became more total. Thus the war did not open with air raids against cities, as many had feared, but soon cities in the way of invading German forces were attacked. It took almost a year before air raids against large centres of population began to become common. They initially reflected notions about how popular morale could be a legitimate target to undermine war production. They then came to reflect a lack of alternative options and a yearning for revenge. By the end of the war, with the allies having freedom of the skies, bombing was progressively unrestrained, concluding with the systematic fire-bombing of Japanese cities and then the use of the two  atom bombs.  Political leaders were authorising actions by the end of the war that would have appalled them at the start. The taboos did not last.

Thus, a point can come during the course of a conflict when the unthinkable becomes possible. In a war of growing brutalisation and intensity, the pressures would build so that the most devastating weapons available would be used, even nuclear weapons, regardless of the consequences. We do not need to doubt that the nuclear taboo has been internalised to worry that the effect might ease during the course of a war of increasing intensity and violence. This prospect might well influence crisis behaviour. Imagine a crisis in which the leaders of one nuclear state observed that the risks of a major war with another nuclear state leading to mutual destruction were negligible because the taboo was in place. This would seem alarmingly complacent. The danger, these leaders would quickly be warned, lies not in what has been said before, but what might happen should the crisis get out of control. Even if nuclear threats are becoming less credible, the possibility of a catastrophic miscalculation remains, especially in a social and political setting already transformed by brutalising violence. Because nuclear weapons are dangerous, prudence dictates considerable caution when moving towards any situation which could create pressures for their use. This is why nuclear weapons can have a deterrent effect well beyond their logical limits. There is therefore no reason to view the normative restraints surrounding nuclear weapons as an alternative to prudential deterrent effects. It is good to have a normative peace, but it needs the backstop of a coercive peace.

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​Takeaways From the Times Investigation Into ‘The Unpunished’

Radical forces in Israeli society have moved from the fringes to the mainstream and put Israel’s democracy in peril. Here are the takeaways from our investigation.

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By Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti

Ronen Bergman, a reporter in Israel, and Mark Mazzetti, based in Washington, interviewed more than 100 people, including current and former Israeli government officials, for this investigation.

For decades, most Israelis have considered Palestinian terrorism the country’s biggest security concern. But there is another threat that may be even more destabilizing for Israel’s future as a democracy: Jewish terrorism and violence, and the failure to enforce the law against it.

Our yearslong investigation reveals how violent factions within the Israeli settler movement, protected and sometimes abetted by the government, have come to pose a grave threat to Palestinians in the occupied territories and to the State of Israel itself. Piecing together new documents, videos and over 100 interviews, we found a government shaken by an internal war — burying reports it commissioned, neutering investigations it assigned and silencing whistle-blowers, some of them senior officials.

It is a blunt account , told in some cases for the first time by Israeli officials, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of the country’s democracy.

Settlers Pursuing a Theocratic State Have Become Lawmakers

Officials told us that once fringe, sometimes criminal groups of settlers bent on pursuing a theocratic state have been allowed for decades to operate with few restraints. Since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government came to power in 2022, elements of that faction have taken power — driving the country’s policies, including in the war in Gaza.

The lawbreakers have become the law.

Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and the official in Netanyahu’s government with oversight over the West Bank, was arrested in 2005 by the Shin Bet domestic security service for plotting road blockages to halt the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He was released with no charges. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student.

Settler Violence Has Been Protected and Abetted for Decades

All West Bank settlers are in theory subject to the same military law that applies to Palestinian residents. But in practice, they are treated according to the civil law of the State of Israel, which formally applies only to territory within the state’s borders. This means that Shin Bet might probe two similar acts of terrorism in the West Bank — one committed by Jewish settlers and one committed by Palestinians — and use wholly different investigative tools.

The job of investigating Jewish terrorism falls to a division of Shin Bet known commonly as the Jewish Department. But it is dwarfed both in size and prestige by the Arab Department, the division charged mostly with combating Palestinian terrorism.

Jews involved in terror attacks against Arabs over the past decades have received substantial leniency, which has included reductions in prison time, anemic investigations and pardons. Most incidents of settler violence — torching vehicles, cutting down olive groves — fall under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to ignore them. When the Jewish Department investigates more serious terrorist threats, it is often stymied from the outset, and even its successes have sometimes been undermined by judges and politicians sympathetic to the settler cause.

The two-tier situation has only become worse during the past year. We scrutinized a sample of three dozen cases from the West Bank since Oct. 7 that shows how much the legal system has decayed. In cases ranging from stealing livestock to arson to violent assault, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes and never as a criminal suspect.

Ami Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet in the late 1990s, told us that government leaders “signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”

But Jews have also been targets of ultranationalists. Prime Minister Rabin was murdered after rabbis passed what amounted to a death sentence on him for his support of the Oslo peace process.

Critics Have Been Silenced and Investigations Buried

In 1981, after a group of professors in Jerusalem raised concern about possible collusion between the settlers and the authorities and illegal “private policing activity” against Palestinians in the occupied territories, Judith Karp, then Israel’s deputy attorney general for special duties, was asked to lead a committee to look into the issue. Their report found case after case of trespassing, extortion, assault and murder, even as the military authorities and the police did nothing or performed notional investigations that went nowhere.

The minister of the interior at the time responded to their report with a scolding. “I understood that he wanted us to drop it,” Karp told us.

Another report two decades later met a similar fate. Talia Sasson, who was tapped to draw up a legal opinion on the “unauthorized outposts,” found that in a span of just over three years, the Construction and Housing Ministry had issued dozens of illegal contracts in the West Bank. In some cases, the ministry even paid for their construction.

Sasson and her Justice Ministry colleagues called the separate laws under which they saw the West Bank being administered “utterly insane.”

The report had little impact, powerless against the machine in place to expand settlements.

Security Officials Are Speaking Out in Alarm

In the West Bank, a new generation of ultranationalists has taken an even more radical turn against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. Their objective is to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews.

It was always clear, Lior Akerman, a former Shin Bet official, told us, “that those wild groups would move from bullying Arabs to damaging property and trees and eventually would murder people.”

This past October, according to a classified document we saw, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fox, the head of Israel’s Central Command responsible for the West Bank, wrote a letter to his boss, the chief of Israel’s military staff, saying that the surge of Jewish terrorism and violence carried out in revenge for the Oct. 7 attacks “could set the West Bank on fire.”

Another document describes a meeting in March, when Fox wrote that since Smotrich took office, the effort to clamp down on illegal settlement construction has dwindled “to the point where it has disappeared.”

Gaza has refocused the world’s attention on Israel’s long inability to address the question of Palestinian autonomy. But it is in the West Bank, in the hands of emboldened settlers, some of whom are now in power, that the corrosive effects of the occupation on both Palestinians and Israel’s rule of law are most apparent.

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A. More about Mark Mazzetti

Our Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War

News and Analysis

Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Israel’s war cabinet, presented Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with an ultimatum , saying he would leave the government if it did not soon develop a plan for the future of the war in Gaza.

At least 64,000 Gazans have been displaced from the northern town of Jabaliya as Israel’s military launched a new offensive there .

Trucks of aid began moving ashore into Gaza via a temporary pier built by the U.S. military , but the new shipments fall far short of what humanitarian groups say is needed.

Gaza’s Wartime Economy: In the seven months since Israel started bombarding Gaza, the enclave’s economy has been crushed. In its place, a marketplace of survival has arisen focused on the basics .

Protest in Brooklyn: A large pro-Palestinian protest in Brooklyn erupted into a chaotic scene , as the police arrested dozens of demonstrators and at times confronted them violently.

FIFA Delays a Vote: Soccer’s global governing body postponed a decision to temporarily suspend Israel  over its actions in Gaza, saying it needed to solicit legal advice before taking up a motion from the Palestinian Football Association.

PEN America’s Literary Gala: The free-expression group has been engulfed by debate  over its response to the Gaza war that forced the cancellation of its literary awards and annual festival. But its literary gala went on as planned .

It's about time we played the LI name game

A signpost at the corner of Poe Place and Keats Court in Plainedge. Credit: Rose Warren

Native Americans named our island Paumanok, meaning “land of tribute.” The Dutch started calling it “Lange Eylandt,” translated by the British to mean a long island.

Like the Dutch, I would like to see a few changes made. The names of some Long Island towns and streets could use some freshening.

The inspiration came while walking through my neighborhood with my granddaughters, Samantha, 10, and Sophia, 17. Some nearby Plainedge streets are named for poets. The names I recognized were Keats, Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, Milton, Holmes, Miller, Whittier and Coleridge.

The three of us researched the poets and some of their famous works. The girls liked Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” I liked reading Edgar Allan Poe’s words “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’  ” I would have preferred living one block over on Poe Place — it conjures up eerie images. Every Halloween I would have posted a raven at my front door to greet the arriving children.

All the poets are American or British, but not one is from Long Island.

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Walt Whitman was born on Long Island in the Town of Huntington. My family has visited his home and stood at the threshold of his birth room. In his famous book “Leaves of Grass,” he writes of “Paumanok” in the 1860 edition, employing the Native American name rather than “Long Island.” Whitman fondly recounts the natural beauty of his hometown.

The Plainedge builder should have given the hamlet a Whitman Avenue. Why wasn’t the poet honored with a street name here? It seems like a glaring omission. After all, Huntington Station does have a road, school and mall bearing his name.

Whitman, though, has no town, village or hamlet named after him. Wyandanch is named for the powerful chief of the Montaukett tribe. Levittown bears the name of its builder, William Levitt. Valentine Hicks, a famous Quaker and abolitionist, is memorialized with Hicksville. Smithtown is named for Richard Smith. Legend has it that Native Americans gifted him all the land he could encircle in one day while riding a bull.

Long Island has a rich history of famous people with Long Island ties. Nikola Tesla built his wireless transmission station in Shoreham in 1901-02. Charles Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field on his 1927 transatlantic flight. I envision local areas being renamed to honor these pioneers. After all, Whitman wrote, “Never stop dreaming.”

Long Island celebrities who did not change the world did bring us entertainment. Town names could be changed to reflect their contributions.

I whimsically imagine Huntington and Levittown being renamed. Change Mariah Carey’s original hometown of Huntington to Mariah Manor. Eddie Money grew up in Levittown. The new name? Moneytown.

Reader Rose Warren lives in Plainedge.

SEND AN ESSAY about life on Long Island (about 550 words) to [email protected] . Essays will be edited and may be republished in all media. Include your full name, address and telephone numbers.

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South Sudan government and rebel groups sign ‘commitment’ for peace in ongoing peace talks in Kenya

South Sudanese president Salva Kiir Mayardit, left, shakes hands with Pagan Amum Okiech, leader of the Real-SPLM group, during the launch of high-level peace talks for South Sudan at State House in Nairobi, Kenya, on Thursday, May 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga)

Pagan Amum Okiech, leader of the Real SPLM, walks after addressing the launch of high-level peace talks for South Sudan at State House in Nairobi, Kenya, on Thursday, May 9, 2024. High-level mediation talks on South Sudan were launched in Kenya with African presidents in attendance calling for an end to a conflict that has crippled the country’s economy for years. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga)

Kenya’s President William Ruto, centre, shakes hands with South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir Mayardit after addressing the launch of high-level peace talks for South Sudan at State House in Nairobi, Kenya, on Thursday, May 9, 2024. High-level mediation talks on South Sudan were launched in Kenya with African presidents in attendance calling for an end to a conflict that has crippled the country’s economy for years. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga)

South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir Mayardit, silhouetted, gives an address during the launch of high-level peace talks for South Sudan at State House in Nairobi, Kenya, on Thursday, May 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga)

Kenyan President William Ruto gives an address during the launch of high-level peace talks for South Sudan at State House in Nairobi, Kenya, on Thursday, May 9, 2024. High-level mediation talks on South Sudan were launched in Kenya with African presidents in attendance calling for an end to a conflict that has crippled the country’s economy for years. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga)

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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The government of South Sudan and rebel opposition groups on Thursday signed a “commitment declaration” for peace during high-level mediation talks in Kenya , described as key step in efforts to end the conflict in South Sudan that has long crippled its economy.

The content of the agreement was not made public during the signing ceremony, attended by diplomats and civil society groups.

The rebel opposition groups were not part of the 2018 agreement that ended South Sudan’s five-year civil war that left 400,000 people dead and millions displaced.

Kenya’s foreign office said the agreement was a “first milestone” in the ongoing talks in which warring sides pledged their commitment to end the violence and hostilities.

At the start of the high-level mediation talks launched a week ago, South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir thanked his Kenyan counterpart, William Ruto , for hosting the negotiations.

The talks have been dubbed Tumaini, Swahili for hope, Initiative and are led by former Kenyan army commander Lazarus Sumbeiywo.

South Sudan is due to hold elections in December but remains politically fragile, in part because the 2018 peace agreement is yet to be fully implemented and because conflict and violence continues in different parts of the country over ethnic and political differences.

The mother of a protester whose killer was pardoned says she was robbed of justice

The mother of a man killed during a Black Lives Matter protest said Friday she was robbed of "long overdue peace" when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pardoned the Army sergeant convicted of murdering her son.

Sheila Foster said she had been upset ever since Abbott declared he would pardon Daniel Perry, who was convicted of murder last year in the death of 28-year-old Air Force veteran Garrett Foster.

Abbott issued the pardon Thursday for Perry, an Army sergeant who was serving a 25-year sentence, after the governor asked the Board of Pardons and Paroles to consider Perry’s case.

The board offered a unanimous recommendation on Thursday to pardon Perry, and Abbott signed the declaration. Perry was released from prison shortly afterward.

“We finally got a trial and we finally got justice, we finally got long overdue peace, and then the governor ripped it right from under us,” Sheila Foster said. “My life has been hell the last four years.”

Sheila Foster said she has lost 40 pounds since her son's death and is suffering from cervical cancer, which has been aggravated by the stress of wondering if her son's killer would be released from prison.

“I’ve been sick ever since the governor announced his plans to pardon,” she said. “There’s not been a single week where I have been healthy every day.”

Garrett Foster was marching with other protesters in downtown Austin on July 25, 2020, against racial injustice and police brutality after George Floyd's death, when Perry nearly drove into the group.

Foster, who was legally carrying a semiautomatic rifle, approached Perry, who was still in his car, and Perry fatally shot him with a handgun.

Perry told police that Foster had pointed the rifle at him and that he had acted in self-defense.

Sheila Foster said her son had attended the march not only to honor Floyd, a Black man killed that May by a Minnesota police officer, but to help protect protesters.

“I feel like I’m living in a nightmare that I can’t wake up from, and I haven’t been able to grieve for my child like a normal person,” she said.

Abbott and representatives for Black Lives Matter could not be reached for comment Friday.

Travis County District Attorney José Garza said Thursday that he disagreed with the decisions by Perry and the Board of Pardons and Parole.

“Their actions are contrary to the law and demonstrate that there are two classes of people in this state where some lives matter and some lives do not,” Garza said in a statement. “They have sent a message to Garrett Foster’s family, to his partner, and to our community that his life does not matter.”

Sheila Foster said she believes Abbott should be removed from office.

“I will spend the rest of my life making sure that happens,” Foster said. “This is so corrupt and it’s all a political circus.”

She said she misses Garrett and relies on memories of him to make her smile, like the time he brought home baby ducks from a creek.

“He grew up an animal lover with birds, dogs, lizards and snakes,” she said, adding that after his death she bought a bird for emotional support. 

Deon J. Hampton is a national reporter for NBC News.

Screen Rant

"a place of happy endings": marvel just revealed the best possible world in the multiverse - how long before they blow it up.

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• Marvel's multiverse has a rare timeline of pure happiness, threatened by Onslaught's destructive power.
• Old Man Logan and 'Old Lady Phoenix' remain on the world to explore and witness their friends' happy endings.
• Will Marvel allow this one perfect timeline to exist, or will the next cosmic villain destroy it to make a name for themselves?

Warning: contains spoilers for Weapon X-Men #4!! The Marvel Universe is filled to bursting with timelines where all manner of terrible things befall its heroes, from zombie invasions to heroes-turned-supervillains. Despite all the horror and tragedy, there is a pocket of pure good out there in the multiverse . But now that Old Man Logan has discovered the "place of happy endings" , others may seek to destroy everything it has built, turning the best timeline to rubble.

In Weapon X-Men #4 , by Christos Gage, Yıldıray Çınar, Nolan Woodard, and Clayton Cowles, multiple incarnations of Wolverine and Onslaught track Old Man Logan to a new timeline, where he engineers a confrontation between Onslaught and the Phoenix . In an attempt to best Phoenix, Onslaught threatens to destroy this reality, telling her it offers happy endings to all the X-Men's friends and allies, stating, "You might call this world a place of happy endings."

Not only does the revelation give Phoenix pause, but it opens up a whole host of possibilities. Happiness is a tenuous thing. Now that the contented timeline has been found, discovery could yield danger. After all, Marvel has always loved to bring its heroes' contentment crashing to the ground.

Happiness Is Always Temporary in the Marvel Universe

Weapon x-men's new timeline is in danger of being destroyed to give future stories more weight.

It's comforting to think of long-suffering characters living their days in peace and contentment, but doing so leaves them susceptible to the horrors lurking in the multiverse. Marvel has a tendency to blow up its characters' happy endings, and not just because their mainstream stories need to be ongoing. Destroying a world or beloved location is an effective way to set up a big bad, and now that the perfect world exists, it will be tempting for future creative teams to use it as fodder for establishing the power level of some future cosmic villain.

It's easy to see this reality as the polar opposite of Marvel's 'Ruins' reality. Created by Warren Ellis, Cliff Nielsen and Terese Nielsen in a series of the same name, the world of Ruins is a place where every superhero origin went as badly as possible, and most heroes were killed either gaining their powers or by using them. Spider-Man's spider bite gave him a skin-eating virus, the Hulk became a giant tumor, and Nick Fury assassinates the Avengers.

Moreover, the timeline itself is an easy target. Many heroes are much older, suggesting the usual teams are in their golden years. They have no reason to fight, begging the question of whether they still can. Their resilience and skill were born of adversity; if everyone gets a happy ending, that drive has effectively been removed. It remains unclear who stepped up in their place, or if there is anything left to save the world from, but it is likely not a place of soldiers and active heroes. Fortunately, it gains two defenders as Old Man Logan and Jean 'Old Lady Phoenix' Grey choose to stay.

Marvel's Multiverse Needs a Dose of Peace and Prosperity

Marvel's 'happy endings' universe has two new protectors.

With Logan and Jean electing to explore the world, positioning them to stave off possible attacks, there is hope for its preservation. While its destruction would be dramatic, the intact timeline would be an even more novel concept in a multiverse full of suffering. In world after world, the X-Men, Avengers, and other heroes take on the unimaginable. They've more than earned happiness, and there are too many other timelines where they're robbed of it. With the discovery of Marvel's happiest timeline, its days could be numbered, but the multiverse is better off with one bright spot.

Weapon X-Men #4 is available now from Marvel Comics.

• Marvel Comics

Garrett Foster: Mom of Daniel Perry's victim says she's been robbed of 'long overdue peace' after son's killer gets pardon

Warning: This article contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some, readers' discretion advised.

AUSTIN, TEXAS: The mother of a man slain at a Black Lives Matter protest stated on Friday, May 17, that the pardon granted by Texas Governor Greg Abbott to her son's killer, an Army sergeant, has robbed her of "long overdue peace."

Sheila Foster has expressed her distress following the announcement by Abbott that he would pardon Daniel Perry , who was convicted last year for the murder of 28-year-old Air Force veteran Garrett Foster.

Sheila Foster claims to have health issues since her son's death

The governor requested that the Board of Pardons and Paroles take up Perry's case and on Thursday, May 16, Abbott granted the pardon to the Army sergeant, who was serving a 25-year sentence.

Abbott signed the proclamation following the board's unanimous recommendation on Thursday to pardon Daniel Perry . Not long afterward, Perry was released from prison.

"We finally got a trial and we finally got justice, we finally got long overdue peace, and then the governor ripped it right from under us," Sheila Foster said. "My life has been hell the last four years," NBC News reports.

Sheila Foster claimed that since her son's passing, she has shed forty pounds and developed cervical cancer, which has been made worse by the anxiety she felt over whether her son's killer would be let out of jail.

"I've been sick ever since the governor announced his plans to pardon," she said. "There's not been a single week where I have been healthy every day."

How was Garrett Foster killed?

In downtown Austin on July 25, 2020, Garrett Foster was part of a protest group against police brutality and racial injustice following the death of George Floyd when Perry almost drove into the group.

When Foster approached Perry, who was still in his car, legally brandishing a semiautomatic rifle, Perry shot Foster dead with a handgun. Foster had pointed the rifle at Perry, he told the police, and he had acted in self-defense.

Sheila Foster stated that her son participated in the march to pay tribute to Floyd, a Black man who was killed by a Minnesota police officer in May, and also to safeguard the protesters.

"I feel like I'm living in a nightmare that I can't wake up from, and I haven't been able to grieve for my child like a normal person," she said.

Sheila Foster says Governor Greg Abbott should be removed from office

Jose Garza, the district attorney for Travis County, declared on Thursday that he disapproved of Perry and the Board of Pardons and Parole's rulings.

"Their actions are contrary to the law and demonstrate that there are two classes of people in this state where some lives matter and some lives do not," Garza said in a statement. "They have sent a message to Garrett Foster's family, to his partner, and to our community that his life does not matter."

Sheila Foster expressed her opinion that Abbott ought to be ousted from office.

"I will spend the rest of my life making sure that happens," Foster said. "This is so corrupt and it's all a political circus."

She mentioned how much she misses Garrett and how happy memories of him, like the day he brought home baby ducks from a creek, bring her joy.

"He grew up an animal lover with birds, dogs, lizards and snakes," she explained, noting that she purchased a bird for emotional support following his passing.