Everyone speaks of peace, yet surprisingly little attention is devoted to what peace actually is or how it can be achieved. Because peace is universally valued, governments, alliances, and institutions routinely describe their policies as serving peace, regardless of whether those policies reduce violence or increase it. Meanwhile, humanity remains confronted by war, insecurity, environmental degradation, and even the possibility of nuclear catastrophe. This paradox suggests that we still suffer from a profound illiteracy about peace and conflict, and that humanity’s future depends on our ability to reprogram a civilizational malfunction.
Peace is often understood as the absence of war. When the fighting stops and a ceasefire is signed, we tend to say that peace has been achieved. In reality, many such settlements represent merely non-war. The underlying conflict remains unresolved and may later reappear in new forms.
Others associate peace with harmony, spirituality, justice, democracy, human rights, or personal well-being. While all of these may contribute to peaceful societies, peace cannot simply be reduced to a collection of other desirable values. Nor is peace passivity. Peace is not static; it is a dynamic and continuous process.
At its most basic level, peace is the ongoing effort to reduce violence in all its forms and to handle conflicts through constructive and nonviolent means. The academic discipline of peace and conflict studies focuses on how to do that and how to secure peace into the long-term future. The challenge facing humanity, therefore, is not the existence of conflict. Conflicts are inevitable wherever human beings are free to think, create, and pursue different goals. The real challenge is to handle conflicts with as little violence as possible—just as medicine seeks to heal a disease with as little violence as possible to body and mind. Violence emerges when conflicts are ignored, manipulated, misunderstood, simplified, suppressed, or approached through coercion rather than understanding.
This distinction was captured in the concepts of negative and positive peace developed by the late Johan Galtung, the pioneer of peace research. Negative peace means the absence of direct violence and war. Positive peace refers to the presence of conditions that enable human beings and societies to flourish: cooperation, creativity, development, participation, and the realization of human potential. Peace, therefore, is not merely the absence of something bad. It is the presence of something good.
Positive Peace
Over the years, I have come to formulate peace as the process of securing development and developing security for the whole human being and for all human beings, in interaction with one another and with the global environment, guided by an ethics of care.
This formulation rests on a simple observation. Individuals and societies essentially seek two things at once. They seek development, understood as the opportunity to realize their capacities, improve their lives, and expand their horizons through education, culture, creativity, and productive activity. At the same time, they seek security, understood as confidence that this development can continue into the future without being destroyed by internal or external threats. Development without security becomes fragile. Security without development becomes stagnation. Genuine peace requires both.
The concept of the whole human being is equally important. Human beings are not merely economic units, workers, consumers, citizens, or military assets. They are also ethical, emotional, cultural, and spiritual beings. A peaceful society must concern itself with the full spectrum of human needs and aspirations.
Likewise, peace must apply to all human beings. There is no genuine peace where development and security are reserved for privileged groups while others are marginalized, exploited, or excluded. Peace cannot coexist with systems whose functioning depends on fragmentation, domination, or permanent inequality—or on militarism, racism, or imperialism.
Toward a Global Ethics of Care
A meaningful concept of peace must also include humanity’s relationship with nature and with future generations. The consequences of our actions today increasingly extend across the entire planet and far into the future. A neighborhood ethics—the Ten Commandments, say—will not do. Traditional ethical systems evolved in an age when most human actions had local and limited effects. That is no longer our reality. We need a broader ethics suited to an interconnected and technologically powerful world, and such an ethics cannot rest on an anthropocentric worldview, one that places the human being above everything else.
Such an ethics begins with humility. Humanity possesses unprecedented scientific and technological power, yet it remains dependent on ecological systems it neither created nor fully controls. We have acquired the capacity to alter the climate, destroy biodiversity, poison ecosystems, and, through nuclear weapons, threaten the future of civilization itself.
This situation demands that we recognize duties alongside rights. Modern society has rightly emphasized human rights, but peace also requires a culture of responsibility. Rights without duties can easily become disconnected from wider human and ecological realities. Duties remind us that we exist within networks of mutual dependence, including with all other, nonhuman organisms.
The philosopher Hans Jonas anticipated this challenge when he argued that humanity’s growing technological power requires a new ethical imperative: to act in ways compatible with the continued existence of genuine human life. Future humanity must become part of our present moral horizon.
Three principles seem particularly important. The first is care for the continuity of life. The second is care for biodiversity and the natural world. The third is care for those yet unborn. Future generations cannot vote, protest, or represent themselves in today’s institutions. Yet they will inherit the consequences of our choices. Environmental destruction and nuclear weapons belong to the same ethical category: both allow present generations to impose potentially irreversible risks on future ones.
No generation can have the right to sacrifice humanity’s future and its potential to short-term interests. Peace therefore extends beyond relations among states. It concerns the relationship among humanity, nature, and the future itself.
The Security Paradox
If peace means reducing violence and expanding the possibilities for human development, much of contemporary security thinking rests on a profound contradiction. Across cultures, ideologies, and political systems, governments have largely embraced the same underlying assumption about national security: that security is achieved primarily through national military strength, measured against real or invented threats that are themselves predominantly military. Countries may disagree on many things, but most share the belief that increasing military capability leads to greater security—and even, more wrongly still, to world peace. Contemporary history shows that this is simply not true.
Yet this belief generates a paradox. Measures intended to increase the security of one actor often decrease the security felt by others. Those others respond by strengthening their own militaries. The result is a cycle of action and reaction, armament and counter-armament, fear and mistrust.
This process operates almost independently of intentions. Governments typically perceive their own military preparations as defensive, while viewing similar actions by others as threatening. Consequently, entire security systems may evolve in ways that nobody originally desired, producing growing insecurity even where no actor actively seeks war. The process comes close to a perpetual-motion machine—an addiction to counterproductive means that, over time, harms both the other and ourselves.
These mechanisms largely operate outside parliaments and other forms of democratic decision-making. They are an elite phenomenon, which I call the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, or MIMAC—an expansion of the “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address.
The central mechanism and belief system behind this process is the philosophy of deterrence. Deterrence seeks to prevent unwanted behavior by threatening unacceptable consequences. It may sometimes discourage aggression, but it contains an inherent limitation. Fear can restrain behavior, but it cannot create trust. It cannot produce friendship, empathy, understanding, or cooperation. It cannot create peace, either in theory or in practice.
By definition, deterrence communicates that the other remains a potential adversary. For this reason, deterrence should not be confused with peace. At best, it may produce a temporary stability based on fear. At worst, it helps generate the very insecurities it claims to manage. Security built primarily on deterrence becomes trapped in a self-reinforcing cycle. When that cycle begins to shape civil society, thinking, and culture as well, societies become militarist. The MIMAC then becomes what the philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich called a “radical monopoly”: in the name of serving and protecting citizens, it deprives them of their own genuinely human activity, rights, and independence, and turns societies toward passive mass consumption—of weapons and enemy images, among other things. Over time, this uncontrolled society within society is bound to do more harm than good.
From Offensive to Defensive Security
A future peace and security system must therefore ask a different question: not whether security is necessary, but what kind of security can genuinely support peacemaking, civilian conflict resolution, and long-term peaceful global coexistence. Here it is useful to distinguish between offensive and defensive security.
Offensive military capabilities are designed to project force far beyond one’s own territory. Their message, whether intended or not, is that one possesses the capacity to impose costs on others far from home. Such capabilities inevitably generate suspicion, because they can be used not only for defense but also for coercion. On the other hand, defensive security follows a different logic. Its purpose is not to threaten others but to deny aggressors the possibility of successful conquest. Effective defensive capabilities protect a society without creating corresponding fears among its neighbors. Their message is not “we can destroy you” but “you cannot successfully dominate us.”
The distinction is not always absolute in technical terms, but the philosophical difference is fundamental. Offensive systems derive security from the ability to threaten. Defensive systems derive security from the ability to resist.
A peaceful international order cannot be based on military deterrence. Where military instruments retain a role, they should increasingly move toward defensive rather than offensive functions—which means shorter range, greater mobility, and less destructive capacity. Security arrangements should reassure rather than intimidate. Think of the fundamental difference between a street on which everyone carries a gun and one on which everyone is trained in jiujitsu.
Common Security in an Interdependent World
This leads naturally to the concept of common security: a concept of security that is transnational, reaching from the individual through the state (for as long as states exist) to the global level. It is not predominantly military. It is defensively military, coupled with many other elements, in a combined structure that includes early warning, conflict management, mediation, civil defense, and nonviolent defense, including civil resistance and disobedience.
Common security begins with a simple but transformative insight: no actor can become genuinely secure by making others insecure. In an interconnected world, security is ultimately indivisible. My security depends on your security. Your insecurity eventually affects me. Common security—and peace research—therefore asks a different question from traditional power politics and is far removed from geopolitical realpolitik. Instead of asking how one side can gain advantage over another, it asks how all sides can become safer at the same time. It seeks positive-sum rather than zero-sum outcomes.
This principle has profound implications. Policies should be evaluated not only by whether they increase one’s own security, but also by how they affect the security perceptions of others. Security is sustainable only when it is shared—and when it is shared, it becomes more likely that the perceived enemies of the past will become the cooperative partners of the future.
Conflict is Not the Enemy
A world based on common security would not be a world without disagreements. Nor would it be a world without conflicts. Indeed, one of the greatest misconceptions in political thought is the belief that peace requires the elimination of conflict. We often see the term “conflict prevention” used, but it does not reflect any deeper thinking. In reality, conflict is an unavoidable feature of all free and dynamic societies. Differences in values, interests, identities, memories, and aspirations are the natural consequences of human diversity.
A society without conflict would not necessarily be peaceful. It might instead be stagnant or repressive. Conflicts, therefore, possess positive potential. They encourage reflection, creativity, and change. They force individuals and societies to reconsider their assumptions about themselves and others, and to search for new solutions. Many advances in human history emerged through constructive engagement with conflict rather than through its suppression. Suppressed conflicts invariably produce violence when they move from the latent to the manifest level.
The crucial distinction is not between conflict and peace, but between conflict and violence. Conflicts are problems that stand between parties—far more than they are something that stems from “the other” being violent or being the cause of problems. Yet, counterproductively, blame games are an integral part of the old security thinking. Violence occurs when conflicts are handled destructively. Peace means transforming conflicts before they become violent.
Building Institutions for Peace
This insight carries major practical implications. Most wars begin as political, economic, cultural, or psychological problems and conflicts that remain unaddressed for years. By the time violence erupts, positions have hardened, fears have intensified, and the available options have narrowed dramatically. The violence may then become the single driving force—tit for tat—with nothing to do with solving the underlying problem. The MIMAC thrives on that sort of process.
The future of peacebuilding must therefore place much greater emphasis on early warning, violence-preventive diplomacy, mediation, and conflict transformation. Just as medicine seeks to prevent disease rather than merely treat its consequences, peace policy should seek to address conflicts while they remain manageable. Nowhere is it truer than in peacemaking that prevention is better than the cure.
The world already possesses elements of such an approach. Mediation, reconciliation processes, confidence-building measures, and conflict-management institutions have repeatedly demonstrated their value. Yet compared with the enormous resources devoted to military establishments, these capacities remain remarkably underdeveloped. Huge shares of the world’s research go to developing new weapons and strategies, while there is hardly any research into intellectually exciting and important phenomena such as peace, forgiveness, reconciliation, and mediation methods. Or, to put it succinctly: the world’s military budgets are roughly 100 times larger than the budgets for everything the United Nations does worldwide.
These unsustainable priorities must change. Actors who continue to promote them will, sooner or later, destroy themselves, humanity’s future, or both. Everything has its opportunity costs, so let us always ask ourselves: what constructive things could we do to make the world a better place with the human, financial, and other resources now allocated to war and militarism in the name of defense, security, and peace?
A genuinely peace-oriented world order would treat expertise in conflict management with the same seriousness currently devoted to military expertise. Citizens would learn not only the history of wars but also the history of successful peacemaking; there would be more peace museums and statues than military ones. Schools would teach peaceful conflict resolution. Universities would educate future mediators. For every military academy, there would be two peace academies. Governments would invest in ministries, institutions, and professional capacities devoted specifically to peacebuilding and reconciliation. Statesmen and ministers would have peace experts to consult, not only people in physical or intellectual uniforms.
The United Nations Charter remains humanity’s most important normative framework in this regard, because it places the peaceful resolution of conflicts at the center of international relations. Article 1 commits the organization to bringing about the settlement of international disputes by peaceful means, and the Charter allows the use of force only as a last resort, once peaceful measures have been tried and found inadequate. Yet no country systematically prepares and trains for that; most train for the opposite.
As regional institutions grow in influence, they too should increasingly become arenas for conflict management rather than geopolitical competition. The ultimate goal is the gradual construction of a global culture of peace: a culture that values prevention over reaction, dialogue over coercion, and cooperation over domination. Deep down, we know what is right. There are prizes for peace, but none for mass killing, and no contest over who can win the most wars at the highest human cost.
Toward a Eutopia of Peace
What this article has dealt with is neither utopian nor naive. It is a theoretically rational and politically practical response to the realities of an increasingly interdependent world, one that faces serious problems of survival and can no longer waste resources on destructive processes. The resources currently devoted to preparing for war could be invested far more productively in building the institutions and capacities that peace requires.
Human beings are capable of learning peace, just as they have learned war. We can learn to engage in conflict intelligently, and to solve problems for the common good. Societies teach young people how to compete, deter, and fight. They can also teach them how to analyze conflicts, mediate disputes, and cooperate across differences. If violence can generate vicious circles, peace can generate virtuous ones. The habits, institutions, and values that support peaceful interaction can reinforce themselves just as effectively as fear and militarization.
The challenge before humanity is therefore not a lack of possibilities. It may be a lack of political will—but much worse, it is a lack of imagination and vision. We have become programmed, or accustomed, to view security primarily through a military lens, and peace primarily as the absence of war. We have invested vast intellectual and material resources in preparing for violence, while devoting little or no attention and resources to understanding and constructing peace. The future requires a different balance: less militarism and more peacebuilding, less preparation for destruction and more investment in human development, less reliance on fear and more reliance on common security.
This is not a vision of a perfect world. Some violent conflicts may still break out, just as medicine cannot eradicate all diseases and new ones will appear. Mistakes will be made. New challenges will emerge. The goal is not utopia, in the sense of a flawless society or an unattainable future. It is better understood as a eutopia: a better and more humane world that consciously and gradually reduces violence while expanding the possibilities for cooperation, justice, sustainability, and shared flourishing. It is a world that can be created. And it marks the conscious choice between future co-existence and no-existence.
Peace will never be a final destination. It is a continuous process of learning, caring, developing, and securing. Yet it remains the indispensable condition for everything else humanity hopes to achieve. For what could matter more than peace, the most important enabler of all human possibilities?
