The Future of Peace

The acceptance of conflict, a hatred of violence, and the moral imagination

The world does not seem to have an idea of peace worthy of the 21st century.

Perspectiva is interested in working with others to respond to that challenge. We believe there is an urgent need to enrich our thinking about peace in the context of the metacrisis. We are actively developing collaborations and looking for funders who share an interest in informing and inspiring this enormous challenge.

In January, I wrote a version of the following piece on my personal substack. In July, along with Perspectiva colleagues, I will present some of the thoughts below to networks convened by our friends at The St Ethelburga’s Centre for Peace and Reconciliation. If anyone has thoughts on how best to develop this project, please leave your thoughts in the comments or get in touch by email.

Thank you.

Jonathan Rowson

Co-Founder and CEO of Perspectiva.

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I am neither a peace scholar nor a peace activist, so this essay is another attempt to ‘lead from confusion’.

In general, things do not augur well for peace in 2024. In addition to what we see in our news about Gaza and Ukraine, there are implications for peace from ecological collapse, and technological developments, and there are growing tensions in multiple sites around the world. Shortly, for instance, the Presidential elections in the USA could go wrong in multiple ways and there are already manifest or latent troubles in Serbia, Sudan, and Taiwan. We should expect unexpected developments too. (Even Dublin briefly looked like it was at war with itself).

With our febrile context in mind, here is the question that fuels our inquiry:

Do we have a theory and practice of peace that is worthy of the risks and challenges of the 21st century? If not, how do we expect to survive? And if so, what would that look like?

The aggregate level of peace measured by the Global Peace Index went down in 2023, and the average level of global peacefulness has deteriorated for 13 of the last 15 years, with no year-on-year improvements recorded since 2014. While the motivation and methodology of such measures can always be questioned, the perception that the world is becoming less peaceful is not just a result of doomscrolling.

The GPI is a rigorous and well-resourced methodology, though it feels technocratic in spirit, and is motivated to show the economic impacts of peace, which is valuable information for financial investors primarily; so I am inclined to give it two cheers rather than three. Moreover, as far as I can make out, it still measures peace in aggregate terms by adding up country scores, which are always ranked, as if peace were an international competition. I don’t wish to devalue the significant amount of effort that goes into compiling this data, but to me, it feels somehow confected and brittle, as if it’s a product of the world we are leaving rather than the one we appear to be entering. What the GPI doesn’t do is describe the planet as a whole as a complex system with emergent properties that cannot be predicted by analyzing the parts.

The problem of peace is still about keeping countries from going to war with each other and understanding all the antecedents of that including militarisation and language, but today the challenge of peace is more profoundly about keeping the world as a whole from being at war with itself.

That’s a more complex proposition to measure, but it feels closer to the heart of the matter. Today there are wars between nation-states, yes, but at a systemic level, it feels like the deeper battle is the war on nature waged by unfettered capitalist logic, and the war on truth waged by propaganda and advertising. In that wider war, I believe we need to refashion our idea of peace to better keep pace with the world, particularly its financial, technological, and ecological interdependence, also known as planetization.

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Thomas Mann wrote that “War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace” and that’s a useful place to start the inquiry.

War is always a kind of failure, but it’s a failure that arises regularly because succeeding at peace takes more than one side, and is often difficult. Peace is not merely difficult because it calls for sacrifice and restraint and compromise and imagination, but also because war can seem so darkly alluring. However horrific and brutal it gets, war is a force that gives us meaning.

James Hilman speaks of our “Terrible Love of War” , and the historical and archaeological record indicates that while there is plenty of evidence of peace and care and cooperation, there is plenty of evidence of barbaric collective violence too. I recently re-read Humanity by Jonathan Glover, which is a moral history of the 20th century and outlines the psychologies that led, for instance to the madness of WWI, the decision to use the atom bomb, the holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda and how war broke out in the former Yugoslavia.

It seems facile to say we humans are peaceful by nature or that we are warmongering. We are both, and the challenge of peace is therefore perennial.

But the challenge of peace is also historical. Peace is not just the absence of war but also the presence of qualities like harmony, reciprocity, trust, kindness, friendship, peaceful language and leadership, and rituals to celebrate peace, but all such things arise in the context of conflict of various kinds, and they are related to the social, economic, political, technological and cultural affordances of their time. It is well known that peace is not just something we have, but also something we have to make, and we have to make it within a particular historical situation.

As far as I can tell, some of the best research on peace today comes from the Sustaining Peace Project, which is an interdisciplinary collective that learns from peace systems (clusters of stable countries, like the Nordic countries for the last 200 years) and uses multiple methods including ethnographic research and mathematical modelling to learn what makes and keeps societies peaceful. An article for The Greater Good magazine in 2021 gives a good summary of their research methodology and their main findings, which includes this startling claim:

“The focus of our model is simple. It views the central dynamic responsible for the emergence of sustainably peaceful relations in communities as the thousands or millions of daily reciprocal interactions that happen between members of different groups in those communities, and the degree to which more positive interactions outweigh more negative. That’s it. The more positive reciprocity and the less negative reciprocity between members of different groups, the more sustainable the peace.”

Gosh.

That finding is somehow inspiring and hopeful. And yet, I don’t find it persuasive somehow. Much of the intellectual and imaginative impetus of today’s peace-building was forged in the 20th-century battles between alliances of nation-states. But it is not clear if our prevailing ideas of peace are suited to a world where the defining themes of our times will create unprecedented emergent properties from their co-arising. For multiple reasons, not least reckoning with a shift in geological time (Holocene to Anthropocene) and an explosion in our information system (internet, smartphones, and social media) not to mention new weaponry, the world has utterly changed.

So I wonder what some version of ‘be nice to each other’ means geopolitically in a world of exponential technology where many believe the race to master AI is the defining power game of our time. And I wonder what it means when climate-driven wet bulb temperatures arise in densely populated areas, or when the next pandemic happens. And I wonder what it means to hyper-agentic decision-makers like Putin or Xi, or for mitigating catastrophic and existential risks.

While the issues driving conflict are still related to land, religion, and ideology; they are now also informed by ecological breakdown, democratic deconsolidation, and the alliance of technological power and transnational financial capitalism.

What does it mean, in that particular historical context, to give peace a chance?

*Musical interlude*

Peace in the Context of Metacrisis

Another way to ask that question is this: how might we help the peace movement keep pace with the metacrisis?

The metacrisis is a word that could detain us, but I believe it is important, useful, and worthy of your attention until you can feel its intellectual dignity; if you don’t feel that, then leave it alone, but do give it a chance - it’s not just a buzzword. Rather than hyperlink away to a video or an essay, I will just share my preferred definition here and hope it suffices for present purposes:

“The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.”

An idea of peace forged in modernity may well mislead us when what we need is a vision of peace for a liminal time where it feels like modernity is slowly ending. The nation-state and the army are the quintessential modernist institutions. It feels like we may be in the process of gradually moving beyond them, for good or bad, but peace in the context of that possibility is very different from peace as two hostile sides agreeing to a ceasefire.

As I argue in Five Flavours of Betweenness we are arguably between cultures, systems, paradigms, ontologies, and metaphysics. While Zak Stein’s term “a time between worlds” is elegant, he would be the first to admit that one of the defining characteristics of a time between worlds is violence and lots of it; and yet what is unique about our historical moment is that we have the power not merely to inflict localized harm, which was always true; now there are a variety of ways we can destroy the viability of humanity’s only habitat; not just with nuclear weapons, but with deep fakes declarations of war causing chain reactions, or homemade dirty bombs sent into marketplaces with homemade drones, and the creation of internecine violence through misinformation. The recent Netflix film Leave the World Behind gives a taste of that kind of scenario.

In that emerging context, I feel it is our responsibility to be as proactive and preemptive about peace as possible.

I surprise myself a little because I am not particularly irenic by nature. Through decades of sublimated warfare on the chess board, I have developed quite a martial spirit. In day-to-day life, I am often looking for peace, but usually after the struggle, and sometimes I feel restless and inauthentic when a necessary struggle is avoided (Johan Galtung calls this ‘negative peace’). Real war is very different of course, and well worth avoiding where possible. I count myself lucky never to have been in a war, and have no wish for that to change.

It sounds privileged to say so, and perhaps offensive to those more directly affected by war, but in all candor, I have for many years considered the notion of peace uninteresting, static, even worthy. Until recently peace felt lenten and generic, never the subject of our best stories.

But how wrong I was.

Peace (1951). A Stained glass window in Canterbury Cathedral.

I am beginning to understand that peace is the battle of our times. Indeed peace is inherently about struggle, and it is co-extensive with conflict. Moreover, peace is fascinating.

A few things become clear when you look into it. The first is that peace is not about avoiding conflict but about recognizing conflict as a perennial feature of life and then leaning into the delicious complexity of conflict resolution as an intensely humanising and creative process. War may be meaningful but it is notoriously unimaginative. Peace, however, is often inherently creative in a way that calls for us to grow into a deeper version of ourselves. The creative processes that lead to peace call for us to venture into the heart, into the psyche, deeper into social relations, deeper into emotional needs, and beyond the trappings of identity towards individuation forged by knowing ourselves through things and people that are both parts of ourselves and unique. Moreover, peaceful outcomes invariably involve forms of insight or transcendence that are all but unimaginable before the peace work begins. Peace can be profoundly surprising.

In recent years, my friend Pheobe Tickell has made ‘moral imagination’ an impressive and valuable social and civic practice, but it also has a history in peace praxis. Here’s how John Paul Lederach puts it in his book Moral Imagination: The Art of Soul of Building Peace (OUP, 2005):

“Transcending violence is forged by the capacity to generate, mobilize, and build the moral imagination. The kind of imagination to which I refer is mobilised when four disciplines and capacities are held together and practiced by those who find their way to rise above violence. Stated simply, the moral imagination requires the capacity to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemies; the ability to sustain a paradoxical curiosity that embraces complexity without reliance on dualistic polarity; the fundamental belief in and pursuit of the creative act; and the acceptance of the inherent risk of stepping into the mystery of the unknown that lies beyond the far too familiar landscape of violence."

Making peace appears to be about increasing our personal, cultural, and institutional capacity to handle conflict while progressively tempering the disposition to be violent. In 2024, the question then becomes: what does that mean at a planetary scale?

Structural Peace as the Third Attractor

Regular readers may remember a prior post on the inner life of the future, where I begin with the idea of ‘the third attractor’.

In essence, as we consider how things are unfolding on a global scale, it looks like we will have to change course to avoid some form of societal collapse. However, since deep transformations of perception and purpose are hard and rare, the most likely ways we will choose to avert collapse could well involve forms of authoritarian leadership. The claim is that our default scenarios are, in old money, anarchy, and tyranny, or as Daniel Schmachtenberger puts it: collapse or dystopia. Neither of those two attractors (in the systemic sense) is attractive (in the aesthetic sense). If you look more closely the critical problem is not just that they are not nice, but that both default scenarios are likely to lead to some version of world world three. (A heterodox view, offered by Fiona Hill and others, is that World War Three is already underway).

In Attractor One, ecological and social collapse could lead to the breakdown of legitimate governance and the worst kinds of anarchy and resource wars. In Attractor Two, authoritarian rule relies on external enemies to legitimize its oppression, which makes warmongering and warfare an inherent feature of legitimacy. In light of technological developments, that is likely to lead to the end of the world. As Albert Einstein once prophetically put it, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Keeping in mind that all models are wrong but some are useful, on this model our job is to create The Third Attractor. Since the first and second attractors seem to lead inexorably to war, the defining feature of the third attractor is that it has to contain the elements of enduring peace.

I’ve been thinking about peace in one way or the other since Stephen Pinker gave a talk at the RSA in 2011. Informed by Kant’s essay on Perpetual Peace, Pinker argued that reductions in violence had been evident for several decades due to factors including the spread of democratic norms and free trade. I am not sure if Pinker would say the same thing now, because the context has shifted quite a lot, but my question to him back then amounted to this: If you define violence as human-on-human activity, then the argument (that violence is reducing) flows and the data seems to back it (in 2011). But if you give a broader definition of violence, including forms of 'structural violence' in social and economic systems, violence against other species in the form of factory farming, and violence against nature in the form of ecological degradation, it is not so clear that we have become less violent; not just because these things are violent in themselves but they also contain the seeds of future ‘real’ violence. His answer was basically that these things are not really violence as such, and he slightly ridiculed the environmental point by comparing killing somebody to polluting a stream, which is rather different from heat-related deaths, or entire island civilisations disappearing and their population being displaced, or Darfur arguably being the first of many climate change wars. In essence, Pinker left me unpersuaded.

I may be biased because I am generally impressed by Johan Galtung’s notion of structural violence. This idea stems from his seminal article in 1969, which is about violence as the avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs, and the gap between what is possible and desirable in human life and what becomes actualized due to what might be considered unfair and avoidable harms or constraints (This reminds me of Roberto Unger’s idea of ‘larger lives’ being the essence of the progressive vision). Structural violence describes forms of violence that are not caused by direct human-on-human activity but are still about human decisions that lead to harm to other humans; the ‘violence’ is so thoroughly mediated by culture and institutions that it is typically not thought of as ‘violent’, but the harm is often just as real.

So racism is a form of structural violence, but a clearer example might be the feudal system or India’s caste system where inequality of life opportunity is baked into the social structure. Poverty leading to malnutrition in children is structural violence. More recently, during the COVID pandemic, the legal mechanism of the TRIPS agreement on intellectual property led to pharmaceutical companies refusing to share information on vaccine production processes with the developing world leading to an estimated million deaths. At a more global scale, the rich world causing the climate crisis that the poorer parts of the world will suffer from more immediately and directly is an example of structural violence.

Some say structural violence is just another word for social injustice, but that’s a little facile. First of all, the moral importance of the distinction between the subjective intent to harm and the objective outcome of harm is moot; it disguises the real harms caused, and it’s self-serving for those in power who are responsible for structural violence not to think of it as violent, but rather ‘just the way things are’; because they tend to be invested in keeping them as they are. Galtung also wants to say that the idea of peace is crucially important but it can and often does become too wooly a notion. To protect its intellectual clarity and dignity Galtung suggests it serves the cause of peace to think of it simply as the absence of violence (NB not the absence of conflict). But if peace is important and peace is the absence of violence, it is incumbent on those who care about peace to think clearly about what violence is. Only then does it properly reveal itself in its myriad forms. Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, famously said that poverty is the worst form of violence.

Inspired by Galtung’s notion of structural violence, I wonder what ‘structural peace’ might mean.

If structural violence is about features of social and economic structure that cause avoidable harm, structural peace will be the opposite; features of social and economic structure that seek to reduce and minimize or even eliminate avoidable harm. In light of the prior suggestion that most default scenarios for global civilization lead to a version of World War Three, to think about structural peace is to contend with design principles for a viable civilization.

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To “give peace a chance” in the 21st century I think it helps to recognize two fundamental premises. First, the ecological emergency - a major driver of structural violence and the real violence it often leads to - is a symptom of a deeper historical process culminating in a time between worlds, characterized by the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity. Second, enduring peace depends upon realizing that the world in transition is three inter-influencing worlds in transition. These go by many names and are described in different ways by different theorists (eg Popper, Archer, Habermas, Guattari, Harris) but they all refer to some version of the following trio: an exterior world of processes and events, an interior world of thoughts and feelings, and a social world of ideas and institutions. Perspectiva’s shorthand for these three worlds is ‘systems, souls, and society’ and all our work is fundamentally grounded in understanding their relationship in theory and practice.

I envisage ‘structural peace’ will include open society norms (society/souls) that allow for legitimate decision-making, scientific progress, and epistemic maturation, the wise governance of technology (society/systems) that keeps the information stream healthy and helps to distribute power, the reduction in economic inequality within and between countries to improve social trust and harmony (systems) regenerative and redistributive ecological economics to temper human impact (systems), and transformative education (souls/society) to help us learn who we are and what we are living for.

The details need filling out of course, and I’ve offered my sketch in The Flip, The Formation, and The Fun, to some extent in The Inner Life of the Future, and previously in posts about our goal and our entelechy for Emerge. As indicated previously though, the third attractor, even when described as ‘structural peace’ is less like a single vision or a single action plan, and more like a feeling that a viable and desirable future for humanity is within our grasp. Our job is to attend to that feeling and consider what it is asking of us.