by Baruch Solomon

Created on: March 30, 2010

World peace is often seen as a sentimental ideal rather than something that can be realistically achieved. This shouldn’t surprise us. Pretty much every society, from primitive tribes to great empires and civilisations, has engaged in warfare or conflicts in which rival groups of people attempt to, and usually succeed in, killing one another. In most cases furthermore, this has been a frequent and recurring phenomenon. The last century in particular not only saw unprecedented technical and social advances, but two devastating world wars and innumerable bloody, if less publicised conflicts. As I write, Wikipedia lists almost thirty wars currently going on in different parts of the world.

But I believe that there are reasons why, even if warfare has been a recurring feature in almost every society, the future will not be like the past. In the first instance, even if war as a feature of our society hasn’t gone away, the nature of warfare has changed, as have the reasons for peoples’ engaging in it. Nearly all wars nowadays are either guerrilla wars, usually responded to with state or global counter-measures; civil wars, normally fought with small arms, as in Southern Sudan or the Eastern Congo; or else they are cold wars, as with the current conflict between Iran and the US, which tend to involve the threat of violence as a bargaining tool, though both sides are usually anxious to avoid actual violence.

Related to the prevalence  of cold wars is the idea that in the modern world, all out war between countries with weapons of mass destruction may be sufficiently devastating to be unsustainable without destroying all or nearly all, of the Earth’s population. This means that there is unprecedented global concern about reducing or eliminating the possibility of all out wars between such powers. There is of course, every chance that humanity will eliminate or virtually eliminate itself during the next few centuries, but whether we choose to destroy ourselves or find a way to live together in harmony, things cannot simply go on as they have for millennia, with countries or other warring factions periodically trying to inflict as much damage upon one another as possible.

I actually believe that there are good reasons why we might not only avoid World War Three, but learn to live without war, more or less. Firstly though, we need to look a little more closely into why war, which few regard as a good thing in itself; has proved so difficult

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