peace is not the absence of war essay

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Tracing Quotations

True Peace Is Not Merely the Absence of Tension; It Is the Presence of Justice

Martin Luther King? Elizabeth Tipton Derieux? Alton Hawkins? United Presbyterian Church? Apocryphal?

Quote Investigator: A match for this expression appeared in the 1964 collection “A Martin Luther King Treasury” within a chapter titled “Montgomery Before the Protest”. King described a conversation during which he employed the following line circa 1954-1955. Boldface added to excerpts by QI : [1] 1964, A Martin Luther King Treasury by Martin Luther King Jr., Chapter 2: Montgomery Before the Protest, Quote Page 30, Published Educational Heritage, Yonkers, New York. (Verified on paper)

True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

A thematic match occurred in a letter to the editor of “The Bergen Evening Record” of Hackensack, New Jersey published in 1938 from a person using the initials F. O. E.: [2] 1938 September 17, The Bergen Evening Record, Section: Voice of the People Forum, Letter to the Editor, Letter Title: Democracy, Letter From: F. O. E., Letter Location: Park Ridge, Letter Date: … Continue reading

We have conflict within and fears without but no armed warfare with any other state. But peace is more than absence of armed conflict. Men may fight with their naked fists, with violent words, and by strategy and coups and chicanery. The main cause of conflict is a sense of injustice.

Another thematic match occurred in 1944 within an article by Elizabeth Tipton Derieux printed in “The News and Observer” of Raleigh, North Carolina: [3] 1944 October 1, The News and Observer, The Christian Church In Tomorrow’s World by Elizabeth Tipton Derieux, Quote Page 10, Column 3, Raleigh, North Carolina. (Newspapers_com)

Tomorrow’s peace must be more than the absence of armed conflict. It must be just, creative and cooperative. The weak must be protected from exploitation, the brutal strong curbed, and a sympathetic appreciation developed for the races of mankind.

Another match of this type occurred in 1945 within an article by columnist Dorothy Thompson that appeared in many newspapers: [4] 1945 November 30, Lincoln Evening Journal, Resignation of Ambassador Hurley by Dorothy Thompson, Quote Page 6, Column 3, Lincoln, Nebraska. (Newspapers_com)

Peace is not the mere absence of war. It is a positive condition of justice. It is the sister of charity and mercy. It is the offspring of honesty and truth. It is the triumph of principle.

King used the expression under analysis during a conversation circa 1954-1955 as mentioned previously.

In 1957 King employed an instance during a speech reported in the “Alabama Tribune” of Montgomery, Alabama: [5] 1957 April 26, Alabama Tribune, Noted Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Urges Realistic Look At Race Relations Progress, Quote Page 6, Column 3, Montgomery, Alabama. (Newspapers_com)

I come not to bring this old peace which is merely the absence of tension; I come to bring a positive peace which is the presence of justice and the Kingdom of God. Peace is not merely the absence of something. but it’s the presence of something.

In 1963 a columnist in “The Windsor Star” of Windsor, Ontario, Canada presented a version of the saying with an anonymous attribution: [6] 1963 August 31, The Windsor Star, As We See It by W. L. Clark, Quote Page 2, Column 1, Windsor, Ontario, Canada. (Newspapers_com)

One shrewd comment notes: “Peace is not the absence of violence, it is the presence of justice.”

In 1964 Whitney M Young Jr. executive director of the National Urban League employed a variant: [7] 1964 December 10, The Miami Herald, New Negro Aim: ‘A Little More Money in Pocket’ by Phil Meyer (Washington Bureau), Quote Page 14D, Column 1, Miami, Florida. (Newspapers_com)

Good race relations, he told the assembly, is “not the absence of conflict, tensions, or even riots” “It is the presence of justice and equal opportunity to share in the rewards as well as the opportunities of a truly great society.”

In 1969 a newspaper in Columbus, Indiana printed the following brief statement of prayer from Reverend Alton Hawkins of the Asbury United Methodist church: [8] 1969 September 12, The Republic, Today’s Prayer, Quote Page 4, Column 7, Columbus, Indiana. (Newspapers_com)

. . . we celebrate the peace you offer to all men; a peace that is more than the absence of armed conflict and broader than “peace of mind” or “peace of soul” — a peace that is marked by joy, social harmony, exalted justice and worship.

In 1981 a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate met to discuss the establishment of a U.S. Academy of Peace. When the transcript of the meeting was published it included an addendum with a variety of documents. One document listed a statement that had been formally adopted at the 193rd General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church held in Texas in 1981. This was one of the part of the statement: [9] 1982, Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources United States Senate, Ninety-Seventh Congress, Second Session on S.1889, United … Continue reading

Whereas the desire for peace is not sufficient. Peace must be more than an absence of conflict — peace must be the presence of justice …

In conclusion, Martin Luther King Jr. deserves credit for the statement in the 1964 book “A Martin Luther King Treasury”. King delivered the line in conversation circa 1954-1955, and he used a similar line during a speech in 1957. Thematic precursors appeared in 1938 and 1944.

Image Notes: Public domain illustration of a peace dove from Clker-Free-Vector-Images. The image has been resized and framed.

(Great thanks to Benjamin Pfeiffer whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration. Special thanks to scholar Drew Dellinger who told QI the phrasing that King used in “A Martin Luther King Treasury”. Dellinger also pointed out that King used the saying a few times with slightly different variations. Special thanks to Terri Guillemets who operates “The Quote Garden” website. She has a webpage about quotations that fit within the “Peace is not” topic. She mentioned to QI the pertinence of the 1945 citation.)

Update History: On February 2, 2021 the 1945 citation was added.

Peace is not the absence of war

To get peace, we must first understand the causes and logic of war.

Today is the International Day of Peace, as declared by the United Nations. It recalls the noble words of its 1945 Charter to save us “from the scourge of war”. Thus, the labours of generations of politicians, diplomats and security forces got framed by the dogma that war is always bad, and peace is an unquestionable good that must prevail.

War, per se, is not illegal. It is permitted in the UN Charter to counter crimes of aggression. The concept of a “just war” also exists under international humanitarian law. War may also be necessary, indeed moral. Historically, genocides and crimes against humanity have been ended through the use of force.

At the same time, our peacemaking track record is unimpressive. Over the past half-century, it is hard to think of many armed conflicts that have truly, fully ceased. Instead, most grumble along, boiling up or simmering down periodically. Think of the historical conflicts in Palestine  or  Kashmir , or the many struggles on  Myanmar’s periphery , or the insurgencies in the Maghreb and in the Sahel. Many national authorities are preoccupied with persistent internal divisions, such as  Pakistan which is facing unrest in tribal areas and  South Sudan  which has seen ethnic violence.

Internationally, the UN has spent billions of dollars and deployed tens of thousands of peacekeepers  in scores of countries. Dozens of UN envoys along with those of regional bodies such as the European Union, African Union, and ASEAN criss-cross warzones. Think-tanks and NGOs are busy, peacebuilding projects abound, and peace conferences fronted by eminent personalities fill the calendar.

Some efforts are sanctified by portentous UN Security Council resolutions on the increasingly rare occasions of consensus among the great powers. Sticks and carrots are dangled through  sanctions  and  aid inducements .

But this well-practised modus operandi of the peace business produces meagre returns. It may put a temporary lid on violence as protagonists under pressure sign any piece of paper that allows a breather and chance to regroup. Then the conflict flares up again until the next ceasefire or “peace” deal. And so, the cycle goes on.

Worse still, there is concern that premature peace meddling prolongs conflict as happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina and on the Korean Peninsula. That is because conflicts end only when they are ready to do so. Ideally, that would be when underlying causes or differences have been resolved, including accountability and justice for wrongs inflicted. But, in reality, that hardly ever happens and so wars end only when one side has won decisively. Think World War II or the Vietnam War .

But modern war-making is multidimensional and much more resilient, especially when external sponsors pitch in on different sides. The durability of any subsequent peace depends on two key factors. First is the viciousness of the way in which the earlier war was waged. The reality is that nowadays, appalling atrocities are the norm, and raped, tortured, starved, dispossessed survivors are in no mood to reconcile with their assailants. The second factor then kicks in – the magnanimity or wisdom of victors. This is almost always in short supply.

The irony is that although we know a lot about waging war, we are not smart at making peace. It is easy to award Nobel Peace Prizes, but many winners are embarrassed when their efforts do not withstand the test of time. Prominent examples are former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger  and Ethiopian President  Abiy Ahmed .

That is why, all peace is provisional and once a society has tasted violence, it is perpetually prone to it, especially when Hollywood, Bollywood, and Netflix myth-makers get into shaping the remembrance of history.

We should not be surprised, therefore, that endless armed conflicts have accumulated over the decades: some 170 of different types are now raging across the world. The numbers who died directly in combat increased approximately three-fold to 120,000 last year compared to mortality in the early 2000s. Such statistics give a partial view of the human cost of war, as they underestimate the indirect consequences that fall largely on civilians. These have increased greatly over past decades as wars last longer and become more vicious. The United Nations estimates that currently a quarter of the global population – two billion people – live in conflict areas.

The war-and-peace theory holds that it is not supposed to be this way. As more of us get educated, healthier, and better off, we are supposed to become more peace-loving because that serves our self-interest in achieving stable prosperity. Besides, with more of our essential needs satisfied, and more of our higher needs for voice and esteem realised through representative democracy, we should have less reason to fear or fight others.

Even if we do, we have a plethora of norms and entitlements, laws and institutions to constrain us. Thus, our disputes – within communities and nations, or between them – should be settled tranquilly, informed by the rationality of facts and balanced give-and-take.

Indeed, global indicators on poverty alleviation, human development, and institutional capacity suggest that despite periodic crises, including currently around energy and food, we have made historically unprecedented progress in most economic, social, and political dimensions. But that has not brought world peace. Does that mean the theory is wrong?

Not necessarily, because history also suggests that more education and development bring greater enlightenment about what is wrong with our world as well as the aspiration and capability to do something about it. Most of our social and political advancements have come through fighting for them.

For example, each of the human rights that we take for granted nowadays were achieved through struggle. This happened first in one pioneering setting, and then, as particular rights such as to food and water, or to vote or not to be tortured, got codified, they became universal.

But without the sturdy defence of hard-won rights, they easily flip into wrongs, thereby triggering renewed conflict. And some rights are yet to be fully realised everywhere, such as the right for women and girls to learn in  Afghanistan  or for them to have reproductive choice in parts of the  United States .

Those who enjoy such rights in peace and comfort have no moral standing to stop others from acquiring them. While peaceful means to do so are preferable, conflict often breaks out when authoritarian regimes thwart progress.

Looking ahead, yet more conflicts loom with new geopolitical tensions, and novel insecurities from climate change, pandemics, resource competition, and dysfunctional globalisation. These spawn violence because inequalities within and between societies grow and people around the world continue battling vested interests to gain new human rights.

Every conflict has a logic that must be understood before countering it fairly and justly so that the consequent peace is sustainable. Otherwise, to get peace, we may be obliged to first give conflict a chance.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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Article Contents

• Conceptions of Peace
• Positive Peace as a Priority in the Global Mindset
• Scholarly Myopia and Positive Peace
• Studying Peace
• How to Study Peace: Some Guidelines

Exploring Peace: Looking Beyond War and Negative Peace

Paul F. Diehl is Associate Provost and Ashbel Smith Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas-Dallas. Previously, he was Henning Larsen Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He served as President of the International Studies Association for the 2015-16 term. His areas of expertise include the causes of war, UN peacekeeping, and international law.

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Paul F. Diehl, Exploring Peace: Looking Beyond War and Negative Peace, International Studies Quarterly , Volume 60, Issue 1, March 2016, Pages 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqw005

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Concern about war and large-scale violence has long dominated the study of international security. To the extent that peace receives any scholarly attention, it primarily does so under the rubric of “negative peace:” the absence of war. This article calls for a focus on peace in international studies that begins with a reconceptualization of the term. I examine the limitations of negative peace as a concept, discuss “positive peace,” and demonstrate empirically that Nobel Peace Prize winners have increasingly been those recognized for contributions to positive peace. Nevertheless, scholarly emphasis remains on war, violence, and negative peace—as demonstrated by references to articles appearing in a leading peace-studies journal and to papers presented at International Studies Association meetings. Peace is not the inverse or mirror image of war and therefore requires different theoretical orientations and explanatory variables. The article concludes with a series of guidelines on how to study peace.

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Peace isn't just the absence of war

From war to crime to political disputes, conflicts dominate the news. When the dust settles, people hunger for peace. But without 10,000 small acts that build peace, conflict too easily returns.

• By John Yemma Editor

April 2, 2011

When you learn about peacebuilding , you are likely to experience an aha moment.

All over the world, conflicts are raging between nations, tribes, families, individuals. The war stories you read in Monitor and and other media outlets follow a familiar arc: Discontent leads to tension. Young men take up arms. Horrid acts are committed.Then worse ones. The poet William Butler Yeats called this the “blood dimmed tide” that returns when moderation breaks down.

Eventually exhausted, combatants slump into an uneasy truce. Families mourn and try to rebuild – an apparent end state that is sometimes mistaken for peace. Most of the time, it isn’t.

No area of the world is exempt from the cycle of violence. In the 1980s, Latin America was caught in an acute period of it. In the 1990s, it was the Balkans . Fifty years before that, most of the planet was engulfed.

The cycle is most pronounced where populations have surged, resources are scarce, and young men face bleak prospects. Africa and the Middle East are such places today.

But wars are only a surprise if you haven’t been watching closely. Inside a society sliding toward conflict, the direction is always clear. I remember visiting Kosovo in 1993. It wasn’t the poorest country I’d seen, but a deep feeling of forboding was in the air. Young Albanian men milled about the capital. Serbian police watched from a distance. Nothing said growth or expansion or happier days ahead. Kosovo was not yet at war, but the peace that existed was not real.

Realists believe the cycle of violence is just the way of the world. Idealists believe if we can just stop the fighting, a natural state of peace will return. No one, after all, is against peace. But peace is not just the absence of war. It requires hard work and constant attention. Peacebuilding embraces both the realist and idealist positions. It is a broad-front effort that has emerged in the past 20 years and that is aimed at going beyond conflict resolution to conflict prevention.

Peacebuilding sn’t photogenic. War is. War is sleek and dangerous. It is shock and awe. Peacebuilding doesn’t have an image. A United Nations official in Sierra Leone puts it this way: “Nobody has seen the animal called peacebuilding.”

Peacebuilding is 10,000 small, practical things. Because young men without jobs and too much time on their hands are easily coaxed into fighting, peace builders have to work on creating jobs. Schools and health clinics help war-battered families mend. Professionally trained lawyers, judges, and administrators instill confidence that the system is not rigged to favor the few. Utilities and roads foster a sense of progress. Free and fair elections encourage people to feel they are the actual owners of their nation.

One other ingredient in peacebuilding is needed – addressing a community’s spiritual needs. Religion is often central to conflict. In the northern tier of sub-Saharan Africa , Muslims are in conflict with Christians. In the Balkans, it is Islam vs. Orthodox Christianity. In South Asia , Hindus confront Muslims. In the Gulf, the divide is Sunni and Shiite. Not so long ago in Northern Ireland , it was Catholics against Protestants.

Sure, each tradition has a penchant for excess – crusades, jihads, victimization, persecution. But each also has strands of forgiveness and tolerance. If there is a central truth amidst all these traditions, it has to be tolerance. People who work on peacebuilding look for aspects of different belief systems that emphasis that.

The world has always had wars. But if there is even the slightest possibility that the spirit of freedom so evident in early 2011 can take hold, then all the practical tools of peacebuilding will be needed to ensure that tribal, ethnic, family, and racial rivalries don’t subvert the process. Peacebuilding is about helping the center hold. It is the alternative to the narrative of war that otherwise dominates the pages of any publication whose job is to monitor the world.

John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor . To read this column in the context of the week's news -- and to support quality journalism -- consider subscribing to the Christian Science Monitor weekly newsmagazine.

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Peace means dignity, well-being for all, not just absence of war – UN officials

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“We know that peace cannot be decreed solely through treaties – it must be nurtured through the dignity, rights and capacities of every man and woman,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his remarks to the High-level Forum on the Culture of Peace, convened by the General Assembly. “It is a way of being, of interacting with others, of living on this planet.”

In September 1999, the Assembly adopted, by consensus, a resolution on the Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace. Since then, it has met annually to discuss the issue, as well as how to advance this noble goal.

Mr. Ban said that peace means access to education, health and essential services – especially for girls and women; giving every young woman and man the chance to live as they choose; and developing sustainably and protecting the planet’s biodiversity.

“More than ever, it means living with others on the basis of tolerance, respect and mutual understanding,” he added.

“We are challenged today. We join forces here to promote a culture of peace, and yet all around us we see a spreading virus of war, of conflict, extremism, violence, hatred and terrorism.

“But I am convinced that our strongest arsenal in the face of these threats is not weapons or missiles or guns,” he stated. “It is our shared values … our common vision for peace, development and human rights … our universal aspiration for a meaningful culture of peace.”

Delivering remarks on behalf of Assembly President John Ashe, Vice-President Isabelle F. Picco said the desire for a culture of peace knows no boundaries and is inherent in the hearts of all people.

“It transcends gender, culture, religion, faith and belief, and unites the rich and poor, the old and young, East and West, North and South around a common desire.”

She added that the post-2015 development agenda that Member States are currently working on must be rooted in a culture of peace.

“Peace as an overarching theme must be woven throughout the goals and underpin the targets,” Ms. Picco stated. “And our new agenda must be backed by the political will, commitment, partnerships and financial support to help usher in a new era of peace on a global level.”

• culture of peace

United States Institute of Peace

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Handling Conflict by Peaceful Means

On the Issues with J. Robin West

By: J. Robinson West

Publication Type: Analysis

USIP leaders explain the effect that events around the world and here at home will have on the U.S., and the contributions the Institute can and does make during a time of tremendous challenge – and opportunity.

This past year offered fresh proof that the world we live in is ever dynamic. Fundamental change can come from something as extraordinary as a fruit vendor’s act of defiance in Tunisia to popular revolts by reform movements across the Middle East. At the same time, a decade of war and the weak U.S. economy dictates that there must be new ways to think about the role the U.S. will play in the world in the coming years.

We asked USIP leaders, from board members to senior staff and experts, to explain the effect that events around the world and here at home will have on the U.S., and the contributions the Institute can and does make during a time of tremendous challenge – and opportunity.

Robin West is the chairman and founder of PFC Energy. He has advised chief executives of leading national and international oil and gas companies on corporate strategy, portfolio management, acquisitions, divestitures and investor relations. West served in both the Reagan and Ford administrations; under Reagan, he was an assistant secretary of the Interior for policy, budget and administration, with responsibility for U.S. offshore oil policy. Under Ford, he was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for International Economic Affairs, and, earlier, was on the White House staff. West became chairman of USIP's board of directors in 2004.

As the weak economy forces Americans to look more inward, larger and perhaps more draconian cuts to foreign affairs budgets are inevitable. What do you think this means for America’s role in the world in the next decade?

The U.S. may no longer be the Colossus that bestrides the globe, but nor is any other country. There has been a rise in other countries, but it’s not something that should alarm us. In the last 50 years, important countries have been transformed into democracies with market based economies. This is a triumph of American values and policies. It’s an opportunity.

If you look at Brazil, Turkey, or Indonesia there are all these countries coming up in the world. They are important, and they all believe they have a role to play. The U.S. should not approach this from a position of fear or inadequacy, it’s simply that the world is changing. These countries are going from childhood to adolescence to maturity. Frankly, I think it’s healthy. We have to be sure that their values and interests are aligned with ours.

What is USIP’s role in all of this? Is that role duplicative, for example, of the Department of State?

President Ronald Reagan said: “peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with conflict by peaceful means.” Our job is to find those means. We’re trying to give to practitioners the necessary tools in a changing world. We are not involved in American diplomacy. Diplomacy is defined as the conduct of relations between governments. But what’s happening is you have all these new forces, often non-state actors. We have a very important role to play to try to understand these people and places and find new means to protect our values and interests, and there really isn’t anybody else who does that. America has to be engaged in the world, but we have to find new, more cost effective ways to do it and that’s precisely what USIP is about. We do not want to compete with the Department of State. That is not our job. We are trying to complement it, and all the other agencies of government, plus important new players such as non-governmental agencies, or NGOs.

Given the political situation in Washington, is the case for USIP to Congress and to taxpayers easier to make or harder to make?

Our critics don’t get it but our friends do. What the Institute does is very important. It boils down to this: we save lives and money, and protect our values and interests. Actually, it is a very cost effective way to find the means to empower the people who are actually going to go out and do it including diplomats and soldiers. I think that for Americans to understand what USIP does in the abstract is difficult. When it can demonstrate specifically what it has done, it’s pretty impressive. In the end, the Institute of Peace is about the means, it’s the practical realities.

In a world in which “persistent conflict” is a term of art often used within national security circles in the U.S., should Americans recalibrate their notion of peace?

Yes and no. Recent studies show that fewer people have been killed violently than any other period in mankind. There are still conflicts and there are some very nasty places in the world. The Reagan quote is very useful. There is always going to be conflict, but the questions are, how do you avoid violence or if you go to war, how do you end it and win the peace? No think tank does what we do.

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Explore Further

• Global Change, Peacebuilding and USIP USIP leaders explain the effect that events around the world and here at home will have on the U.S., and the contributions the Institute can and does make during a time of tremendous challenge – and opportunity.

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Last week, foreign ministers from member-states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) gathered in Astana, Kazakhstan. The nine-member SCO — made up of China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan — represents one of the largest regional organizations in the world. And with the SCO’s annual heads-of-state summit slated for early July, the ministers’ meeting offers an important glimpse into the group’s priorities going forward. USIP’s Bates Gill and Carla Freeman examine how regional security made its way to the top of the agenda, China’s evolving role in Central Asia and why SCO expansion has led to frustrations among member states.

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PEACE BEYOND THE ABSENCE OF WAR

This essay explores the notion that peace is more than the mere absence of war with multiple perspectives and examples. While the traditional definition of peace emphasizes the absence of violence, a more nuanced definition acknowledges the multifaceted nature of peace. The United Nations' definition of peace highlights the importance of human rights, good governance, social and economic development, and environmental sustainability. The essay argues that this holistic view of peace is crucial in understanding the complexity of achieving peace in our societies. By considering different perspectives and examples, it aims to provide a deeper understanding of the significance of peace beyond the absence of war. It also discusses the challenges of achieving peace in different contexts, such as in conflict zones, post-conflict societies, and areas affected by structural violence. Furthermore, it highlights the role of non-violent conflict resolution, dialogue, and reconciliation in achieving sustainable peace. It draws on examples such as the peacebuilding efforts in Northern Ireland and South Africa, as well as the role of women in peacebuilding and conflict resolution. The essay discusses the relationship between peace and development. It argues that peace and development are mutually reinforcing, and sustainable peace is only possible when there is social and economic development. It highlights the role of inclusive economic policies, education, and healthcare in building peaceful societies not only at the national level but also regionally, internationally, and globally.

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The paper argues why the idea of peacebuilding ought to be revisited in the context of sustainable development agenda. The authors contend that peacebuilding should not be conceived only as a post-conflict phenomenon, especially in light of the SDGs. The SDGs succeeded their predecessor Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) but are fundamentally different from their forerunner. The new sustainable goals are universal—to be pursued by both the developing and developed countries, putting all nations in the same boat. One of the major targets of SDGs relates to peace. Yet, the Western developed countries are deemed inherently peaceful as advocated by the ‘democratic peace’ logic. Peacebuilding evokes images of war-torn non-Western societies battered by protracted conflicts. However, an increasing appeal of populism, rising global inequality coupled with violent extremism are creating unanticipated rifts in the Western societies. In this context, it is important to view the idea of peacebuilding through the lens of SDGs. The authors discuss the need of a differentiation between ‘hard peacebuilding’, such as those overseen by the UN Peace Support Operations (UNPSOs) aimed at addressing negative peace or ending violence in post-war countries, at the same time, ‘soft peacebuilding’ in societies where functional state institutions are present but their existence does not translate into grievances of communities being addressed.

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks

Smita Ramnarain

Erin McCandless

Journal of International Relations

Teresa Almeida Cravo

Peacebuilding has become a guiding principle of international intervention in the periphery since its inclusion in the United Nations’ (UN) Agenda for Peace in 1992.1 With the objective of creating the conditions for a selfsustaining peace in order to prevent a return to armed conflict, peacebuild­ ing is directed towards the eradication of the root causes of violence and is necessar­ ily a multifaceted project that involves political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions and security practices, which are understood as complementary and mu­ tually reinforcing. However, the transition from armed violence to lasting peace has not been easy or consensual. The conception of liberal peace proved particularly limited, and inevi­ tably controversial, and the reality of war-torn societies far more complex than an­ ticipated by international actors that assume activities in the promotion of peace in post-conflict contexts today. With a career full of contested successes and some...

Helen Ware , DB Subedi , Marty Branagan , Bert (Bertram) A Jenkins

Cultivating Peace: Contexts, Practices and Multidimensional Models moves away from negative connotations associated with the concept of post-conflict peacebuilding. It embraces a multiplicity of trans-disciplinary approaches to peacebuilding, mostly coinciding with the eco-horticultural metaphor of peace cultivation. Ultimately, the idea of cultivating peace embodies love and compassion, while utilising local knowledge, expertise and wisdom to do no harm. Using various case studies from across the world, the narratives and insights in this book present diverse facets of peacebuilding, yet all contribute constructive lessons. The chapters cover three general themes. Some examine the structural and discursive causes of violence and how to improve situations where violence is evident, or to prevent it from breaking out. Others deal with the aftermath of violence and how to reconcile and restore shattered lives and societies. The third group deals with positive social change by nonviolent means, which is much more constructive than the “negative peace” of ceasefires and peace enforcement used to manage direct violence. Promoting the ideal of peace cultivation, this volume emphasises ways to improve things, to suggest alternatives, and to employ initiatives to plant and grow positive changes both during the fighting and in the aftermath of violent conflicts.

Fazli DOĞAN

Recent events in international relations push us to analyze comprehensively and simultaneously the issues regarding peace, security and development. Many states in the world still suffer from deep and stark economic problems. These economic problems also increase the risk of conflict especially in the developing world. If any conflict occurs, the political, social, economic and environmental disasters can be deepened as well. Therefore, any state facing chronic development problems, has greater risks in terms of the potential conflict or humanitarian crisis. The states in conflict are obliged to use their human capital as soldiers rather than their economic developments. Additionally, those countries mostly allocate their own resources for armament rather than infrastructure or investment. They are not also able to get enough foreign aid for development. These economic and security problems reproduce widespread humanitarian crises, violations of law and corruption that may undermine order and peace in those countries. In this respect, security, peace and development are inseparable issues and concepts that must be tackled together both in theory and practice. Being aware of this necessity, this paper argues that if we analyze those three concepts together, the agenda of the security studies can be broadened. This paper also deals with the case of United Nations in general, and recent resolutions of the United Nations Security Council in particular that evaluate peace, security and development in the same perspective.

Unmana Sarangi

ray perkins

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November 1, 2014

Perpetual Peace

Are democracies less warlike?

By Michael Shermer

From Ukraine, Syria and Gaza to the centenary of the First World War in 2014, news junkies and students of history cannot help but wonder if war is a perpetual feature of civilization. German philosopher Immanuel Kant wondered as much in a 1795 essay entitled “Perpetual Peace,” concluding that citizens of a democratic republic are less likely to support their government in a war because “this would mean calling down on themselves all the miseries of war.” Ever since, the “democratic peace theory” has had its supporters. Rutgers University political scientist Jack Levy, in a 1989 essay on “The Causes of War,” reasoned that the “absence of war between democratic states comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.” Skeptics point out such exceptions as the Greek and Punic wars, the War of 1812, the U.S. Civil War, the India-Pakistan wars and the Israel-Lebanon War. Who is right? Can science answer the question?

In their 2001 book Triangulating Peace , political scientists Bruce Russett and John Oneal employed a multiple logistic regression model on data from the Correlates of War Project that recorded 2,300 militarized interstate disputes between 1816 and 2001. They assigned each country a democracy score between 1 and 10, based on the Polity Project, which measures how competitive its political process is, as well as the fairness of its elections, checks and balances of power, transparency, and so on. The researchers found that when two countries scored high on the Polity scale, disputes between them decreased by 50 percent, but when one country was either a low-scoring democracy or an autocracy, it doubled the chance of a quarrel between them.

Kant also suggested that international trade (economic interdependency) and membership in international communities (transparency and accountability) reduce the likelihood of conflict. So in their model Russett and Oneal included data on the amount of trade between nations and found that countries that depended more on trade in a given year were less likely to have a militarized dispute in the subsequent year. They also counted the number of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) that every pair of nations jointly belonged to and ran a regression analysis with democracy and trade scores. Overall, democracy, trade and membership in IGOs (the “triangle” of their title) all favor peace, and if a pair of countries are in the top 10th of the scale on all three variables, they are 81 percent less likely than an average pair of countries to have a militarized dispute in a given year.

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How has the democratic peace theory held up since 2001? With all the conflict around the world, it seems like peace is on the rocks. But anecdotes are not data. In a 2014 special issue of the Journal of Peace Research , Uppsala University political scientist Håvard Hegre reassessed all the evidence on “Democracy and Armed Conflict.” He stated that “the empirical finding that pairs of democratic states have a lower risk of interstate conflict than other pairs holds up, as does the conclusion that consolidated democracies have less conflict than semi-democracies.” Hegre is skeptical that economic interdependence alone can keep countries from going to war—the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” popularized by Thomas Friedman's observation that no two countries with McDonald's fight—unless their economies are in democratic nations. He wonders, reasonably, if there might be some other underlying factor that explains both democracy and peace but does not suggest what that might be. I propose human nature itself and our propensity to prefer the elements of democracy. Peace is a pleasant by-product.

Whatever the deeper cause may be, the long-term trends are encouraging. According to Freedom House, there were no electoral democracies (with universal suffrage) in 1900, 69 in 1990, and 122 in 2014—63 percent of the 195 countries in the world. That's moral progress. The other 37 percent—particularly the theocratic autocracies desirous of thermonuclear weapons and bent on bringing about Armageddon—means we must remain vigilant. Otherwise we run the risk that Kant's perpetual peace will dissolve into the source of his essay title's inspiration: an innkeeper's sign featuring a cemetery. This is not the type of perpetual peace toward which most sentient beings strive.

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Article contents

The conduct and consequences of war.

• Alyssa K. Prorok Alyssa K. Prorok Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
•  and  Paul K. Huth Paul K. Huth Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.72
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 22 December 2017
• This version: 25 June 2019
• Previous version

The academic study of warfare has expanded considerably over the past 15 years. Whereas research used to focus almost exclusively on the onset of interstate war, more recent scholarship has shifted the focus from wars between states to civil conflict, and from war onset to questions of how combatants wage and terminate war. Questioned as well are the longer-term consequences of warfare for countries and their populations. Scholarship has also shifted away from country-conflict-year units of analysis to micro-level studies that are attentive to individual-level motives and explanations of spatial variation in wartime behavior by civilians and combatants within a country or armed conflict. Today, research focuses on variations in how states and rebel groups wage war, particularly regarding when and how wars expand, whether combatants comply with the laws of war, when and why conflicts terminate, and whether conflicts end with a clear military victory or with a political settlement through negotiations. Recent research also recognizes that strategic behavior continues into the post-conflict period, with important implications for the stability of the post-conflict peace. Finally, the consequences of warfare are wide-ranging and complex, affecting everything from political stability to public health, often long after the fighting stops.

• interstate war
• laws of war
• civilian victimization
• war termination
• war severity
• post-conflict peace

Updated in this version

Updated introduction, subheadings, references, and substantial revision throughout.

Introduction

Over the past 15 years, research by social scientists on the conduct and consequences of war has expanded considerably. Previously, scholarly research had been heavily oriented towards the analysis of the causes of interstate war and its onset. Three simultaneous trends, however, have characterized scholarship on war since the early 2000s. First, studies of the dynamics of civil war have proliferated. Second, war is conceptualized as a series of inter-related stages in which the onset, conduct, and termination of wars as well as post-war relations are analyzed theoretically and empirically in a more integrated fashion. Third, studies have shifted away from country-conflict-year units of analysis to micro-level studies that are sensitive to spatial variation in behavior within a country or conflict.

This article reviews and assesses this body of recent scholarship, which has shifted the focus from war onset to questions of how combatants wage war and what are the longer-term consequences of warfare for countries and their populations. Scholarly research examines the conduct and consequences of both interstate and civil wars.

The analysis is organized into three main sections. It begins with research on how states and rebel groups wage war, with particular attention given to questions regarding war expansion, compliance with the laws of war, and war severity. Section two turns to the literature on war duration, termination, and outcomes. Different explanations are discussed, for when and why wars come to an end; then, the question of how war’s end influences the prospects for a stable post-war peace is considered. In section three, recent scholarship is examined on the consequences of war for post-war trends in political stability and public health. The concluding discussion addresses some of the important contributions associated with recent scholarship on the conduct and consequences of war as well as promising directions for future research.

The Waging of Civil and International Wars

What accounts for the nature of the wars we see? This broad question drives a new research tradition in conflict studies that compliments traditional analyses of war onset by shifting the focus to state behavior during war. This research goes beyond understandings of why states fight one another to engaging questions of why states join ongoing wars, when and why they follow the laws of war, and what explains the severity of wars. Taken together, these questions open the black box of wartime behavior.

Intervention and the Expansion of Interstate Wars

Research on war expansion developed as a natural outgrowth of analyses of war onset: scholars studying why states initiate conflict shifted focus to understand why third parties join ongoing wars. The link between alliances and joining behavior has been central to studies of war expansion, spawning a broad research tradition that focuses on alliances and geography, differences among types of alliances, and the characteristics of alliance members. Siverson and Starr ( 1991 ), for example, find a strong interaction effect between geography and alliances, in that a warring neighbor who is an ally increases the likelihood of a state joining an existing conflict. Leeds, Long, and Mitchell ( 2000 ) also find that the specific content of alliance obligations is critical to understanding when states choose to intervene, and that states uphold the terms of their alliance commitments nearly 75% of the time. Most recently, Vasquez and Rundlett ( 2016 ) found that alliances are essentially a necessary condition for war expansion, highlighting the importance of this factor in explaining joining behavior.

Alliance behavior is also an important topic in the study of democratic wartime behavior. While Choi ( 2004 ) presents findings suggesting that democracies are particularly likely to align with one another, Reiter and Stam ( 2002 ) provide counter-evidence that democracies are willing to align with non-democracies when it serves their strategic interests. Given the tendency to uphold alliance obligations, and empirical evidence showing that war initiators are more successful when their adversary does not receive third-party assistance (Gartner & Siverson, 1996 ), recent theoretical research suggests that states, understanding joining dynamics, might manipulate war aims to reduce the likelihood of outside intervention (Werner, 2000 ).

These studies suggest that war expansion should be understood as the consequence of a decision calculus undertaken by potential joiners. While much of the contemporary literature focuses on alliance behavior, this only indirectly gets at the question of who will join ongoing conflicts. A full explanation of war expansion from this perspective would also require that we explain when states form alliances in the first place. Further, the analyses of Gartner and Siverson ( 1996 ) and of Werner ( 2000 ) suggest that strategic thinking must be the focus of future research on war expansion. Recent research begins to address this issue: DiLorenzo and Rooney ( 2018 ) examine how uncertainty over estimates of third party resolve influence war-making decisions of states, finding that rival states are more likely to initiate conflict when domestic power shifts in potential joiner states (i.e., allies) increase uncertainty over the strength of that alliance commitment. Future research should continue to investigate the links between expectations of third-party behavior and initial war initiation decisions, as this research highlights important selection processes that empirical research has not yet fully explored.

Finally, recent research goes further to connect war initiation and expansion by arguing that commitment problems—one of the key bargaining failures leading to war initiation—also helps explain war expansion. Shirkey ( 2018 ) finds that wars caused by commitment rather than information problems are more likely to expand, as they are generally fought over greater war aims, are more severe, and last longer. These factors generate risks and rewards for intervention that encourage expansion.

The literature on interstate war expansion has made progress in the last decade with much closer attention to modeling strategic calculations by combatants and potential interveners. The result has been a better understanding of the interrelationship between onset and joining behavior and the realization that the timing and the sequence in which sides intervene is critical to war expansion (Joyce, Ghosn, & Bayer, 2014 ).

Expansion of Civil Wars

The analog to studies of war expansion in the interstate context has traditionally been the study of intervention in the civil war context. Research in this field treats the decision to intervene in much the same way as the war expansion literature treats the potential joiner’s decision calculus. That is, intervention is the result of a rational, utility-maximizing decision calculus in which potential interveners consider the costs and benefits of intervention as well as the potential for achieving desired outcomes. Understood in these terms, both domestic and international strategic considerations affect the decision to intervene, with the Cold War geopolitical climate much more conducive to countervailing interventions than the post-Cold War era has been (Regan, 2002a ), and peacekeeping-oriented interventions most likely in states with ethnic, trade, military, or colonial ties to the intervening state (Rost & Greig, 2011 ).

Whether states are most likely to intervene in easy or hard cases is a central question. While Aydin ( 2010 ) showed that states will delay intervention when previous interventions by other states have failed to influence the conflict, Rost and Grieg ( 2011 ) showed that state-based interventions for peacekeeping purposes are most likely in tough cases—long ethnic wars and conflicts that kill and displace large numbers of civilians. Finally, Gent ( 2008 ) shows that the likelihood of success may not affect the intervention decision equally for government and opposition-targeted interventions. He finds that both types of intervention are more likely when governments face stronger rebel groups, thus implying that intervention in support of rebel groups occurs when the likelihood of success is highest, but intervention supporting governments is most likely when states face their most intense challenges.

There are two likely sources of the discrepancies in this literature. First, most analyses have focused exclusively on the intervener’s decision calculus, or the supply side, failing to account for variation in the demand for intervention. Second, there is significant inconsistency in the literature’s treatment of the goals of interveners. Some analyses assume that states intervene to end conflicts, while others don’t make this limiting assumption but still fail to distinguish among interventions for different purposes.

Newer research takes important strides to address these issues. First, Salehyan, Skrede Gleditsch, and Cunningham ( 2011 ) developed a theory of third party support for insurgent groups that explicitly modeled both supply-side and demand-side factors driving the intervention decision. They found that demand is greatest among weak rebel groups, but supply is greatest for strong groups. Second, research by Cunningham ( 2010 ) explicitly measured whether third party states intervene with independent goals, and Stojek and Chacha ( 2015 ) theorized that intervention behavior is driven by economic motivations. Trade ties increase the likelihood of intervention on the side of the government.

Finally, Kathman ( 2010 ) focused on contiguous state interveners in examining motives for intervention. He developed a measure of conflict infection risk that predicts the likelihood of conflict spreading to each contiguous state. Empirically, he finds that, as the risk of contagion increases, so does the probability of intervention by at-risk neighbors. This research develops a convincing mechanism and empirical test to explain a subset of interventions and provides a clear link from intervention research to recent research on civil conflict contagion. While the contagion literature is too broad to review here, mechanisms posited for civil war expansion across borders range from refugee flows (Salehyan & Gleditsch, 2006 ), to ethnic kinship ties (Forsberg, 2014 ), to increased military expenditures in neighboring states (Phillips, 2015 ).

The literature on intervention into civil wars has grown significantly over the past decade as internationalization of civil conflicts has become common and often results in escalatory dynamics that are of deep concern to analysts and policymakers.

Compliance With the Laws of War

Scholars have recently begun studying the conditions under which compliance with the laws of war is most likely and the mechanisms most important in determining compliance. This research shifts the focus toward understanding state behavior during war and the strategic and normative considerations that influence decision-making processes of states. Two key questions drive scholarship in this tradition; first, does international law constrain state behavior, even when the state is threatened by severe conflict, and second, can observed compliance be attributed to ratification status, or is it instead a result of strategic decision making?

Scholars have yet to provide conclusive answers to these questions; while compliance is observed in many circumstances, most scholars attribute observed restraint to factors other than international law. Legro ( 1995 ), for example, found that international agreements had limited impact on Britain and Germany’s use of unrestricted submarine warfare, strategic bombing of civilian targets, and chemical weapons during WWII. In analyses of civilian targeting during interstate war, Downes ( 2006 ) and Valentino, Huth, and Croco ( 2006 ) also found that international law itself has little impact on a state’s propensity for civilian targeting. Downes argued that civilian targeting occurs most often when states are fighting protracted wars of attrition and desire to save lives on their own side, or when they intend to annex enemy territory with potentially hostile civilians. Valentino et al. ( 2006 ) similarly found that the decision to target civilians is driven by strategic considerations and is unconstrained by treaty obligations relating to the laws of war. Finally, Fazal and Greene ( 2015 ) found that observed compliance is explained by identity rather than law; violations are much more common in European vs. non-European dyads than in other types of dyads.

While these analyses suggest that international law has little effect on state behavior and that observed compliance is incidental, Price ( 1997 ) and Morrow ( 2014 ) argued that law does exert some influence on compliance behavior. Price attributed variation in the use of chemical weapons to the terms of international agreements, arguing that complete bans are more effective than partial bans. Morrow ( 2014 ), however, demonstrated that law’s impact varies depending upon issue area, regime characteristics, and adversary identity. Of eight issue areas, he found the worst compliance records on civilian targeting and prisoners of war, which perhaps accounts for the largely negative conclusions drawn by Downes ( 2006 ) and Valentino et al. ( 2006 ). Additionally, Morrow found, unlike Valentino et al., that democratic states are more likely to comply after ratification than before, suggesting that obligations under international law do affect state behavior, at least in democracies. Finally, he demonstrated that compliance increases significantly when an adversary has also ratified a given treaty, arguing this effect is due to reciprocity.

More recent scholarship expands this research, showing that law may affect state behavior through additional mechanisms that previous research had not considered. For example, Kreps and Wallace ( 2016 ) and Wallace ( 2015 ) found that public support for state policies as diverse as drone strikes and torture of prisoners of war are critically influenced by international law. International condemnation of U.S. policies reduces public support most when such condemnation focuses on legal critiques. This suggests that international law influences state behavior in democracies through its effect on public opinion, not through liberal norms of nonviolence. Additionally, Appel and Prorok ( 2018 ) and Jo and Thompson ( 2014 ) showed that external constraints influence states’ compliance behavior. Specifically, Appel and Prorok showed that states target fewer civilians in interstate war when they are embedded in alliance and trade networks dominated by third party states who have ratified international treaties prohibiting the abuse of non-combatants during war. Jo and Thompson showed that states are more likely to grant international observers access to detention centers when they are more reliant upon foreign aid. These findings suggest that international law can influence state behavior indirectly, through pressure exerted by international donors and backers.

Scholarship on compliance with the laws of war in interstate wars has made considerable progress over the past decade. We now know much more about the contingent support of democratic state leaders and publics for compliance with the laws of war. This key finding opens up new areas of research on the strategic efforts of political and military leaders to convince publics of their commitment to international law and whether those strategies are likely to be successful.

Civilian Targeting in Civil War

The mistreatment and deliberate targeting of civilian populations is an active area of research by scholars who study civil wars (Hultman, 2007 ; Humphreys & Weinstein, 2006 ; Kalyvas, 2006 ; Valentino et al., 2004 ; Weinstein, 2007 ; Wickham-Crowley, 1990 ). Most research on this topic treats the use of violence against civilians as a strategic choice; that is, combatants target civilians to induce their compliance, signal resolve, weaken an opponent’s support base, or extract resources from the population. In his seminal work on the topic, Kalyvas ( 2006 ) demonstrated that combatants resort to the use of indiscriminate violence to coerce civilian populations when they lack the information and control necessary to target defectors selectively. Similarly, Valentino ( 2005 ) and Valentino et al. ( 2004 ) found that incumbents are more likely to resort to mass killing of civilians when faced with strong insurgent opponents that they are unable to defeat through more conventional tactics.

More recent analyses have built upon these earlier works, adding levels of complexity to the central theories developed previously and examining new forms of violence that previous studies did not. Balcells ( 2011 ) brought political considerations back in, finding that direct violence is most likely in areas where pre-conflict political power between state and rebel supporters was at parity, while indirect violence is most likely in locations where the adversary’s pre-war political support was highest. Wood ( 2010 ) accounted for the impact of relative strength and adversary strategy, finding that weak rebel groups, lacking the capacity to protect civilian populations, will increase their use of violence in response to state violence, while strong rebel groups display the opposite pattern of behavior. Lyall ( 2010a ) also found conditionalities in the relationship between state behavior and insurgent reactions, demonstrating that government “sweep” operations are much more effective at preventing and delaying insurgent violence when carried out by forces of the same ethnicity as the insurgent group. Finally, Cohen ( 2016 ) advanced research by focusing on wartime sexual violence. She found that rape, like other forms of violence, is used strategically in civil war. Specifically, armed groups use rape as a socialization tactic: groups that recruit through abduction engage in rape at higher rates, to generate loyalty and trust between soldiers.

This large body of research provides many insights into the strategic use of violence against civilians during civil war. However, until recently, little research addressed questions of compliance with legal obligations. With the recent formation of the International Criminal Court, however, states and rebel groups are now subject to legal investigation for failure to comply with basic principles of the laws of war.

Emerging research suggests that the International Criminal Court (ICC) and international law more generally do affect the behavior of civil war combatants. For example, Hillebrecht ( 2016 ) found that ICC actions during the Libyan civil war reduced the level of mass atrocities committed in the conflict, while Jo and Simmons ( 2016 ) found that the ICC reduces civilian targeting by governments and rebel groups that are seeking legitimacy, suggesting international legal institutions can reduce violations of humanitarian law during civil war. These findings should be tempered, however, by recent research suggesting that ICC involvement in civil wars can, under certain conditions, extend ongoing conflicts (Prorok, 2017 ).

Finally, beyond the ICC, Stanton ( 2016 ) and Jo ( 2015 ) both demonstrated that international law constrains civil war actors by establishing standards against which domestic and international constituencies judge the behavior of governments and rebel groups. Particularly when rebels are seeking legitimacy, Jo argues, they are more likely to comply with international legal standards in a variety of areas, from protection of civilian populations to child soldiering. This research suggests that even without direct intervention by the ICC, international law can influence the behavior of governments and rebels engaged in civil war.

While recent research has shown that the laws of war can influence civilian targeting in civil wars, the large loss of civilian life in the Syrian civil war highlights how fragile the commitment to international law can be. It points to important future research questions about when threats of various sanctions by the international community against non-compliance are actually credible and which actors can apply effective coercive pressure.

Losses Suffered in Wars

Recent scholarship has taken up the issue of war severity. Empirical research suggests that the tactics and strategies used by states during war, and the political pressures that compel them to adopt those policies, affect the severity of conflict. Biddle ( 2004 ), for instance, argued that war-fighting strategies influence the magnitude of losses sustained during war, and found that states employing the modern system of force reduce their exposure to lethal firepower, thus limiting losses. Valentino, Huth, and Croco ( 2010 ) examined the reasons behind different strategic choices, arguing that democratic sensitivity to the costs of war pressure democratic leaders to adopt military policies designed to limit fatalities. They found that increasing military capabilities decreases civilian and military fatalities, while reliance on guerrilla or attrition strategies, as well as fighting on or near one’s own territory, increases fatalities. They reported that democracies are significantly more likely to join powerful alliances and less likely to use attrition or guerrilla strategies, or to fight on their own territory.

Speaking to the conventional wisdom that interstate warfare is on the decline, recent research by Fazal ( 2014 ) suggests that modern medical advances mean that, while war has become less fatal, it has not necessarily become less severe. This raises questions about common understandings of broad trends in conflict frequency and severity as well as questions about best practices for measuring conflict severity. Future research should grapple with both of these issues.

Civil war studies have recently begun to focus more on conflict severity as an outcome in need of explanation. Many key explanatory factors in early research mirrored those in interstate war research, making comparison possible. For example, like interstate war, civil war scholarship consistently finds that democracies suffer less severe conflicts than nondemocracies (Heger & Salehyan, 2007 ; Lacina, 2006 ; Lujala, 2009 ). Regarding state military strength, research by Lujala ( 2009 ) demonstrated that relative equality between government and rebel forces leads to the deadliest conflicts, as rebels with the strength to fight back will likely inflict more losses than those without the ability to sustain heavy engagement with government forces. Finally, recent research by Balcells and Kalyvas ( 2014 ) mirrored work on interstate war by focusing on how the military strategies adopted by combatants affect conflict intensity. They found that civil conflicts fought via conventional means tend to be more lethal than irregular or symmetric nonconventional (SNC) wars, as only the former involve direct confrontations with heavy weaponry. While research on conflict severity is still developing, these studies suggest that democracy, military strength, and strategy are consistent predictors of conflict severity, although the mechanisms posited for the effects of these variables sometimes differ between civil and interstate war.

What this research does not provide clear answers on is how battle losses trend throughout the course of conflict, as most factors examined in the above research are static throughout a conflict. As our ability to measure conflict severity at a more micro temporal and spatial level has improved, emerging research is beginning to address these questions. For example, Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon ( 2014 ) find that increasing UN troop presence decreases battlefield deaths by increasing the costs of perpetrating violence. Dasgupta Gawande, and Kapur ( 2017 ) also found reductions in insurgent violence associated with implementation of development programs, though the pacifying effects of such programs are conditional upon local state capacity. Additional research shows that trends in violence in Islamist insurgencies vary predictably, with violence suppressed due to anticipated social disapproval during important Islamic holidays (Reese, Ruby, & Pape, 2017 ). Recent research also suggests local variation in cell-phone coverage affects local levels of insurgent violence, as increasing cell-phone communication improves the state’s ability to gather information and monitor insurgent behavior, thereby reducing insurgent violence (Shapiro & Weidmann, 2015 ). These recent studies represent an important trend in conflict severity research that more carefully examines the dynamics of escalation and de-escalation within given conflicts, both spatially and temporally. We encourage additional research in this vein.

The Duration, Termination, and Outcome of War

What accounts for the duration, termination, and outcomes of interstate and civil wars, and the durability of the peace that follows these conflicts? These questions represent a central focus of contemporary conflict studies, and are closely linked in terms of their explanations. A major innovation in this literature in the past 10 to 15 years has been the extension of the bargaining model of war from its original application in the context of war onset (Blainey, 1973 ; Fearon, 1995 ) to its use in the context of war duration, termination, and outcome.

The turn to bargaining models has placed relative military capabilities and battlefield developments at the center of much of the theoretical literature in this area. This focus, however, has spawned a backlash in recent years, as patterns that contradict the implications of bargaining models are detected and theorized. The bargaining approach and its critiques are discussed in the following sections.

Duration of Wars

Understood within the bargaining framework, war duration is closely linked to factors that influence the relative strength of combatants. Theoretical and empirical research suggests that longer wars occur when opponents of relatively equal strength cannot achieve breakthroughs on the battlefield (Bennett & Stam, 1996 ; Filson & Werner, 2007b ; Slantchev, 2004 ), although this pattern does not hold for wars involving non-state actors where a large asymmetry in power increases war duration (Sullivan, 2008 ).

Additional research suggests, however, that relative military strength may not be the best predictor of war duration. Bennett and Stam ( 1996 ), for example, demonstrated that military strategy has a large impact on war duration, independent of military strength, with attrition and punishment strategies leading to longer wars than maneuver strategies. The type of political objectives sought by a war initiator may also offset the impact of military strength, as war aims that require significant target compliance generally lead to longer wars (Sullivan, 2008 ). Still others argue that domestic political sensitivity to concessions-making increases conflict duration, while domestic cost sensitivity leads to shorter wars (Filson & Werner, 2007a ; Mattes & Morgan, 2004 ). Thus, democracies are expected to fight shorter wars (Filson & Werner, 2007b ), whereas mixed regimes will fight longer wars as they gamble for resurrection in the face of high domestic costs for war losses (Goemans, 2000 ). Research by Lyall ( 2010b ), however, suggests that this relationship is conditional upon conflict type, as he found no relationship between democracy and war duration in the context of counterinsurgency wars.

Biddle ( 2004 ) more directly challenged bargaining models of war duration by comparing the predictive power of models including traditional measures of relative military capabilities to those accounting for combatants’ methods of force employment. Biddle demonstrated that models taking force employment into account generate more accurate predictions of war duration than those assuming an unconditional relationship between military power and war duration. A second important challenge to traditional applications of bargaining models comes from Reiter ( 2009 ). He demonstrated that the argument that decisive battlefield outcomes promote quick termination is conditional upon the absence of commitment problems. When compliance fears dominate information asymmetries, battle losses and the expectation of future losses may not be sufficient to end conflict, as belligerents will continue fighting in pursuit of absolute victory to eliminate the threat of the losing state defecting from post-war settlements. Reiter thus demonstrates that commitment problems and information asymmetries have varying effects on war duration, and both must be accounted for in models of conflict duration and termination.

Despite these critiques, more recent research continues to approach the question of war duration from the bargaining perspective. Shirkey ( 2012 ), for example, argued that late third-party joiners to interstate conflicts lengthen those disputes by complicating the bargaining process. Joiners add new issues to the war and increase uncertainty about relative power among combatants, thus requiring additional fighting to reveal information and find a bargained solution. Weisiger ( 2016 ) similarly focused on information problems, but attempts to unpack the mechanism by focusing on more specific characteristics of battlefield events. Using new data on the timing of battle deaths for specific war participants, Weisiger found that settlement is more likely after more extensive fighting, and that states are more likely to make concessions after their battle results have deteriorated. Finally, recent research has also begun to problematize resolve, considering how variation in actors’ resolve affects their willingness to stay in a fight or cut losses (Kertzer, 2017 ). This represents a fruitful area for future research, as conceptually and empirically unpacking resolve will shed new light on costs of war and how they relate to war onset, duration, and termination.

Scholars studying the duration of civil wars also commonly apply a rationalist perspective. Factors that increase the costs of sustaining the fight generally shorten wars, while those that raise the costs of making concessions tend to lengthen conflicts. Along these lines, research suggests that the availability of contraband funding for rebel groups lengthens conflicts by providing rebels with the economic resources to sustain their campaigns (Fearon, 2004 ). However, additional research demonstrates that the influence of contraband is mitigated by fluctuations in its market value (Collier, Hoeffler, & Söderbom, 2004 ), by how rebels earn funding from resources (through smuggling versus extortion; Conrad, Greene, Igoe Walsh, & Whitaker, 2018 ), and by the composition of state institutions (Wiegand & Keels, 2018 ).

Research suggests that structural conditions also affect civil war duration, such as the stakes of war, ethnic divisions, and the number of combatants involved. For example, ethnic conflicts over control of territory are generally longer than those fought over control of the central government (Balch-Lindsay & Enterline, 2000 ; Collier et al., 2004 ; Fearon, 2004 ). Regarding the role of ethnicity, Wucherpfennig, Metternich, Cederman, and Skrede Gleditsch ( 2012 ) demonstrated that the effect of ethnic cleavages is conditional on their relationship to political institutions. Regarding the complexity of the conflict, Cunningham ( 2011 ) found that civil wars with a greater number of combatants on each side are longer than those with fewer combatants. Findley ( 2013 ), however, showed that the number of conflict actors has varying effects across different stages of conflict, encouraging cooperation early on while impeding lasting settlement.

Third party intervention has also received significant attention in the civil war duration literature, with scholars generally arguing that intervention affects duration by augmenting the military strength of combatants. Empirical findings in early studies are mixed, however; while results consistently show that unbiased intervention or simultaneous intervention on both sides of a conflict increase war duration (Balch-Lindsay & Enterline, 2000 ; Balch-Lindsay, Enterline, & Joyce, 2008 ; Regan, 2002b ), biased interventions generate more inconsistent results.

In a valuable study addressing limitations of earlier research, Cunningham ( 2010 ) focused on the goals of third parties, and found that when interveners pursue agendas that are independent of those of the internal combatants, wars are more difficult to terminate due to decreased incentives to negotiate and a higher likelihood that commitment problems stymie settlements. This suggests that the empirical finding that intervention lengthens war may be driven by a subset of cases in which third parties intervene with specific goals. Ultimately, analyses focused on intervention do not account for the potential selection effect that influences when states will intervene. If Gent ( 2008 ) is correct, biased intervention should be most likely when the power ratio between government and rebel forces is close to parity, a factor which, if ignored, may bias the results of these analyses.

More recent studies have continued to unpack intervention, demonstrating that there are important distinctions beyond the biased versus balanced debate. Sawyer, Cunningham, and Reed ( 2015 ), for example, showed that different types of external support affect rebel fighting capacity differently. Specifically, fungible types of support like financial and arms transfers are particularly likely to lengthen conflict because they increase uncertainty over relative power. Similarly, Narang ( 2015 ) also focused on the uncertainty induced by external support. He showed that humanitarian assistance inadvertently increases both actors’ uncertainty over relative power, thereby prolonging civil war.

Until recently, this literature suffered from a major weakness in that it relied empirically on state-level variables that did not fully capture the dyadic nature of its theoretical propositions. Cunningham, Skrede Gleditsch, and Salehyan ( 2013 ) new dyadic data represents an important contribution to the field, as it explicitly measures the relative strength, mobilization capacity, and fighting capacity of rebel groups and applies a truly dyadic empirical approach. New research in this field should continue to approach questions of war duration and outcome with dyadic data and theory along with more micro-level studies that seek to explain variation in rebel and state fighting across different geographic locations and over time (e.g., Greig, 2015 ).

Ending Wars as a Bargaining Process

Interstate wars rarely end in the complete destruction of the defeated party’s military forces. Instead, new information is revealed through combat operations and negotiating behavior which enables belligerents to converge on a mutually agreeable settlement short of total war. Wittman ( 1979 ) provided the first formal articulation of the bargaining model in the context of war termination. He argued theoretically that war continues until both adversaries believe they can be made better off through settlement. Subsequent analyses have focused on both the battlefield conditions and strategies of negotiations leading states to believe settlement is the better option.

These analyses show that, as a state’s resources are depleted from battle losses, it has incentives to negotiate a settlement more acceptable to its adversary rather than suffer total defeat (Filson & Werner, 2002 ; Smith & Stam, 2004 ). Further, fighting battles reduces uncertainty by revealing information about resolve, military effectiveness, and the true balance of power between adversaries, causing expectations on the likely outcome of the war to converge, and making settlement possible (Wagner, 2000 ). Wartime negotiations provide adversaries with additional information, which Slantchev ( 2011 ) argued makes war termination more likely.

Challenging traditional notions regarding the likelihood of termination in the face of large asymmetries in capabilities, Slantchev ( 2011 ) argued that war termination depends upon states’ abilities to both impose and bear the costs of fighting. If a weaker state can minimize the costs it bears while forcing its adversary to expand its war effort, the benefits of fighting relative to its costs are reduced, and the stronger state may choose termination. The implication of this argument relates closely to Biddle’s ( 2004 ) empirical critique of the bargaining literature, which finds modern methods of force employment can mitigate losses during war, thereby shifting the balance of costs and benefits independent of relative military capabilities. Reiter’s ( 2009 ) critique of bargaining approaches also has implications for war termination. While traditional approaches argue that fighting battles reveals information and increases the likelihood of termination, Reiter suggested that this is only the case if belligerents expect their opponent to comply with the post-war status quo. If commitment problems are severe, information revealed during battles and war-time negotiations will have little effect on termination.

Biddle’s argument that country-year measures of military capabilities are inexact and crude proxies for the concepts advanced in theoretical models is a strong one that should be taken seriously by scholars. We therefore appreciate the contributions of Ramsay ( 2008 ) and Weisiger ( 2016 ), which use more fine-grained battle trend data rather than country-level measures of military capabilities to empirically test the implications of bargaining theories of war termination, and advocate future research adopting this strategy for testing the implications of bargaining theories.

Much of the literature on civil war termination also focuses on how battlefield developments affect the termination of civil wars. Collier et al. ( 2004 ) built on the idea of war as an information revelation mechanism, arguing that the probability of settlement should increase as war duration increases and more information is revealed regarding the relative strength of each side. Others focus on the costs of battle, with research showing that settlements are more likely when the costs of battle are high and the relative payoffs from victory decrease (Walter, 2002 ). Also, a relatively equal balance of power between combatants creates a mutually hurting stalemate, in which neither side can achieve victory, and settlement becomes more likely (Walter, 2002 ).

Empirical results support many of these theoretical predictions. Several scholars show that the longer a civil war lasts, the more likely it is to terminate (Collier et al., 2004 ; Fearon,, 2004 ; Regan, 2002b ), and that the probability of negotiated settlement increases as conflict duration increases (Mason, Weingarten, & Fett, 1999 ). The magnitude of conflict, measured as total war deaths, also correlates positively with the probability of adversaries initiating negotiations (Walter, 2002 ). Finally, Walter ( 2002 ) found that military stalemates significantly increase the likelihood of negotiations as well as the implementation of a ceasefire.

While these results support the theoretical predictions surrounding “hurting stalemates,” Walter’s coding of stalemates does not account for the timing of the stalemate or the number of stalemates that occur throughout the course of conflict. We therefore see great value in more recent research that uses new micro-level data to more closely capture actual battle dynamics and incorporate more information at the conflict and group-level. For example, Hultquist ( 2013 ) used a novel troop strength measure to better capture relative strength between rebel and government forces. He found that relative power parity increases the likelihood of negotiated settlement, while power imbalances extend civil war. Making use of fine-grained data on battle event dates and locations, Greig ( 2015 ) showed that the location, and changes in location over time, of battle events relays information to combatants that, in turn, affects their willingness to negotiate and settle their conflicts. We encourage additional research in this vein moving forward.

Domestic-Level Factors and War Termination

Recent research suggests that domestic political conditions influence war termination. Specifically, domestic political accountability, the domestic audience’s expectations, and cost-sensitivity affect leaders’ decisions to continue fighting versus settling on specific terms (Mattes & Morgan, 2004 ). Along these lines, Goemans ( 2000 ) argued that the postwar fate of leaders influences their choice between terminating and continuing a war. The threat of severe punishment by domestic actors increases the costs of war losses for leaders of semi-repressive regimes, leading them to continue fighting a war they are losing in the hope of achieving victory. Thus, war termination does not follow strictly from battle trends.

Empirically, Goemans ( 2000 ) found that losing mixed regimes suffer significantly more battle deaths than democratic or autocratic losers, and that wars fought against losing mixed regimes last, on average, almost twice as long as those fought against either democratic or autocratic losers. Taken together, these results suggest that mixed regime leaders are likely to sustain rather than terminate a losing war, and more generally, that regime type significantly influences war termination. Croco ( 2015 ) refined Goemans’s work by arguing that the individual responsibility of leaders for involving their country in a war has important effects on war termination patterns, with culpable leaders more likely to fight for victory in order to avoid being punished domestically for poor wartime performance. Croco and Weeks ( 2013 ) refined this logic further, showing that only culpable leaders from democracies and vulnerable nondemocracies face increased punishment risk from war losses. Koch and Sullivan ( 2010 ) provide another take on the relationship between domestic politics and war termination, demonstrating that partisanship significantly affects democratic states’ war termination decisions. Faced with declining approval for military interventions, their results demonstrate, right-leaning governments will continue the fight, while left-leaning executives will be more likely to end their military engagements.

The analog to studying domestic-level factors in interstate conflict would be to examine the effect of internal state and rebel characteristics on civil war termination. Traditionally, civil war studies have focused only on state characteristics, as data on rebel groups’ organization and internal characteristics has been unavailable. Early research argued that state capacity, regime characteristics, and ethnic/religious divisions influenced war termination by influencing the balance of power, accountability of leaders, and stakes of conflict, but empirical results provided mixed support for these theories (e.g., DeRouen & Sobek, 2004 ; Svensson, 2007 ; Walter, 2002 ).

More recent research has made significant strides in understanding how internal characteristics of combatants affect civil conflict termination by using new data to explore how the composition and practices (i.e., leader characteristics, governance, and internal cohesion) of rebel groups influence civil conflict dynamics. This research demonstrates that some of the same leader-accountability mechanisms that affect interstate war termination also influence civil conflict. For example, Prorok ( 2016 ) used novel data on rebel group leaders to show that culpable leaders are less willing to terminate or settle for compromise outcomes than their non-culpable counterparts in civil wars, just like in interstate conflicts. Heger and Jung ( 2017 ) also advanced existing research by using novel data on rebel service provision to civilian populations to explore how good rebel governance affects conflict negotiations. They found that service-providing rebels are more likely to engage in negotiations and to achieve favorable results, arguing that this reflects the lower risk of spoilers from groups with broad support and centralized power structures. Finally, Findley and Rudloff ( 2012 ) examined rebel group fragmentation’s effects on conflict termination and outcomes. Using computational modeling, they find that fragmentation only sometimes increases war duration (on fragmentation, also see Cunningham, 2014 ).

These studies underscore the value of exploring rebel group internal structures and practices in greater detail in future research, as they have an important impact on how, and when, civil wars end.

Victory/Defeat in Wars

Recent scholarship on victory and defeat in war suggests, as in the duration and termination literatures, that domestic politics, strategies of force employment, military mechanization, and war aims mediate the basic relationship between military strength and victory. Empirical results show that strategy choices and methods of force employment have a greater impact on war outcomes than relative military capabilities (Biddle, 2004 ; Stam, 1996 ), that high levels of mechanization within state militaries actually increase the probability of state defeat in counterinsurgency wars (Lyall & Wilson, 2009 ), and that weak states win more often when they employ an opposite-strategy approach in asymmetric conflicts (Arreguin-Toft, 2006 ) or when the stronger party’s war aims require high levels of target compliance (Sullivan, 2007 ). High relative losses and increasing war duration also decrease the likelihood of victory for war initiators, even if prewar capabilities favored the aggressor (Slantchev, 2004 ).

More recent research focuses on counter-insurgent conflicts, using new micro-level data and modeling techniques to address questions of counterinsurgent effectiveness in these complex conflicts. For example, Toft and Zhukov ( 2012 ) evaluated the effectiveness of denial versus punishment strategies, finding that denial (i.e., increasing the costs of expanding insurgent violence) is most effective, while punishment is counterproductive. Relatedly, Weidmann and Salehyan ( 2013 ) used an agent-based model applied to the U.S. surge in Baghdad to understand the mechanisms behind the surge’s success. They found that ethnic homogenization, rather than increased counterinsurgent capacity, best accounts for the surge’s success. Finally, Quackenbush and Murdie ( 2015 ) found that, counter to conventional wisdom, past experiences with counterinsurgency or conventional warfare have little effect on future success in conflict. States are not simply fighting the last war.

An important area of research that has fostered significant debate among scholars focuses on explaining the historical pattern of high rates of victory by democracies in interstate wars. The strongest explanations for the winning record of democracies center on their superior battlefield initiative and leadership, cooperative civil-military relations, and careful selection into wars they have a high probability of winning (Reiter & Stam, 2002 ). Challenging these results both theoretically and empirically, however, Desch ( 2002 ) argues that “democracy hardly matters,” that relative power plays a more important role in explaining victory. This debate essentially comes down to the relative importance of realist-type power variables versus regime type variables in explaining military victory; while scholars such as Lake ( 1992 ) and Reiter and Stam ( 2002 ) argued that regime type matters more, Desch asserted that relative power is the more important determinant of military victory.

Ultimately, we find Desch’s objections to the relevance of democracy to be overstated and his theoretical and empirical justifications to be largely unconvincing. First, Desch’s analysis is biased against Reiter and Stam’s argument because it is limited to dyads that Desch labels “fair fights,” that is, dyads with relatively equal military capabilities. This does not allow Desch to test the selection effect that Reiter and Stam discuss. Second, Desch failed to recognize that many of the realist variables he attributes the greatest explanatory power to are actually influenced by the foreign and military policies adopted by democratic leaders (Valentino et al., 2010 ). Democracy thus has both a direct and an indirect effect on war outcomes, and because Desch ignores the latter, he underestimates democracy’s total impact. Finally, the impacts of power variables may be overstated, as recent research demonstrates that military power’s influence is conditional upon method of force employment and military mechanization (Biddle, 2004 ; Lyall & Wilson, 2009 ).

More recent research examines some of the mechanisms suggested for the unique war-time behavior of democracies, raising some questions about existing mechanisms and suggesting alternatives to explain democratic exceptionalism. For example, Gibler and Miller ( 2013 ) argued that democracies tend to fight short, victorious wars because they have fewer territorial (i.e., high salience) issues over which to fight, rather than because of their leaders’ political accountability. Once controlling for issue salience, they find no relationship between democracy and victory. Similarly, using novel statistical techniques that allow them to account for the latent abilities of states, Renshon and Spirling ( 2015 ) showed that democracy only increases military effectiveness under certain conditions, and is actually counterproductive in others. Finally, new research by Bausch ( 2017 ) using laboratory experiments to test the mechanisms behind democracy and victory suggested that only some of these mechanisms hold up. Specifically, Bausch found that democratic leaders are actually more likely to select into conflict and do not mobilize more resources for war once involved, contrary to the selection and war fighting stories developed by Reiter and Stam ( 2002 ). He did find, however, that democratic leaders are less likely to accept settlement and more likely to fight to decisive victory once conflict is underway, and that democratic leaders are more likely to be punished than autocrats for losing a war. Thus, the debate over the democratic advantage in winning interstate wars continues to progress in productive directions.

Theoretical arguments regarding civil war outcomes focus on state/rebel strength, positing that factors such as natural resource wealth, state military capacity, and third-party assistance influence relative combatant strength and war outcomes. Empirical studies find that increasing state military strength decreases the likelihood of negotiated settlement and increases the probability of government victory (Mason et al., 1999 ). Characteristics of the war itself also affect outcomes, with the probability of negotiated settlement increasing as war duration increases (Mason et al., 1999 ; Walter, 2002 ), and high casualty rates increasing the likelihood of rebel victory (Mason et al., 1999 ).

Debate remains over how third-party interventions affect civil war outcomes. UN intervention decreases the likelihood of victory by either side while increasing the probability of negotiated war terminations (DeRouen & Sobek, 2004 ). This impact is time sensitive, however (Mason et al., 1999 ). Further, the impact of unilateral interventions is less clear. While Regan ( 1996 ) found intervention supporting the government to increase the likelihood of war termination, Gent ( 2008 ) found military intervention in support of rebels to increase their chance of victory but that in support of governments to have no significant impact. More recent research by Sullivan and Karreth ( 2015 ) helps explain this discrepancy. They argued that biased intervention only alters the chances for victory by the supported side if that side’s key deficiency is conventional war-fighting capacity. Empirically, they show that because rebels are generally weaker, military intervention on their behalf increases their chance of victory. For states, however, military intervention only increases their odds of victory if the state is militarily weaker than or at parity with the rebels.

Additional new research by Jones ( 2017 ) also represents an important step forward in understanding the effects of intervention in civil war. By examining both the timing and strategy of intervention, Jones demonstrated that the effects of intervention on conflict outcomes are much more complex than previous research suggests.

Post-War Peace Durability

As with studies on war duration, termination, and outcomes, much of the literature on the stability of post-war peace grows from extensions of the bargaining model of war. For these scholars, recurrence is most likely under conditions that encourage the renegotiation of the terms of settlement, including postwar changes in the balance of power (Werner, 1999 ) and externally forced ceasefires that artificially terminate fighting before both sides agree on the proper allocation of the spoils of war (Werner & Yuen, 2005 ). Building off of commitment problem models, Fortna ( 2004b ) argued that strong peace agreements that enhance monitoring, incorporate punishment for defection, and reward cooperation help sustain peace. Specific measures within agreements, however, affect the durability of peace differently. For example, troop withdrawals and the establishment of demilitarized zones decrease the likelihood of war resumption, while arms control measures have no significant impact (Fortna, 2004b , p. 176).

Postwar intervention is also expected to increase peace duration by ameliorating commitment problems, as peacekeepers act as a physical barrier and reduce security fears, uncertainty, and misperceptions between former adversaries (Fortna, 2004a ). Empirical results support this theoretical prediction, and while the size of the force is not significant, both monitoring and armed forces missions increase the durability of post-war peace (Fortna, 2004a ).

The debate that remains in this literature is whether or not peace agreements can effectively mitigate the influence of relative power variables. Recent research by Lo, Hashimoto, and Reiter ( 2008 ) suggests that they cannot. They demonstrated that cease-fire agreement strength has almost no significant impact on post-war peace duration, while factors encouraging renegotiation receive partial support. While discrepancies in results may be in part attributable to differences in time periods covered, this result essentially confirms Warner and Yuen’s ( 2005 ) finding that externally imposed war termination invites resumption of conflict, regardless of the presence of strong cease-fire agreements.

If, at the end of a civil conflict, each side maintains its ability to wage war, issues of credibility can undermine the peace and cause the conflict to resume. Thus, wars ending in negotiated settlements are more likely to recur than those ending with a decisive victory because both sides have the ability to resume fighting to gain greater concessions and neither can credibly commit to the peace (Licklider,, 1995 ; Walter, 2002 ). More recent research confirms that conflicts ending in military victory are less likely to recur than those ending in settlement (Caplan & Hoeffler, 2017 ; Toft, 2009 ), though Toft suggested that this is particularly true for rebel victories.

This understanding of post-war peace in terms of the bargaining model’s commitment problem has led scholars to examine three primary avenues through which commitment problems might be overcome and peace maintained. First, partition has been advanced as a possible solution to post-war instability. The separation of warring factions is expected to reduce security fears by creating demographically separate, militarily defensible regions (Kaufmann, 1996 ). Empirical evidence generally supports this strategy. Partitions that successfully separate warring ethnic groups significantly reduce the risk of renewed conflict (Johnson, 2008 ), while those that do not achieve demographic separation increase the risk of renewed hostilities (Tir, 2005 ). Further, relative to de facto separation, autonomy arrangements, or maintenance of a unitary state, partition is significantly less likely to lead to war recurrence (Chapman & Roeder, 2007 ).

Second, third-party intervention is expected to play a role in ameliorating the security dilemma arising from commitment problems in post-conflict states (Fearon, 2004 ; Walter, 2002 ). Empirical results confirm that third-party security guarantees are critical to the signing and durability of peace settlements (Walter, 2002 ). Once settlement has been reached, third-party guarantees and international peacekeeping establish punishments for defection (Fortna, 2008 ; Walter, 2002 ), thereby reducing incentives for and increasing costs of renewed conflict. More recent research that employs more fine-grained data on the size and composition of UN peacekeeping forces suggests, however, that this type of third-party guarantee is most effective when it has the military power to enforce the peace. Specifically, Hultman, Kathman, and Shannon ( 2016 ) found that increasing UN troop presence increases peace durability, but the presence of other types of UN monitors has little effect on peace duration. By using more fine-grained data, this study makes an important contribution by allowing us to parse the mechanisms driving the role of third party guarantees in promoting peace.

Third, the incorporation of power-sharing arrangements that guarantee the survival of each side into the postwar settlement is also expected to solve post-civil war commitment problems (Walter, 2002 ). These arrangements allow adversaries to generate costly signals of their resolve to preserve the peace, thus ameliorating security fears (Hartzell & Hoddie, 2007 ). Empirical results indicate that given a negotiated settlement, the agreement’s ability to ameliorate security concerns is positively associated with the preservation of peace. Thus, the more regulation of coercive and political power included in an agreement, and the greater the number of dimensions (political, territorial, military, economic) of power sharing specified, the more likely agreements are to endure (Hartzell & Hoddie, 2007 ).

More recently, scholars have begun to extend this research by focusing more broadly on settlement design. Whereas previous research tended to simply count the number of power-sharing dimensions, newer analyses focus on issues such as the quality of the agreement (Badran, 2014 ) and equality in the terms of settlement (Albin & Druckman, 2012 ). Martin ( 2013 ), for example, found that provisions that share power at the executive level are less effective than those that regulate power at the level of rank-and-file or the public, as elite-level power-sharing is relatively easy for insincere actors to engage in at a relatively low cost. Cammett and Malesky ( 2012 ) found that proportional representation provisions are particularly effective at stabilizing post-conflict peace because of their ability to promote good governance and service provision, while Joshi and Mason ( 2011 ) similarly found that power-sharing provisions that expand the size of the governing coalition result in more stable peace. These analyses suggest that delving further into the design and content of settlement agreements is a positive avenue for future research. Future research should also examine how implementation of peace agreements proceeds, and how the timing and sequencing of implementation affects the durability of peace (e.g., Langer & Brown, 2016 ).

Finally, emerging research on civil war recurrence also shifts focus toward rebel groups and how their composition and integration affect post-conflict peace. For example, new research finds that rebel group fragmentation hastens the recurrence of civil war (Rudloff & Findley, 2016 ), while greater inclusion of former rebels in government improves prospects for post-conflict peace (Call, 2012 ; Marshall & Ishiyama, 2016 ). Emerging research on post-conflict elections also represents an important area for further study, as debate remains over how elections affect conflict recurrence. While some argue that they destabilize the peace (Flores & Nooruddin, 2012 ), others suggest they actually reduce the risk of conflict recurrence (Matanock, 2017 ).

The Longer-Term Consequences of Wars

What are the political, economic, and social consequences of interstate and civil wars, and what explains these postwar conditions? As Rasler and Thompson ( 1992 ) recognized, the consequences of war are often far-reaching and complex. Given this complexity, much of the literature varies significantly in quality and coverage; while post-war political change has received significant attention from political scientists, the social and health-related consequences of war are less well-known.

Post-War Domestic Political Stability and Change

Scholarship on post-war political stability focuses on both regime and leadership change, positing political accountability as a central mechanism in both cases. Interstate war has been theorized to induce internal revolution both indirectly (Skocpol, 1979 ) and directly (Bueno De Mesquita et al., 2003 ; Goemans, 2000 ). Empirical results support the accountability argument, as war losses and increasing costs of war increase the likelihood of post-war leadership turnover (Bueno De Mesquita & Siverson, 1995 ) as well as violent regime overthrow (Bueno De Mesquita, Siverson, & Woller, 1992 ). Related work shows that accountable leaders are also more likely to face foreign-imposed regime change at the hands of war victors (Bueno De Mesquita et al., 2003 ).

A central focus of recent research has been the conditional relationship between war outcomes and regime type. In his seminal study, Goemans, 2000 ) found that leaders of mixed and democratic regimes are more likely to be removed from office as a result of moderate losses in war than are leaders of autocracies. These findings, however, have been challenged by recent scholarship. Colaresi ( 2004 ) finds no difference in leadership turnover rates across all regimes types under conditions of moderate war losses, and Chiozza and Goemans ( 2004 ), employing a different measure of war outcomes and discounting the impact of termination over time, find that defeat in war is most costly for autocratic leaders and has no significant impact on tenure for democratic leaders.

Recently, research in the civil war literature has begun to focus more on post-war democratization, elections, and how groups transition from fighting forces to political parties. Much of the early work in this area focused on the link between war outcomes and the development of democratic institutions in the post-war period, specifically arguing that negotiated settlements facilitate democratization by requiring the inclusion of opposition groups in the decision-making process (Doyle & Sambanis, 2006 ; Gurses & Mason, 2008 ). More recent research, however, challenges this conventional wisdom, showing that the benefits of negotiated settlement are limited to the short-term and that economic factors are better predictors of post-war democratization (Fortna & Huang, 2012 ).

Recognizing that not all negotiated settlements are created equal, scholars have also begun to examine how variation in power-sharing provisions influences democratization. Debate remains on this topic as well, however. While some argue that power-sharing facilitates democratization by generating costly signals that create the stability necessary for democratization (Hoddie & Hartzell, 2005 ), others argue that they undermine democratization by reifying wartime cleavages, incentivizing political parties to seek support only from their own wartime constituencies, and undermining public confidence in governmental institutions (Jung, 2012 ). However, after accounting for non-random selection into power-sharing, Hartzell and Hoddie ( 2015 ) found that the inclusion of multiple power-sharing provisions in peace agreements increases post-civil war democratization. Future research should delve further into this debate, and consider more carefully whether specific types of provisions or institutional designs vary in their ability to promote democracy. Joshi ( 2013 ) represents an important first step in this direction, finding that institutional designs that favor inclusivity (e.g., parliamentary systems and proportional representation) are more successful at producing democracy.

Debate also continues over the effects of international intervention on post-conflict democratization. While some scholars expect intervention to facilitate postwar democratization by mitigating commitment problems and raising the costs of defection (Doyle & Sambanis, 2006 ), others suggest it is used as a tool by interveners to impose amenable, generally non-democratic, institutions in the target country (Bueno De Mesquita & Downs, 2006 ). Doyle and Sambanis ( 2006 ) found multidimensional UN missions incorporating economic reconstruction, institutional reform, and election oversight, to be significantly and positively correlated with the development of postwar democracy. However, Gurses and Mason ( 2008 ) and Fortna and Huang ( 2012 ) challenged this finding, reporting no significant relationship between UN presence and postwar democratization, and Paris ( 2004 ) and Bueno de Mesquita and Downs ( 2006 ) showed that peacebuilding missions and UN interventions actually decrease levels of democracy.

Future research should attempt to reconcile many of these open debates in both the interstate and civil conflict literatures. It should also build upon emerging research on post-conflict elections (Flores & Nooruddin, 2012 ; Matanock, 2017 ) and rebel governance (Huang, 2016 ). Huang’s work on rebel governance, in particular, shows that how rebels interact with civilian populations during conflict has important implications for post-conflict democratization.

Public Health Conditions in the Aftermath of Wars

Social scientists have recently begun to study the consequences of war for the postwar health and well-being of civilian populations. Theoretical arguments developed in this literature generally do not distinguish between interstate and civil war, instead developing mechanisms that apply to both types of conflict. The most direct public health consequence of war, of course, results from the killing and wounding of civilian populations. Scholars argue, however, that more indirect mechanisms cause longer-term public health problems as well. War, for example, is expected to undermine long-term public health by exposing populations to hazardous conditions through the movement of refugees and soldiers as vectors for disease (Ghobarah, Huth, & Russett, 2003 ; Iqbal, 2006 ), damaging health-related facilities and basic infrastructure (Li & Wen, 2005 ; Plümper & Neumayer, 2006 ), and reducing government spending and private investment on public health (Ghobarah et al., 2003 ).

Many empirical analyses, unfortunately, do not directly address the mechanisms outlined above. Overall, findings indicate that both civil and interstate war increase adult mortality in the short and long term (Li & Wen, 2005 ) and decrease health-adjusted life-expectancy in the short term (Iqbal, 2006 ). Conflict severity is also influential; while low-level conflict has no significant effect on mortality rates, severe conflict increases mortality and decreases life-expectancy in the long run (Li & Wen, 2005 ; Hoddie & Smith, 2009 ; Iqbal, 2006 ). Comparing the health impacts of interstate and civil wars, analysts have found interstate conflict to exert a stronger, negative impact on long-term mortality rates than civil war, despite the finding that civil war’s immediate impact is more severe (Li & Wen, 2005 ). Finally, many analysts have found that the negative, long-term effects of war are consistently stronger for women and children (Ghobarah, et al., 2003 ; Plümper & Neumayer ( 2006 ) than for men.

This developing field provides important new insights into the civilian consequences of war, but remains underdeveloped in many respects. First, while some evidence suggests that civil and interstate war might affect public health differently, the mechanisms behind these differences require further elaboration. Research by Hoddie and Smith, represented an important contribution in this respect, as it distinguishes between different conflict strategies, finding that conflicts involving extensive violence against noncombatants have more severe health consequences than those in which most fatalities are combat-related. Second, theoretical models are generally much more developed and sophisticated than the data used to test them. While data availability is limited, efforts should be made to more closely match theory and empirics.

Third, analyses that employ disaggregated measures of health consequences (Ghobarah et al., 2003 ) provided a more thorough understanding of the specific consequences of war and represent an important avenue for additional theoretical and empirical development. Iqbal and Zorn ( 2010 ) thus focus specifically on conflict’s detrimental impact on the transmission of HIV/AIDS, while Iqbal ( 2010 ) examines the impact of conflict on many different health-based metrics, including infant mortality, health-associated life expectancy, fertility rates, and even measles and diphtheria vaccination rates. These studies represent important advances in the literature, which should be explored further in future research to disentangle the potentially complex health effects of civil and interstate conflict.

Finally, recent research has begun to conceptualize health more broadly, accounting for the psychological consequences of wartime violence. Building upon research in psychology, Koos ( 2018 ) finds that exposure to conflict-related sexual violence in Sierra Leone generates resilience: affected households display greater cooperation and altruism than those unaffected by such violence during conflict. Bauer et al. ( 2016 ) similarly find that conflict fosters greater social cohesion and civic engagement in the aftermath of war. This is an important area for future research. As conceptions of conflict-related violence broaden, our conceptualizations of the consequences of violence should also expand to include notions of how conflict affects psychological health, community cohesion, and other less direct indicators of public health.

This final section highlights some of the contributions generated by scholarship on the conduct and consequences of war, as well as some of the gaps that remain to be addressed. First, this body of scholarship usefully compliments the large and more traditional work of military historians who study international wars, as well as the work of contemporary defense analysts who conduct careful policy analyses on relevant issues such as wartime military tactics and strategy as well as weapon system performance. The bargaining model of war has also proven a useful theoretical framework in which to structure and integrate theoretical analyses across different stages in the evolution of war.

Second, a number of studies in this body of work have contributed to the further development and testing of the democratic peace literature by extending the logic of political accountability models from questions of war onset to democratic wartime behavior. New dependent variables, including civilian targeting, imposition of regime change, the waging of war in ways designed to reduce military and civilian losses, and victory versus defeat in war have been analyzed. As a result, a number of new arguments and empirical findings have improved our understanding of how major security policy decisions by democratic leaders are influenced by domestic politics.

Third, this literature has advanced scholarship on international law and institutions by examining questions about compliance with the laws of war and the role played by the UN in terminating wars and maintaining a durable post-war peace. The impact of international law and institutions is much better understood on issues relating to international political economy, human rights, and international environmental governance than it is on international security affairs. As a result, studies of compliance with the laws of war, the design of ceasefire agreements, or international peace-building efforts address major gaps in existing literature.

Fourth, this new body of research has explicitly focused on the consequences of war for civilian populations, a relatively neglected topic in academic research. Research on questions such as the deliberate targeting of civilians during wars and the longer-term health consequences of war begin to address this surprising gap in research. As such, this new literature subjects the study of terrorism to more systematic social science methods and also challenges the common practice of restricting terrorism to non-state actors and groups when, in fact, governments have resorted to terrorist attacks on many occasions in the waging of war.

While this literature has advanced scholarship in many ways, there remain several theoretical and empirical gaps that future research should aim to address, two of which are highlighted here. First, while research on interstate war duration and termination is more theoretically unified than its civil war counterpart, the dominance of the bargaining model in this literature is currently being challenged. Recent research on asymmetric conflict suggests that the basic tenants of the bargaining model may not hold for non-symmetric conflict, while research on force employment and mechanization suggest that traditional power measures exert a conditional impact at best. Additional research is needed to determine the conditions under which bargaining logic applies and its relative importance in explaining wartime behavior and war outcomes.

Second, the accumulation of knowledge on civil war’s conduct and consequences has lagged behind that on interstate war, partially because the civil war literature is younger, and partially because sub-national level data is only now becoming more readily available. While bargaining logic is often applied to civil war, we have little cross-national information on relative capabilities and battle trends, and thus a very limited understanding of the way in which these variables affect civil war duration and outcomes. New micro-level data and studies that are beginning to address these problems represent a promising direction forward for civil conflict research.

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Home > Books > New Perspectives on Global Peace [Working Title]

Peace beyond the Absence of War: Three Trends in the Study of Positive Peace

Submitted: 05 February 2024 Reviewed: 12 February 2024 Published: 28 March 2024

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.1004656

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New Perspectives on Global Peace [Working Title]

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Recent years have seen a surge in renewed academic interest in positive concepts of peace. This chapter takes stock of these developments, arguing that three trends can be observed. First, in a quest to make positive peace measurable, additional indicators of peace are added to the absence of war, mostly relying on existing databases. Second, in an attempt to capture the varieties of peace that resonate with inhabitants of postwar countries, authors rely on interviews with various groups to construct locally grounded notions of peace. Third, the ontological status of peace is reconceptualized. Rather than being a (utopian?) state of affairs, peace is said to be a process, an emergent phenomenon, or a quality of relationships between actors. The uptake of these three trends is that we are left with a variety of peace paradigms for local and international peacebuilders to work on. Consequently, special attention should be paid to concepts of peace that resonate with rising powers in peacebuilding and with populations in conflict-affected areas. The chapter concludes that the field of peace studies is maturing into a separate discipline, following a different logic than that of conflict studies, holistic rather than reductionist, bottom-up rather than top-down and focusing on long-term change rather than quick problem-solving.

• peacebuilding
• positive peace
• concepts of peace
• measuring peace
• peace continuum
• relational peace
• quality peace
• peace and conflict studies

Author Information

Gijsbert m. van iterson scholten *.

• University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

*Address all correspondence to: [email protected]

1. Introduction

In 2016, the International Study Association devoted its annual conference to the topic of “exploring peace,” a call by its president to “look beyond conventional ideas of ‘negative peace,’ typically thought of as the absence of war, and examine the manifestation of ‘positive peace’ in the cases and situations that we study” [ 1 ]. A few years before, the president of the Peace Science Society (International) likewise called on the members of his society to “bring peace back in” to their studies of armed conflict and peacebuilding [ 2 ]. Both calls seem to have originated in a certain unease with the fact that most academics that study peace are actually studying armed conflict [ 3 ,  4 ]. Some exceptions withstanding, the general consensus among peace researchers seemed, and perhaps still seems, to be a paraphrase of the old Latin adage: if you want to understand peace, study war.

This chapter is about those exceptions. It argues that they are growing in both numbers and depth and that the calls to “bring peace back in” should be seen as part of a renewed interest in the study of peace as a positive phenomenon. That is, as something that extends beyond the absence of war and should be studied as a phenomenon “in and of its own” ([ 5 ], p. 177). This renewed interest comes at a time when armed conflict is once again on the rise [ 6 ], seemingly thwarting earlier optimism about a decline in violence [ 7 , 8 ].

It also comes at a time when other authors are arguing that international peacebuilding is experiencing a severe crisis [ 9 , 10 ]. For the study of (post-conflict) peacebuilding, conceptualizing peace in terms other than an absence of armed conflict seems to be especially appropriate, as the very notion of building peace would seem to presuppose that peace is a positive phenomenon. Building an “absence” of anything seems a priori absurd. Having a more fine-grained concept of peace might lead to a more realistic assessment of what international peacebuilding can and has achieved and thus a better assessment of whether peacebuilding is “in crisis” or merely building a different kind of peace, or different peaces (in the plural, see [ 11 ]) than its critics are looking for.

Various authors, in contexts other than peacebuilding operations, have pointed out the need for a concept of peace that can make a distinction between North Korea and Sweden [ 12 ], for instance, or between various situations described as “no war, no peace” [ 13 ]. Whether the trend of focusing primarily on the study of armed conflict to understand peace has been broken is not yet certain, but the past decade has been rather productive in producing studies that explore peace as a positive phenomenon. This chapter seeks to take stock of this renewed interest in positive peace, exploring three tracks researchers have taken to further our understanding of peace. Adopting a peacebuilding perspective, the chapter presents arguments for fruitful ways in which to combine and/or elaborate on these three tracks. The three paths taken can roughly be characterized as (1) a quantitative track expanding the concept of peace by combining the absence of armed conflict with other databases and indices, for instance, on democracy or various human rights; (2) a local turn asking mostly representatives of marginalized groups in (post-) conflict areas what peace means to them; and (3) a more philosophical approach seeking to understand the ontological nature of peace as something other than a condition at a certain point in space and time. Before going into the details of these three developments, it is important to first briefly revisit the concept of positive peace and the changes it has undergone since its first inception in the 1950s/1960s.

2. Positive peace: a short history

The notion of positive peace is often traced back to two of the founding fathers of peace studies: Quincy Wright and Johan Galtung. Wright was the first to coin the term “positive peace” [ 14 ] to describe a situation of integration and cooperation between states in international relations. This idea of cooperation and integration as the antithesis of war was taken up by Johan Galtung in his first exploration of positive and negative peace [ 15 ]. He later changed his mind though and famously equated positive peace with the absence of structural—rather than direct or physical—violence, or “structural limitations on the fulfillment of human potential,” sometimes also formulated as the presence of social justice [ 16 , 17 ].

Over time, other peace researchers have proposed different conceptualizations of positive peace (for an excellent overview, see [ 12 ], p. 40-47). Some of these went back to the original meaning attached to the concept by Wright, stressing “harmonious relationships” as a core attribute of peace (see, e.g., [ 18 , 19 ]). Others have tried to describe a situation of positive peace as the presence of a common legal order or international rule of law [ 20 , 21 ] or tried to conceptualize peace as a continuum of ever-increasing levels of peacefulness in various domains of human interaction [ 19 , 22 , 23 , 24 ].

However, among scholars of peace, it is primarily Galtung’s name that has stuck to the concept of positive peace. His focus on peace as the absence of different kinds of violence has probably helped to keep the discussion of peace closely linked to conflict and violence, rather than studying peace as a phenomenon in and of itself ([ 12 ], p. 27). Concerns that more elaborative definitions of peace would be too vague or expansive to be of any practical use in studying the real-world occurrence of peace have reinforced the tendency of peace scholars to focus on conflict and war [ 12 , 25 , 26 ].

In the late 2000s, the need to evaluate the success of United Nations peacebuilding operations, especially the more multidimensional peace operations that did much more than observe cease-fires, led to a renewed interest in definitions of peace beyond the absence of war [ 27 ]. It is to these efforts to reconceptualize peace that we now turn, starting with the idea that positive peace equals negative peace plus some additional criteria.

3. The first trend: more data

The first trend that can be observed in more recent efforts to reconceptualize peace as a positive phenomenon is to add additional criteria for a situation to count as one of positive rather than negative peace. Scholars in this first track are mostly concerned with finding operational definitions of peace that allow for systematic analysis and comparison across cases [ 12 ]. One of the reasons negative peace is so attractive as a concept is that it is easy to observe. Various institutes host online databases, like the Correlates of War project (COW, https://correlatesofwar.org/ ), the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP, https://ucdp.uu.se/ ), or the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED, https://acleddata.com/ ). All of these keep track of the number of armed conflicts in the world, using precise and widely accepted measures of armed conflict, based on casualty statistics. If the level of violence drops below the specified threshold for armed conflict, (negative) peace prevails.

However, for many comparisons, merely relying on casualty statistics is too crude a measure to capture the diversity of peace in post-settlement societies [ 28 ] or the differences between the peacefulness of Sweden and North Korea [ 12 , 29 ]. For larger-N comparisons, we need some concept of peace, for which indicators exist, that can be measured with the same level of accuracy as the absence of armed conflict. Therefore, authors have searched for other datasets that can capture these additional aspects of peace.

Early attempts in this direction simply added a measure of democracy to distinguish more “participatory” peace from negative peace (e.g., [ 17 , 30 , 31 , 32 ]). Although this does make it possible to distinguish peace in Sweden from that in North Korea, the stream of critiques on what is called “liberal peace” by its critics (for example [ 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 ], see also [ 11 ] chapter 2) shows serious challenges with this simple equation of positive peace with some semblance of democracy. In a nutshell, critics argue that state capacity might be more important than democracy for prolonged peace [ 33 ], that the notion of democracy (or at least the models implemented in postwar peacebuilding) forces Western concepts and institutions onto non-Western states [ 36 ,  37 ,  39 ], and that democracy-promotion makes liberal peacebuilding focus too much on national-level politics at the expense of local factors relevant for peace [ 37 ,  38 , 40 ].

A more ambitious attempt was made by Madhav Joshi and Peter Wallensteen in a 2016 edited volume [ 41 ]. They try to conceptualize the quality of peace in societies emerging from civil war along five dimensions: post-accord security, governance, economic reconstruction, transitional justice, and reconciliation and civil society. They stress that every situation is different and not every dimension is equally important in every situation or at each moment in time. Although they present the diversity of the findings in different case study chapters as a strength of their new concept of peace, they also acknowledge that more data, more theory development, and more rigorous methods are needed to make the concept as clear as the classic notion of negative peace.

Davenport, Melander, and Regan build on the idea of quality peace, as well as Wright’s insistence that peace is best thought of as a continuum, to argue for various interpretations of a “peace continuum” [ 12 ]. Their three proposals for a positive concept of peace are all grounded in a solid theoretical approach to peace and measurable by way of indicators that should be able to distinguish different levels of quality peace. They take great care to avoid both the Scylla of an overly narrow definition like the one by Doyle and Sambanis [ 30 ] and the Charybdis of overly broad concepts of peace that are impossible to measure, like the ones by De Rivera [ 18 ] and Anderson [ 19 ]. As an illustration of this rather sophisticated attempt to broaden our understanding of peace, while keeping it measurable, their three proposals will be briefly introduced.

Regan offers the narrowest conceptualization, proposing that we see peace as a situation in which “no actor or group of actors has a unilateral incentive to attempt change by force of arms” ([ 42 ], p. 86). This may seem overly biased in favor of stability and keeping the status quo, as well as difficult to measure, but he valiantly tries to overcome these doubts and propose proxy indicators for risk assessment (bond prices and black-market currency exchange rates) that might capture the extent to which actors have such incentives.

His two colleagues propose more expansive definitions of peace, one cleverly constructed as a mirroring of Carl Clausewitz’ famous definition of war as the continuation of policy by other means [ 43 ], the other as a continuum ranging from opposition to mutuality along different dimensions of interaction and levels of analysis [ 44 ]. Both approaches produce indicators that can be measured using existing databases on, for example, the occurrence of torture, democracy, and women’s rights [ 43 ], or citizenship rights and degrees of segregation [ 44 ].

A slightly different, but even more ambitious approach, to come up with indicators for positive peace is the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Positive Peace Index [ 45 , 46 ]. Based on a big data analysis of factors that create and sustain peaceful societies, it identifies no less than eight “pillars of peace” that create and sustain peaceful societies: a well-functioning government, low levels of corruption, acceptance of the rights of others, good relations with neighbors, free flow of information, a sound business environment, the equitable distribution of resources, and high levels of human capital. Each pillar has various indicators to measure a country’s progress on it. If this seems to leave open the question of what constitutes a peaceful society, the same institute also publishes the Global Peace Index measuring peacefulness in terms of a country’s level of safety and security in society, the extent of domestic or international conflict, and the degree of militarization [ 47 ].

For all their sophistication, these attempts at operationalizing a measurable concept of peace are not without problems. For one thing, the focus on measurability and country rankings sits somewhat uncomfortably with the idea that peace in different societies is qualitatively different. How can these qualitative differences be accounted for in some quantitative comparison like the Positive Peace Index? Can we really say that a country with high levels of economic growth but low levels of human rights observance (let us say China) is less peaceful than a country that is economically less developed but fares better on the human rights spectrum (like Guyana or, potentially, Bhutan)? Is the United States, with its large levels of gun violence but also a sound business environment and premium internet access, really more peaceful than Costa Rica or Mauritius, two countries in the positive peace index that do not even have a standing army? 1

However, the move to expand the concept of peace beyond the absence of war by integrating various other concerns into it is definitely an interesting one. While the authors working in this track should be applauded for their efforts at methodological rigor, operationalization, and data collection, the track is not without risk. Three main risks are conceptual overstretch, conceptual confusion, and blind spots because of the need for indicators and data.

The first risk is conceptual overstretch. By adding democracy, observance of various human rights, or the IEP’s eight pillars of peace, the risk is that peace becomes a synonym for “all things desirable,” making it impossible theoretically to even describe the relationship between positive peace and things like economic development, human happiness or well-being, and various forms of government. This seems to be a risk most people working with this notion of positive peace are aware of though and seek to limit by proposing only a few indicators and insisting that peace remains a separate concept ([ 12 ], p. 29).

The second risk is that indicators drive the underlying concept of peace away from something that can be meaningfully labeled “positive peace” and to the direction of human rights observance, economic development, or economic risk management. For instance, Regan’s concept of peace as a situation in which “no actor or group of actors has a unilateral incentive to attempt change by force of arms’ ([ 42 ], p. 186) can still be seen as a positive concept of peace, but his indicators (bond prices and black-market currency exchange rates) push peace into the economic domain, where many actors actually working for peace would not think it belongs (see [ 11 , 48 ]). Of course, it can be argued that the proposed indicators should explicitly be seen as proxy indicators, but that begs the question of whether these proxies correctly mirror the level of positive peace in a society or are merely selected because of the availability of databases.

Third, by basing their concept of peace on indicators for which data is available, authors in this line of research run the risk of molding peace according to Western practices, as the Global West has the most extensive and highest quality data available. Western countries score consistently higher on all pillars of the positive peace index, but maybe because the index is based on statistics that come mostly from Western countries. It is this third pitfall that the second trend in positive peace research seeks to counteract by calling attention to the concepts of peace that people in the Global South espouse.

4. The second trend: more voices

The second shift in conceptualizing peace can be observed in authors partaking in a “local,” or anthropological, turn, who have started to ask people in conflict-affected areas what peace means to them, in order to come up with more locally legitimate notions of peace. The local turn is a hotly debated topic among peacebuilding scholars [ 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 ]. Those debates will not be summarized here; rather the focus is on the key development relevant for exploring peace: the trend to ask people in conflict-affected areas what peace means to them in their everyday lives. In the past 10 years, studies have been published on the meanings that indigenous peoples [ 53 , 54 ], young people [ 55 ], women [ 56 , 57 ], or more generally people in local communities in conflict-affected areas [ 48 , 58 , 59 ] or traditional peaceful societies [ 60 ] attach to peace.

One of the most ambitious projects in this regard has been the effort to “reclaim” everyday peace by developing a set of Everyday Peace Indicators that can serve as a yardstick for measuring peacebuilding success [ 48 , 61 , 62 ]. These indicators were established in a two-step bottom-up process using focus groups from particular conflict-affected communities in Colombia and Uganda. First, people were asked what peace means to them and how they know whether there is more peace or less peace in their community. The list of possible indicators derived from these interviews was then narrowed down to ten indicators for everyday peace that a focus group from the community had to agree on. These indicators were subsequently used in longitudinal surveys to establish whether peace was increasing or decreasing over time in this particular community ([ 48 ], pp. 68–76).

Although presented as a tool to improve the measurement of peacebuilding success in external evaluations, the Everyday Peace Indicators project also has consequences for how peace is conceptualized. One of the more interesting findings in this respect is that the indicators, and thus the meaning attached to peace, not only are different for different communities but also change over time [ 48 , see also 63 ]. This presents problems not only for peacebuilders who might have to adapt their programs to fit these shifts in objectives but even more so for researchers who want to study the development of peace over time and/or in different parts of the world, like the academics in the first track identified above.

One other striking aspect of these studies is that often the (explicit) objective of them is to “give a voice to people who have not been heard before” [ 64 ]: the victims of armed conflict, in particular marginalized groups like youth or women. Lee [ 58 ] is an exception in that he also included former Khmer Rouge combatants in his study of everyday peace in Cambodia, but often the focus seems to be on making additional voices heard, rather than on finding consensus between different groups or actors. While this is certainly laudable, and a much-needed correction on overly Western-centric conceptualizations of peace, it would be interesting to apply the same methodology to Western peacebuilders. Doing so could establish a dialog between local and external peacebuilders that would allow both sides to see some new perspectives, rather than maintaining the divide between warzones and what Severine Autesserre has called “peaceland” [ 65 ] or the fiction of a unified liberal peace consensus [ 34 , 66 ]. The works of Van Iterson Scholten [ 11 ] who interviewed professional peace workers rather than victims of conflict and Caplan [ 26 ] who studied the meanings that different international organizations attach to peace are promising points of entry for such a dialog.

5. The third trend: A different ontology

The third way authors have tried to find new meanings for positive peace is by moving away from the idea that peace is a certain condition, or situation, in a particular country at a certain moment in time. While this idea of peace as a state of affairs is highly attractive, if we want to measure it, it just might not reflect the ontological status of the phenomenon in reality. Or, to put it in slightly less controversial terms, changing the ontology of our concepts of peace provides new insights into how it can be achieved. There are three main routes for this ontological reorientation: defining peace as a process, as an emergent phenomenon, and as a relationship.

The first, peace as a process, is the oldest of the three (for an early formulation, see [ 67 ]). Authors studying nonviolence [ 68 , 69 , 70 ] or conflict transformation [ 71 , 72 ] stress that conflicts do not necessarily need to be resolved for peace to occur, but rather that peace is about the way in which conflicts are handled. The quote that “there is no way to peace, peace is the way,” ascribed (apocryphally) to both Gandhi and the Buddha, nicely sums up this approach.

More recent contributions to this line of thinking have stressed the need for an “agonistic” understanding of peace [ 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 ]. Building on the work of Carl Schmitt and Chantal Mouffe, these authors argue that peace consists of the transformation of antagonistic (openly hostile) conflicts into agonistic ones, in which the opponent is thought of as an “adversary” rather than an enemy. In order to achieve this, structures should be put in place that channel conflicts between adversaries along nonviolent paths. Especially the work of Lisa Strömbom and colleagues should be mentioned here, who valiantly try to operationalize this idea into an analytical framework [ 75 , 76 , 77 ].

In the 2015 review of its peacebuilding architecture, the United Nations has also taken up the idea that peace is more a continuous process than a goal to be achieved [ 78 ]. This insight has led to a new literature on “sustaining peace” (see, e.g., [ 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 ]). At the core of the sustaining peace agenda are two ideas. Peacebuilding should be focused more on prevention of violent conflict than on handling the aftermath of violent conflict, and it requires a more holistic approach than the UN has taken to date ([ 82 ], pp. 15–16). Peace is something that requires upkeep, or “perpetual peacebuilding” [ 83 ], also in countries not immediately affected by war. Although this is still often framed in terms of preventing armed conflict, one interesting consequence of reconceptualizing peace as a process is that it allows us to see that also in countries where war seems “unthinkable” ([ 84 ], p. 13), sustaining peace still requires governments to invest in peace as a positive project. In this respect, it is like the Sustainable Development Goals, which also require action by all governments, not only by governments in the Global South.

One other aspect of peace that is stressed by authors writing about sustaining peace is the idea that peace is not so much the result of deliberate policies or actions, but “emerges” out of a complex web of social interaction among a host of different actors [ 79 ]. This idea of peace as an “emergent phenomenon” is the second interesting reconceptualization now taking place [ 79 , 85 , 86 , 87 ]. Drawing on complexity theory, authors working with this concept of peace suggest that peace is best thought of as a stable equilibrium in a complex system. Complex systems are defined by three characteristics: holism, nonlinearity, and self-organization ([ 79 ], p. 168). Holism means that the properties of individual elements of a social system (individuals or groups) are co-determined by the properties of the system as a whole. To put it (perhaps too) bluntly: people in a democracy behave differently from those in an autocracy. Hence, analysis should not start from (rational) individuals or social groups but should take into account the feedback loops between the individual and the system level.

One of the consequences of these feedback loops is that causality takes a nonlinear form, meaning that the output of a system can be disproportional to its input. A small peacebuilding initiative may have large consequences but may equally have effect only in the longer term, or have one effect at one point in time but another effect at another point in time. This nonlinearity makes it difficult to predict the outcomes of any specific peacebuilding intervention.

Finally, complex systems are self-organizing, meaning that the feedback loops tend to push the system toward a state of equilibrium, even in the absence of specific planning or (foreign) intervention. Thinking about peace as an emergent property of complex systems makes concepts like the local [ 49 , 50 , 51 ], friction [ 87 ], resilience [ 88 ], and hybridity [ 89 ] even more relevant. As de Coning notes, if the system is self-organizing, intervention can also be seen as an interruption preventing such organization ([ 79 ], pp. 174–175).

The complexity approach to peace has two main drawbacks. The first is that it becomes extremely difficult to identify the factors that lead to successful peacebuilding. If peace is some emergent phenomenon arising more or less spontaneously out of complex interactions between a myriad of actors and factors (both local and international, if those categories still make sense in a complex system), it becomes hard, if not a priori impossible, to pinpoint which of these exactly lead to success. The most one can do is either analyze which characteristics of a system correlate to a situation of peace (as the Positive Peace Index purports to do) or reconstruct the factors that led to success after the fact. But since no two complex situations are alike, it becomes virtually impossible to draw lessons from past peacebuilding experiences. Or, to make the point even more pressing, if peace is something that emerges autonomously from complex interactions, efforts to actively “build” it may always go amiss. This might seem like a philosophical underpinning of the argument that peacebuilding is in crisis [ 9 , 10 ] or that war should be given a chance [ 90 ].

The second problem with this approach is that for all its stress on complexity and emerging properties, it is not very clear what exactly constitutes this “emerging” peace, other than a situation in which no regular fighting occurs: negative peace. By limiting peace to a stable state of the system, even if this comes in the form of a dictatorship, we once again lose sight of a positive definition of peace that is more than the (self-organized) absence of war.

Here is where another set of scholars, some of whom are also interested in complexity, come in [ 44 , 91 , 92 , 93 , 94 ]. Rather than focusing on characteristics of the system in which actors operate, they investigate the relationships between actors and conceptualize peace as a quality of these relationships. The more relationships between two actors are characterized by symbiosis [ 92 ] or by cooperation, non-domination, and trust [ 93 ], the more peaceful this relationship is.

There are five advantages to defining peace in relational, rather than conditional, terms. First, it relates peace much closer to power, which is also a relational concept. Second, it draws attention to the crucial role played by reconciliation and trust-building in establishing sustainable peace. Third, it reminds us that war and peace are ontologically different and hence can coexist at the same time and place. Even in a situation of war, people can still experience peaceful relations with others, a point developed in the literature on everyday peace as well [e.g., 95 ]. Fourth, it matches the way people in conflict-affected areas themselves define peace. In the Everyday Peace Indicators project alluded to above, relational indicators were the second most common kind mentioned, after security-related ones ([ 62 ], p. 7). Fifth, defining peace in relational terms makes it easier to study its occurrence across different levels of analysis. Individuals can have (everyday) peaceful relations with other individuals, even if the relations between their respective ethnic groups are more hostile. States have relations with other states, as well as with the people living in their state, and predatory elites can do a lot of damage to the relationship people experience with their own state. Finally, international interventions build new relationships between those intervening and those intervened upon. Relational peace offers a framework that can accommodate all of these.

Despite its potential, the reconceptualization of peace into a quality of relationships is not without problems. The first of these is epistemological. How do we know whether a relationship between two actors is peaceful or not, other than by looking at the behavior that characterizes their interactions? If the two are fighting, their relationship is obviously not peaceful, but if not, how can we tell just how peaceful their relationship is? Or whether there is a relationship at all, and the two are not just ignoring each other? Söderström and colleagues [ 93 ] propose two other components of relational peace, subjective attitudes toward the other and the idea actors have of the relationship, and provide some categories that can be used to classify these but do not really discuss the validity or operationalization of these categories. More work needs to be done here.

Second, if relations extend beyond individuals to inter-group relations, what are the boundaries of these groups? Individual people often have different overlapping identities, but if peace is conceived as a collective phenomenon depending on the quality of relationships between groups, how can the boundaries between these groups be drawn? If the groups are ethnic (a relatively easy and often occurring case), what to do with people who are of mixed ethnic origin? Or with people who do not identify (primarily) with their ethnic group or who reject the concept of different ethnic groups altogether? Any distinction between social groups runs a risk of essentializing those groups, but without some sort of differentiation between groups, it becomes extremely difficult to say anything at all about the relationships between them. And given the interconnectedness of groups at the local, national, regional, and international levels, it becomes very challenging to compare cases.

6. Toward a mature field of peace studies

So far, this chapter has sketched three different tracks that research into positive peace has taken over the past 10, maybe 15 years. By analytically separating these tracks and showing the advantages and disadvantages of each, this chapter strives to have contributed to the building of better notions of peace along each of them. But if some of the brush between the paths has been cleared and people along the tracks can once again clearly see each other, the question remains what the way forward should look like. Three suggestions are provided.

The first is to really start treating peace as a word with a plural [ 96 ]. Researchers should take seriously the idea that peace is not just an essentially contested concept, but that it might be more fruitful to make some distinctions between different kinds of peace. Doing so would allow researchers to identify both what kind of peace is most urgently needed in a specific (post-) conflict area (or frozen conflict, or pre-conflict situation) and what kind of peace different kinds of peacebuilders (both local and international) can actually bring. Elsewhere, I have proposed both a five-fold distinction of different visions of peace, based on what professional peace workers say they are working on ([ 11 ], chapter 3), and a more coarse-grained distinction between (political) Security Council peace and (cultural, societal, or even individual) UNESCO peace ([ 11 ], pp. 212–214). Other authors have proposed different distinctions with different numbers of “peaces” [ 24 , 97 , 98 ]. The point is not so much to settle on a specific number, or to draw rigid boundaries between them, but rather to acknowledge that different peacebuilders build different peaces . Peace education is not going to lead to the signing of a peace agreement in the foreseeable future, but neither is peace agreement implementation (no matter how “comprehensive” the accord) going to lead to a genuinely felt desire for reconciliation and a culture of peace among the wider population. What academics should do is find out how these different peaces are connected to one another, either strengthening each other or working at cross-purposes. The Varieties of Peace research program at the University of Umeå is one interesting development in this regard, as it actively seeks to further a research agenda taking into account situational, relational, and ideational conceptualizations of peace [ 98 ].

Second, academics should look beyond the Global West for existing ideas about peace. If we think of peace as a relational phenomenon, rather than a state of affairs, non-Western philosophies may offer interesting insights. Especially Eastern philosophy also focuses more on relationships rather than on entities and may bring useful insights for how to further peace [ 99 ]. Along the same lines, the interesting work of Call and de Coning on rising powers and peacebuilding [ 100 ] should be elaborated with an exploration of the philosophical backgrounds these rising powers bring to their peacebuilding efforts. Likewise, the exploration of everyday peace can be deepened by considering the many different ways that local traditions in conflict-affected areas conceptualize peace. Some work in this field has already been done [ 53 , 101 , 102 , 103 ], but more effort is required to connect it to the literature on peacebuilding and make it operational.

Although the diversity of peace probably warrants scrutiny of the ideas of peace prevalent in many different societies, two areas would seem to be particularly urgent. On the one hand, it would be interesting to look at future “providers” of peace in the world. This makes Chinese visions of peace and related concepts a very interesting area to study. By all accounts, China is going to be a, if not the, major power in the 21st century, so studying its ideas about peace and peacebuilding might help us understand the way UN peacebuilding is going to evolve [ 100 , 104 , 105 ].

On the other hand, and following the cue of the local turn, African ideas about peace also ought to receive much more attention. Most armed conflicts still take place in Africa, and whereas we should not fall in the trap of treating all these conflicts (or indeed all of Africa, probably the most diverse continent on earth) as somehow similar, much can be learned from studying African ideas of peace [ 101 , 102 , 106 ].

The third way forward is to stop thinking of peace as something closely related to either violence or conflict. Violence is merely a symptom of conflict run amok, as the conflict transformation literature has been arguing for a long time, and conflict can also be productive. However, the main lesson we can draw from this review of positive peace is that conflict and peace might have two different “logics”. Hence, efforts to mirror Clausewitz’ analysis of war [ 43 ] or Galtung’s conflict triangle [ 28 ] are not necessarily the best way forward for the study of positive peace. Just like the study of conflict has provided us with models for conflict analysis, conflict transformation tools, and many other insights into the working of conflicts, the study of peace, as a phenomenon in and of itself, should provide us with models for peace analysis and valuable insights for peacebuilding. To demonstrate, I will end this chapter with three differences between an approach focused on (analyzing or ending) conflict and an approach focused on (analyzing or building) peace. Three things seem to be especially worth noticing about these different approaches.

First, both the practice and analysis of conflict is geared toward finding differences between actors. A conflict approach has a binary logic, separating one side from the other and trying to get a clear view of where both sides differ. Conflict analysis is quite clear on this: the aim is to identify actors, their allies, the incompatibilities between their positions, and their underlying goals and positions [ 107 ].

Peacebuilders, on the other hand, seek to identify not just what different actors have in common but more broadly to overcome a focus on incompatibilities and oppositions. Peacebuilding is often presented as a holistic enterprise that seeks to take all elements of a situation into account. If peace is an emergent phenomenon arising from a complex set of interactions in nonlinear ways, then analysts of peacebuilding ought to have attention for all the little details that make up a conflict situation and should always be on the lookout for other factors that further complicate the picture. In that sense, academics studying peace have more in common with historians than with social scientists.

Second, scholars of conflict and conflict resolution practitioners often take a top-down approach, by focusing on the incompatibilities and demands of political leaders, as well as high-level negotiations, the signing of peace agreements and political interventions like democracy promotion, rule of law, and state building. This is a point well noted by many critics of international peacebuilding (e.g., [ 37 , 40 , 61 ]), but my argument would be that this top-down approach is an inherent part of any strategy that focuses on violent conflict as the main obstacle to peace. After all, the easiest way to resolve, transform, or mitigate violent conflict is via the leadership that drives the conflict.

In contrast, peacebuilders take a bottom-up approach, focusing on civil society, infrastructures for peace, and what ordinary people can do to promote peace. Rather than trying to find solutions for a particular incompatibility, peacebuilding tries to inculcate the population against conflict entrepreneurs and delegitimizes the use of violence to achieve any objective. This is a long-term strategy that requires a different mindset than international actors operating in conflict zones often have [ 65 ].

Third, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, because of its focus on bringing out incompatibilities, the logic of conflict is better suited to address issues of injustice and demands for (radical) change. If a group feels they are subject to historical injustices, naturally they want to get attention for their cause, rally supporters (both within their own country and internationally), and show that they are being treated differently from other groups in society. This fits very well with a (nonviolent) conflict approach.

In contrast, peacebuilding is more geared toward stability and slow change in the status quo. Being holistic and bottom-up, there is no principled objection to including ever more perspectives and voices, but there is also plenty of attention for other groups and how demands for radical change might impact them. This is probably a drawback of this approach for practitioners who want to see (or need to show) quick results. It is, however, entirely in line with what peace practitioners have been saying for decades: peace is a slow and never-ending process.

Acknowledgments

This chapter was originally written as an introduction to the course The other side of conflict: peace beyond the absence of war , which I teach at the University of Amsterdam. I want to thank all students who have participated in this course over the years for their enthusiasm and thoughtful reflection on previous drafts.

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• Like 19 other countries in the world, though most of them are too small to have been included in the positive peace index.

© The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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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Copied Jean Hélion, "Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."--Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, 1670. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man. , 1963, oil on canvas, 21   3 ⁄ 8 x  18   1 ⁄ 8  in. ( 54 . 3 x  46 . 0  cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Container Corporation of America, 1984.124.115

This media is in the public domain (free of copyright restrictions). You can copy, modify, and distribute this work without contacting the Smithsonian.

Living on Purpose: A time for war and a time for peace

On June 6, 1944, America under the guidance of General Dwight Eisenhower and its allies engaged in one of the most significant military operations of the 20th century under the now legendary name of D-Day.

Code named Operation Neptune, this was the largest seaborne invasions in history with 160,000 Allied troops landing in Normandy on that day. Of those, 73,000 were from the United States and 83,000 from Britain and Canada, with no less than 17 other allied countries participating on the ground, the sea, and in the air, including French troops fighting under the command of General Charles de Gaulle.

Despite poor weather conditions and fierce resistance from German forces, the operations were successful. On the evening of June 6th, the Allies had gained a foothold on all five beaches as the German defenders numbering around 50,000 were uncertain how to respond.

We live near Camp Nelson National Cemetery and from the highway, you can see many of the over twelve thousand perfectly lined white marble tombstones. A reminder of the individuals who accepted the call of duty, and what is that call? To defend and protect our freedom whatever the cost!

These brave soldiers were willing to fight for their country and I cannot help but wonder how many of us have convictions that strong. The First Amendment was not only signed into existence with ink but with the blood of over 1.1 million Americans who have died in U.S. wars along with the countless more that have suffered from physical disabilities and psychological difficulties.

The privileges and freedoms we enjoy have truly come at a great price. My family has suffered loss from war and has a deep appreciation for the service and sacrifice that men and women have given to protect our country. My grandfather served in WWI, two uncles served in Vietnam, and another uncle only 20 years old, died on the battlefield in Korea.

As a volunteer chaplain for Thomson Hood, a veteran healthcare facility, I’ve had the opportunity and honor to sit and talk with many fine men and women who have served in our nation’s military.

The Second World War veterans are now in their eighties and nineties and I believe as with all military personnel, it’s important to not only record and preserve their amazing stories but to sincerely listen and respect who they are as individuals. One of these residents is a man named Edward Hicks who willingly stepped forward when his country needed him the most.

He was only 22 years old in 1944 and had just married his lovely bride Mary Lou four months earlier. He received the call to join the front line and bravely responded to what would be known around the world as Operation Overlord. The American soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong and they refused to allow a world where wrong prevailed.

Edward and his company were assigned to six miles of beach that was code-named “Omaha” which has been recorded as one of the bloodiest first-wave battles of Normandy.

Only 600 men survived out of the 2,600 that came ashore. He recalls when he jumped out of the amphibious vehicle, how the water was up to his neck and icy cold. Being loaded down with full gear that was now water-logged, he said it was very difficult to keep from drowning.

As bullets were splashing the water and whizzing past his head, all he knew to do was to stay as low as possible. Using floating bodies as shields, he was numb with fear.

As he crawled upon the sand, he immediately began to dig a hole where he could partially avoid the onslaught of constant machine gunfire. Somehow throughout the day and thankfully with the Germans running out of ammunition, they managed to slowly make their way inland and went on to accomplish the mission.

Edward received several medals for bravery including a silver star and 4 bronze stars, but there is much more to standing against tyranny than human fortitude and earning recognition. It is comprehending the depth of spiritual love that includes loving others as much as we love ourselves.

Jesus demonstrated the greatest love the world has ever known when He willingly sacrificed His life for us.

John 15:13 is a solemn reminder, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Dr. Billy Holland is a minister, chaplain and author. Read more about the Christian life at billyhollandministries.com .

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Guest Essay

America’s Military Is Not Prepared for War — or Peace

By Roger Wicker

Mr. Wicker, a Republican, is the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

“To be prepared for war,” George Washington said, “is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” President Ronald Reagan agreed with his forebear’s words, and peace through strength became a theme of his administration. In the past four decades, the American arsenal helped secure that peace, but political neglect has led to its atrophy as other nations’ war machines have kicked into high gear. Most Americans do not realize the specter of great power conflict has risen again.

It is far past time to rebuild America’s military. We can avoid war by preparing for it.

When America’s senior military leaders testify before my colleagues and me on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee behind closed doors, they have said that we face some of the most dangerous global threat environments since World War II. Then, they darken that already unsettling picture by explaining that our armed forces are at risk of being underequipped and outgunned. We struggle to build and maintain ships, our fighter jet fleet is dangerously small, and our military infrastructure is outdated. Meanwhile, America’s adversaries are growing their militaries and getting more aggressive.

In China, the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has orchestrated a historic military modernization intended to exploit the U.S. military’s weaknesses. He has overtaken the U.S. Navy in fleet size, built one of the world’s largest missile stockpiles and made big advances in space. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has thrown Europe into war and mobilized his society for long-term conflict. Iran and its proxy groups have escalated their shadow war against Israel and increased attacks on U.S. ships and soldiers. And North Korea has disregarded efforts toward arms control negotiations and moved toward wartime readiness.

Worse yet, these governments are materially helping one another, cooperating in new ways to prevent an American-led 21st century. Iran has provided Russia with battlefield drones, and China is sending technical and logistical help to aid Mr. Putin’s war. They are also helping one another prepare for future fights by increasing weapons transfers and to evade sanctions. Their unprecedented coordination makes new global conflict increasingly possible.

That theoretical future could come faster than most Americans think. We may find ourselves in a state of extreme vulnerability in a matter of a few years, according to a growing consensus of experts. Our military readiness could be at its lowest point in decades just as China’s military in particular hits its stride. The U.S. Indo-Pacific commander released what I believe to be the largest list of unfunded items ever for services and combatant commands for next year’s budget, amounting to $11 billion. It requested funding for a raft of infrastructure, missile defense and targeting programs that would prove vital in a Pacific fight. China, on the other hand, has no such problems, as it accumulates the world’s leading hypersonic arsenal with a mix of other lethal cruise and attack missiles.

Our military leaders are being forced to make impossible choices. The Navy is struggling to adequately fund new ships, routine maintenance and munition procurement; it is unable to effectively address all three. We recently signed a deal to sell submarines to Australia, but we’ve failed to sufficiently fund our own submarine industrial base, leaving an aging fleet unprepared to respond to threats. Two of the three most important nuclear modernization programs are underfunded and are at risk of delays. The military faces a backlog of at least $180 billion for basic maintenance, from barracks to training ranges. This projects weakness to our adversaries as we send service members abroad with diminished ability to respond to crises.

Fortunately, we can change course. We can avoid that extreme vulnerability and resurrect American military might.

On Wednesday I am publishing a plan that includes a series of detailed proposals to address this reality head-on. We have been living off the Reagan military buildup for too long; it is time for updates and upgrades. My plan outlines why and how the United States should aim to spend an additional $55 billion on the military in the 2025 fiscal year and grow military spending from a projected 2.9 percent of our national gross domestic product this year to 5 percent over the next five to seven years.

It would be a significant investment that would start a reckoning over our nation’s spending priorities. There will be conversations ahead about all manner of budget questions. We do not need to spend this much indefinitely — but we do need a short-term generational investment to help us prevent another world war.

My blueprint would grow the Navy to 357 ships by 2035 and halt our shrinking Air Force fleet by producing at least 340 additional fighters in five years. This will help patch near-term holes and put each fleet on a sustainable trajectory. The plan would also replenish the Air Force tanker and training fleets, accelerate the modernization of the Army and Marine Corps, and invest in joint capabilities that are all too often forgotten, including logistics and munitions.

The proposal would build on the $3.3 billion in submarine industrial base funding included in the national security supplemental passed in April, so we can bolster our defense and that of our allies. It would also rapidly equip service members all over the world with innovative technologies at scale, from the seabed to the stars.

We should pair increased investment with wiser spending. Combining this crucial investment with fiscal responsibility would funnel resources to the most strategic ends. Emerging technology must play an essential role, and we can build and deploy much of it in less than five years. My road map would also help make improvements to the military procurement system and increase accountability for bureaucrats and companies that fail to perform on vital national security projects.

This whole endeavor would shake our status quo but be far less disruptive and expensive than the alternative. Should China decide to wage war with the United States, the global economy could immediately fall into a depression. Americans have grown far too comfortable under the decades-old presumption of overwhelming military superiority. And that false sense of security has led us to ignore necessary maintenance and made us vulnerable.

Our ability to deter our adversaries can be regained because we have done it before. At the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, in the twilight of the Soviet Union, George H.W. Bush reflected on the lessons of Pearl Harbor. Though the conflict was long gone, it taught him an enduring lesson: “When it comes to national defense,” he said, “finishing second means finishing last.”

Regaining American strength will be expensive. But fighting a war — and worse, losing one — is far more costly. We need to begin a national conversation today on how we achieve a peaceful, prosperous and American-led 21st century. The first step is a generational investment in the U.S. military.

Roger Wicker is the senior U.S. senator from Mississippi and the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

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As Moscow bureau chief, Guy runs coverage of Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Before Moscow, Guy ran Brexit coverage as London bureau chief (2012-2022). On the night of Brexit, his team delivered one of Reuters historic wins - reporting news of Brexit first to the world and the financial markets. Guy graduated from the London School of Economics and started his career as an intern at Bloomberg. He has spent over 14 years covering the former Soviet Union. He speaks fluent Russian.

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