Political Economy of Peace

The globalization of the world's economies has accelerated the breaking up of traditional habitats without providing new ones. Even advanced industrial nations are experiencing de-industrialization without a clear sense of how to adapt to it. The uneven levels of development among the world's nations and regions and the changing roles that define the interplay between the private and public sector, between work and community—all of which are overcast by environmental hazards—require a coherent ideological perspective with a human face. Therein lies the task of the peacemakers and their endeavors to develop a culture involving nonviolent means to achieve goals based on sustainable development. Such development would focus on social needs that minimally embrace health, education, and human rights. More, of course, would follow once these minimum needs were satisfied. Neither nonviolent means nor goals based on social need can be universally established in a world wrought by war, threat of war, and the abusive uses of power by dominant nation-states. The most wrenching recent misuse of power is the US invasion of Iraq.

Following the United States' inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the stated purpose for the invasion in 2003, its goals shifted to developing democracy and state building. In a very short time, these multiple objectives were reduced to one: state building. But even that singular goal has turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. The reasons are the prevalence of internal strife, fragmentation, multiple insurgencies, and general ideological chaos. In Hobbesian terms, Iraq presently defines the condition of “Warre of everyone against every-one It followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a Right to every thing; even to one anothers body” (Hobbes 1651/1968, p. 42). One rational solution to such a degree of disorder is the achievement of safety and some modicum of civil peace by “whatever means and whatever allegiance” are possible (p. 21). If this seems too far fetched, it is worth noting that Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times who initially supported the invasion of Iraq, suggested that Iraq “has descended into such a Hobbesian state that even [the murderous] Saddam called on Iraqis from his prison cell to stop killing each other”(October 18, 2006, p. A23).