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Why We Should Acknowledge That Most of the World Is at Peace

It keeps existing conflicts in proper perspective and staves off alarmist panic about global "chaos."
peace sign

Richard Gowan worries that emphasizing the overall peacefulness of most of the world promotes indifference toward the places suffering from conflict:

But even leaving these worrying but realistic scenarios aside, there is a moral peril in emphasizing that “only” a fifth of the global population has to live with war: We come to conclude that it is somehow okay, perhaps even normal, that the unlucky 20 percent are experiencing aberrational levels of violence.

It is possible that acknowledging the peace and stability of most of the planet could lead people to be completely indifferent to existing conflicts and crises, but in general this lack of attention to foreign wars is not a problem that we have in our foreign policy debates and news coverage. The public is routinely bombarded with images and stories about armed conflict, and our political leaders usually overstate foreign threats and the frequency of conflict around the world. We are more likely to hear that the “world is on fire” than “most of the world is at peace,” and that shapes the way we assess how dangerous the world is. Indeed, we are constantly told by military officers and government officials that the world is more dangerous than ever before. These claims are obviously untrue, and they are also irresponsible: these claims are made to rally public support behind militarized and destabilizing policies that contribute to ongoing conflicts. The relatively few analysts and writers that stress that the world is mostly secure and at peace can barely be heard above the din of threat inflation and fear-mongering.

Of course, it doesn’t follow that the general peace and stability of most of the world should make us neglect the remaining conflicts around the world. If anything, the comparative rarity of major wars makes us pay more attention to most of the conflicts that do exist than we would if there were far more. As far as I know, no one is arguing that it is “somehow okay” for regions currently suffering from armed conflict to continue to suffer. Those that are most likely to acknowledge that most of the world is not at war tend to be some of the most frequent critics of policies that lead to the launching and escalation of wars. The point of emphasizing that most of the world is peaceful is to keep existing conflicts in proper perspective and to stave off alarmist panic about global “chaos” that leads to heavy-handed and militarized policies that make existing wars worse.

There are unfortunately some wars that are ignored, including the Saudi-led war on Yemen, but that war isn’t being ignored because we have all been convinced that most of the world is at peace. Rather, the war on Yemen is being ignored as much as it is because much of the country’s devastation is being wrought by U.S. clients with U.S. help. Yemen’s dire humanitarian crisis is the result of outside military intervention, so it can’t be exploited as a pretext for a new intervention. The problem isn’t that the U.S. and its allies have been indifferent to conflict in Yemen, but that they have foolishly and inexcusably joined forces with governments responsible for escalating it. That isn’t a case of dismissing a country as being “beyond redemption” so much as it is actively working to condemn it to hell.

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