Did we nearly achieve world peace? This is a moment to keep alive the moment of optimism when that goal appeared possible. This month the U.S. has regressed to having a ‘Department of War’—an obvious snub to the foundational principle of the United Nations, which abolished war as legally permissible except for legitimate self-defense or when authorized by the UN itself. Russia is pushing the boundaries of the permissible with its attacks on Ukraine, including through Poland’s airspace. The last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia expires in February 2026. Israel has flagrantly violated the oldest and deepest norm in the warrior’s honor code, namely respect for the peace negotiator. None of these were thinkable just a few years ago.
When the man who established the World Peace Foundation, Edwin Ginn, died in January 1914 he endowed a separate trust with $1 million, to provide 5 percent annually as income to the WPF. His gift had a proviso, stipulated in his will that when—“at some time, and I hope not in the far distant future”—World Peace were achieved, the funds should instead go to the Charlesbank Homes Foundation, which he had set up to build high quality, low rental housing for the working people of Boston.
Robert Rotberg, my predecessor as president of the World Peace Foundation, detailed Ginn’s life in his book A Leadership for Peace. He outlines how, in his last will, Ginn instructed the trustees of his bequest to decide when world peace had been achieved, at which point it would be “unnecessary or unwise” to continue to support the WPF (p. 125):
“If and when nations shall so far cooperate in the settlement of controversies by the substitution of peace methods for those of war as to constitute an International Supreme Court, an International Executive, an International Police Force, or something substantially equivalent thereto… and an International Parliament; if and when in the sound judgment of my Trustees such changes have taken place as to the status of armaments for war and prospective war…”
One hundred and eleven years after Ginn died, the Charlesbank Homes are still waiting for a decision. Every November the Ginn trustees meet and take a vote, which has gone the same way every time. The next vote is, sadly, a foregone conclusion.
Within a few months of Ginn’s death Europe recklessly embarked upon its Great War, plunging other campaigners for peace into despair. From the horrors of that war, was born a new determination to work for world peace. And, despite an ailing American president allowing himself to be arm-twisted by European leaders intent on retribution, there was substantial progress. In the aftermath of World War One the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice were set up, followed by a treaty to ban chemical weapons and proposals (which were thwarted) to prohibit other types of weapon including aerial bombing, and the 1928 General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy (the ‘Kellogg-Briand pact’). Much-maligned for failing to prevent the aggressions in the 1930s that culminated in World War Two, this experimentation nonetheless set the stage for a refashioning of the principles and institutions for peace in the aftermath of World War Two.
The world-changing achievement of 1945 was the creation of the United Nations at the San Francisco conference, set up to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’ This was also an achievement of a U.S. president who had a vision of world peace, albeit ailing at the time who conceded far too much to the Soviet Union. The then-director of the WPF, Leland Goodrich, was a member of the secretariat delegation to the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco and took a lead in drafting the charter of the International Court of Justice.
And so, by the end of the 20th century, the nations of the world delivered on many of Ginn’s goals. His final one, disarmament, never got properly started.
Ginn’s theory of world peace is squarely within the Enlightenment tradition of Emmanuel Kant. And, in line with that philosophy, war largely disappeared as a legal category. The foundational doctrine of the UN is that a state can resort to war only in self-defense or when authorized by the UN Security Council. That principle spawned restrictions on what was permissible in war (the Geneva Conventions and related developments in international humanitarian law) what weapons could be used (e.g. the anti-personnel landmines convention) and a consensus that starvation was a weapon of war was beyond the pale (Security Council resolution 2417). The justice cascade, the ‘responsibility to protect’, the activism of the UN Security Council, the African Union and its norms, principles and institutions, the proliferation of peacemaking and peacebuilding initiatives, all pointed towards the end of war.
Indeed, Andrew Clapham has argued that not only has ‘war’ been abolished as a legal institution, but the concept of ‘belligerent rights’ that once accompanied the right to wage war, have vanished too. There is nothing lawful that can be gained in war—no territory, no resources, no power to dictate what another state can do, no right to rule over another people. Any winnings of war are unlawful.
This is the 20th century logic of world peace, defined in line with Johan Galtung’s formulation of ‘negative peace’—an end to direct violence. This can be measured empirically, and several quantitative measures do exactly this, among them the Correlates of War project, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and the Human Security Report Project. Their data point to declines in interstate war, in the numbers of battle deaths, and in other measures of violence such as criminality and mass atrocity, reaching lows in the first decade of the 21stcentury.
Notably, the macro trends in the data don’t show any trade-off between negative and positive peace. As violence declines, social justice measures increase. Drawing on a spectrum of data over a timespan of millennia, Steven Pinker has shown in The Better Angels of Our Nature, violence of all kinds declined. The WPF famines dataset shows a similar decline in mass starvation.
With inter-state war having almost vanished, and the historic epicenters of major conflicts—Europe and East and Southeast Asia—enjoying unparalleled regimes of peace, it seemed that the task of world peace was expanding that beneficial order to the remaining corners of the world where rogue regimes, failed states, warlords and terrorists were resisting the march of progress. The Middle East was one major anomaly. Despite intense attention by specialists in conflict resolution, its conflicts grew wider and deeper roots year by year, without consensus on how to build an all-inclusive alternative order. Successive American presidents vowed to build peace, but, exhausted, ailing or otherwise, allowed themselves to be outplayed by intransigent leaders in the region. Sub-Saharan Africa was the other outlier, which in the foundation principles of the African Union and its emergent ‘peace and security architecture’ for a few years held the potential of bringing peace to the continent.
At a global level, there were efforts to fill key gaps, such as the ‘peace treaty initiative’, to create an international legal protection regime for those involved in peace talks. This would have formalized the foundational honor code of peacemaking and outlawed Israel’s outrageous assassination of Hamas’s negotiators.
Did these positive trends mean that wars could be ended for good? Quite possibly. According to the empirical metrics and international law and norms, a decade or so ago, world peace was within grasp. The historic opportunity was not seized.
But in the meantime, the seeds of World War X had germinated—and understanding what they were, and how they took root, is the first step towards charting a new course for world peace.
