{"id":51117,"date":"2019-10-09T12:40:28","date_gmt":"2019-10-09T01:40:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=51117"},"modified":"2020-04-30T16:10:03","modified_gmt":"2020-04-30T06:10:03","slug":"from-the-bookshelf-world-peace-and-how-we-can-achieve-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/from-the-bookshelf-world-peace-and-how-we-can-achieve-it\/","title":{"rendered":"From the bookshelf: \u2018World peace (and how we can achieve it)\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Alex Bellamy is one of Australia\u2019s leading authorities on security issues, especially the possible application of the \u2018responsibility to protect\u2019 doctrine. By academic standards he\u2019s also the very model of an engaged, highly influential public intellectual who has worked tirelessly in the cause of peace and security. In short, there is a lot to admire about Professor Bellamy, which is what makes his new book<\/a> the proverbial \u2018must read\u2019 for anyone with even a passing interest in the theory and\u2014more importantly\u2014the possible practice of world peace.<\/p>\n

Writing a book about the prospects and even the very possibility of world peace might seem like a quixotic project at this moment in history. After all, we\u2019re continually inundated with images of people being blown up in some war-torn part of the world or other. And yet the underlying empirical reality that drives much of the discussion in this rather inspiring and hopeful book is that \u2018peace is more common than we think\u2019. The pursuit of world peace is, in fact, \u2018deeply pragmatic\u2019, not least because war is \u2018increasingly anachronistic\u2019.<\/p>\n

Bellamy develops this thesis by examining the causes of war\u2014political divisions and differences in values; its historical profitability; its contagiousness\u2014and by suggesting that peace has a long history and is, in fact, much more likely than it may seem. Far from being the inevitable driver of conflict as realists claim, states that are accountable to their citizens, even if they are non-democratic, can play a crucial role in developing a less violent world.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Bellamy highlights the potentially pacifying effects of international commerce, especially the sort that is embedded in cross-border production networks. The assumption that people\u2014especially policymakers\u2014are potentially rational and capable of making enlightened judgements about their long-term interests pervades the book. It\u2019s a claim that is being put to a searching examination in the current \u2018trade war\u2019 between the United States and China.<\/p>\n

The fact that the dispute with China is proving less \u2018easy to win\u2019 than President Donald Trump believed may actually be confirmation of liberal claims about the constraining influence of economic interdependence. Yet Bellamy recognises that \u2018peace activists and theorists have underestimated the capacity of nationalism to reorder people\u2019s priorities\u2019, a possibility he might have explored more fully in the context of the rising tide of populism and authoritarianism that is currently afflicting much of the globe, perhaps.<\/p>\n

One of the most significant contributions of this ambitious book is to provide a roadmap for practical steps towards actually achieving world peace. The path, Bellamy suggests, \u2018probably does not lie through world government\u2019. States will continue to play a crucial role, but so will \u2018recognizing and nurturing the plurality of our identities\u2019. No doubt such sentiments will induce much eye-rolling among the strategic elites of Canberra and elsewhere, but it hardly needs to be pointed out that intolerance and prejudice aren\u2019t exactly a recipe for peaceful relations\u2014which I assume we\u2019d all like to see if possible.<\/p>\n

Bellamy\u2019s suggestions for encouraging world peace revolve around a more effective United Nations with a greater capacity to implement legal restraints on aggression, arms dealing, promoting security communities, protecting and\/or holding individuals to account, and generally promoting the idea of peace. This will no doubt strike some prospective readers as unlikely wishful thinking, but it is not possible to do justice to the sophistication and persuasiveness of the arguments Bellamy deploys in a short review.<\/p>\n

For all its brilliance, however, there is one glaring gap in the discussion and it is planet-sized: there\u2019s almost no mention of climate change and its increasingly visible impact on the natural and strategic environment in which questions of war and peace will be decided. My own feeling is that we may have collectively missed the opportunity to really \u2018change the world\u2019 in the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War really did hold out entirely unforeseen opportunities. Now, however, the circumstances are very different and the \u2018principle of hospitality\u2019 that Bellamy sees as a key part of pluralising our identities looks increasingly unlikely\u2014at the very time that climate change is likely to make it ever more prominent and contested.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, this is a very significant contribution to what is generally an impoverished, deeply depressing and all-too-predictable discussion of security issues. It really ought to be read by the policymaking community in this country and elsewhere, but I suspect it won\u2019t be. They are, of course, too busy spending money we don\u2019t have on weapons we don\u2019t need for conflict we couldn\u2019t win in any meaningful sense anyway. Changing the dominant discourse is never easy, but Bellamy has produced a brave and brilliant meditation on the most important issue facing the world. That\u2019s worth at least an hour or two of anyone\u2019s time, I would have thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alex Bellamy is one of Australia\u2019s leading authorities on security issues, especially the possible application of the \u2018responsibility to protect\u2019 doctrine. By academic standards he\u2019s also the very model of an engaged, highly influential public …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":454,"featured_media":51118,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[32,338,806],"class_list":["post-51117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-book-review","tag-defence-policy","tag-peace"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFrom the bookshelf: \u2018World peace (and how we can achieve it)\u2019 | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/from-the-bookshelf-world-peace-and-how-we-can-achieve-it\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"From the bookshelf: \u2018World peace (and how we can achieve it)\u2019 | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Alex Bellamy is one of Australia\u2019s leading authorities on security issues, especially the possible application of the \u2018responsibility to protect\u2019 doctrine. 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