Target world peace actively, explicitly

John Lanchester quotes Adam Smith:

‘Commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours and of servile dependency on their superiors. This, though that has been the least observed, is by far the most important of all their effects.’ After the Fall, John Lanchester, 'London Review of Books', dated 5 July

Mr Lanchester doubts that this still applies: 'elites seem to have moved from defending capitalism on moral grounds to defending it on the grounds of realism. They say: this is just the way the world works,' and then writes cogently and readably about the crash of 2008, subsequent policy changes, and inequality. My focus here though is on the Adam Smith's point: "So according to the godfather of economics, ‘by far the most important of all the effects’ of commerce is its benign impact on wider society."

Francis Fukuyama pointed out that, once you have a common agreement to engage in voluntary, good-faith transactions, people engaging in market transactions can be highly individualistic and do not even need to like each other. It's hard to disagree, but trade, and especially international trade, can be disrupted by politics, with rancorous results. So here's my question: instead of relying on a highly politicised world trading system to achieve peace between countries, why not reward people directly for achieving peace? Perhaps it's because we believe at some level, like the ancient Greeks, that war is part of the natural order of things, so there's no point trying to do anything about it. Or perhaps it's because we think that bodies like the United Nations will succeed in bringing about world peace. Or it could be because our politicians and bureaucrats, and many of the rest of us, don't think there's much point looking too far ahead; and achieving a sustained period of world peace, by any definition, is going to be a long-term undertaking.

Which is where the Social Policy Bond principle applied to violent political conflict, can play a role. No single way of stopping war will work. We therefore need to encourage diverse, adaptive solutions, including feedback mechanisms that ensure that promising approaches are encouraged and, crucially, that failing approaches are terminated. It's unlikely that existing organisations, however well resourced, however well meaning, could do this, even if they had proper incentives. Organisations have their own objectives, of which the over-riding one is self-perpetuation; they have few incentives to be imaginative in their approaches to social problems. What is needed are highly motivated new organisations, whose goals are exactly congruent with society’s. Under a Conflict Reduction Bond regime these organisations might not have a stable structure, nor a stable composition, but their societally defined goal would be stable: a sustained period of peace would be the raison d’etre of such organisations. Their rewards would be inextricably tied to their achieving it. Conflict Reduction Bonds would be redeemable only when absence of conflict had been sustained for a defined period. These bonds would contract the achievement of peace to the market, instead of to the inevitably poorly-resourced, distracted or corrupted bureaucracies that are currently charged with the task. Peace, then, would not be an incidental side-effect of commerce and an ever more rickety world trading system, but the direct, targeted, explicitly rewarded a goal for highly motivated coalitions and their agents.