Transcending identity geopolitics: Conflict Reduction Bonds

Gideon Rachman asks:

What is it that causes some tragedies and conflicts to command the world's attention and others to pass almost unnoticed?

The tragedies of Ukraine, Gaza and Israel all get far more attention than wars and humanitarian calamities in the rest of the world. ... [L]ast week the UN warned that "Sudan will soon be the world's worst hunger crisis" with 18mn people facing acute food insecurity. It highlighted an ongoing conflict that involves "mass graves, gang rapes, shockingly indiscriminate attacks in densely populated areas" and more than 6.5mn displaced people. War and the rise of identity geopolitics, Gideon Rachman, 'Financial Times', 27 March

The answer appears to be something Mr Rachman calls identity geopolitics. But for my purposes, the 'why' doesn't really matter. A higher priority is, I believe, to target for reduction all deaths and depredations caused by human conflict, impartially; that is, without regard to people's identity, beliefs, or where they live. We have limited conflict reduction resources, and they should be deployed where they can relieve the most human suffering. When thinking rationally and compassionately, I believe most of us would agree. 

One way of doing this would be to issue Social Policy Bonds to target conflict and the results of conflict. The bonds could target conflict in a particular region (the Middle East, for instance), or the entire globe, or (simpler to monitor), nuclear conflict specifically, depending on the source, magnitude and interests of those funding the bonds. I will admit that the idea of issuing bonds targeting something the ancient Greeks and others have deemed an inescapable aspect of human nature seems overly idealistic at first sight. But incentives can direct our goals and behaviour in unimaginably varied directions. Financial incentives, as offered by the bonds, aren't the only way of influencing our behaviour but, if they are sufficiently large and embedded in a very long-term vision, they could attenuate some of the more negative human traits that lead to deadly conflict. If that sounds far-fetched, consider the power of financial incentives to foment conflict: without weapons at every level of sophistication, tragedies of the scale at which we are seeing today would simply not occur. Manufacturers supply weapons in such copious quantities precisely because of the financial incentives on offer. 

The links in the previous paragraph lead to pieces explaining how the bonds would work. In my view, issuing bonds with the goal of peace sustained for several decades would have two huge benefits:

• They would bring about more more efficient allocation of conflict-reduction resources, so minimising the human suffering that conflict brings about, including that measured in terms of deaths, injury, or homelessness.

•  For that reason, people would be more inclined to invest in conflict reduction, in all its aspects, many of which will be innovate and that we cannot anticipate. 

Greater effectiveness of peace making, and more resources devoted to peace making: I think it's worth a try.

Defining and rewarding peace

How do we define 'peace' in such a way it could be meaningfully targeted by such applications of the Social Policy Bond concept as World Peace Bonds or Middle East Peace Bonds? 

It seems difficult at first. Peace, in the sense of absence of open conflict reigns, by definition, in the years before wars break out. But the opening sentence of Liddell Hart's History of the First World War gives a clue:

Fifty years were spent in the process of making Europe explosive. Five
days were enough to detonate it.

A World Peace Bond regime would be targeting long-term peace. Bondholders therefore would be rewarded when they reduce the probability of conflict before it becomes lethal. As with most Social Policy Bond applications, our overall goal will be a set of subordinate goals, each of which has to be satisfied before the bonds will be redeemed. So, one such sub-goal could be to ensure that the 'number of people killed within 24 hours of an act of violence' falls below 5000 for a period of several decades. But this condition would have to be satisfied at the same time as others, such as the lethality of weaponry held by actors. 

With a goal for peace that must be sustained over fifty or more years, metrics that target for elimination the use of deadly violence become more closely aligned with what we actually want to achieve. With such a decades-long outlook, bondholders would have incentives not merely to prevent the outbreak of violence, but also to prevent the precursors to violence. For example: the Cold War ended peacefully, but if World Peace Bonds issued in the year 1950 had targeted a period of sustained peace of just ten years then bondholders would have profited, despite the accumulation of ever more horrific atomic and nuclear weapons, during the period that preceded the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. If the same bonds had been issued with a target of fifty years of sustained peace, then bondholders would have been motivated to reduce tensions, including by such means as reducing the weapons pile-up, or fostering better relations between the US and USSR. A ten-year goal would see the original bondholders making profits while the prospects for peace looked ever darker. A fifty-year goal would have seen the value of their holdings collapse before and during the Crisis.

The point is that rewarding peace sustained for a decades-long period encourages longer-term thinking. By choosing to target a decades-long period of sustained peace, we should do much to eliminate the much less quantifiable - but hugely important - precursors of violence.

Even more appealing as a target would be nuclear peace. A goal such as 'fewer than 500 people killed by a nuclear device within one month of its detonation over a period of fifty years' would be even simpler to define robustly, and could be a top priority for organisations, or philanthropists perhaps, who wish to ensure nuclear peace, but have no means or wish to get involved in achieving it.

Black Out nights, climate and war: the need for verifiable goals

Stephen Bush writes about 'Black Out' nights in the US and UK, which are intended to encourage more black people to attend theatre performances by inviting an 'all-Black-identifying audience'. Mr Bush's opinion about this form of segregation is similar to mine (negative), but he is also ...

...struck by an equally important and more widespread problem: that no one involved either has any idea if the scheme works or any plan for measuring it. Even worthwhile causes need a metric for success (paywall), Stephen Bush, 'Financial Times', 11 March

He concludes:

All of us who criticise Black Out nights because we don't like the principle at stake are also guilty of failing to ask the first question we should pose to anyone doing anything, no matter how worthwhile. And that is: how, exactly, will we be able to tell if you've succeeded or failed?

It's a common failing, and one that is most grievous when it's made by policymakers. My previous post refers to an article written 22 years ago by Stephen van Evera, and I don't think things have improved since then. It's one of the reasons that I have posed Climate Stability Bonds as an alternative to the current focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions as the sole solution the climate change problem. We can target emissions fairly accurately, but we cannot reliably link any changes in emissions to changes in the things that matter to us. We need to specify exactly what are those concerns, and set up reliable measures of progress towards addressing them, before imposing heavy regulatory and financial costs on society. That's one reason, I believe, that despite heroic efforts (alongside those costs), nothing in the way of greenhouse gas emission has been achieved.

'Climate activism became a big public cause about halfway along this graph. Notice any effect?' From Riding the Climate Toboggan, John Michael Greer, 6 September 2023

It seems that charities and activists are following the government's lead: declaring grandiose, lofty-sounding goals that just happen to be so vague as to resist effective monitoring. Speaking out against initiatives that may well be futile and certainly cannot be shown to be successful, such as Black Out nights or, indeed, agreements to cut greenhouse gas emissions is, in today's politically polarised scene, risky. Potentially even more disastrous for humanity than the climate change circus is the failure to set and reward verifiable goals for eliminating deadly conflicts: wars and civil wars and their consequences. There are well-meaning, hard-working people working for bodies ostensibly aimed at reducing conflict levels, but nobody is in a position to judge how effective are any of their myriad approaches.

A Social Policy Bond regime would not allow policymakers to get away with specifying goals that can't be measured. So, for example, we need to identify what exactly we want climate change policy to achieve. Our goals in that area could be defined in terms of a range of physical, ecological, social and financial indicators, all of which would have to fall within an approved range for a sustained period before the policy would be deemed successful, and holders of Climate Stability Bonds rewarded. That period could be decades long. All of this would be a sharp contrast to today's approach, which has as its sole goal a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which even if it were to be achieved, does not speak to the concerns of ordinary people, which is one reason why it has gained no real traction. Similarly, with conflict. Targeting broad, verifiable, meaningful, long-term outcomes, such as sustained period of a more benign climate or world peace would not only be more effective than any current efforts to solve global problems; it would enjoy more public support and hence more buy-in; essential if we are to successfully meet the huge challenges humanity faces, of which climate change and war are two of the most urgent.