World Peace Bonds: Chapter 2

This is the first draft of the second chapter of a book I'm writing on World Peace Bonds. I don't expect to find a publisher in the book industry, so I will probably end up publishing it myself. I will make all chapters freely available for download as pdfs once the book is finished. Comments are welcome.

Chapter 2: Toward a solution: markets and outcomes

The previous chapter touched on some of the difficulties of identifying causal relationships between conflict and its possible precursors and looked at some of the real-world institutional rigidities that bedevil the prevention and ending of conflict. All these difficulties point to the need for a rational, flexible and adaptive mechanism for allocating conflict-reduction resources. This chapter makes the case for channelling market forces into efforts aimed at achieving sustained world peace.

Markets

The resources for all conflict-reduction activities are limited and, in economic theory, and on all the historical evidence, markets are the most efficient means yet discovered of allocating society’s scarce resources. Unfortunately, many believe that market forces inevitably conflict with social goals. Understandably so, since in recent decades deregulation of some economies and an enhanced role for markets has led to staggering and disturbing levels of inequality of income and wealth, while and many social and environmental problems appear to have worsened. As well what ought to be free, competitive markets are often undermined or distorted by powerful bodies, and the terms ‘free markets’ and ‘competition’ are invoked in support of activities that have little to do with raising societal well-being.

So it is important to remind ourselves that market forces and self-interest can be channelled into achieving public, as well as private, goals. Often, these private goals coincide with social goals, so that, for instance, the market routinely performs vital tasks such as food distribution and the provision of such indispensables as home medicines, baby needs, furniture and other consumer goods. These are exceedingly complex tasks but, left to the multiplicity of agents operating in reasonably competitive markets, they are accomplished in ways that fulfil not only the private goals of the firms and consumers involved but also society’s goal of efficient supply of goods and services. This feat results from the combination of the self-interest of large numbers of market players, and their ability to react appropriately to ever-changing circumstances. Some would attribute the triumph of the western market economies over the state-controlled, centrally-planned economies of the Soviet Union and its satellites to the victory of materialist motivations over political ideals. But it is more likely that the market’s efficiencies and incentives had won out over central direction; that decentralisation had triumphed over dirigisme.

Governments tend to be centralist in their instincts. In practice, this has meant that market forces are rarely allowed to play a significant role in organising the production and distribution of those goods and services that governments supply. Government agencies also operate in a non-competitive environment, which discourages self-evaluation.[i] Since governments in the developed countries now spend on average about 42% of their Gross Domestic Product[ii] these are significant deficiencies. One result is that public services, such as health, education and housing, seem perpetually to be in crisis.

What about world peace? Are government-backed organisations like the United Nations any more efficient in allocating conflict-reduction resources? Unfortunately all these bodies’ decisions about conflict reduction are subject to the same deficiencies as those of their contributing governments. They are centralised, unexposed to competition and rarely carry out meaningful self-evaluation. Most of the time governmental conflict-reduction activities are also uncoordinated with those of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), whose own spending is probably more flexible and efficient.

The tragedy is that market incentives operate all too freely in the market for the weaponry that creates so much horror and misery. We saw in the Introduction that world military expenditure in 2024 reached $2718 billion. By contrast, extraordinarily few global resources are committed to the prevention, management, or resolution of the world's most prevalent wars, almost all of which take place in poor countries. Nor, in relative terms, is much spent on peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction. The annual budget for UN peacekeeping is about $5.6 billion.[iii] Preventive diplomacy missions cost only a tiny fraction of this amount: the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA), which leads the UN’s preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention work, operates on an annual budget of approximately $80 million.[iv]

Given the huge benefits that sustained world peace would generate: financial as well as humanitarian, it’s an indictment of the way things are currently being done that we spend so little, collectively, on trying to eliminate conflict. It speaks to the failure of the current conflict reduction systems that we don’t think it worthwhile to devote funds to conflict reduction at anything like sums commensurate with the potential benefits of sustained world peace.  

The manifold complexity of conflicts, the proliferation of possible root causes, the intricacies involved in conflict-reduction: virtually all aspects of conflict cry out for a diverse, adaptive solutions of the sort that competitive markets can provide. The key, I believe is to find a way of channelling the market’s efficiencies and incentives into bringing about world peace.

Inputs, outputs and outcomes

Always taking peace as our goal, some definitions are required:

Inputs into conflict-reduction activities and organisations would comprise such items as expenditure on conflict prevention, numbers of full-time equivalents of organisations devoted to conflict reduction, or spending on peacekeeping.

Outputs are products or services that are directly attributable to the performance of a conflict-reduction agency. Examples include: the number of patrols carried out by peacekeeping forces; firepower of weapons withdrawn from conflict areas by a decommissioning agency; proportion of time that communications and Information Technology services to a conflict-reduction agency are up and running. Outputs however efficiently supplied, do not necessarily lead to more favourable, or more efficiently supplied, outcomes.

Even if market forces were introduced into the supply of conflict-reduction outputs, there would be a major problem: outputs do not necessarily bring about better outcomes.

Outcomes are desirable sets of circumstances, which are likely to be influenced by both an agent’s outputs, and by factors outside agents’ control. Targeted conflict-reduction outcomes could include: numbers of people killed by violent political conflict; numbers of refugees from conflict - see discussion in text below. Our world peace goal would include these, and other metrics that are meaningful to human populations. The terms ‘objectives’ and ‘goals’ are used synonymously in this text to mean outcomes.

Governments have tried to introduce more-market methods into achievement of some of their objectives. But they have been less willing to experiment with the stipulation of outcomes, as against outputs or other simple numerical targets. There have been efforts to link payments and other rewards such as autonomy to outcomes in, for example, the UK,[v] Kenya,[vi] and Indonesia.[vii] These and other similar efforts have been successful – but limited in scale and application. Part of the difficulty with extending outcome-based incentives is that the existing conflict-reduction institutions are taken as given, which drastically limits range of outcomes that can be considered, for two related reasons:

• Existing institutions are unlikely to encourage innovative approaches. This is partly because they have established ways of doing things: innovation has upfront costs: staff need to be retrained or recruited. And partly because the time scale on which they operate makes such investment in innovation unattractive.
• Institutional inertia of this kind bedevils innovation in many areas. Sometimes institutions achieve their ostensible objectives but, for obvious and understandable reasons, do not dissolve themselves. In so many institutions, be they government bodies, aid organisations, religious organisations, trade unions or universities, self-perpetuation becomes an end in itself – and one that often overrides all others. We shall say more about the need for a new type of institution below.

More charitably, it is fair that bodies should not be penalised if the outcomes they are charged with achieving are not reached because of circumstances that are beyond their control. But that means that these bodies have little incentive to look at these circumstances to try to bring them within their control, nor to manage the risks and so maximise their performance against those circumstances that cannot be controlled. Most organisations simply are simply not big enough to take on these tasks.

The result is that institutions charged with reducing conflict aren’t rewarded according to how successful they are in actually achieving them. Even at the individual level actual outcomes matter little: nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize included Benito Mussolini in 1945 and Joseph Stalin in 1948, while more recent awards to Henry Kissinger (1973), Yasser Arafat (1994), Aung San Suu Kyi (1991) and Barack Obama (2009) have been, to say the least, controversial.

A new paradigm

Consider those conflict-reduction operations that are currently performed by the United Nations, national governments or other inter-governmental bodies: conflict assessment, conflict mediation, peacekeeping, arms verification, reconciliation, and re-integration of combatants. In some cases their efforts to reduce conflict are by-products of programmes focused on other social problems. But more importantly, such resources as are devoted specifically to conflict-reduction are allocated to activities or institutions, rather than any targeted outcome. And, unfortunately, the most important of these bodies are organised along the same lines as the governmental bodies in the developed countries that are charged with social and environmental responsibilities:

• they are centrally run, either by governments, or by intergovernmental agencies,
• they do not explicitly reward the reduction of conflict, and
• they subordinate the achievement of outcomes to existing institutional structures and payment mechanisms.

The many non-governmental organisations, working diligently in conflict-reduction and related areas, suffer from similar problems. They are small, and while their own resources might be very well managed, and allocated in ways that maximise returns, they do not receive funds in proportion to their success or otherwise in their chosen field of endeavour.

No single solution is going to work. The world’s conflicts arise from a multiplicity of causes. What is needed then is a way of preventing or defusing war that is flexible enough to identify and deal with root causes when doing so will be the most practical and efficient way of reducing conflict, but that can also operate even when the causes or aggravating factors are obscure, unknown or intractable. For some conflicts there might be nothing wrong with current methods: all that is needed are more resources. But for other conflicts, totally new approaches and institutions might be necessary, and people must be motivated to look for, find and use them. We cannot prejudge whether this conflict or that can best be solved by any particular method. Circumstances are always changing, and no conflict is exactly like any other.

An ideal solution then would encourage a range of diverse and responsive approaches. It would mobilise the interests of the large majority of people in every country of the world who want peace. It would find ways of co-opting or subsidising those people in positions of authority and power who want to build peace, and at the same time it would bypass, distract, or otherwise undermine, those opposed to that goal. It would operate on a large scale, so that variables outside the control of smaller bodies can be brought under control, and so that resources can shift to where they will be most efficient.

Ideally too, it would use market forces: the multiplicity of causes of armed political conflict, and the need for a wide range of diverse, adaptive solutions strongly suggest that market approach could be effective. If market forces could be harnessed into the achievement of a specific, targeted conflict-reduction goals, their pluralism and incentives would work better than current methods at directing scarce resources into their most efficient use. Greater efficiency in terms of conflict reduction per unit outlay could bring about double benefits: it would be an end in itself, but it could also attract more resources into conflict reduction.

The rest of this book describes a new financial instrument, World Peace Bonds, which are intended to channel the market’s incentives and efficiencies into ending for all time what must surely be the world’s most urgent and terrible social problem: war.

---

[i] Why states believe foolish ideas: non-self-evaluation by states and societies, Stephen Van Evera, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Political Science, Department and Security Studies Program, 10 January, 2002.

[ii] OECD: Government at a glance, 2025, https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/06/government-at-a-glance-2025_70e14c6c/full-report/general-government-expenditures_395dfea8.html, sighted 6 July 2025.

[iii] Sum is for the year ended 30 June 2025. United Nations Peacekeeping: How we are funded, https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/how-we-are-funded.

[iv] United Nations DPPA: Giving peace a chance. 2020-2022 Multi-Year Appeal Mandate: https://dppa.un.org/sites/default/files/6141_unny_appeal_2021-v28_i.pdf

[v] Some local area agreements attach reward grants to the achievement of specific, agreed-upon goals—like crime rate reduction or environmental improvements—focused squarely on outcomes. The Use of Sanctions and Rewards in the Public Sector, the National Audit Office, September 2008. https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/sanctions_rewards_public_sector.pdf, sighted 18 July 2025.

[vi] Some teachers were rewarded based on their schools' results in government exams, a clear instance of outcomes (student achievement) rather than outputs (teaching hours taught) being rewarded. Rewarding bureaucrats: Can incentives improve public sector performance?, IGC Growth Brief, March 2017. https://www.theigc.org/publications/rewarding-bureaucrats-can-incentives-improve-public-sector-performance, sighted 18 July 2025.

[vii] Villages received incentive payments based on performance on specific health indicators—such as increasing prenatal visits and reducing malnutrition. This directly tied rewards to measurable health outcomes rather than simple activity counts. IGC Growth Brief, March 2017. https://www.theigc.org/publications/rewarding-bureaucrats-can-incentives-improve-public-sector-performance, sighted 18 July 2025.

World Peace Bonds: first chapter

I'm writing a book about World Peace Bonds - the application of the Social Policy Bond concept to war and political violence. This is a first draft of Chapter 1. The draft introduction was here. 

Chapter 1: Preventing conflict

The best way of reducing conflict is to preventing it from starting. This chapter looks at efforts to identify the root causes of conflict, and current institutional attempts to prevent conflict.

Root causes

To those of us fortunate to be distant spectators of violent political conflict it all seems very simple. War between country A and country B is inevitable, we think, because they both want the same piece of land. Or the inhabitants of country A believe in X while the inhabitants of country B believe in Y. Or within country C the ruling party are of ethnic group D and rich, while the masses are of ethnic group E and poor. Once conflict is actually happening, it is not difficult for outsiders to give plausible reasons for its occurrence, or even its inevitability.

Poverty, ignorance, despair, and differences of wealth, ethnicity, religion,[i] class, culture or ideology: all these are thought to be some of the ‘root causes’ of war and violence. So are inequalities in access to resources, scarcity and economic decline, insecurity, the violation of human rights, exclusion or persecution of sectoral groups, and state failures including declining institutional and political legitimacy and capacity. Other key foundations for conflict could be historical legacies, regional threats, the availability of weapons, economic shocks, and the extension or withdrawal of external support.[ii] Large numbers of unemployed males may also catalyse conflict.

Inward factors are also cited; such as individual pathologies, like a history of being abused that predisposes someone to take up violence in later life. Often blamed too are the media, and the frequency with which our children are exposed to images of violence - especially when violence is presented as an acceptable and effective way of solving problems.

No doubt all these factors can and do play a part in fomenting and fanning the flames of conflict. But even aside from the impossibility of eliminating every potential cause of conflict, there is no inevitability that these causes will lead to war. Selective memory has strengthened these linkages in the collective mind, but for each of these ‘root causes’ there are examples that disprove any simple cause-and-effect relationship. There are dozens of countries in which people of different ethnicity and religion live happily side-by-side. There are also thousands of decent, peaceable and fulfilled adults who as children were horribly abused. One researcher into child abuse concluded that it does increase the risk of later criminality - but not always. The ‘intergenerational transmission of violence is not inevitable,’ she wrote.[iii] There are many instances of land disputes that have ended. Take, for example, the border between Scotland and England, once the setting of a 300-year old series of bloody conflicts, now as peaceful as any border in the world. The Swiss have a high rate of gun ownership and an enviable absence of internal political conflict, as well as a low rate of gun crime. Japan is still a relatively peaceful society, but one in which lurid depictions of violence are avidly produced, promulgated and consumed, and have been for many years. Paul Collier and the World Bank, examining the world’s civil wars since 1960, concluded that although tribalism is often a factor it is rarely the main one. They also found that societies composed of several different ethnic and religious groups were actually less likely to experience civil war than homogeneous societies.[iv]

It would seem likely, then, that political violence cannot be inextricably linked to one, or even several, root causes. What could be a root cause of conflict in one region can be irrelevant in another. Elimination of supposed root causes, such as poverty, could alleviate tension in one particular conflict, but it could conceivably by, say, allowing more to be spent on weapons, inflame conflict in another. Availability of small arms in most societies probably does inflame conflict, but the low Swiss murder rate, for example, is underpinned by strict gun control laws. There is no formula connecting any alleged root cause with conflict in ways that can be meaningful in the sense that removing it will always and inevitably lessen the chance of conflict.

As well, the factors that generate conflict may differ from those that make it feasible. In general, the existence of some form of grievance, whether economic, political, or social in nature, whether well founded or not, appears to be the most persuasive motivation for conflict. Of these, economic motivations appear most significant in initiating, prolonging, and transforming conflict. Valuable natural resources can inflame conflict when grievances already exist, as they offer a ready means of financing rebellion. But they can also become a source of grievance in themselves, if state institutions responsible for their management instead engage in corruption.[v] The United Nations estimates that, in the last 60 years, at least 40 per cent of all intrastate conflicts have a link to natural resources, and that this link doubles the risk of a conflict relapse in the first five years.[vi] The exploitation of natural resources and climate- and ecological-related stresses, are becoming significant causes of violent conflict.

It is not always clear in which way is the direction of causation. In some cases, resource competition can exacerbate civil war. In others, civil war can exacerbate competition over resources. Neither is it always clear which particular ‘root causes’ are operating even once a conflict has started. Explanations for the civil war in Lebanon from 1975-90 centred on ethnic or ideological causes of the conflict. But since the end of the conflict, economic developments, and rampant corruption in particular, seem to imply that economic opportunities were probably more important. The civil war resulted in the entry of new actors and an unprecedented rise in the level of social and political power, financial accumulation, and exercise of violence surrounding pre-existing, illegal drug-related activities. For local militias, drugs not only provided a means by which to pay wages, procure arms, and materiel, but also a source of capital accumulation among their leaders and middlemen. This trade resulted in trans-communal, regional cooperation between producers and militias, who negotiated the division of labour and took a share of the profits. These groups, therefore, had a collective interest in prolonging the war. The authorities have since done little to dismantle the drug networks and their factories. As a result, there has been long-term integration of these networks into the international drug market. Satisfaction of ‘greed’ in the name of ‘creed’ would have been impossible if not for cooperation across allegedly ‘intractable’ communal boundaries.[vii]

These findings echo the pioneering work of Lewis Fry Richardson, who gathered data on all the wars of recent times, that is from 1820 to 1949. Rather than ranking wars by historical importance, or by relevance to later events, he picked the most objective measure he could find: the number killed, and focussed on those conflicts that killed more than 3000, for which the data were reasonably complete. There were 108 such conflicts during the 130-year period of study described in his seminal Statistics of Deadly Quarrels.[viii] World Wars I and II together accounted for some 36 million deaths, or about 60 percent of all the deaths of his study period. (This total excludes those caused by famine and disease associated with war.[ix]) While compiling his list of wars, Richardson noted the various items that historians mentioned as possible irritants or pacifying influences, and then he looked for correlations between these factors and belligerence. The results were almost uniformly disappointing. There were tendencies or correlations, but no unambiguous causal relationships. So states tended to become involved in wars in proportion to the number of states with which they have common frontiers, though in proportion to their possible contacts for war-making, sea powers seem to have been less belligerent than land powers.  Richardson’s own suppositions about the importance of arms races were not confirmed; he found evidence of a preparatory arms race in only 13 out of 315 cases. Richardson was also a proponent of Esperanto, but found that similarity and difference of language appeared to have little influence on the occurrence of wars, contrary to the belief of some advocates of universal languages. Economic indicators were equally unhelpful: economic causes seem to have featured directly in fewer than 29 per cent of the wars since between 1820 and 1949. The statistics neither confirm nor refute the ideas that war is mainly a struggle between the rich and the poor or that commerce between nations creates bonds that prevent war.[x]

So it is not always obvious, even after a long conflict has ended, what its ‘root causes’ were, and perhaps the very notion of a ‘root cause’ needs questioning. It implies that factors such as ‘poverty’ or ‘ethnicity’ can be removed from their social context, and somehow dealt with, and that then a desired result will follow. But human societies are complex. Poverty can feed grievance, but grievance can be a result of poverty. No single formula, no single set of parameters will always lead to conflict, and guarantee freedom from conflict. Indeed, even the notion of ‘causation’ in this context is questionable. Perhaps we should leave the last word to Tolstoy:

The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we discover, and each single cause or series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself, and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the event.[xi]

Conflict prevention: vortices of bureaucracy

If the intellectual underpinning of a root causes approach is fragile, so too is the institutional structure that exists to prevent conflict.

While there has been increasing emphasis on preventing conflict, government agencies and international organisations concerned with conflict are still mainly geared towards dealing with conflict once it has become violent, rather than preventing it arising in the first place. Too often the international community becomes involved in such conflict-prevention activities as mediation and peacekeeping only when the protagonists are facing each other or have actually begun armed conflict. There is also some institutional reluctance to become involved. Many development professionals, for example, see the more immediate causes of national conflicts as 'getting into politics' and thus something that should be left to military agencies, or as interference in a country's internal affairs.

The United Nations been criticised for institutional weakness and inflexibility in this area. There is no single UN agency responsible for conflict prevention.

Over the past eight decades, the United Nations has expanded to encompass an alphabet soup of humanitarian agencies and subsidiary organs with colossal, overlapping ambitions, supported by layers and layers of middle managers. There are endless commissions and centers and conferences and committees, departments and offices and institutes and forums tangled up in abstruse rules and regulations …. There is a Counter-Terrorism Committee and an Office of Counter-Terrorism; a Department of Peace Operations and a Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. The organization has become so unwieldy that even its most well-meaning workers describe being caught in a culture of toxic inefficiency, hamstrung by problems of accountability, organization, and funding. “The U.N. is a vortex of bureaucracy,” Anadil Hossain, a former senior adviser at the U.N. Refugee Agency, told me. “Something needs to change. It’s embarrassing.” Harper’s Magazine (calibre)

Perhaps the single official whose mandate is solely conflict prevention is the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s High Commissioner on National Minorities, and his charge allows him to act only in pre-crisis situations; if they heat up, he must disengage. Another example: the UN High Commissioner for Refugees can only alleviate refugees’ plight, not address the forces that caused it. More fundamental criticisms concern the structure of the UN Security Council, set up 80 years ago. And the Security Council, though technically empowered to act on threats to international peace and security that arise within member countries, has mainly concerned itself with inter-state conflicts. Yet there is a growing trend in the number of intrastate conflicts: According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), the vast majority of the 61 active conflicts that involved at least one state in 2024 (the highest number recorded since statistics began in 1946) are intrastate conflicts—armed conflicts occurring within a single country, often between government forces and non-state groups or between multiple non-state groups.^[xii]

Many overseas aid programmes have, as an implicit objective, conflict prevention. But few donors exert the leverage that they could. In fact, development assistance can contribute to conflict. A systematic review of 36 cases of aid given by the US, the World Bank and non-governmental organisations found that aid increased violence in 14 cases, had no effect in eight, reduced violence in seven, and had mixed effects in five. No type of aid was immune: every type, depending on context, could increase violence. [xiii]

Discussion

There are no mechanisms in place to monitor, in an over-arching way, the distribution of conflict-reduction resources to make sure that they are achieving the best possible return for their outlay; nor are there incentives to set up such monitoring systems. The widespread presence of violent political conflict, the human cost of conflict, the potential for further conflict, and the obvious inadequacies of existing peace-making bodies; all suggest that it is worth investigating new approaches, even in the absence of definitive proof that anything new will work.

There are many government and non-governmental bodies that have as their aim the prevention or reduction of conflict.[xiv] None of these organisations, nor the people that work for them, either permanently or on short-term contracts, are paid according to results. They have only indirect incentives to seek out and develop those ways of minimising conflict that are most cost-effective. They might even be subconsciously discouraged from achieving their stated goals: if too successful, their funding might be curtailed. There is no question that the people who work for these organisations are competent and well meaning and hard working. But, however well-intentioned, neither these bodies nor their agents are rewarded in ways that correlate with its success in maintaining peace or achieving peaceful resolution of political conflict. They behave rationally given the incentives they face, but these incentives do not consistently reward the achievement of desired outcomes.

Lack of pecuniary incentives has two other dimensions. First, the funding of these bodies bears no relationship with their success or otherwise in reducing conflict. This means that the net resources at each organisation’s command including the number of professional and support personnel, and non-labour resources, are unrelated to their efficiency or effectiveness in reducing conflict. Second, while there are well-intentioned and highly motivated people who work for these organisations without expecting (or wanting) high financial compensation, there are also others who would be more willing and able to work for these organisations, even on short-term contracts, if there were more funds available either for their own compensation, or for expanding the range of personnel and other resources at their disposal, which would make it easier for them to do their job effectively.

It cannot be proven, but given the current number of conflicts in the world and the potential for more, and more catastrophic, it can be taken that current funding levels are inadequate. This may be because or a sense of fatalism: a sense that conflict is inevitable, so why bother trying to prevent it? But it may also be a result of the inefficiency of current conflict prevention methods. Since they are so ineffective, it is rational to channel limited resources into other areas, where they will bring about a better return. It follows that increasing efficiency, as measured by conflict-reduction per unit outlay would bring double benefits: the efficiencies would be valuable in their own right, but they would also lead to more resources being deployed to reduce conflict in the future. 

Our quick look at root causes and conflict prevention makes clear that:

• Conflict prevention requires diverse, adaptive approaches; and
• Increased efficiency, in terms of peace achieved per dollar spent, could bring huge benefits.

---

[i] ‘The conviction that any one group has exclusive possession of truth and goodness is a root cause of prejudice and boundaries that allow for discrimination and worse.’ Oliver McTernan, War Cries, ‘the Times’, 12 August 2003.  

[ii] From reaction to conflict prevention, Fen Osler Hampson and David M. Malone, editors, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002.

[iii] The cycle of violence, Cathy Widom, ‘Science’, vol 244, pages 160-66, 1989.

[iv] The global menace of local strife, ‘The Economist’, 24 May 2003 (page 26).

[v] The economics of war: the intersection of need, creed and greed, Conference Report, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C. 10 September, 2001.

[vi] United Nations Peacekeeping: Conflict and natural resources: https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/conflict-and-natural-resources, sighted 4 July 2025.

[vii] Elizabeth Picard of the Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Méditerranéan, speaking at: The economics of war: the intersection of need, creed and greed, Conference Report, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C. 10 September, 2001.

[viii] Statistics of deadly quarrels, Richardson, Lewis F. Edited by Quincy Wright and C. C. Lienau. Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press, 1960.

[ix] Ibid.  

[x] Ibid.

[xi] War and peace, Leo Tolstoy (translated by Ann Dunnigan), New York: Signet Classic, 1968 (page 730).

[xii] UCDP: Sharp increase in conflicts and wars, 11 June 2025. https://www.uu.se/en/news/2025/2025-06-11-ucdp-sharp-increase-in-conflicts-and-wars. Sighted 4 July 2025.

[xiii] The impact of development aid on organised violence: A systematic assessment, Christophe Zurcher, August 2020, International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie). https://www.3ieimpact.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/WP37-Systematic-Review-Aid-Violence.pdf.

[xiv] I’ve approached many of these bodies with my World Peace Bonds idea, but not one has shown any interest, nor even replied to my emails.