I'm writing a book about World Peace Bonds - the application of the Social Policy Bond concept to war and political violence. This is my draft introduction to the book.
Market incentives to end war: World Peace Bonds
We are, understandably, not quite rational about war. We regard its opposite, peace, as an ideal: as unattainable as it is desirable; something to be worshipped from afar, and something that will never actually happen. War appears to many of us, as it did to the ancient Greeks, to be part of the natural order of things.
This book is different. It assumes nothing about either the inevitability of conflict, or its causes. It will take as its starting point only the reality of conflict. It will not assume that the idealists and ideologues, the politicians, the generals, and the men of religion are the best people to bring peace to the world, but neither will it assume that none of them have any contribution to make. It will propose not a single solution to the horror of violent political conflict, but rather a way of encouraging people to explore an array of diverse, adaptive solutions. We do not need to know the exact nature of these solutions in advance, but we can put in place a mechanism that will encourage and reward people for finding them. Conflict Reduction Bonds ae a new financial instrument designed, in effect, to contract out to whoever is most capable, the achievement of lasting world peace. They aim to bridge the gap between humanity’s undoubted flare and genius and the seemingly remote ideal of a world without war.
In the single year 2024 war directly killed 161 000 people;[1] about 0.27 percent of all world deaths. But this understates the potential for catastrophe: while fewer people have died in conflicts in recent decades than in most of the 20th century, three-quarters of all war deaths since 1800 happened in World Wars 1 and 2, and 90% in the biggest ten wars, which is why the downward trend in war deaths cannot be relied on to continue. As well, raw figures massively understate the suffering wars cause. Indirectly, armed political conflict kills many more.[2] In the 1990s 3.6 million people, most of them civilians, were killed in conflict.[3] In the entire 20th century, an estimated 191 million people lost their lives directly or indirectly as a result of conflict—and well over half of them were civilians.[4] This amounts to about one in 22, or 4.5 per cent of all human deaths during that century. (Rough calculations suggest that this is a higher proportion of deaths attributable to conflict than in the 19th century.[5])
And, of course, war also maims and sickens people. It destroys social fabrics and coping mechanisms. As well, resources devoted to the military or to peacekeeping are unavailable for life-enhancing sectors of the world economy. World military expenditure rose to $2718 billion in 2024, meaning that spending has increased every year for a full decade, going up by 37 per cent between 2015 and 2024. Average military expenditure as a share of government expenditure rose to 7.1 per cent in 2024 and world military spending per person was the highest since 1990, at $334.[6] War traumatises non-combatants, and fear of war, fed by the endless accounts of war worldwide, adds to people’s anxiety, however distant they may be from current conflict. The possibility of war leads to underinvestment of people and resources in places that sorely need them. It accelerates the migration of blighted countries’ best and brightest to stable countries, governed by law.
Meanwhile the potential for violent political conflict, represented by nuclear weapons proliferation, is increasing. in January 2025, about 9614 were in military stockpiles for potential use. An estimated 3912 of those warheads were deployed with missiles and aircraft and the rest were in central storage. Around 2100 of the deployed warheads were kept in a state of high operational alert on ballistic missiles.[7] ‘The era of reductions in the number of nuclear weapons in the world, which had lasted since the end of the cold war, is coming to an end,’ said Hans M. Kristensen, Associate Senior Fellow with SIPRI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme and Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). ‘Instead, we see a clear trend of growing nuclear arsenals, sharpened nuclear rhetoric and the abandonment of arms control agreements.’ Economic growth, the dissemination of current technology, and research into new technology will mean that access to weapons of mass destruction will widen still further. Now it is not only nation states, but also well-funded and well-organised terrorist groups that have the capability to acquire and use, for example, atomic or chemical weapons. The need for new solutions to violent political conflict, as urgent as it is today, is fast becoming an absolute necessity.
War therefore is a major social, health and economic problem. It’s not our only problem, of course. For instance, the World Health Organisation estimates that in 2023 there were around 263 million acute cases of malaria resulting in 600 000 deaths.[8] Of all humankind’s many troubles, however, war is perhaps the most disheartening because it is not a natural disaster or an unavoidable ‘Act of God’; its casualties result from human beings’ deliberate use of force on one another.
It is worth briefly pointing out why world peace is a worthwhile goal. Essentially it is because the costs of conflict almost always outweigh the ‘benefits’. These costs and benefits are to be interpreted broadly; they include, in no particular order, the humanitarian, social, economic, environmental and distributional impacts of violent political conflict. But there are benefits too, and they are not limited to those that flow directly from military spending. They also include the freedoms won from tyrannies deposed by conflict. There are instances, such as the war to defeat Hitler, where the benefits of waging a successful war are almost universally thought to outweigh the very grievous costs. It is arguable that any means of reducing conflict should not discourage wars that generate such net benefits. But it would also be far better to avoid the circumstances that precipitated ‘necessary’ or ‘just’ wars on violent regimes ever arising in the first place. These invariably comprise the use of force on populations either within or outside the regimes’ borders. Ending war, permanently, then does not mean only the temporary cessation of violence: the goal should be the sustained achievement of world peace.
Most people need no convincing that violent political conflict adds to the burden of human misery. These include especially the countless millions currently caught up in hostilities, who would like nothing more than to live their lives undisturbed by conflict. As well, it is safe to assume that a large proportion of those in governments, religious bodies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and other positions of authority also prefer peace to conflict. Tragically though, there are many in positions of power or influence who are half-hearted about peace; others who feel threatened by it, and others who, for whatever reason, actively promote violence. Conflict often serves the ends of a minority of actors, who may profit from instability and violence within a country that often precedes inter-state conflict.[9] This book will take as it as axiomatic that any ‘benefits’ arising from violent political conflict enjoyed those who foment violence are heavily outweighed by the costs imposed on the far more numerous victims.
This book is entirely focussed on that desired outcome. It will introduce a means of rewarding successful achievement of world peace, rather than activities that are supposedly aimed at achieving this goal. It will describe and explain a new financial instrument, World Peace Bonds aimed at stimulating an array of adaptive ways of ending war, each appropriate to the highly variable circumstances of particular conflicts.
Definitions of conflict are crucial, and will be discussed in more detail below. But, in general, ‘violent political conflict’ refers both to wars between different states and to domestic political conflict, while ‘peace-building’ and ‘conflict reduction’ or ‘conflict minimisation’ can be taken as synonymous.
[1] Uppsala Conflict Data Program, https://ucdp.uu.se/year/2024, sighted 3 July 2025.
[2] Civil wars kill and maim people-long after the shooting stops, Ghobarah H., Huth P., Russett B. (Draft 29 Aug 2001). Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences. One statistical assessment, based on a cross sectional analysis, indicates that the total disability-adjusted life years lost in 1999 owing to the indirect effects of military conflicts occurring between 1991 and 1997 was about the same as the number lost owing to the direct effects of all wars in 1999.
[3] Saferworld, UK http://saferworld.org.uk.
[4] World Report on Violence and Health, World Health Organization, September 2002.
[5] For a list of compilations of violent conflicts, see Violent Conflicts 1400 A.D. to the Present in Different Regions of the World, Peter Brecke, The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA, United States, http://www.inta.gatech.edu/peter.html.
[6] SIPRI Fact sheet April 2025, https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2025-04/2504_fs_milex_2024.pdf.
[7] SIPRI, 16 June 2025, https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2025/nuclear-risks-grow-new-arms-race-looms-new-sipri-yearbook-out-now
[8] World Health Organisation, Global Health Observatory, https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/malaria (sighted July 2025).
[9] “Rivalry, Instability, and the Probability of International Conflict.” Daxecker, Ursula E.Conflict Management and Peace Science 28, no. 5 (2011): 543–65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26275345.
