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.

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[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.

Meaningless targets and hidden agendas

This is what can happen when targets have nothing to do with society's well-being: 

Stephen Miller, the [US] president's deputy chief of staff and the architect of his immigration policy, wants ICE to arrest 3,000 people a day. In early June the agency was averaging roughly 1,100, according to the Deportation Data Project, a group that collects immigration statistics Mr Homan and DHS insist that the administration is prioritising criminals and national-security threats. But the pressure to ramp up arrests is leading to indiscriminate round-ups of day labourers and taco-sellers. An analysis of the Deportation Data Project’s figures by Mr Bier suggests that nearly half of the migrants arrested during the first week of June had no criminal record. ICE’s big payday makes mass deportation possible, the 'Economist', 12 July 2025 

Why 3000? Why not 300...or 30 000? Numerical targets are probably essential for governments of our large, complex societies, but they need to be meaningful. The case for Social Policy Bonds rest on two pillars. One is the channelling of market forces into the achievement of our goals. The other, though, is the precise definition of these goals. For any quantitative measures of progress, our goals should not only be meaningful to ordinary people. They should be ends in themselves or inextricably linked to those ends. They need to be broad and long term, so that solving one problem can't occur simply by creating others, or shifting the problem into another region, or kicking the can down the road.

So, if the perceived problem in the US is criminality, then target crime. If the target is the number of criminal migrants then, OK, target the number of criminal migrants. But that's not what's happening here. These targets, and other unfocused micro-targets, might have started out as well intentioned. But they are too easily devised or perverted by people with an interest in avoiding effort or, as seems to be happening here, fulfilling an unstated, more sinister, agenda. People can get away with this because few of us will challenge the stated goal, or because we share the unstated agenda. Only in retrospect do we see how the targets and indicators associated with such ideals are so poorly or cynically designed that they have little do with achieving society's real goals. 

World Peace Bonds: setting the scene

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.

Cesspits are also stable: how to bring about peace in the Middle East

Aljazeera reports:  

[German] Chancellor Friedrich Merz urged both Israel and Iran to avoid any “further escalation”. Both sides should refrain from steps that could “destabilise the entire region,” said Merz... 

Australia said it was “alarmed by the escalation between Israel and Iran”. “This risks further destabilising a region that is already volatile. We call on all parties to refrain from actions and rhetoric that will further exacerbate tensions,” said Foreign Minister Penny Wong. How the world is reacting to Israel attacks on Iran nuclear, military sites, Aljazeera.com, 13 June 2025 

One great advantage of a Social Policy Bond regime is that it would oblige us to choose real, meaningful goals. Cesspits are generally stable, but a social environment as stable a cesspit is hardly aspirational.  

 

 

 

 

 

Ahh, stability: a cesspit in New Zealand 

 

I'm convinced that, for most of us, a stable Middle East is not a goal. A peaceful, prosperous, enlightened Middle East would surely be a more desirable goal for the vast majority of the region's population, but getting there will mean change. Instability is a necessary condition for movement towards our goal, but it's not sufficient. It needs to be guided and that is where a Middle East Peace Bond regime could help. 

Now peace in the Middle East - a lasting, warm peace - might seem an outlandish goal, and so it is if we take a short-term view. But a regime would have as its goal a peace sustained for, say four decades. How to achieve that? No single approach will work by itself. My suggestion is that we put in place incentives to research, experiment and implement the most promising of a range of diverse approaches, always with the ultimate goal of a lasting peace in mind. 

While robust definitions of 'peace' will need to be thought through, a long-term peace means more than the absence of war. We could issue Middle East Peace bonds redeemable only when there had been no significant numbers of people in the region killed, injured or forced to flee their homes during our four decades. That would necessitate not just the minimisation of casualties, but elimination of the threat of such casualties: only a warm peace would bring that about, circumventing the need for a definition of such a concept. 

Middle East Peace Bonds would be an application of the Social Policy Bond concept. They would, in effect, contract out the achievement of long-term peace to those who are most efficient at bringing it about. Bondholders have incentives explore and implement new, more diverse options than are currently being undertaken, and they could divert funding into the most promising of these. They would have more latitude for action than existing - failing - efforts undertaken by governments. For example, bondholders could subsidise intermarriage between members of different religious or territorial communities. They could sponsor school exchange visits, sports matches or the broadcasting of peaceful propaganda. They could arrange for the most virulent warlords and preachers of hate to take one-way, first-class journeys to luxurious holidays in remote resorts with limited access to communication facilities. There are well-meaning and hard-working bodies working today in imaginative and helpful ways (see here for example), but they lack resources: bond regime would channel funds into the most promising of these bodies. 

Whatever holders of bonds targeting war and terrorism do, they will have successes and failures. But they will also have incentives to terminate projects that are failing and to refine and replicate their successes - to be efficient, in other words. Government has no such direct incentive. It cannot offer direct financial rewards for success, and its talent pool is limited, partly for that reason. It has a short-term focus, too often resorting to military action, and it would get into trouble if it advocated things like intermarriage, or sponsored sybaritic retirement for the region's warmongers. Its actions tend to be one-size-fits-all, slow to adapt and advocated mainly because they have been done before, rather than because of their putated efficiency: government will always prefer tried, tested and failed solutions to innovative, promising, and successful initiatives that entail relinquishing some of their powers. 

The field of conflict is one area where the private sector can and should be given the chance to operate more freely. Sadly, it is largely private, short-term incentives - to arms dealers and fanatics - that keep conflict going. A well-funded bond regime would redress the balance. 

Under a Middle East Peace Bond regime, government could still play a role in defining our peace goal and raising some of the revenue for its achievement, but I am more convinced now that the private sector will have to take the initiative. That could mean a combination of NGOs, interested corporations, philanthropists and ordinary citizens. Probably all of these, with perhaps some neutral governments, would be needed to raise sufficient funding. The goal of long-term, warm peace, would benefit tens of millions and if that means making the current iteration of the region less stable than a cesspit, then so be it. 

Blundering toward catastrophe

 Gillian Tett interviews Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency: 

...Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has put civilian nuclear plants in the line of fire; meanwhile Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons. "This is worrying because it normalises this," Grossi admits with masterly understatement. "In the past, this was quite taboo, but now people talk about tactical nuclear weapons like something which could be contained or permissible." Grossi also faces a nuclear-armed North Korea, rising tensions between India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers, and his "biggest preoccupation": Iran. Lunch with the FT, 'Financial Times', 7 June 2025

The taboo against threatening the use of nuclear weapons has been broken.  It now appears inevitable that, unless we are determined to establish long-term nuclear peace, the taboo against their use will also break. There are few incentives not to threaten use of nuclear weapons, and plenty of incentive to acquire them. We need to offer meaningful and effective incentives for people to do everything they can to deter the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons.     

For many of our social goals, one difficulty is reliably monitoring progress toward their achievement. That certainly applies to the Social Policy Bond concept - but not in the case of nuclear peace. Use of a nuclear weapon that kills, say, more than 500 people, or that creates a serious electromagnetic pulse, is something that we could unequivocally detect. There are other reasons why maintaining nuclear peace would be an ideal goal for the Social Policy Bond concept:

•     existing initiatives don't seem to be working,
•     the goal is long term, and
•     the goal is likely to require a multiplicity of diverse, adaptive approaches. 

There are bodies, including the IAEA, that are working toward nuclear peace either as their main activity or indirectly, but they are typically short of resources and - relatedly - have little financial incentive to succeed. 

Given that a nuclear conflict is one of the worst scenarios imaginable, dwarfing even our serious, urgent social and environmental problems, it's worth exploring new approaches to nuclear peace. I don't know a way out of any impending nuclear conflict, but what I can propose is that we offer incentives for people to find such ways. Rather than leave everything to the politicians, ideologues, military men and the war-gamers, or even the well-meaning, dedicated professionals at bodies such as the IAEA, we could encourage the issuing of Nuclear Peace Bonds that would be redeemed only when there has been a sustained period of nuclear peace. Backers would contribute to the funds for redemption of the bonds, which would occur only when nuclear peace, defined as, say, the absence of a nuclear detonation that kills more than 500 people (or a serious electromagnetic pulse) has been sustained for three decades. The bonds could be backed and issued by any combination of governments, international organisations, non-governmental organisations and philanthropists, and their funds could be swelled by contributions from the public.

Nuclear Peace Bonds could run in parallel with existing efforts. Indeed, it's likely to channel more resources into those existing bodies whose activities are most promising. It would also encourage new approaches, the precise nature of which we cannot and need not know in advance.

A Nuclear Peace Bond regime would reward those who achieve peace, whoever they are and however they do so. It’s an admittedly novel approach, but the relevant question is 'what is the alternative?'. The Doomsday Clock is currently at 89 seconds to midnight.