Article on World Peace

           Factorial viewpoint of (non-)existent world peace

                                                                                                                 Ananta Kar                                                                                                                                                   

According to the UN, 21st September 2009 was International Peace Day. In fact, it is the same day every year. It was planned first in 1981 and was celebrated for the first time in September 1982. Remember the peace dove? Yeah, it is the dove’s day. On this day, each country on the planet-4 is expected to keep the war weapons aside and try to help peace prevail across all the 7 continents and 5 oceans. At national and international levels, this is surely a different day than an as usual one; no need to worry about missile testing, nuclear weapons, might be a special day for a soldier safeguarding the border of his country that he can sleep peacefully this one night. Actually, if a look is thrown on to statistics, it can be inferred, after its inception, the effort towards planetary peace has expedited in some parts of the globe. But moving down the level of hierarchy, when we reach at personal level, do we feel this day as a different one! We have the same routine life, no holiday. So why should we celebrate peace for that one day! Other viewpoints can be like, International peace day! Huh! What big deal in this? What will change on a single day? Any optimistic person can easily answer this one theoretically. The most common answer would come from the other side saying someday it got to start and let this one be the day. The mission of achieving world piece will get stronger and more appealing as the days progress. Moving on to the practical side of this answer, how many of us really believe in world peace, do we want to have it or it is just another word we try to repeat every time when required! Here, “we” starts from you, me, friends, our community, near and far relatives, the people we know, the people we don’t know, people across seven seas and people of every religion to the set of individuals of every continent. If we talk about the phenomena called world piece, the whole world is taken as a family and all of us are the elements of this we. Celebrating peace at international level is just a start which can never be complete without being implemented at lower levels. Many of the good things start from a lower level and move up, the process of establishing world peace if started at personal and inter-personal levels would be the easiest of all difficult approaches.

May the difference be a minute or a significant one, each person is no indifferent from another when exposed to events. The most important one can be considered as behavioral or characteristics difference. In a given situation, one person might act wisely enough to handle the occurrence of events in a smooth and peaceful way where as, a different person might invite trouble for not acting in a proper way. There is absolutely no way to eliminate these kinds of differences in each and every part of the globe. Such differences many a times lead to disputes starting from differences in views and opinions. While heading for a global peaceful environment, some things needed to be taken care of. One of them is conflict-free or peaceful interaction at lower levels. Some say, trust is the base of peaceful personal interaction. Some say, there got to be a shared language and an open channel of communication with an understandable value evaluation where both sender and receiver will be synchronized upon a matter. Some say, its religion, further dividing to inter-religion and intra-religion ones. To support the view, they throw light on history to remind again the war in Ireland between Roman Catholic and Protestants, conflicts between Shias and Sunni in Islamic arena. The process of finding such factors is a continuous one. In my view, how about the approach given by Mario Puzzo, the great writer, in one of the greatest fictions till date! Let’s reason with people. While negotiating with a person, understand his needs properly, be honest, know your limitations, act accordingly and lead to a win-win situation. This will definitely help in any kind of situation where disputes are likely to happen. 

Change is the only constant thing and at any point, things are changing radically with the conversion process of present to past and future to present. Individuals believe they are in the midst of a significant change, planning and preparing for emergency escape routes at the right time. Subject is not on fringe survivalists. It is about the types of people in a corporate world. Those people, who are good entrepreneurs, those who have good jobs in government and private or public sectors, those who are essential parts of successful companies and those people with some source of earning with families and mortgages are, in a world, distinctly unpeaceful in current time. They are baffled, hesitant, lacking in confidence, concerned, fearful. They run on their routine lives but, do look up towards the sky in speculation of what is next there for me. There is always a never ending negatively inclined curiosity. These factors can be said to be one of the biggest robbers of the wealth called mental peace at personal level. Personal peace leads to inter-personal peace. To achieve the goal “world peace” the beginning has to be strong and a serious thought is to be given by each individual for building a healthy and peaceful social environment.

                                          Picture Courtesy- http://positivekismet.blogspot.com

Moving on to the international arena, there have been several peace pacts in the world history over the last century. Alongside, the differences in peace theories have been obstacles since the very beginning. Democratic peace theory has been controversial and in accordance to its proponents, there is existence of strong enough empirical evidences proving democracies haven’t and won’t ever or rarely indulge in war with each other. Despite of every variation, all the theories that are referred to as democratic peace theory (DPT), often, used to refer only to the original conjecture, disregarding later developments in the theory. Such theories are often referred as liberal peace or perpetual peace or the Kantian peace theory in honor of Immanuel Kant, who proposed an earlier and useful version of the theory. Several researchers have worked on experimentation of the behaviour of this theory and they too have inferred the fact of lowest probability of any war between well-established liberal democracies. Doesn't matter if it is trivial or controversial, all that ends good, most of the times produces good results. If the democratic peace theory helps a progress towards the ultimate goal in right direction, there is no harm in looking forward along its line of existence and trying to increase its scope. On the contrary, some propose that the capitalist peace theory is a better solution to the problem. The security dilemma implies that insecurity is an everlasting facet in international affairs. As each country on the earth is fearful and concerned for its own security, insecurity is predicated on the expectation that there are some countries that are revisionist powers. Even the pessimistic conceptions of world affairs seem to be more sanguine as the assumption that insecurity is ubiquitous and immutable if taken on a relaxed note. The act of promoting open international markets and continuously monitoring the direction in which it advances will help spreading capitalism and will help encourage peace as well as prosperity. They say it has its bad side too but quite less! Many enemies of economic liberty also stridently denounce war, often in near pacifist terms and yet they oppose the very economic policies most likely to encourage peace. The peace theorists have a task in their queue, that is to identify when and how nations can be liberated from the security dilemma they are in. Here they try to argue and prove that the resolution of insecurity can be achieved by creating powerful pacifists and capitalism comes into picture right here. This theory says countries that possess military strength ensure that they are mutually exclusive with outside influence or domination. But, in my view, it is not a very effective solution as under certain circumstances, they lack incentives to act aggressively abroad when there is a real need to do so. Another peace theory is the communist peace theory. There are certain other theories like communist peace theory and globalization, but these are not proven to be very effective and would be difficult to implement.

In my view, it is next to impossible to achieve worldwide peace. But if a serious effort has to be given, then first and easiest approach would be self-organized peace at personal level, trying to improve the state of mental peace in an individual. If we compare the model to the structure of internet, as internet is a network of networks, a network of peace has to be structured in subsequent steps. Every conflict doesn't start with an explosion of a nuclear bomb. If tried, almost all of the conflicts can be avoided at the first step. Such a global conflict-free environment will help the mankind avoiding a possible extinction. Let peace prevail.