It may seem ridiculous to entertain the idea of world peace at this time. With major active wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Myanmar, and multiple locations in Africa, plus smaller conflicts and tense relations between many countries and subnational factions, this is clearly not a moment of peace on Earth. Furthermore, peace and global catastrophic risk are different types of things: one is about the character of relations between people, and the other is about the survival of the global population. Given this difference and the seemingly intractable character of contemporary conflicts, it is tempting to conclude that world peace, however nice it might seem in theory, is not, in practice, a worthy topic to pursue for those of us who are active on global catastrophic risk.
I am not convinced that this is true.
In fact, when I stare across the landscape of global catastrophic risk, which I have been doing for many years, I cannot shake the idea that world peace should be a significant part of our agenda. It certainly should not be our entire agenda, but there are many aspects of global catastrophic risk that would be much easier to address if the world was at peace.
The concept of “world peace” can be defined in many ways. How best to define it is a worthy topic: what type of world should we be pursuing? As a rough starting point for discussion, by “world peace”, I mean a world in which countries and other groups have generally friendly relations, a world in which there is not only low violent conflict, but also a low desire to have violent conflict in the first place. For example, right now, the US is not at war with either China or the UK, but there’s a big difference between these two sets of relationships. A world at peace would look more like the US-UK relationship and less like the US-China relationship.
With that in mind, here are some examples of how world peace could make it easier to address global catastrophic risk:
• If the current nuclear-armed countries could somehow manage to get along with each other better, then they would be less likely to wage nuclear war and may even pursue nuclear disarmament. Indeed, I struggle to imagine significant nuclear disarmament without major improvements in the relations between nuclear-armed countries.
• The adversarial relationship between the US and China is a major impediment to cooperation on AI safety. In the US, concern about Chinese AI motivates the US AI sector, including both private companies and would-be government regulators, to rush ahead with more advanced AI systems, a haste that could ultimately be catastrophically reckless. A similar dynamic may likewise exist in China.
• Climate change, and global environmental change more generally, are gigantic collective action problems. The world as a whole may be better off if each country pollutes less, but each country individually may often be better off if it pollutes more. There are important exceptions in which reducing pollution also brings local benefits to the country, but it remains the case that a more peaceful and less adversarial world would probably be more successful at cooperating to reduce global environmental risks. Also, war itself can be a major source of pollution.
• Conflict can spread infectious disease. World War I was a major factor in the spread of the 1918-1920 Spanish flu. In March 2020, the UN Secretary General called for a global ceasefire to reduce the spread of COVID-19, though this was not followed. Furthermore, conflict can motivate the development of contagious biological weapons.
That is, in my opinion, much more than enough for us to at least give world peace some attention as an agenda item for global catastrophic risk.
There is an important exception, in which world peace could actually increase global catastrophic risk. The global human population may be less vulnerable to catastrophe if there is a higher degree of local self-sufficiency. Countries that have poor relations with the international community may pursue greater self-sufficiency (i.e., autarky); North Korea is a prime example. Shocks to the global economy can reverberate around the world, as occurred in 2021 when a ship got stuck in the Suez Canal. Self-sufficient countries are relatively insulated from such shocks and may even serve as refuges in certain global catastrophe scenarios.
In principle, it should be possible to achieve an appropriate degree of local self-sufficiency even in a world at peace. Furthermore, a world at peace is less likely to have major global shocks in the first place, making local self-sufficiency less necessary. So it would seem that world peace is a clear net positive for addressing global catastrophic risk. It would of course also have many other benefits.
This raises a practical question: How can we advance toward world peace? This question of “how” is always important, but especially for world peace, the pursuit of which can often seem hopelessly naive and idealistic. In my view, an agenda for world peace should have a high degree of pragmatism and analytical rigor, the same as for any other issue. Furthermore, world peace should be seen as a goal to pursue, an endpoint to work toward, not a singular problem to solve with one sweeping singular solution. Progress may often be incremental and unglamorous—so be it, as long as it helps.
With that in mind, here are some notable publications that I have found helpful: World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It), Winning the War on War, A New Map for Relationships (pdf), and Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict (pdf). These publications cover a range of factors from the institutional to the interpersonal and emotional. This is undoubtedly only a very partial list of relevant works—a more comprehensive survey would be a sizable research project—but they all point to concrete, practical steps that can be taken to advance toward world peace.
A starting point for the field of global catastrophic risk would be to engage with literature such as this and the community of scholars behind it. Such an initiative could identify opportunities to advance world peace that make sense for the field to pursue. Opportunities might be assessed in terms of how much they would help on world peace and how difficult they would be for us to pursue. In general, we should favor the opportunities that are relatively easy and helpful.
Some opportunities may be so easy that we should pursue them regardless of how helpful they are. For example, we could speak in ways that reduce feelings of humiliation and enhance feelings of dignity. Humiliation is a recurring theme in the peace literature: populations that feel humiliated are more prone to violence. It should not be difficult for us to adjust our rhetoric to account for this. It could be as simple as saying positive things about geopolitical adversaries. For example, those of us in the West could openly acknowledge that China’s recent economic growth has pulled many millions of people out of poverty, and that is a very good thing that the world should celebrate, regardless of whatever other disagreements our countries may have. Saying basic things like that might not do much to advance world peace, but it might help some, and it’s so easy that we might as well.
The field of global catastrophic risk may also be able to help on specific policy issues. For example, a major point of attention within the field is on policy for advanced future AI systems. Of particular concern is AI systems that could take control of the world, but before that happens, there could be intermediate AI systems that induce extensive job loss. Some insight can be gained from existing industrial automation that has (alongside other factors) caused extensive job loss in many manufacturing hubs, bringing feelings of humiliation among people no longer able to support themselves. If future AI might induce population-scale job loss, humiliation, and violence, AI policy should account for it, such as by restricting the proliferation of AI automation or developing means for populations to maintain dignity despite job loss.
Most ambitiously, the field of global catastrophic risk could pursue a leadership role in initiatives for world peace. All countries have a shared interest in avoiding global catastrophe. Likewise, adversaries have sometimes set aside their differences to cooperate on global catastrophic risks: the US and USSR signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty Treaty and the START I treaty on nuclear arms control during the Cold War; the US and China have cooperated on climate change. Perhaps there may be additional opportunities to leverage mutual concern about global catastrophic risk to advance international cooperation and move more aggressively toward world peace.
Image credit: Seth Baum
