The Business Plan for Peace

Scilla Elworthy has been nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the Oxford Research Group in developing effective dialogue between nuclear-weapons policymakers, scientists and military, and she has been an active peacemaker for decades. I imagine that many readers would like to contribute to peace building themselves, and this brilliant and strategic book spells out exactly how you can do this in the context of a continuing war economy based on mutual fear and threat. We can all step out of helplessness and apply our skills to the challenges we face and, in the words of Nelson Mandela, 'support courage where there is fear, foster agreement where there is conflict, and inspire hope where there is despair.' The book is in three parts: the problem of war, how war can be stopped, and who can do this and how. A key initial insight is that humiliation is a key driver of violence, and respect is the strongest antidote to humiliation and the fastest way of reducing a conflict; also that power is essentially human beings making decisions, and in that sense we can all exercise a degree of power.

The global interest in stopping war is in fact a no-brainer, even though we find it difficult because we are suffering from centuries of revenge, terrorism, floods of refugees, not to mention children maimed for life. Syria is perhaps a good example of intractability, where more than 470,000 people have been killed and 12 million people driven from their homes. All this violence is very expensive, totalling an estimated $13.6 trillion in 2015 as compared with UN peacekeeping expenditures of $8.27 billion in the same year - really an unanswerable argument for spending more on peace, all the more so since militarism cannot address future security threats in terms of climate change, migration, water shortage and inequality. Needless to say, the cost of addressing these issues is peanuts beside the annual $2 trillion spent on war or preparing for war.

The psychological drivers of war are aggression, greed, fanaticism, ambition, fear or threat. Global military expenditure has increased by 64% in the period between 1999 and 2016, with annual global arms sales running at $94.5 billion. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council are also the top five arms sellers, and it is an outrageous scandal that the UK has sold arms to 22 of 30 countries on its own human rights watch list since 2010 – notably to Saudi Arabia where UK arms were used to attack Yemen and create a severe humanitarian crisis. Hypocritically, sales approved to these countries are said to be 'essential for our security and prosperity' - they should have said that they help perpetuate a vicious cycle of inhumanity and insecurity. Underlying all this is the prevailing defence establishment narrative of security through dominance, and it is revealing to learn that almost all these people are privately educated men advocating what Scilla calls a hardware rather than a software approach, which would involve 'dealing with people, developing trust, finding common ground.'

Encouragingly, though, we do know how to prevent war and resolve conflict, and there is good training available to develop the requisite skills, the most essential of which is mutual listening where inner power replaces domination power. This is all explained in the second part dealing with basic principles of dialogue, prevention and early intervention, strategies for building peace, and costing the business plan for peace. Critically, this involves intervening in the cycle of violence so that the anger generated by an atrocity does not lead to further revenge and retaliation. Scilla gives 25 diverse strategies, explaining the principle of each, giving an example, and how to plan for its replication. In a number of these, the role of women is crucial, in spite of the fact that 90% of negotiators and those in policy-making positions on peace and conflict are men. One proposal is for 2.5% tax on current annual arms sales, which would yield more than enough money to fund diverse peace initiatives, as costed in the next chapter. Here, she notes that political will is critical in order to pressure on ministers.

The business plan for peace is a first, and it is based on systems that effectively prevent conflict and build peace at local, national and international levels. Each component is explained and costed over a ten-year period, and the total is just under $2 billion as compared with 2016 global military expenditure of $1,686 billion! The essential new approach is understanding how safety and security involve preventing violence at source instead of waiting for conflict to break out. Government thinking is so narrowly and pragmatically based, that we the people have to take things into our own hands, and the third part of the book explains how. The rising generation is more familiar with the shift from me to we, representing the application of feminine intelligence and the bringing into balance of masculine and feminine principles. Scilla suggests many potential causes of action for readers to espouse at local, national and international levels, including supporting Simultaneous Policy - see my review of the recent book about this in Books in Brief.

In terms of skills, Scilla has learned from experience that inner work is a prerequisite for outer effectiveness, because the quality of our awareness directly affects the quality of results. This means moving beyond self-righteousness, working with emotions and the shadow, and developing our capacity for deep listening. In an alchemical process, aggression can be replaced by presence and integrity. Scilla also gives good practical advice on taking a stand and concludes that 'the most powerful and lasting way to counter war and violence is to build a culture of peace', living together and celebrating differences, transforming society from the inside out. This remarkable book distils a lifetime of practical wisdom and provides readers with a comprehensive toolkit including the necessary figures to make the case for building a world beyond war while at the same time creating a truly sustainable society.