GLOBAL PEACE

Global Peace

Global Peace

Introduction

Global Peace is a ideal, but around the world people face terrorism and violence, frequently which leads one to think if global peace a is possibility or is it an unachievable ideal. There is considerable conflict regarding the appropriateness, neutrality, and efficacy of United Nations (U.N.) peacekeeping forces. U.N. troops have prevented considerable bloodshed and provided a safe environment for non-combatants. They have also been taken hostage, killed, and accused of prolonging war. The frequency, scope and effects of warfare have been changing dramatically since the last decade of the twentieth century. The principal causes of the change have been the effects of globalisation on the role of states and governments and the consequences of the end of the Cold War. The first has changed the likely security ambitions of states by largely removing disputes about territory and influence and at the same time it has reduced the willingness of most governments to accept the primacy of defence expenditure as a first charge on their budgets. The contemporary problems of governments, particularly in respect of taxation, are discussed elsewhere. (Binur 2009, 14-22)

At a more fundamental level, the tendency of weaker states to collapse into chaos and civil conflict is a consequence of the processes of globalisation and in doing so it has provided the most common cause of fighting in the contemporary world. The end of the Cold War altered the common assumptions about what a war would be. High-tech war fought between highly sophisticated and organised alliance groups suddenly disappeared both as an expectation and as the basis of preparation, to be replaced by conflict of an almost completely opposite character - low tech, local and deeply disorganised. The bench mark for modern war was for a very long time the appalling war in Europe between 1914 and 1918 and to understand the immensity of the difference between then and the contemporary situation, some historical analysis is required. This paper answers the following questions;

Is global peace a possibility or is it an unachievable ideal?

Many reasons/motivations have been presented for the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, ranging from WMDs to oil. What was the single most important factor behind the US invasion?

Is conflict resolution better achieved through domestic pressures and processes, or via external intervention?

Discussion

The devastation of World War II (1939-45) led many world leaders to conclude that the best hope for the future of mankind lay in finding a peaceful means of managing disputes between nations and other warring parties. The creation of the United Nations Organization (UNO), or simply the United Nations (U.N.), in 1945 offered a forum for the settlement of international disputes. The concept of a global peace forum, however, had an unfortunate legacy. Although President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924; president 1913-21) called for the creation of a League of Nations to govern international politics in at the end of World War I (1914-18), that institution fundamentally failed time and again to deter aggression by rising militaristic ...