It's clear that this is an exciting topic for techies.
But keep in mind what this all is made for: Destroying and killing. We are talking about war machinery, and technical discussions about those tend to romanticize all that technology much too often.
If we'd only pour 10% of the investments that today goes into war machinery into peace research and conflict prevention, then this world would be a much safer place.
There would be less toys to play with and less "fascinating" discussions about tanks and guided missiles and strategy and artillery and infantry and fighter planes, which may sadden the technically inclined, but in the end these are not toys. These are devices to destroy and kill, and designing, building and maintaining them has enormous costs even in peacetime.
> If we'd only pour 10% of the investments that today goes into war machinery into peace research and conflict prevention, then this world would be a much safer place.
If you get everyone to decide this, yes.
But if you do this and your aggressive neighbor doesn't, your decision to forgo military spending can make the world less safe. Some parts of Europe are remembering this now.
If you find out why conflicts and wars have broken out in the past, that could enable you to devise strategies to avoid them in the future.
Just like post-mortems in other areas. A plane crashed? Investigators go find out why, amend protocols and technical safeguards so that root cause won't bring down another plane in the future. Too many bad side effects of some drug? Investigation into why and adjustment of recommendations to doctors. You had a prod network meltdown? The responsible team does an ideally blame-free investigation to find the root cause and re-structures their setup to prevent it next time. Fight with your wife? Find out what caused it and then improve communication or expectations or whatever contributed to it. A war broke out? THOSE GUYS ARE EVIL AND WE NEED MORE SPENDING ON WEAPONS!!!1
Since WW2, all those former world-power countries in western Europe have lived in peace with one another, not because they built weapons for mutually assured destruction, but because they built economic interdependence and mutual understanding. That's a start and proper research into this could take things much further.
> Since WW2, all those former world-power countries in western Europe have lived in peace with one another, not because they built weapons for mutually assured destruction, but because they built economic interdependence and mutual understanding.
Yes, and people thought this would work with Russia too, hence Nordstream and other trade.
Turns out, only more military power would've stopped Putin from invading. Economic interdependence can certainly be a good thing, but it's not all-powerful. Sometimes the answer really is having enough military power to deter your enemies. Democracies generally don't invade other democracies, but not every place is a democracy.
Investment into things like research of past conflicts to determine optimal policies. E.g. if most conflicts are found to occur from trade issues, you could possibly reduce risk by lobbying the WTO to amend its policies.
The cost would be negligent compared to existing defence costs. World military budgets are on the order of trillions, so even a 1% spend on prevention would get you billions in funding. With that you could fund a research institution with thousands of people, and have billions left over to implement any policies they come up with.
What do you think existing diplomatic and political institutions are, at this point?
There's no diplomacy hack that would've stopped Russia from invading Ukraine, and major projects that people thought would've stopped them -- including major trade infrastructure like Nordstream (2) -- were ineffective.
On the other hand, if Ukraine had been part of NATO, there was no chance Russia would've invaded. Almost like having more military power on their side would be the correct answer.
Diplomatic and political institutions are currently designed for communication between polities, their fundamental mission isn't to promote peace unless that is in their national interest (which is most of the time- but not always). The UN now has departments with this task, but my point is they are barely funded. I'm not expecting any silver bullet, I just think having minimal people working on this problem is foolish.
I didn't say anything about stopping the Ukraine War, so I'm not sure how that relates.
I decided to look up the figures and it's not pretty...
The "United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs" [prevention] had an income of $81m in 2020 whereas the "United Nations Department of Peace Operations" [mitigation] has a budget of $6.5b. And the UN has a budget of $3t!
To over-simplify a bit:
Cost(prevention) ~ 1% * cost(mitigation)
Cost(prevention) ~ 0.0003% * UN Budget
So essentially the global institution tasked with preventing conflict spends a rounding error of its budget doing so.
But keep in mind what this all is made for: Destroying and killing. We are talking about war machinery, and technical discussions about those tend to romanticize all that technology much too often.
If we'd only pour 10% of the investments that today goes into war machinery into peace research and conflict prevention, then this world would be a much safer place.
There would be less toys to play with and less "fascinating" discussions about tanks and guided missiles and strategy and artillery and infantry and fighter planes, which may sadden the technically inclined, but in the end these are not toys. These are devices to destroy and kill, and designing, building and maintaining them has enormous costs even in peacetime.