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Concept
World peace
Summary
World peace is the concept of an ideal state of peace within and among all people and nations on Planet Earth. Different cultures, religions, philosophies, and organizations have varying concepts on how such a state would come about.
Various religious and secular organizations have the stated aim of achieving world peace through addressing human rights, technology, education, engineering, medicine, or diplomacy used as an end to all forms of fighting. Since 1945, the United Nations and the five permanent members of its Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) have operated under the aim to resolve conflicts without war. Nonetheless, nations have entered numerous military conflicts since then.
Peace and conflict studies
Many theories as to how world peace could be achieved have been proposed. Several of these are listed below.
Capitalist peace
Capitalist, or commercial peace, forms one of the three planks of Kantian peace, together with democratic peace theory and institutionalist arguments for peace. Although the evidence is inconclusive, various scholars have argued for capitalist peace. For instance, in her essay "The Roots of War", Ayn Rand held that the major wars of history were started by the more controlled economies of the time against the freer ones and that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history—a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world—from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, with the exceptions of the Franco-Prussian War (1870), the Spanish–American War (1898), and the American Civil War (1861–1865).
Proponents of Cobdenism claim that by removing tariffs and creating international free trade, wars would become impossible because free trade prevents a nation from becoming self-sufficient, which is a requirement for long wars.
However, free trade does not prevent a nation from establishing some sort of emergency plan to become temporarily self-sufficient in case of war or that a nation could simply acquire what it needs from a different nation.
Official source
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