Sanctuarial Peace
The premise of sanctuarial peace is that without tangible assurances and reason to believe that intentional harm is unlikely to be done to us as individuals or groups, world peace is no less a mirage than the promise of bodily and mental wellbeing.
Indeed, breaches of sanctuarial peace often originate in violations of corporeal peace at the level below and result from contraventions of socio-economic peace at the level above. The “minimal” before each item in this level serves to indicate that regardless of longstanding cultural and categorical imperatives aimed at curbing and eliminating intentional harm, it has, does and is likely to continue to occur despite best efforts. Though beyond our scope to explain why this is, what can and has been done about it is not. The use of “harm” instead of “violence” is intended to denote that damage can be done in more ways than physically. Minimalization as a goal for social and collective mechanisms for averting harm, ending it quickly and equitably is thus more probable and plausible than permanent eradication, as history makes painfully clear. Sanctuarial peace is not absolute in the same way as corporeal peace and perhaps cannot be, even if to actualize it we must believe it is.Minimal Interpersonal Harm
Intentional interpersonal harm has been proportionally less prevalent in primate behavior than help, an equation equally applicable to human prehistory and history. Sympathy, mutual aid and social cohesion as evolutionary advantages; Confucius’ passive rule not to do to others what you do not wish for yourself; Jesus’ active rule to do to others as you would have done to you; and Kant’s categorical rule to do only that which could bear being universally done are just three of many exemplary imperatives to prevent interpersonal harm so far proposed, which of course would be pointless to posit if it never happened.
Interdependencies like those put forth by capitalists and cooperatives put forth by socialists each served the same purpose: making interpersonal harm unnecessary by meeting individual and social needs. Conflict may or may not be inevitable but using harm to resolve conflicts certainly is not, and doing so creates retaliatory cycles much more difficult to end than start. Interpersonal harm prevention as a discipline is still in its infancy, but as an unevenly studied practice is as old as humanity.Minimal Structural Harm
No social, political or economic system yet implemented has been devoid of structural violence, again redubbed harm to broaden its senses, despite the fact that without those on whom it has been inflicted they could not have existed. The Indian caste system, citizenship in Ancient Greece and Rome, European feudalism and Chinese Fengjian, and industrial societies’ classes show that many such systems have nonetheless survived for centuries. However, they did so only because social strife stemming from structural harm was effectively mitigated and, when not, it brought about their downfall either from internal collapse or restructuring, or external invasion or amalgamation. Counter-dominant behavior such as non-violent removals from power, ostracism, coups, popular revolts and factionary feuds are answers to questions about why structural harm is perpetuated, but not solutions to the problem in themselves. Power vacuums like power struggles have historically closely coincided with periods of broken peace for two reasons. One, external powers have no authority with which to make and maintain peace, as with Bengal and the British East India Company in colonial times. The other, crises of legitimacy by which wannabe powers lack the authority to internally make and maintain peace, a driver of the Thermidor during the French Revolution. Intra-national peace theories and practices across the political spectrum and collective bargaining have sought to mitigate structural harm when it cannot be min- imalized, upon which world peace relies until it can be eliminated.
Minimal State Harm
That states must be adequately defended from external threats and properly equipped to deal with internal threats for peace to be secured is not tantamount to affirming that states have always been and must always be war machines. Cicero’s conceptions of just war as self-defense and unjust for those without provocation were held even by the imaginary residents of Utopia, who also practiced Spartan discipline for protection and order. The key difference between Romans and them is that Utopians subscribed to Grotius’ notion of just warfare, or doing the least harm possible, a version of “civilized” warfare as with the Bushido in Shoen Japan. Deterrence, the oldest and crudest means of preserving peace between states, was in the end what kept the Cold War cold, culminating in traditions of states and their leagues decreasing frequencies of warfare by increasing its specter’s scale. International law, balances of powers, neutrality and isolationism, arbitration and coordinated disarmament have been successful in varying degrees in moderating harm between states. Harm caused by states internally is predicated on and perpetuated by their unchecked sovereignty, against which transformative non-violence works but also has its limits. The organized peace movement’s peace-despite- states approach shows that the only way to absolutely guarantee the end of state harm is to eliminate or pacify states altogether. For now, the surest path to world peace is to globally secure minimal use of minimal force.
Minimal Harm to Nature
Depletions of natural resources are far from new concerns, and have been related to peace since before humans were humans. Bio-genetic imperatives or peace instincts such as restorative behavior and tension relief in primates have human correlates such as reconciliation and detente, and have as much to do with how we relate to each other as how we relate to ecological systems to which we owe our existence. The Minoan Peace, the longest lasting in European history, ended with an ecological catastrophe of some kind, and inaugurated the fractious First Intermediary Period in Ancient Egypt after a unitive peace of some 700 years.
Malthus’ proposition that only checked populations can secure peace within and between nations because if unchecked, nature cannot support them is pessimistic insofar as it is realistic. The doctrine of peace at any price, he suggests, applied to the environment shows how ludicrous it is, as terminal harm to the earth would mean the ruination of the only place we have to be at peace. This simple logic was lent an added intensity in the second half of the twentieth century when nuclear energy was harnessed and burning oil became ubiquitous, reunifying the causes of environmental and peace activists. The non-violent direct action and awareness campaigns of Greenpeace and politicizations of peace and sustainability in Green Parties are thus two recent manifestations of age-old concerns.