The Paradox Of Peace | Outlook's Next Issue On War And Democracy

🌌As we welcomed 2025, some parts of our world were being torn apart by ongoing wars. Almost every day people are being killed in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and many other places. Ironically, the era of democracy has ushered genocidal imageries into our everyday conversations.

🔯Democracy, the most successful political idea of the 20th century, was believed to be inherently ‘peaceful,’ while dictatorship or autocracy were considered ‘warlike.’ If that belief held true, a democratic world should ideally be a world without war. But it is not.

In Outlook’s next issue, War and Democracy𓃲, we discuss the troubled relationship between democracy, war, and peace. History tells us democracy was invented to tame power, force, and violence — imagined as the antonym of violence. 

꧅Yet, in the 21st century, not only are democracies seemingly dying but also they are erupting into mass violence and death. Much of the violence is happening not against but in the name of democracies. 

🐭The two big flashpoints in the world today are the Middle East and Ukraine. The US is deeply embroiled in one, and Russia is the invader in the other. Both conflicts have the potential to escalate into a larger war that could turn nuclear in a flash. Then there is China, which threatens to invade Taiwan and is bullying countries in the South China Sea.

Former PR to the United Nations in Geneva, Dilip Sinha, writes in Outlook🍨's latest issue that, with such masters and guarantors of peace, the United Nations stands no chance of fulfilling its mandate of maintaining international peace and security. "It has already become as irrelevant as its predecessor was on the eve of the Second World War. The UN has always been haunted by memories of the League of Nations dying unsung in Geneva."

🍃Former diplomat P.S. Raghavan examines the making of a 21st-century world order. He explains the divergent responses of countries to the conflict in Ukraine, the West Asian crisis and the US-China diplomatic standoff. 

He says the post-Cold War liberal order, which historian Francis Fukuyama presaged in his End of Historyও, is fading away. A new 21st-century order should factor in the interests and aspirations of today’s players — a genuine, universal “rules-based order,” rather than the one touted in every international document today.

🍰“An order that condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine, condones the disproportionate killings in Gaza, and ignores the massive destruction in African civil wars cannot be described as rules-based.”

🌳Philosopher Immanuel Kant, in Perpetual Peace (1795), argued that democracies represented the people’s will and the people often sought to avoid wars unless absolutely necessary. This is why Kant believed that democracies will naturally form what he called a “league of peace” and that this alliance would eventually become strong enough to eliminate war as an instrument of resolving conflicts.

𝓀Ideally, this principle should guide democratic nations, as their governments are accountable to the people, and people want peace, not war.

In the previous issue, “War and Peace”ꦓ, we tried to tell the biggest story of our times. The story of wartime… in fragments, because all wars leave us fragmented. In the next issue, we continue to do so.

🅰Our twin editions at the beginning of 2025 are about who we become when we are at war, and we have almost always been at war with each other.