The Global Peace Offensive Gains Momentum

Above, Donato Kiniger Passigli speaks in Maribor about the “Global Peace Offensive.”

After more than three years of war in Ukraine, it seems that many people are thinking it is enough. Up to no long ago, speaking of peace meant to be buried under a landslide of insults and accusations to be “Putin’s friend” (and, by the way, if you like Russia so much, why don’t you go live there?). Now, the atmosphere is changing with the US evidently trying to stop the confrontation with Russia, which never made any sense. There remains a diehard group of warlike psychos who are running the European Union, but they seem to be in disarray, too. So, the “Peace Offensive” created by Donato Kiniger Passigli is gaining momentum; it is now officially promoted by the Club of Rome and by the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, as you can read in this document. And other international organizations are joining it. Nevertheless, the road to peace is still long and difficult, because problems are deep and structural. Below is a thoughtful post by Timothy Sha-Ching Wong that highlights these problems from a historical perspective

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Guest Post by Timothy Sha-Ching Wong

I am a long-time reader of Ugo Bardi's "The Seneca Effect" Facebook page.

The following originally appeared as a reply in the discussion thread after Ugo posted Donato Kiniger Passigli's address of March 14, 2025 at the 13th Annual Conference of Europe's Sciences and Arts Leaders entitled

" A Peace Offensive for Conflict Resolution"

Whilst there is much in Passigli's ideas that are attractive and to which I would like to subscribe as a believer, I find that I remain skeptical for the reasons briefly outlined here.

We can easily surmise that the central motivating factor driving Passigli's proposal to create a pacifist network of civil society groups is the failure of our current inter-stater arrangements and forums such as the United Nations to achieve Perpetual Peace.

In an attempt to grasp the scope of the problem, consider how far we have *regressed* historically since Kant wrote his essay “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” in 1795.

The immediate occasion for Kant's essay was the March 1795 signing of the Treaty of Basel by Prussia and revolutionary France, which Kant famously condemned as only "the suspension of hostilities, not a peace."

Military destructive power has increased by several orders of magnitude since 1795.

Far worse than the Treaty of Basel, consider two recent attempts at peace agreements that in fact marked the escalation of even greater hostilities:

- the Minsk Agreements

- the even more devastating Oslo Accords – used as a fig leaf (inasmuch as any diplomat of the major powers can even vaguely recall that they are obliged to at least pay lip service to the 2 State Solution) and taken as a licence for the intensification of Israeli military-colonial annexation, the construction of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocidal military siege.

As a Prussian civil servant, Kant was unable to conceive of any political actors except *States* to carry out his vision of Perpetual Peace. Once more, we can see that we have not advanced much beyond Kant.

On the positive side, since Kant's day we have now have global forums such as the United Nations.

What has come to be referred to as Kantian cosmopolitanism can be seen the universalism of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; 20th and 21st International Law as the codification of the morality that should govern the conduct of nations and nation-state alliances alongside the establishment of two international courts - the ICC and the ICJ - to rule on these matters of International Law.

On the negative side of the ledger, is the fact that States and inter-State alliances remain the primary actors in global affairs. The foreign policy decisions of these States is determined and carried out by a tiny global power-elite whose equally narrow geo-strategic and vested material interests are the drivers behind their decision-making.

It is here that we can ask, can Donato Kiniger Passigli's proposal for the development of a global network of pacifist civil society groups act as an effective counter to the belligerent nature of states that are currently locked in a multi-polar world that is marked by a greater state of inherently conflictual instability than any other modern configuration of inter-state powers? Trump's tariffs just unleashed a new coruscating wave of destabilizing currents with the strong potential for causing conflictual results.

Considered as a simple contest of power, States can simply ignore or, if necessary, actively repress civil society groups and individuals that dissent from State objectives. As described by Max Weber, the modern State is the monopoly of legitimate *violence*. Both as domestic forces of law and order, and as geo-strategic actors States are entities of violence.

The most obvious current example is the systematic suppression of anti-war, anti-genocide groups in all of the nations allied with Israel. (To say nothing of the genocidal nature of the military-colonial Israeli state itself). In Germany, the USA, Australia, the UK, France, Canada anti-war individuals and groups are currently being subjected to naked repression with people being deported, summarily removed from their places of employment, had literary awards and academic grants revoked, been imprisoned, been banned from entry into the nation, subjected to slanderous press and social media campaigns, subjected to police violence in the streets, subjected to vigilante violence and homicide etc. All against a backdrop of deafening silence and passive hostility from the rest of "liberal" society.

But let's see and let material reality run its course. Let this new pacifist civil society network put a stop to a war; then prevent a war; then prevent a series of wars; then achieve an extended period of peace; then achieve Perpetual Peace as a real-world norm and not an abstract Ideal, then this movement, indeed the human species, can claim success."