There are many reasons to improve funding for peacebuilding activities. It is often maintained that financial market actors make rational choices, but when it comes to peace and security, most of the money goes towards funding war. Is that rational? To establish and sustain peace in the long term and globally, we need to reverse this trend.
The fact is, compared to the tools of war, the tools of peace are particularly cheap. Teaching peace and nonviolence, as proposed in the Sustainable Development Goals (Target 4.7), is integrated into the usual costs of education, training, and paying mediators, providing them with the necessary premises and means to reach and help the people and communities affected, will always cost less than thousands of soldiers and officers, their military bases and weapons. Integrating prevention and foresight into public security policies, ensuring a decent living wage, and education in co-existence are always going to cost less than rehabilitation after acts of violence against people or infrastructure.
Are things changing? “The world is over-armed and peace is underfunded,” said Ban Ki-Moon, then Secretary General of the United Nations. This heartfelt cry has partly been heard because there is now a UN Peacebuilding Fund. António Guterres and the UN General Assembly are calling for all states to fund some peacebuilding activities (a handful of jobs) within the organization’s usual budget. These steps are modest and the consensus is reluctant, but they are generating a relative degree of awareness and many states are getting on board.
For civil society, too, there is a tangible need to fund peace. Raising the general public awareness of peace, even if politicized, is so often done in micro peace structures, in which most people are volunteers or paid very little. However, peacebuilding is an honorable profession that gives or should give, the right to a fair wage. Fortunately, the profession is progressing and is integrating more or less successfully into State and academic institutions and development organizations. But it still leaves too little room for independent researchers, practitioners and activists for it to become a profession in itself.
This lack of, or poor funding of peace sometimes goes so far as to stir up a conscientious objection to military budgets, leading to calls to instead pay taxes that are categorically in favor of peacebuilding projects. This also carries weight when you realize that military expenditure is overwhelmingly financed by VAT, which costs people of modest means more than to the wealthy classes.
Lastly, the fact is that a public and private peace-positive economy that finances its own security without resorting to the use of force, civilian or military is more sustainable in the long term. It is also more ethical and, above all, more human. Funding peace helps create an economic system that works in favor of humanity and the biosphere.
You too can fund peace.