Rethinking peace: Beyond the absence of war with Paul Shrivastava and Nolita Mvunelo

Why are current peace frameworks struggling to meet today’s complex challenges and what would it take to create genuine security in the 21st Century?

In this episode of The Club of Rome Podcast, Nolita Mvunelo speaks with Paul Shrivastava, co-president of The Club of Rome about why traditional peace frameworks are ill-equipped to address the deeper threats emerging from ecological breakdown, widening inequality and systemic instability. Drawing on The Club of Rome’s recent publication Planetary Peace for Human Security, Paul outlines a bold reimagining of what peace might mean today.

Together, Nolita and Paul dive into how conventional approaches shaped by military logic and colonial legacies often reinforce the divisions they aim to heal. They discuss the need for a planetary vision of peace that connects inner transformation, environmental renewal and social justice and why moving beyond analysis towards systemic action is now essential.

This episode invites us to transcend outdated paradigms, embrace an expanded understanding of peace and mobilise the transformative collaboration needed for a regenerative future.

Watch the episode:

Full transcript:

Nolita: What does true peace and human security mean in the 21st Century? In a world of climate breakdown, rising inequality and the accelerating risks of AI and emerging technologies, our guest on today's podcast reminds us that peace must mean more than simply the absence of war. In a recent paper, planetary peace for human security, Paul Shrivastava, co-president of The Club of Rome, argues that traditional ideas of peace, shaped by colonial legacies, military power and post Second World War diplomacy, are no longer fit for purpose. Instead, he and his co-authors propose a concept of planetary peace, a vision of security grounded in the wellbeing of people, the planet and future generations. 

I am Nolita Mvunelo, and on today's podcast, Paul and I discuss why peace today must encompass inner development, the environment, technology, and our relationship with nature, and how collaboration can turn global crises into opportunities for renewal. That's all ahead on The Club of Rome Podcast, where we explore bold ideas for shaping sustainable futures. 

Hi Paul. Thank you so much for joining us today. How are you doing? 

Paul: I am doing fine, Nolita, how are you doing? 

I'm good, I'm good, and getting right into it. So, what is planetary peace? Because you describe it as something that's much bigger than the absence of war. What exactly does this mean? And why have you chosen to pursue this topic specifically? 

So historically, peace has been cued in relation to wars, usually wars among nations and among sub national groups, and peace is what's supposed to stop the wars and take care of victims, etc. But humanity now faces a much bigger risk to human life that can cause 10 times to 100 times the number of deaths that even the largest wars in history have caused, and that risk is the breakdown of planetary ecosystems. These kinds of events can kill and injure millions of people at a time in specific natural disasters that we hear about, which are becoming worse and more frequent, but also in slow seeping harm that is causing excess number of deaths from what was normal before the pollution of Oceans and air became so huge. So planetary peace is a concept of peace and nonviolence that is responsive to these major sources of violence against humans and against nature and all species. These kind of dangers and risks ensue from breaching of our planetary boundaries. So, we kind of wanted to raise the discussion of peace from the narrow focus on international wars to something that is planetary in scale and responsive to the challenges of the planetary boundaries and also the destruction of ecosystems. 

Nolita: This was the title of the first version of this publication, and now the second one was on planetary peace in the Anthropocene. So, when I'm hearing your response is that it's very much nested into this idea that we have entered a new epoch. The Club of Rome is well known for its systems thinking, connecting the dots between economics, environment and human wellbeing. Why have you chosen this legacy and the Anthropocene as the way to observe and explore peace? 

Paul: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think some of it is specific to The Club of Rome, the way this discussion emerged amongst us. But on a more abstract scale, we are defining peace in systemic terms, because it is a legacy of The Club of Rome. And for us, there are three components of the systems of planetary peace. One has to be at peace with oneself. The second is peace with others, between neighbors and nations, etc. And the third is peace with nature. These systems of peace are interrelated. They're interconnected. They're very interwoven. So, we are very much following in the legacy of systems thinking of The Club of Rome. We also trace the roots of these systems of peace to other economic, social, cultural and political systems and practices. So, we connect peace with systems that govern everyday activities and the life of people. This way, we hope that each individual person will be able to see the role of peace in their lives, in the way they conduct their lives, and take responsibility for and do something about it. So, we wanted to not only do systems thinking around peace, but also a kind of people-enabling so that peace is not left to security experts. It is not left to governments to deal with. Because, frankly, the record of governments in dealing with peace is rather abysmal. We've had 2000 years of war, so we thought that we need to shift the locus of action to people, and that was the other reason for thinking about it in these systemic terms. 

Nolita: What are the considerations about the question of understanding or navigating power? Because this, this publication, was also coming in like a backdrop of over 100 global conflicts, two of which are really grabbing the attention of people, while also, you know, the political landscape in and of itself, is shifting. 

Paul: Yeah, so actually, we started a conversation within The Club of Rome as a response to the Gaza crisis. I mean, what is now widely acknowledged as being a war of genocide. And it shook a lot of people right at the beginning of the war, and we started having conversations within the club, among members, about what, what are we to think of this? How are we to make sense of what is going on in Gaza and what's going on in Ukraine, and what's going on in all these other wars that we have been engaged in? What does it tell us about being human? And so actually, before this publication that you are referencing, we had another publication called “Enduring Peace in the Anthropocene”. And I'll come back to the question of the Anthropocene in a second. I know I didn't fully address it, but in that publication, I invited about a couple dozen Club of Rome members to explore this question of that we are moving into this new epoch of life in which lot of conditions are changing. People are describing it as a polycrisis and so on and so forth. What do these particular events of war tell us about living peacefully in harmony as human beings? And each person took a very different view. With a kind of open ended invitation, we got these 20-odd essays from people from all parts of the world with very different backgrounds, and it made clear to us the limitations of the traditional notions of peace, which is what prompted us to say, hey, if, if all these dangers and wars and losses are not fitting in, and particularly the Gaza war, into a narrative of peace that we have inherited over the last 200 years of war, then we need a new concept of peace, and we call it planetary peace, and we worked on developing that paper. 

So let me go back to the Anthropocene, because there are pieces of that puzzle that we haven't really fully parsed out. The Anthropocene clearly, we are in a period that is characterised by great acceleration in human population and in economic production and consumption, in devastating extraction of earth's resources, with tremendous inequalities at the same time, and in socio economic activities that are literally, literally killing the soil worldwide, killing plant life, killing other species. I mean, we are killing 80 billion animals every year for food. These are not sustainable, these are not peaceful approaches to the economy, approaches to dealing with the challenges of the Anthropocene. These are nature extractive capital accumulation processes that are at the root of breaching planetary boundaries of life, and they spill over in several ways into security and conflict issues. First, in order to provide security to the resources that we want to extract and the logistics routes for these resources that we need to protect, we are increasing military expenditures, and military systems build out. 

In 2024 we spent about $2.4 trillion in defense, so called defense expenditures. And these expenditures are going to double in the next decade. The US is already for 2026 wanting to spend over a trillion dollars itself. And then China has increased its budget by 7% India has increased its defense budget by six and a half percent, and all the NATO countries, which sort of fell under the US umbrella, are now being pushed by the Trump administration to spend 5% of their GDP into defense budgets in 2026. And so, we are moving in the wrong direction, in to protect the exploitation of resources which actually caused the Anthropocene. So that is one link to the Anthropocene. 

Secondly, the extraction of local resources, whether they're in Africa or in other parts of the world, is itself a source of armed conflicts. Now, these extractive practices benefit very differential populations. They are very unequal, and most of them are quite unfair, at least in the view of the locals. So, there is resistance by local communities to exploiting their local resources for profits by some anonymous, private and public corporations. So environmental technologies and nature-based solutions must become part of the security solution. Human security is not just about protecting the resources for the rich, which is where the inequality equation is becoming so bad now that less than 2% of the world controls 90% of the world's wealth, and so this trajectory of the Anthropocene needs to be dismantled eventually, but at least disturbed right now. 

And the third reason I would connect Anthropocene, and wars and peace is that the impacts of the current security practices is probably one of the largest cause of climate change. Defense forces and wars consume an enormous amount of resources, as Gaza showed us, as Ukraine is showing us, as other wars have showed us, they use a lot of fossil fuels. They destroy a large amount of natural environment, and we don't even track it. We don't measure the ecological footprint of armies, militaries and wars under the Kyoto Protocol, nor under the Paris agreement. And this is a huge blind spot. So we need to tie together the discourse of the Anthropocene and reimagine a piece for the Anthropocene. And this is where we are. We are sort of proposing planetary peace as a way of thinking about peace in broader terms. 

Nolita: So, if I understand correctly, the Anthropocene is, or can be, in and of itself, a violence. And you know, like the extraction, the acquisition of resources, the acquisition of human labor, is kind of what seems to perpetuate this. I mean, even if you think of it like in like the traditional human evolutionary stories, that man starts to farm, man starts to want to protect farm. Man now starts fighting neighbor because neighbor is encroaching on their farm. Here we go. We've invented war. If one accepts that narrative, it seems like it's been this trajectory that has been happening for quite some time, so much so that scholars really start to then grapple around the idea of, when does the Anthropocene start? Some define it as Anthropocene starts when colonisation starts, because that extraction of human labour, kind of makes war almost inevitable, inevitable part of development. I'm thinking of a book called “A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None”. I'll share a link after this. So, I guess my question then is, what does planetary reconciliation look like, or planetary peace? So, the reconciliation of peace with oneself, peace with the other, peace with nature. What are the emerging proposals that were coming up? 

Paul: Yeah, so, I mean, each one of them is a huge area of debate and discourse. The Club of Rome is involved in some of them. We have another paper that was put out just earlier this year on inner development, which spoke to the question of, What does peace with oneself mean? We need to understand the self in deeper ways. And I think we have the whole Fifth Element project thanks to you and all the people that you're leading in that team to try to fully understand what it means to be human. I think those are all elements of trying to understand what peace with oneself could look like. Now, there are also existing practices of people who are leading in that space. I read somewhere that over 300 million people are practicing meditation every day, and another 3 million people are doing things like yoga and other mindfulness things to cultivate the self in a different way. So I don't think in in regards to acknowledging that peace with oneself is an important component, that we are new, or we are the first one. There are a lot of people who already have this insight, but they're perhaps not connecting it to peace. They are kind of thinking of peace, mental peace, or peace with oneself as something that stands alone and is their individual responsibility and doesn't connect to the rest of the world. And we want to invite them into this conversation of planetary peace and say, no, what you're doing is actually a very essential and perhaps a central part of the systems that are needed to engage in planetary peace. 

Similarly, peace with others. I think it has been over the years and the academic discourse and certainly the practical positions have been captured by a kind of specialisation on international security and the international security world has a certain language, a certain narrative, to describe that, and in my somewhat naive judgment, it doesn't contain the key elements of this Anthropocene thinking that we just alluded to earlier. So that community needs to really deeply consider what the implications of the Anthropocene are, whether it started with slavery in the 1500s or 1600s or even earlier, or it started in 1700s with fossil fuel. I mean, the timing of the Anthropocene is, to me, less important than the core insight that it is the Anthropos, the humans, that are now at the center of driving conflicts and change and extraction and exploitation, and we really need to reconsider our way of thinking about the world and thinking about nature and thinking about peace in that light. 

Nolita: I then also want to add a challenge, because also the risk of the framing of the Anthropocene is that it creates this equality of humans, as if all humans have put us in this position we're in. If I take an example of like from an African context, is like the ability of an African person to have an impact on the environment versus someone from somewhere else, are very different. Of course, modernity, right, like how Bruno Latour describes it, or being removed from nature, seeing humanness as separate from nature, I think to some extent, most humans participate in that, but it's not the same. And I probably could then imagine that even the discussion of planetary peace in the Anthropocene probably faces a similar type of debate of that not all people, there is no equality in creating wars. So yes, we can have self-enlightenment. I mean, various cultures also have different forms of enlightenment, like there's Wudu in Southern African context. You know, there's various forms of consciousness in different Asian contexts that already within, embedded in culture has a level of reconciliation that is required. So then the peace with other and peace with nature, question that you've been addressing on the Anthropocene part, still to some extent needs to be addressed. 

Paul: Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you pointed that out, because I also feel that the idea of the Anthropocene is not to just homogenise and blame everybody uniformly. We know that is not true. I mean, I keep emphasising the Anthropocene when I talk about it, I put climate change, of course, as one of the big things. But my very next thing is inequality, because climate change is not happening because what you and I do. 10% of the wealthy and their jets and ships are producing more carbon than most of what the rest of the world is doing. So, even in the case of climate change, I think who produces and who suffers the impact is completely the opposite. And there are two extremes. The production of the Anthropocene can be very squarely put into the hands of the rich, the rich countries, historically, they are the ones who have produced all the carbon that is now causing the changes, and it's the poor countries that suffer the consequences. So, to me, Anthropocene doesn't mean that everybody is equally responsible, or so I accept that, and I think it is also a question of responsibility. So, if there are historical causes that we are now starting to understand, then the richer countries, and within the countries, the richer communities, have a responsibility to deal with it in a more aggressive way. So yes, I think we will, as we start developing programmes, we will need to not only be mindful of this, but we will need to go to some very uncomfortable conversations about what reparations look like, what solutions look like, what reconciliation really means. It is not that simple in my mind, at least, and while I might not have an answer to what that reconciliation might mean. But I think that if we truly want to become human in our full potential, that reconciliation would have to include those three components, forgiving ourselves as individuals finding ways to forgive others, our neighbors, other countries, and reestablishing a new relationship with nature. And it's a very rich area for research, for practice, for change, for leadership. And I'm hoping that what this paper will do is to entice these other communities that have been providing answers to the old questions to rethink new solutions. 

Nolita: You are listening to The Club of Rome Podcast, the place to discover bold ideas, from changemakers who are tackling the world's biggest challenges, from the climate crisis to inequality and systems change. The podcast is over a year old now, and we have an archive including episodes on building wellbeing economies in turbulent times, Africa's war on misinformation and building climate resilience in the most vulnerable communities. You can find them on Apple Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the discussion. 

One of the most hopeful ideas in the publication is what you call existential opportunities, which, you know, nice play on words. You suggest that even amid global crises, humanity has a chance to reinvent itself. What kinds of opportunities are you referring to and what would a regenerative civilisation actually look like and be like in everyday life? Karima Kadaoui, a Club of Rome member, she always does this exercise of you wake up in the morning and your dreams have come true. What does that look like? 

Paul: You're asking some really very piercing questions but let me just say that the reason for thinking about existential opportunities was my rather idiosyncratic reaction to the debate that a year and a half ago I was involved in with regard to existential risks. Everybody was talking about existential risk. We were kind of coming out of a pandemic, which was the newest existential risk, after being exhausted for 20 years by climate change and 50 years with nuclear Armageddon, that were all existential risks, and now this new one, and followed very quickly by AI as an existential risk. So I was getting scared, frankly, and if we are going to think about risks, and as a Chinese proverb that says every risk is also a kind of opportunity for someone, we started thinking about what might be a way to react to existential risks that would be at least of a similar scale as these risks. And so, we came up with this notion of existential opportunity, and what we need to open our minds we become human in certain ways, and some of those ways are actually quite unhuman or inhumane. And the Gaza war is just an example of it. I mean, here is a genocide of hundreds of people, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, and a destruction of nature. We are all watching it on TV every night, and somehow it is getting normalised by people. It is getting justified. And while at an existential level, I feel a complicity. I can't watch this without saying like I am involved in this. It dehumanises me even to watch, and I should be doing something about it, my moral and my social and my all kinds of antennas are going up on, on this and yet there is no language, there is no narrative to describe this opportunity that might be there. So we, we thought that maybe the most fundamental opportunity is what The Club of Rome has been alluding to, what the Fifth Element has been alluding to is, how do we imagine being human in a world where all these major threats and polycrises are all around us? And so at the most fundamental level, this is a personal question, and it's a question that I took hope from that, even at the age that I am, in where most of my life is in my background, that I can still ask, can I be human in a different way that would avoid and prevent these kinds of carnages from happening? And so, at a very fundamental level, I see this as an opportunity to redefine human existence in relationship to themselves, to nature and to others. And it will have different answers for different people. For some, it will be a professional thing. What can they do in their own organisation, and how can they change their businesses or their hospitals or their educational institutions? For others, it will be a more private response. How do we change our consciousness? How do we change our mindset? How do we change our value? And for still others, it will be a policy question that we can be create more humane policy, the educational policy, social policy, economic policy, etc. So, I think our purpose there was to just open the door, just kick it open, and say everything should be reconsidered. 

Nolita: One of the proposals was on this transdisciplinarity, or interdisciplinarity, producing of knowledge, of collaborating, of creating new initiatives. Why was that one of the pillars? What was the opportunity that you were seeing there? 

Paul: Let me say that transdisciplinarity is part of the solution. I still see it as a positive force, but I've been arguing this for like, 20 years, and I'm a little bit fed up that the debate of the discourse of transdisciplinarity is just hung up still around disciplines. Who is having this debate now? In 2004 and 2005, and this was 20 years ago, literally, it was academics who were boxed in small disciplines and started to say, “oh, we need to talk to each other, and we need to talk to people outside academia”. And unfortunately, that debate, while there was this acceptance that we need to break out of disciplines and silos which are narrow and allow us to go deep, but don't allow us to go across, that that was an important challenge. But I'm afraid that as academics, we haven't done a good job. And I consider myself as part of the one who was promoting transdisciplinarity, and as a result, academia now has a transdisciplinary hang up. They keep talking about doing the same thing that we were talking about doing 20 years ago. I would have liked to see that debate emerge and take root in business, in medical, in other fields where practices have to go across their sectoral confines and silos, maybe we failed. Certainly in academia, we're still trying to go across disciplines. And since there are 20, 12,000 or 15,000 I mean, it's an impossible task. So, I think in some ways, we have not truly understood transdisciplinarity, and we have not made that much progress, but the idea that we need holistic action and holistic knowledge, perhaps, and a more holistic, planetary or cosmological consciousness, that core idea is still very valid. The way it is being put into practice in different practitioner groups, like academics or is, is very disheartening to me. So, I would say, yes, we should continue to do it, but let's not just react to our own immediate environment of disciplines. Let us look at what that big insight is calling for and take those large leaps that need to happen, and some of it means getting out of our comfort zone of our discipline or our academic institution or our conference or set of practitioners or communities of practice into completely different ones, and learning what it means to be effective there, and becoming a new person as a result. That's what the core of transdisciplinarity now holds. 

Nolita: I've run a little experiment on transdisciplinarity on myself because I did my undergraduate in chemical engineering. I'm doing my master's in Environmental Humanities. So one day over coffee, I'm going to give you my unhinged analysis of what's going on. But I think, but if I, if I try to keep it professional for the podcast, I think a lot of it, when I try to analyse, like a case, an example of a water conflict in the rules of the Eastern Capes of Africa. And what happened and what continues to happen, a lot of it does have to do with does this learning actually create change, or is it knowledge that insists upon itself, you know, like knowledge that is so refined and so finite that it just insists upon additional knowledge. So hence, the response to the problem is, let's get funding for more knowledge and not let's now inspire change. That's my top line analysis of what I understand, having now put my foot in both worlds. Could this potentially be one of the invitations then that are coming from The Club of Rome to the listeners of this podcast is, how do we overcome some of the analysis paralysis? What does interdisciplinarity at the action level as well as the knowledge level as well as the consciousness level, look like? 

Paul: What you just said is probably the most insightful thing I've heard about transdisciplinarity in a very long time, that it is about action. It is about impact. It is about change. It is about being on the ground in the real world, and what does it take to do that? It doesn't actually have very much to do with the discipline. I mean, these disciplines and silos or whatever blinkers and bubbles we want to live with our choice we like chosen to self-censor ourselves from action, because action is not a trivial thing. It comes with personal responsibility. It comes with personal consequences, and one can play a lot of mind games to avoid taking those risks of action. And I think the transdisciplinary academic discourse is in some ways shielding people from going into action in that dramatic way. And what you are telling me is that as you have experienced life and engaged in projects, you've started realising the kind of connection between that action and understanding. And sometimes you need a lot of understanding to engage in meaningful life, sometimes you don't. You just have it. So, I would agree with you that action is the heart of it. There are some real problems in the world out there, and we can't just keep on understanding these problems. We need to go and solve them. And I think if there's one thing that we could be doing more is modeling. So, when I look at you, and I look at some of our other colleagues and our members, the ones that I'm really inspired by are the ones who are on the ground doing things, rather than just talking about doing things. 

Nolita: So, the invitation is more people on the ground doing things, and for them to please get in touch. Because my final and my last question was that you described planetary peace as both a process and a project. In a world that's defined by division, what gives you the hope that this particular vision might be the one that actually takes root? 

Paul: Very good question, and also it kind of behooves the question of, how are we going to bring some new initiatives into reality and establish some things so as we are taking this concept out, we are always looking for collaborations, and I am really amazed with the kind of reactions that we are getting from all sorts of groups, all the way from the InterAction Council, which is the former heads of state, to individual university like Kyung Hee University, Hiroshima University, to there's a group called The Elders for Peace that are mostly retired bureaucrats and academics who are interested in innovation in the peace space, to peace organisations, the traditional peace NGOs, which is a huge community in itself, to academics, to people who are victims of war and trying to bring about peace in hot areas like Gaza. 

All of these different groups that we are talking to, they get it. They get the need for expanding peace and creating a peace centric world, just like we were arguing for an ecocentric world 50 years ago when the ecological movement started. We are sort of taking that idea of ecocentrism to include peace, and we are kind of weaving the two together to create a peace and ecocentric world together. So it has great appeal, and that is perhaps the biggest source of hope, the fact that younger people are finding a kind of enablement in this notion that saying that, yeah, we can do something, perhaps not about what's going on in Gaza, but if we look around us and look at the economic system that we are embedded in, we see a lot of violence, violence to the earth, violence to our neighbors, violence, and we can hopefully do something to rectify that at our local level. So, this kind of enablement is another source of hope for me, but ultimately the proof of the concept will lie in how many action projects we can create. So, we're going around to foundations, proposing to them that we need to change our economies towards a peace economy. We need to change our political systems and our educational systems and our healthcare systems and our food and energy and all our systems. 

Nolita: Okay, thank you so much, Paul. Thank you for joining me today. 

Paul: Okay, thank you, it was a wonderful conversation. 

Nolita: Thank you for listening to The Club of Rome Podcast. Follow us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about The Club of Rome and planetary peace at Club of Rome.org