Every weekend in the summer, the editorial team of Duty offers you a reflection on the social issues that will shape our world in the coming years. Individual and collective challenges will constantly challenge us on these issues that we will address from the angle of solutions, as far as possible. Today: the militarization of the world.
Late 19th centurye century, the European powers were launched into an arms race that presaged the First World War. A new surge of over-armament at the turn of the 1930s shaped the second. A third race has been underway since the start of the 21ste, all the more dangerous, since it is totally globalized. On all continents, military spending is increasing. The truce brought about by the end of the Cold War was brief.
The latest report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) is scary to read: military spending increased for the eighth year in a row in 2022 (by 3.7%) to reach a record sum of 2.240 billion US dollars. More than half of spending (56%) comes from the United States, China and Russia. Russian aggression in Ukraine is obviously a big part of the latest increase. A conflict that the military-industrial complex feeds on.
At the same time, the operational nuclear arsenal continues to swell around the world among the nine official and unofficial nuclear powers — primarily due to Russia — in a context where strategic arms control treaties are crumbling. It is madness to rely solely on the “balance of terror” vaccine.
We wanted to believe, at the beginning of the 2010s, that armed conflicts were statistically an evil on the way to extinction. A look at the chart from Sweden’s Uppsala Conflict Data Program shows instead that they have been on the rise for the past decade. With the climax of the war in Ukraine, in which we get bogged down, the Western-centrist gaze is cleared up, which consisted in thinking that the world was tending to pacify itself. “If you want peace, prepare for war. The adage has perhaps never been so lame.
There is the “big” militarization, and there is, so to speak, the “small”, but no less significant, that which affects the dissemination of weapons at the local level. Across the global South, from Africa to Central America, there have never been so many AK-47s in circulation, says François Audet, president of the Obcanadian service on humanitarian crises and action. Haiti, he notes, was not in this state of over-armament ten years ago. The scourge induces daily chaos and insecurity that undermine at the root the work of social and democratic development, access to education, the fight against corruption.
So what ? In the radius of the solutions, “as far as possible”, the risk is to be condemned, by easy judgment, for the crime of idealism. Considering the capitalist competition between great arms-making states; given that the balance of power is law.
Upstream, wars hide a dramatic failure of diplomacy in terms of conflict prevention and resolution. Without rewriting the history of the past 30 years, the war in Ukraine is a glaring example of this deficiency. The one that broke out last April in Sudan, which has fallen into oblivion, is another. Prevention efforts should be massively increased.
Downstream, peace missions are an instrument that deserves to be better funded. Either, reforms and important reflections are necessary as for their vocation. But their failures obscure the fact that they often play a vital role, studies point out. When it comes to rebuilding Canada’s military health — and beyond the NATO debate over the “2% of GDP” — peacekeepers should once again become a priority for Ottawa.
Integrating civil societies into conflict resolution processes is essential: a very interesting forum held by SIPRI last June highlighted the contribution of “non-violent movements” to the sustainability of democratic transitions. Gandhi has descendants. You have to listen to him.
The over-militarization of the world calls for a strengthening of arms control treaties, especially as war is increasingly high tech. It is outrageous that the United States is supplying Ukraine with cluster bombs. As it is that Ottawa went to sell tanks to Saudi Arabia, even after committing to sign the Arms Trade Treaty.
In a world less sick with armed violence, international criminal justice would be better equipped, with strong powers of sanction. To fight more frontally the war crimes committed against populations. But also to curb “ecocide”, a concept born of the Vietnam War and the use of “Agent Orange”, but which does not yet exist in international law. Because the urgency of demilitarization also corresponds, among other immense challenges, to the climate emergency.