The world today is teetering on the edge of a deeper and more dangerous disorder than at any time since the Second World War. Global security indicators show a sharp decline in peace and stability, with 2024 marking the highest number of state-based conflicts since 1946. Military expenditures, already surpassing USD 2.7 trillion annually, have risen for ten straight years. What is unfolding is not only a surge in violence but a collapse of the fragile international order that emerged in the post-Cold War era. From Europe to West Asia, from Africa to Asia, the signs are clear: humanity is losing its grip on the instruments of peace, even as the costs of war multiply. Children, women, and marginalised groups are paying the heaviest price. The fact that the United Nations had to convene a Summit for the Future in September 2024 to confront this fragmentation underscores the severity of the crisis. Violence today is no longer confined to battlefields—it is converging with climate change, food insecurity, and environmental destruction. Rising temperatures and droughts fuel instability, while militaries themselves are among the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. In some cases, environmental destruction caused by war has been described as ecocide, adding another tragic dimension to a world already on fire.
The overwhelming response by governments to this worsening insecurity has been to double down on defence spending, a path that offers only fleeting assurance but deepens long-term instability. NATO members, under American pressure, have pledged to allocate five per cent of GDP to defence by 2035—an extraordinary commitment at a time when funding for peacebuilding is shrinking. Russia, China, and the United States, the world’s largest military spenders, have also scaled up their budgets, while Washington continues to funnel vast sums of military aid to Israel even as the United Nations confirms that its actions in Gaza amount to genocide. The logic of this arms race is chilling: states believe they can buy security by amassing weapons, even as those very weapons sustain and expand the cycle of conflict. Meanwhile, institutions and organisations invested in peacemaking are left starved of resources, stripped to the bone, or shut down entirely—as seen with Donald Trump’s closure of the US Institute of Peace. Women-led peace initiatives, vital for building inclusive and sustainable solutions, face acute funding shortages, even as violence against women and girls escalates in conflict zones from Afghanistan to Palestine. Twenty-five years after the UN launched its Women, Peace, and Security agenda, the promise of gender equality is being quietly erased by bombs and bullets. The more governments pump resources into militarisation, the more they erode the fragile scaffolding of rights, inclusion, and long-term stability.
What the world confronts is not just a military arms race but a moral reckoning. The international peace architecture is collapsing, humanitarian needs are ballooning, and yet governments cling to the illusion that military might can substitute for dialogue and reconciliation. This is not just short-sighted—it is suicidal. As Chris Coulter of the Berghof Foundation reminds us, a truly secure world requires dialogue, mediation, and peacebuilding, not endless defence budgets. Yet we see the opposite: deal-making that privileges expedience over solutions, tactical pauses instead of durable agreements, and the abandonment of liberal norms like inclusivity and impartiality. History shows us that peace agreements imposed without participation or fairness rarely last; the return of violence is almost guaranteed. Unless states urgently rebalance their priorities, shifting investment towards peacebuilding, mediation, and addressing structural causes of conflict, the future will be one of accelerating insecurity, disintegrating norms, and diminishing human dignity. The lesson is stark but simple: peace cannot be built on military budgets alone. The world must resist the false comfort of militarisation and instead commit to strengthening the fragile but vital infrastructure of peace, dialogue, and justice—before it is too late.