If people once thought that wars had to be won to bring peace, the years after two world wars have shown us otherwise. And if people also believed that nations must remain prepared for war – a maxim in Latin advises: "Prepare for war if you want peace" – the histories of nations that did prepare themselves also show how fallacious this premise is. The 1st World War yielded the 2nd one. The 2nd World War fathered the Cold War, which, in turn, gave birth to a whole series of civil and ethnic wars in almost every continent. The war in Ukraine, Gaza and now the Indo-Park war underway teach us the lesson again and again just how fatal and futile wars can be.

One reason behind this failure of wars to bring peace adequately, holistically and in a sustained way is because most of the movements for peace were fragile and fragmented. The world is a house deeply divided between the East and West, the poor and super-affluent, between capitalism and communism, between the First and the Third World, between the global North and South, between the veto powers and non-veto nations. It cannot stand firm and long and is destined to fall sooner or later.

If global peace has eluded humankind so far, and is now becoming more of a challenge than an opportunity, there are reasons. Peace as an ecosystem implies six constitutive elements - principle, perception, purpose, personnel, process, path - and is the end-product of the interaction of these factors. The principles of peace remain mere principles if the intention to implement in practice is missing. International guarantees against interference and intervention failed in the cases of both the League of Nations and the UN. The right kind of perception, in other words, attitudes and orientations to peace, is of fundamental importance in promoting peace. The purpose (say vision) guiding a campaign for peace will be ineffective if it is born with a blind spot at its very birth. The personnel leading the peace campaign matter because it is they who sustain it in the long run. Even the campaigns started by global figures such as Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and Johan Galtung sputtered out due to lack of torch bearers who could keep the flame burning. The process that the movement adopts will keep limping if a robust mechanism, the right kind of strategy, is not devised to drive it forward. The path followed, finally, is crucial because it leads to the goal set forth.

Peace thus – to be positive, not the peace of the graveyard – should be a product of the mutual interaction of these six elements, and the result of a complex, tortuous and torturous process that demands vigilance and investment at more than one level and multiple fronts. Peace, therefore, can be regarded as an equation, as an outcome of the interactive play of these variables: a single negative factor among these six variables can render the whole exercise sterile, even counter-productive.

The issue here revolves around the question: when is peace at stake? Peace is at stake when the rat race to produce more for less and sell for more imperils human lives. Peace is at stake when aid largesse begins to mute the voices for justice triggering the AIDS syndrome (Acquired Immunity from Development). Peace is at stake when most of the industrialised North cares least for climate justice. Peace is at stake again when the short-term benefits of individual states begin to dominate the long-term well-being of the world at large.

Today, when the world economy is growing at a fast pace, and when global per capita income is rising at a rate larger than at any other period in human history, decreasing 'political risk' is also allowing probably the most peaceful time in human history. Yet, while a whole array of nations thus enjoy peace as they never did before, from Kosovo to Kenya, to North Korea, a zone of crisis still lingers. One analysis of 50 countries done by this observer in 2006 reveals civil conflicts last longer, are more intense and bring a larger toll of human lives and property than do ethnic and inter-state conflicts or even struggles for the independence of states. Civil wars thus turn out to be the worst forms of wars because they are fought between brothers. The war in the Mahabharata is a specific reminder of this point. More recently, four countries – India, Vietnam, Germany and Korea – remained or remain for long divided although in culture and blood they are similar. Even the China-Taiwan crisis is a fratricidal crisis.

Another observation of relevance at this point is that a society with high tolerance for non-political violence can remain relatively free of political violence. The USA, for instance, a leading supplier of global arms and with a strong tradition of imperial or colonial domination and political or military intervention is one of the most violent societies in the world, although relatively free from political violence, and France and Germany, low in violent crimes, bear a history of political violence.

As a matter of fact, a sustainable campaign for peace demands not just the right visions of leaders to guide it and the call to trigger the process, it also calls for the consent and commitment of the mass public, the citizens, who will keep the banner fluttering and the flame flickering. The three fundamental processes at stake here – to generate mass consent and commitment to peace – have been barely touched so far. Sans the consent and sans the commitment, the calls for peace have remained mere slogans. Absent the consent, the mass public will not rise for action, and absent the commitment, the people will not resist conscription of the youth to die on the battlefront, since they believe it's nice to die for one's land ("Dulce et decorum est pro patria morc"). Three basic processes of society were, moreover, hardly started to start the campaign, keep it going and dynamise its momentum - Education for peace, socialising peace and mobilising the mass (through the state and corporate bodies) on behalf of the cause.