Amit Kapoor and Meenakshi Ajith
In 1971, John Lennon asked the world to imagine something disarmingly simple: no countries, nothing to kill or die for.The lines are often dismissed as the sentimental optimism of a musician who did not have to manage borders or armies. Yet its power lies precisely in the discomfort it produces. The modern world can imagine almost anything, from artificial intelligence, interplanetary travel, weapons capable of destroying civilization many times over. What it struggles to imagine is peace. We organize our politics around armies, deterrence, and enemies with such practiced seriousness that questioning the arrangement feels naïve. Violence, in this system, becomes almost respectable and a kind of guiltless carnality of nations, where power pursues its instincts without the burden of moral embarrassment.
There is even a certain grim humour in how confidently the language of geopolitics sanitizes this reality. Wars are described as ‘operations,’ invasions as ‘stabilization,’ and human suffering as ‘collateral damage.’ Entire societies can be destabilized while the vocabulary remains calm and technical, as though devastation were simply another administrative challenge. This shrinking of language has also quietly shrunk the way we think about peace itself.
Gandhi, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr. lived in different centuries and confronted very different crises, but they arrived at a similar instinctive truth: peace cannot grow out of humiliation. Gandhi saw violence not merely as a tactic but as something that corrupts the moral fabric of a society. The moment cruelty is justified in the name of righteousness, the cause itself begins to change shape. Lincoln came to a similar realization from within war rather than outside it. Leading a nation through its bloodiest conflict, he understood that military victory might end the fighting while leaving the deeper war alive in memory, resentment, and wounded pride. Martin Luther King Jr., speaking a century later, exposed perhaps the most subtle illusion of all: that order and peace are the same thing. A society can look calm on the surface while injustice sits quietly at its centre. That calm, King warned, is not peace. It is simply oppression that has learned good manners.
Seen together, their ideas point toward a much deeper understanding. Conflict itself is unavoidable and is woven into human life. People disagree, societies collide, and history leaves wounds that do not easily disappear. The real question is not whether conflict can vanish, but whether it must always descend into violence and domination.
Yet, domination remains the reflex of modern geopolitics. Wars are still announced with a familiar promise of making the world safer. Iraq war was justified in precisely those terms of removing Saddam Hussein, eliminating the threat and stabilizing the region. Two decades later, we are forced to wonder: safer for whom, and in what sense? The broader landscape offers little reassurance. As per the 2025 Global Peace Index, there are now 59 active state-based conflicts worldwide, the highest number since the Second World War, with 78 countries involved in conflicts beyond their own borders. Military spending has climbed to roughly $2.7 trillion, while peacekeeping and peacebuilding together account for barely 0.52 percent of that sum
What follows from this is a more difficult question, and one that the current international order prefers to blur: by what authority does one country decide that another people’s ruler must be removed from outside? However flawed, repressive, or dangerous a leader may be, the political bond between a society and its government cannot be treated as though it were incidental. It is not only a matter of sovereignty in the legal sense; it is also a matter of historical agency. A population must live with the consequences of its rulers, but it must also retain the right to alter that fate from within.
Once external power assumes for itself the right to dismantle regimes, it does not merely remove a leader; it unsettles the political life beneath. Institutions hollow out, legitimacy fractures, grievance deepens and these are not temporary costs. These are costs that children inherit as mistrust, humiliation, and disorder. That is why imposed solutions so often fail: they mistake submission for consent. A people can be subdued, but they cannot be taken along by force, and where people are not taken along, peace does not follow. What follows instead is a problem deferred across generations.
The ledger of that deferral is brutal on both sides. In Iraq and Syria, the war launched in the name of stability has left between 550,000 and 580,000 people dead by direct violence alone, with more than 7 million refugees and nearly 8 million internally displaced. This is a society broken not only in its present, but in its continuity. Yet even the aggressor does not emerge intact. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that the United States’ post-9/11 wars have already cost about $8 trillion; more than 7,053 U.S. service members have died in those wars, and at least four times as many service members and veterans have died by suicide as in combat, while the long tail of caring for those veterans is expected to cost another $2.2 to $2.5 trillion by 2050. That is the fraud at the heart of war’s promise. The invaded country inherits ruins; the invading country inherits debt, damaged veterans, and the moral habit of calling devastation strategy. If there is a winner, it is rarely a people.
If anything unites the arguments of Gandhi, Lincoln, and King, it is a difficult truth: peace does not emerge automatically when violence pauses, nor does it grow out of domination. It requires dignity, legitimacy, and the patience to allow societies to repair themselves without humiliation. Yet modern geopolitics has become remarkably efficient at the opposite task. It knows how to organize force, remove regimes, redraw alignments, and call the aftermath stability. What it struggles with is the quieter work that actually sustains peace or a trust strong enough to outlive victory and institutions strong enough to outlive resentment. That may be the real paradox of our time. Humanity has become extraordinarily sophisticated at preparing for war, while peace remains something we speak about in abstractions. Perhaps the most unsettling thought is this: we may not lack the means to achieve peace, but we may simply lack the imagination to take it seriously.
(Amit Kapoor is chair and Meenakshi Ajith is development policy lead at Institute for Competitiveness. X: @kautiliya).
The article was published with Economic Times on March 16, 2026.
