the presence of sufficient
If war and militarization create so many obstacles to development, it is logical that peace and
demilitarization can help to remove them. Even negative peace avoids the destruction and
disruption of war, making it possible for people to engage in the ordinary activities that support
production and consumption without constant fear of getting caught in the cross-fire or seeing
all that they worked long and hard to create reduced to rubble in a matter of minutes. Positive
peace implies a more equitable distribution of political power and economic power, both of
which are important in encouraging real political and economic development.
When there is peace and demilitarization, there is less compulsion to divert enormous amounts
of productive economic resources to support the buildup and use of military force as a means of
exerting power and influence in the world. Resources freed from this economically noncontributive
use become available for the kinds of contributive production and investment that
are crucial to economic development. The demilitarization of a society supports political
freedom by reducing the availability of repressive force to those who might be tempted to use it
to concentrate political power in their own hands, as well as by de-legitimizing the use of force
for such purposes.
The Limits of the Virtuous Circle
By removing the impediments to development that militarization and war produce,
demilitarization and peace help create the conditions that support and encourage economic
and political development. The first and perhaps most obvious is that demilitarization and peace may facilitate both economic and political development, but they do not guarantee them.
For economic development to be self-sustaining, or even viable, a sufficient quantity and quality of productive
resources must be channeled into a web of mutually reinforcing investments in human and
physical capital. Among these, the right mix of programs of education, health care,
infrastructure capital formation, and investment in production capital are the most important.
All of these programs are expensive. Militarization and war divert or destroy considerable
quantities of the required resources, making economic development exceedingly difficult to
achieve. But the fact that demilitarization and peace make the necessary resources more
available does not by itself assure that they will be effectively mobilized and properly used.
Corruption can also divert vast quantities of critical resources, undermining development. So
can utter incompetence, corruption’s first cousin.
Even the presence of sufficient foreign development aid to make up for any deficits in requisite
resources domestically available does not guarantee successful development. The effectiveness
of foreign development assistance can also be crippled by corruption and incompetence. More
than that, in the face of the best intentions of donor organizations and recipient governments,
poorly designed and implemented development assistance programs can undermine
development by actually encouraging corruption and failing to penalize incompetence. Ill-conceived
projects, backed by the authority of high status donor organizations and
governments, have also been known to direct the attention and resources of recipient