The eighth and final program area of the Program of Action for a Culture of Peace is international peace and security, also known as ‘disarmament’. Some of the specific provisions are:

• Promote general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control;
• Where appropriate, draw on lessons conducive to a culture of peace learned from “military conversion”;
• Take measures to end the illegal production and trade of small arms and light weapons;
• Promote greater involvement of women in conflict prevention and resolution;
• Encourage training in techniques for understanding, preventing and resolving conflict for relevant personnel of the United Nations, relevant regional organizations and Member States.

Through global efforts, several multilateral treaties and instruments have been established with the aim of regulating, restricting, or eliminating certain weapons. These include the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the Biological and Chemical Weapons Convention, the Anti-Personnel Landmine Convention, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and the Arms Trade Treaty¹.

The ‘UN Arms Treaty’ is a 1980 treaty on the prohibition and restriction of the use of certain conventional weapons that have exceptionally harmful or inaccurate effects (non-distinctive weapons). Protocols to this treaty prohibit, among other things, non-recognizable fragmentation bombs, land mines and incendiary weapons (according to Amnesty International). A more recent example is the Arms Trade Treaty adopted on April 2, 2013 by the United Nations General Assembly and in force since December 2014. The United Nations organized a Conference on Restricting the International Arms Trade in an effort to reduce armed conflict, terrorism and crimes against humanity. The treaty has been ratified by 82 states. The treaty restricts the production and trade of certain weapons, such as landmines and cluster munitions. Furthermore, it aims to regulate the trade in other weapons with the aim of increasing the transparency of the international arms trade under international law, preventing the illegal export of weapons to conflict zones and harmonizing national and regional regulations. Even more recent is the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the first legally binding international agreement to ban nuclear weapons, with the aim of their total elimination. The treaty was signed on July 7, 2017, and entered into force on January 22, 2021.

“It is the five permanent member states of the Security Council, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China, that have the most nuclear weapons and make the majority of the world’s arms sales. The contradictions are many. Perhaps the greatest contradiction is that the great powers dominate the United Nations, which is our greatest potential ally in a transition to a culture of peace,” writes David Adams. coordinator of the Culture of Peace News Network. “On the one hand, in the case of nuclear weapons, the great powers emphasize non-proliferation in an attempt to maintain their position of power. On the other hand, in the case of conventional weapons, they drive proliferation to the point of bribing potential customers to buy their weapon systems.

Another contradiction concerns the relationship between war, drugs and violence on the streets of our cities. It is an open secret that American involvement in the wars in Vietnam and Laos, Nicaragua and Afghanistan was financed in part by the shipment and sale of heroin or cocaine from these countries, and ended in addiction and associated violence on the streets of the cities of the world.”

PAIS, a Dutch pacifist organization writes: “Precisely those who see the willingness to compromise as an ethical principle must recognize that war is the opposite of it. War begins where the willingness to think in a nuanced way, and therefore the willingness to make compromises, is lacking. This makes war the complete defeat of our ethical thinking.”

The World Beyond War organization also calls the culture of violence ‘fighter culture’ or ‘dominating culture’, in which security comes from a more hierarchical position of power. It is also thought, among other things, that preparing for war guarantees peace, that it is impossible to end war, that the world economy is a ‘dog-eat-dog’ competition and if you don’t win, you lose. However, a Culture of Peace is about relationships and working together. Some call it a ‘partnership society’.

An example is the rise of the global conference movement such as the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, attended by 100 heads of state, 10,000 journalists and 30,000 citizens. Since then, global conferences on economic development, women, peace, global warming and other topics have been held, creating a new forum for people from around the world to come together to confront problems and devise cooperative solutions; the further development of a system of diplomacy with established norms of diplomatic immunity, good offices of third parties, permanent missions – all designed to enable states to communicate even in conflict situations; and the development of global interactive communications via the World Wide Web and mobile phones.

The last point in the program of action “Encourage training in techniques for understanding, preventing and resolving conflict for relevant personnel of the United Nations, relevant regional organizations and Member States” actually deserves its own chapter. Therefore there is a separate page under ‘what is peace’ called ‘nonviolent conflict navigation.’