There’s something more powerful than all the armies in the world and that’s an idea whose time has come. Victor Hugo
We Can End War
What we need to make that hope a reality is a bold, unifying vision of how to do it, and sufficient will to act. Victor Hugo’s famous quote stresses the great power of ideas over armies. The essays in this book and on the JudithHand.net website, all updated from their originals in the book’s first edition, are dedicated to one such idea whose time has come:
We can, within twenty-five to thirty-five years from the time the global community officially resolves to do it, create a future in which war not only becomes unacceptable, it’s abhorrent and obsolete.
Negotiation, mediation, compromise—any and all nonviolent means for resolving conflicts—will always be the tools we choose.
In a series of essays, nine cornerstones around which the web project A Future Without War (AFWW) was built, are described. Near the end of the book the essence of each cornerstone is/was presented in the section “Summary of the Nine Cornerstones.” Other essays address related subjects, such as the question of how quickly a campaign to abolish war might be able to succeed, the biological reason why women and men differ in their responses to social conflicts, why women’s empowerment is one of several necessary conditions to achieve an enduring global peace, and what makes people happy, given that fundamentally happy people are hard to convince to go to war. When these essays are referred to in other sections of the text their titles will be placed in quotes; for example “What Makes People Happy.”
Fleshed out in detail and given life by experts working in each of the areas of endeavor they encompass, the cornerstone essays underlie a unifying vision that can guide willing countries through a “warfare transition” to an enduring global peace.