Building Institutions for Peaceful Change

We believe the world needs a new social contract. A contract that puts women equally at all tables where the fate of humanity is at stake; a contract that insists that reading, writing and arithmetic are no longer sufficient basic skills for all children to learn. We need to integrate peace education in all schools in the world; a contract that would make it illegal and immoral for any nation to have a military budget greater than its health and education budgets combined. Finally, the new social contract for the 21st Century should abolish the institution of war and its genocidal weapons just as we have abolished slavery, colonialism and apartheid as legitimate institutions, despite egregious examples of their lingering.

Such a challenge is explained in this article under several angles and proposals: women, peace education, reallocation of resources, closing the cultural gap, abolition of war.