This week marks the 20th anniversary of the first column I wrote for openDemocracy, a few days after the 9/11 attacks and before the start of the interminable ‘War on Terror’. It is also the 1,000th column in the series and so a fitting opportunity to reflect on how it came about, and how the analysis presented back then stands up 20 years later.
Like many peace researchers in the immediate post-Cold War years of the early 1990s, my colleagues and I at the University of Bradford were trying to work out how trends in international insecurity were evolving. In an early contribution, Malcolm Dando and I wrote the book, ‘A Violent Peace’, published in 1992, which argued that state-on-state conflict might be overshadowed by the impact of global trends, especially environmental limits to growth.
Two years later, I co-edited, along with Kath and Geoff Tansey, another book, ‘A World Divided’, recently republished by Routledge, which focused more on how the global system was not only subject to limits to growth but was based on an economic model causing more marginalisation.
