“We are going to win the war and we are going to win the peace that follows” US President Franklin D Roosevelt famously declared in his fireside chat the day after Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbour in 1941.
As the world marks the 75th anniversaries of VE and VJ Days this year, we have a unique opportunity to reimagine what victory means, and to ask whether winning the peace today means trying to rebuild shattered societies after war has been won, or a more fundamental shift that puts societies first from the outset.
There hasn’t been a single year since WWII that there hasn’t been a conflict somewhere in the world. Today around 1.5 billion people live in places affected by large-scale violence and conflict. According to some estimates the cost of violence on the global economy is around £11 trillion annually, and yet the annual expenditure on peacebuilding is less than 1% of this. This mindboggling disparity speaks volumes to the absence of peace on our planet.
