"I want peace on Earth, people, is that wrong?"
by Charlie Edwards
So said Jennifer Aniston in an interview just before Christmas on ABC news . I know, so Miss World, so Hollywood?
Yes, but she has a point- talking of �Peace� is no longer fashionable in policy circles and the idea is frowned upon by practitioners, �well of course that�s what we are aiming for, but let�s looks at the detail�.� And it�s the detail that is making the news. No longer are we fed a diet of grand strategy based on aims and objectives, more often than not we get the details, from the latest fire fight, to the most recent bombing.
This is in part because the media are keen to pursue stories about conflict that make headlines, but it is also because they are responding to the way governments talk about war and peace. This is partly due to the changing nature of warfare but it is also because governments and non-state actors describe conflict in a very different way than they did a decade ago. The UK Government, for instance, no longer talks in terms of war and peace, but of �network centric warfare� and post conflict reconstruction. Swamped by so much technical detail we lose sight of the main objective and with it any aspirations for change we might have once had.
I tend to agree with Andrew Mack, a former aide to Kofi Annan and author of the Human Security Report, who recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post suggesting we shouldn�t accept the media�s account of how dangerous the world is because,
�most people, including many leading policymakers and scholars, are wrong. The reality is that, since the end of the Cold War, armed conflict and nearly all other forms of political violence have decreased. The world is far more peaceful than it was.�