Why are current peace frameworks struggling to meet today’s complex challenges and what would it take to create genuine security in the 21st Century? In this episode of The Club of Rome Podcast, Nolita Mvunelo speaks with Paul Shrivastava, co-president of The Club of Rome about why traditional peace frameworks are ill-equipped to address the deeper threats emerging from ecological breakdown, widening inequality and systemic instability. Drawing on The Club of Rome’s recent publication Planetary Peace for Human Security, Paul outlines a bold reimagining of what peace might mean today. Together, Nolita and Paul dive into how conventional approaches shaped by military logic and colonial legacies often reinforce the divisions they aim to heal. They discuss the need for a planetary vision of peace that connects inner transformation, environmental renewal and social justice and why moving beyond analysis towards systemic action is now essential. This episode invites us to transcend outdated paradigms, embrace an expanded understanding of peace and mobilise the transformative collaboration needed for a regenerative future. Watch the episode: Full transcript: Nolita: What does true peace and human security mean in the 21st Century? In a world of climate breakdown, rising inequality and the accelerating risks of AI and emerging technologies, our guest on today's podcast reminds us that peace must mean more than simply the absence of war. In a recent paper, planetary peace for human security, Paul Shrivastava, co-president of The Club of Rome, argues that traditional ideas of peace, shaped by colonial legacies, military power and post Second World War diplomacy, are no longer fit for purpose. Instead, he and his co-authors propose a concept of planetary peace, a vision of security grounded in the wellbeing of people, the planet and future generations. I am Nolita Mvunelo, and on today's podcast, Paul and I discuss why peace today must encompass inner development, the environment, technology, and our relationship with nature, and how collaboration can turn global crises into opportunities for renewal. That's all ahead on The Club of Rome Podcast, where we explore bold ideas for shaping sustainable futures. Hi Paul. Thank you so much for joining us today. How are you doing? Paul: I am doing fine, Nolita, how are you doing? I'm good, I'm good, and getting right into it. So, what is planetary peace? Because you describe it as something that's much bigger than the absence of war. What exactly does this mean? And why have you chosen to pursue this topic specifically? So historically, peace has been cued in relation to wars, usually wars among nations and among sub national groups, and peace is what's supposed to stop the wars and take care of victims, etc. But humanity now faces a much bigger risk to human life that can cause 10 times to 100 times the number of deaths that even the largest wars in history have caused, and that risk is the breakdown of planetary ecosystems. These kinds of events can kill and injure millions of people at a time in specific natural disasters that we hear about, which are becoming worse and more frequent, but also in slow seeping harm that is causing excess number of deaths from what was normal before the pollution of Oceans and air became so huge. So planetary peace is a concept of peace and nonviolence that is responsive to these major sources of violence against humans and against nature and all species. These kind of dangers and risks ensue from breaching of our planetary boundaries. So, we kind of wanted to raise the discussion of peace from the narrow focus on international wars to something that is planetary in scale and responsive to the challenges of the planetary boundaries and also the destruction of ecosystems. Nolita: This was the title of the first version of this publication, and now the second one was on planetary peace in the Anthropocene. So, when I'm hearing your response is that it's very much nested into this idea that we have entered a new epoch. The Club of Rome is well known for its systems thinking, connecting the dots between economics, environment and human wellbeing. Why have you chosen this legacy and the Anthropocene as the way to observe and explore peace? Paul: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think some of it is specific to The Club of Rome, the way this discussion emerged amongst us. But on a more abstract scale, we are defining peace in systemic terms, because it is a legacy of The Club of Rome. And for us, there are three components of the systems of planetary peace. One has to be at peace with oneself. The second is peace with others, between neighbors and nations, etc. And the third is peace with nature. These systems of peace are interrelated. They're interconnected. They're very interwoven. So, we are very much following in the legacy of systems thinking of The Club of Rome. We also trace the roots of these systems of peace to other economic, social, cultural and political systems and practices. So, we connect peace with systems that govern everyday activities and the life of people. This way, we hope that each individual person will be able to see the role of peace in their lives, in the way they conduct their lives, and take responsibility for and do something about it. So, we wanted to not only do systems thinking around peace, but also a kind of people-enabling so that peace is not left to security experts. It is not left to governments to deal with. Because, frankly, the record of governments in dealing with peace is rather abysmal. We've had 2000 years of war, so we thought that we need to shift the locus of action to people, and that was the other reason for thinking about it in these systemic terms. Nolita: What are the considerations about the question of understanding or navigating power? Because this, this publication, was also coming in like a backdrop of over 100 global conflicts, two of which are really grabbing the attention of people, while also, you know, the political landscape in and of itself, is shifting. Paul: Yeah, so actually, we started a conversation within The Club of Rome as a response to the Gaza crisis. I mean, what is now widely acknowledged as being a war of genocide. And it shook a lot of people right at the beginning of the war, and we started having conversations within the club, among members, about what, what are we to think of this? How are we to make sense of what is going on in Gaza and what's going on in Ukraine, and what's going on in all these other wars that we have been engaged in? What does it tell us about being human? And so actually, before this publication that you are referencing, we had another publication called “Enduring Peace in the Anthropocene”. And I'll come back to the question of the Anthropocene in a second. I know I didn't fully address it, but in that publication, I invited about a couple dozen Club of Rome members to explore this question of that we are moving into this new epoch of life in which lot of conditions are changing. People are describing it as a polycrisis and so on and so forth. What do these particular events of war tell us about living peacefully in harmony as human beings? And each person took a very different view. With a kind of open ended invitation, we got these 20-odd essays from people from all parts of the world with very different backgrounds, and it made clear to us the limitations of the traditional notions of peace, which is what prompted us to say, hey, if, if all these dangers and wars and losses are not fitting in, and particularly the Gaza war, into a narrative of peace that we have inherited over the last 200 years of war, then we need a new concept of peace, and we call it planetary peace, and we worked on developing that paper. So let me go back to the Anthropocene, because there are pieces of that puzzle that we haven't really fully parsed out. The Anthropocene clearly, we are in a period that is characterised by great acceleration in human population and in economic production and consumption, in devastating extraction of earth's resources, with tremendous inequalities at the same time, and in socio economic activities that are literally, literally killing the soil worldwide, killing plant life, killing other species. I mean, we are killing 80 billion animals every year for food. These are not sustainable, these are not peaceful approaches to the economy, approaches to dealing with the challenges of the Anthropocene. These are nature extractive capital accumulation processes that are at the root of breaching planetary boundaries of life, and they spill over in several ways into security and conflict issues. First, in order to provide security to the resources that we want to extract and the logistics routes for these resources that we need to protect, we are increasing military expenditures, and military systems build out. In 2024 we spent about $2.4 trillion in defense, so called defense expenditures. And these expenditures are going to double in the next decade. The US is already for 2026 wanting to spend over a trillion dollars itself. And then China has increased its budget by 7% India has increased its defense budget by six and a half percent, and all the NATO countries, which sort of fell under the US umbrella, are now being pushed by the Trump administration to spend 5% of their GDP into defense budgets in 2026. And so, we are moving in the wrong direction, in to protect the exploitation of resources which actually caused the Anthropocene. So that is one link to the Anthropocene. Secondly, the extraction of local resources, whether they're in Africa or in other parts of the world, is itself a source of armed conflicts. Now, these extractive practices benefit very differential populations. They are very unequal, and most of them are quite unfair, at least in the view of the locals. So, there
