Preparing to Wage Peace: Toward the Creation of an International Peacemaking Command and Staff College

Abstract

Peacemaking, like war, involves the coordinated use of military, economic, diplomatic and propaganda instruments. But while war's objective is to terminate the military capacities of the adversary as economically as possible in order to subordinate it politically, peacemaking involves generating in or imposing on a body politic or a territory such structures as are necessary to make it an autonomous, self-sustaining political and economic entity in accord with the blueprint prepared by the United Nations. Hence peacemaking, though using many of war's instruments, has different conceptions and objectives. In particular, peacemaking militates, by its nature, against the degree of collateral destruction that may be acceptable and even desirable in warmaking, especially insofar as destruction of the adversary minimizes one's own losses.