Four days before the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States, the United Nations General Assembly in New York designated September 21 as the International Day of Peace, to be observed before the opening of each General Assembly session and marked around the word as “a day of global ceasefire and non-violence” The true purpose of the day, though, is to refocus all nations and peoples on finally fulfilling the great promise of the United Nations Charter, 80-years-young this year, of “saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” of building a truly post-War world where a culture of peace and cooperation can flourish.

In the nearly quarter of a century since 9/11, the world has taken giant strides away from that future, inaugurating a 21st century Dark Age of increasingly prevalent, routinely atrocious armed conflict, accompanied by a frenzy of rearmament, a beating not just of war drums but of plowshares back into swords, a fever of hate and Othering threatening the ruination of a planet already suffering one form of acute climate sickness – the global warming militarism does so much to exacerbate – and menaced by another – the drastic global cooling triggered even by ‘limited’ nuclear war.

Today marks the end of a Global Week of Action for Peace and Climate Justice by an informal global coalition seeking “to build stronger links between the peace and climate justice movement.” The new movement, formed in 2021, includes the International Peace Bureau (IPB), formed in 1899 to wake the world from a nightmare of arms racing, great power competition, nationalism and imperialism, creating what Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier called the “vortex of European militarism” into which he rightly feared his country would be drawn.

Today, a similar vortex has opened, building to a far vaster storm even than the two world wars. The nightmare of rearmament is recurring, sending already high military budgets soaring at a time of chronic underinvestment in climate action, education, the arts, housing, healthcare – including pandemic preparedness – and of course international aid and development, frustrating all hopes of reaching the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the target date of 2030.

Today, 2030 seems a more likely date for World War 3 than a world renewed, an unconscionable prospect openly countenanced by military and political leaders self-servingly adamant we are now living a ‘pre-war world,’ requiring the reorganization of entire societies, economies, cultures, even landscapes and geographies, to satisfy the voracious appetites – the carbon hungers and profit-driven thirsts – of a high-tech military-nuclear-industrial complex accelerating out of accountability and control.

So today, we stand in solidarity with all those fighting the good, non-violent fight for a demilitarized, decarbonized planet: the good fight against racism, sexism, ableism, the extractivist colonialism that continues to plunder, displace and disempower; the good fight for rights and freedoms only the right-mindedness of peace can sustain; the good fight to ensure, as the Great War poet Wilfred Owen wrote, that “the next war” will be fought, not “for flags” but “for lives,” against a culture and technology of Death.

For the last week, we have walked in peace, for peace, 80 kilometers to mark 80 intolerably dangerous years on the atomic brink. We walked in protest against the host of war crimes and crimes against humanity we are witnessing in the Gaza genocide, in Sudan, Ukraine, and so many other, often invisible, places. We walked in wide-awake contrast to the lockstep ‘pre-war’ sleepwalkers leading us to new slaughters. But we walked, as well, in hope, in determination not despair, and in celebration of the life-affirming values, principles and practices of the peace movement in all its proud diversity. And today we pledge to keep moving until we reach our destination: a truly free world, no longer scourged by war or menaced with Mushroom Clouds.

The policy path to such peace lies open: we know the route the walk must take. Nuclear weapons, for example – just like biological and chemical weapons – have already been banned, by the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the TPNW so hard fought for by the survivors of nuclear use and testing. What matters now is that all countries – including this ostensibly peace-loving one – take steps to join the community of nearly 100 states, predominantly from the Global South, that have signed it. As well as being much cheaper – and much, much cleaner – than rearmament, disarmament is eminently ‘doable’: military budgets can be cut, military industries converted to peaceful uses, hospitals and houses built instead of tanks and barracks. As called for (and spelled out) in the UN Charter, disputes can be settled by mediation, negotiation, arbitration; conflicts can be prevented and resolved, instead of provoked and prolonged.

The doors to a post-War world lie open: but the key to success may lie as much in psychology as policy, in cultivating a sense of pacifist possibility, a creative moral literacy placing peace at the centre of human culture. Not just for one day in the year, but every day in the life of the world.