Some Desperate Glory

by Emily Tesh

What would peace look like? Many have wrestled with the question. Perhaps it can be enforced? Empires have prided themselves on being peace-bringers and peacekeepers. But this is a paradox. A peace brought about with the threat of violence is only a war in waiting.

The old imperial standby—to take resources from elsewhere, far more than could possibly be of use, and so create a bountiful surplus in which resource conflict cannot arise—has been successful for some; not, of course, for the inhabitants of history’s various elsewheres.

Humanity’s greatest wars have always been conflicts of ideas—ideas of ethnicity and nationality, of religion and belief, of justice and morality. The utopian vision of unenforced peace requires that these conflicts cease. But how?