Peace as an economic strategy

LONDON: In his Labour Party conference speech in September, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer doubled down on “growth” as the central mission of his government. At the same time, he drew a sharp moral line between Labour and Reform UK, invoking British and democratic values to paint the populist party as beyond the pale. But the contrast between these two themes reveals a deeper problem that may well define Starmer’s premiership: growth, in and of itself, has no moral valence.

After all, many Western economies have grown while becoming more unequal, more fictionalized, more carbon-intensive, and more fragile politically. Growth can drive innovation and prosperity, but it can also fuel environmental breakdown, social division, and geopolitical instability. It is not a mission objective, but a metric, and metrics divorced from purpose can be dangerous.

That is why clearly stated missions matter. They are what sets the direction of travel, aligning economic activity around clear, collective goals. A mission took humanity to the moon, galvanizing investment in aerospace, nutrition, electronics, and materials, which in turn brought us camera phones, foil blankets, baby formula, and software products that we now take for granted. If designed to address today’s climate crisis, a mission can galvanize action across agriculture, energy, transportation, digital industries, and all other relevant sectors. Since growth is a function of investment, missions can give it meaning by determining what we grow, how, and for whom.

Yet Starmer’s government, entangling itself in a never-ending debate about fiscal space and budgetary holes, seems to have put mission-oriented thinking on the back burner. It has lost sight of what it takes to catalyze growth, and hence expand budgets, in the long run.

One issue that Starmer has rightly emphasized is global instability, voicing concerns about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the horrors that continue to unfold in Gaza. Yet these are foreign-policy talking points with no connection to his domestic economic agenda. That is a missed opportunity. What if Labour made peace a mission?

Unlike growth, peace is not morally neutral. It implies value commitments: diplomacy over aggression, solidarity over isolation, and democracy over authoritarianism. But it also requires material commitments, such as investments in defence, humanitarian aid, democratic institutions, and the infrastructure that sustains social cohesion. Understood in these terms, peace is not just an aspiration but a potential engine of economic transformation.

Consider what a peace mission would look like in practice. Historically, wars have driven extraordinary innovation, generating everything from the radar to the internet. A peace mission would feature the same level of ambition, but directed toward conflict prevention rather than conflict readiness. It would mobilize investments in infrastructure and programs to address the root causes of instability: food insecurity, water scarcity, and climate displacement.

These are urgent needs. Our recent research finds that if something isn’t done to safeguard water supplies and cycles, over 55% of food systems will be at risk. And such risks of course can increase geopolitical tensions and the risk of more wars. Similarly, climate change is a “threat multiplier” that is already fueling conflict and undermining peace. Changes in rainfall patterns, crop yields, and migration flows will further exacerbate tensions over resources in the coming years.

A mission to provide global food security, then, would reduce the likelihood of resource wars by ensuring adequate nutrition and agricultural resilience. It would require financing innovation for climate-resistant crop varieties, drought-resilient irrigation systems, and sustainable land-use practices that preserve soil quality and stabilize the hydrological cycle. Here, Brazil’s climate fund, now one of the world’s largest, has already shown how public finance can be directed toward sustainable agriculture and land restoration. These are precisely the interventions that support long-term stability and prevent the displacements and conflicts that follow from environmental collapse.

Peace, taken seriously, would also tie together domestic and international policymaking. It would require confronting violence not only abroad but at home in the United Kingdom, which is experiencing rising knife crimes, gender-based violence, and the scapegoating of migrants and asylum seekers. It would mean addressing the conditions – poverty, social exclusion, inequality – that allow conflicts to fester. Social stability would be seen as a product of investment, not as something that can be achieved through punishment.

A peace mission would also resonate with Starmer’s own history as a human-rights lawyer who built his career on the belief that justice is a public good. And it would offer a unifying narrative for a party that needs to unite its pragmatic centre and its activist base under a shared moral banner.

Ironically, US President Donald Trump recognizes the power of this narrative better than Starmer (even if he contradicts it in practice). Trump has relentlessly pursued the Nobel Peace Prize, repeatedly claiming that he “deserves” it for ending wars. With the prize continuing to elude him, FIFA President Gianni Infantino obsequiously invented a new FIFA Peace Prize to bestow on Trump, thus turning peace into political theatre.

Trump understands that peace makes for great optics, but it could be even more powerful as an organizing principle for the economy. Critics may dismiss this idea as too abstract, too soft, too utopian. But there is nothing soft about preventing war, protecting communities, or rebuilding fractured societies. Peace is hard. It requires big investments, and it can be politically difficult, especially in an era when conflict is increasingly profitable (at least if you are in the business of arms or algorithmic outrage). But that is precisely why peace should be made a mission. It is simply too important to leave to chance.

Now that Trump has withdrawn America from values-based and multilateral frameworks, Britain must think bigger for itself. If Starmer wants to usher in a new political era, he must reject the illusion that economic metrics alone can guide us through geopolitical storms and domestic decline.

As we look ahead to 2026, we should reflect on what the economy is actually for. Is the point simply to generate higher GDP figures, or is it to create the conditions for human flourishing? A new year invites us to imagine alternative futures. Our resolutions must go beyond static measures of progress to ask what kind of society we want.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025.
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