There is something grimly familiar about the daily violence that surrounds us – violence that claimed more than 3,400 lives last year and has claimed over 2,500 so far this year. Such violence breeds despair, poisons public life and deepens the hatreds that turn neighbour against neighbour. It must not harden into a norm or perpetuate a vicious cycle in which violence drives militarisation; militarisation deepens poverty and division and poverty and division, in turn, fuel further violence.
We must replace this with a virtuous cycle: one in which peace deepens connectivity across nations; connectivity generates prosperity; and prosperity creates shared interests. Those interests, in turn, build constituencies for peace by making conflict costly and cooperation rewarding.
Our times recall the eighteenth-century Punjab of Bulleh Shah – a land riven by sectarian strife and ravaged by invading armies. From that suffering arose Bulleh Shah’s appeal for peace, expressed through poetry dissolving the barriers of religion, caste, and power that turn neighbour against neighbour. His message resonates with even greater urgency amid our own yearning for peace. This same aspiration runs from the ethical teachings of the great religions, through Al-Farabi’s vision of Al-Madina al-Fadila, Akbar’s sulh-i kul to the intellectual transformations of the Enlightenment, culminating in Immanuel Kant’s vision of perpetual peace.
Yet, for most of history, peace was an anticipation. Poets, statesmen and philosophers raced ahead of their times. They could imagine peace, but the material conditions of interdependence – connectivity – remained limited and peace could rarely be embodied in durable institutions. Economic life was largely local, communication slow, and societies comparatively self-contained. Conquest and plunder were recurring instruments of power and enrichment. Peace was therefore mainly a moral cry born of suffering.
Today, global production chains, instantaneous communication, shared knowledge, and common environmental risks bind nations together as never before. The moral imperative for peace remains, but peace has also become an economic necessity to keep production chains functioning, sustain the movement of trade, energy, knowledge and investment, and confront environmental challenges that cross borders and can be addressed only through cooperation.
Why, then, return to these earlier visions of peace? Because they preserve its enduring moral content while revealing how changed historical conditions transform an ancient aspiration into a realisable project. Ideas do not simply disappear; they recede, re-emerge, and acquire new meanings as the conditions of their realisation change.
Peace today is thus an ancient aspiration entering a new historical stage. In the new conditions it has been transformed into a necessity, an idea whose time has come because it now rests upon the material foundation of connectivity. For us, this necessity is also an opportunity to turn our geography from a frontier between civilisations into their meeting place. The task of statecraft, then, is to build upon the connectivity created by history and give it shape and direction.
Across the world, regional arrangements – from ASEAN and the European Union to emerging African and Eurasian networks – represent attempts, however imperfect, to manage this connectivity. We are far behind in this effort. We cannot continue to view our borders as fortresses and our region as a chessboard for great-power rivalry, as the British did.
We must turn our borders into gateways and embody interdependence in durable institutions, an infrastructure of peace built through trade, transit, energy, and communication. Such institutions would give neighbouring countries a shared stake in one another’s progress and give durable form to the ancient aspiration for peaceful coexistence.
CPEC is an important beginning in overcoming this lag. It is building the infrastructure through which we can connect Central and West Asia with South Asia. The larger task is to extend this network across the region, allowing goods, people and ideas to move in every direction – as they did along the Silk Roads during periods of flourishing exchange.
In this network, our roads, railways, pipelines, power grids, and communication networks would become the arteries of a vast region whose prosperity would depend upon the routes and connections passing through our country. This would set our conception of national strength back on its feet. Security would rest not on fences, weapons and rival alliances, but on our neighbours using our roads, their trade passing through our ports, and their prosperity bound to ours.
By deepening connectivity, generating prosperity, and creating shared interests, such an infrastructure of peace would set in motion the virtuous cycle with which we began: a cycle in which cooperation erodes the foundations of violence and strengthens the foundations of peace.
We must no longer imprison our country within inherited rivalries, but read geography wisely, turn proximity into exchange and convert shared interests into lasting peace. To dissolve the divisions that turn neighbour against neighbour is today both an act of moral courage and an exercise in economic wisdom.
The writer is a freelance contributor. He can be reached at:
