From Reaction to Prevention. Make Health, not Peace our core objective.

From Reaction to Prevention: A Call for the Peace Movement to Transform into a Global Health Movement and prioritize achieving the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

Inspired by Disrupt Science: The Future Matters  (Mihai Nadin, 2023)

 “Reaction to breakdowns is more expensive, by many orders of magnitude, than prevention… The living is by necessity anticipatory.”  — Mihai Nadin

For decades, the global peace movement has mobilized after violence erupts—calling for ceasefires, organizing protests, and responding to refugee crises. Yet wars, genocides, and political violence continue, often increasing in scale and frequency, but fortunately with fewer casualties.

In 2024, there were 61 active state-based conflicts, the highest since 1946.

Since 2010, the number of such conflicts has nearly doubled, and battle-related deaths have increased fivefold, even with temporary fluctuations.

In 2023, the total was 59 conflicts—also at historically high levels.

Organized violence in 2024 claimed nearly 160,000 lives, making it the fifth-deadliest year since 1989.  In 2023, conflict-related deaths reached approximately 122,000, driven by fights in Ukraine, Gaza, and Ethiopia’s Tigray region. 

Civilians are increasingly targeted: in 2024, 13,900 civilians were killed in one-sided or targeted attacks, a 31% increase from the year prior.  In Gaza and Lebanon, 94% of the 26,000 casualties in 2024 were civilians or unidentified.

In urban conflicts, roughly 50–66% of casualties are civilians, depending on how “unknowns” are treated.

Historical patterns & genocides. 

Compared to the 20th century, conflict deaths dropped post–World War II, with spikes in the 1970s/80s (up to 300,000 annually); since then levels stayed lower—aside from recent surges in regions like Ukraine, Ethiopia, and the Middle East.

The Human Security Report 2005 noted a 40% decline in armed conflicts since the early 1990s and an 80% reduction in genocides between 1998 and 2001—but high-intensity conflicts persist.

The Darfur genocide (2003–2005) resulted in an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 deaths, primarily civilians.

The Sudan genocide amid civil war (2023–present) and the Masalit massacres reflect ongoing genocidal violence, with tens of thousands killed—Masalit fatalities in particular range from 10,000 to 136,000.

 

Summary Table

Period / Region	Conflicts (State-Based)	Total Deaths	Civilian Deaths & Notes
2000 early 2000s	Decline noted	Lower than prior decades	Genocides decreased by ~80% by 2001
2010 vs. now	Nearly doubled	Deaths ~50%	Civilians increasingly targeted
2023	59 conflicts	~122,000 deaths	High civilian toll in Ukraine, Gaza
2024	Historic peak: 61 conflicts	~160,000 deaths	13,900 civilian-targeted deaths (+31%)
Darfur (2003-05)	Genocidal event	200,000- 300,000 deaths	Majority were civilians
Sudan (2023-present)	Genocidal campaigns	10,000-136,000 civilians	Ethnic targeting Masalit massacres

Because peace efforts have been largely reactive—addressing the symptoms of conflict, not its causes conflicts are surging both in frequency and complexity, with state involvement and non-state actors overlapping and rising.

Total fatalities remain alarmingly high, especially among civilians; the risk from organized violence is climbing rather than declining.  Thus, preventive strategies and protection—especially safeguarding civilians and healthcare services—must be a top priority given the rising trend of deliberate targeting.  Especially given the record numbers of attacks on medical infrastructure and personnel.

The ideal path is prevention as the peace actually intended by the Peace movement. Peace lovers can be forgiven for this reactionary thinking.  But not if such thinking persists.  Drawing from Nadin’s anticipatory systems theory, there must be a strategic and tactical pivot: The peace movement transforming into a global health movement—focused not on the absence of war, but prioritizing progress in health (mind, body, spirit, family, community, environment, government, economics...).

Like disease, violence has causes—poverty, exclusion, misinformation, trauma, resource scarcity, flawed beliefs and dysfunctional governance and economic systems. These causes are identifiable, measurable, and preventable.

War, like cancer, is often predictable and increasingly aggressive. The longer we wait to act, the more expensive, deadly, and widespread it becomes.

Reframing Peace as Global Health:

Traditional Peace Movement	Peace as Global Health Movement
Ceasefires after war	Prevention before war
Protest against violence	Investment in equity & nutrition
Humanitarian aid post-crisis	Early education, mental health, and social resilience
Diplomacy & treaties	Just governance, truth-telling, inclusive economies

Remember that the single greatest human achievement accomplished in just 10 years was the global eradication of Smallpox.  This global infectious disease had killed over 300 million people in just 70 years of the last century.  That was more human deaths lost in that whole century from wars, revolutions, genocides and murders combined.  And even now 11,000 to 13,000 children under the age of five die each DAY from easily preventable malnutrition and related infectious diseases. This death toll is about 3 times the pace of death in Hitler’s concentration camps - and does not include current daily child deaths from wars, genocides, pandemics, or natural disasters.  And they are not news. Yet these preventable deaths are a primary driver of conflicts.  The loss of a child, even a parent’s fear of losing one - from any cause -is greatest terror of all human experiences.  Yet they are ignored by most progressive organizations and their greater movements.

This calls on peace organizations, foundations, governments, and other progressive movements to champion global health by adopting an anticipatory framework using data and lived experience to identify and intervene before conflict ignites.

Making wise investments in the social determinants of peace like primary health care, food security, basic education, climate resilience/restoration, and justice -

Framing the ambiguous word of peace which can mean many different outcomes for different entities into the language of public health: Prevention, early intervention, systems care, and holistic well-being.

Ideally, progressive movements would align and develop a unified strategy to prioritize a holistic and comprehensive effort to fund the UN 17 SDGs to best achieve the 169 subgoals within them, by educating the public that the peace most progressives image must be far more than a historic slogan.  Health is ambiguous.  It is a measurable, proactive process, and achievable - just like disease prevention when minimal resources are committed.  Just as medicine evolved from crisis response to preventive health, the peace movement must evolve and adapt from its reactionary or preemptive efforts of protests to prevention.  From managing symptoms to strengthening all of life’s vital systems.

“At stake is the future of humankind and even of life on planet Earth.” — Mihai Nadin

Stop treating peace as the absence of war, - or trying to redefine Peace, an ambiguous word even before our polarized era, accelerating Truth decay, and agreeing on anything locally, nationally, or globally.   Start referencing peace as the bearing of health, justice, and foresight to all threats to human freedom and security.

The challenge of overcoming the prevailing global and political mindset of “peace through strength” will be easier, cheaper, faster, and more effective than any a new effort to redefine peace.  Humankind’s well-being through prevention— via global health, compassion, and systemic solutions is possible by a united progressive movement of movements.

Resources.

BOOK:  Disrupt Science: The Future Matters by Mihai Nadin (published November 19, 2023)

 Mihai Nadin argues that our current scientific paradigm is too focused on reductionism—breaking things down into parts—and reactive responses like treating disease only after it appears. That way of thinking, while powerful in engineering and data-driven tech like AI, often overlooks the complexity and adaptive nature of life itself. 

 Life—from bacteria to humans—is inherently anticipatory: organisms act in ways that prepare for future changes rather than merely reacting. This anticipatory intelligence is non‑deterministic and emergent, shaped by memory, creativity, and awareness of consequences. Humanity’s future depends on embracing this complexity instead of relentlessly pursuing progress at any cost. 

Nadin calls for a “Second Revolution in Science”: a shift that completes what he terms the Cartesian Revolution by integrating meaning, ethics, and anticipation back into scientific inquiry. Instead of building ever more powerful machines and accumulating data for its own sake, science must rediscover how to interpret data through purpose—and prevent breakdowns before they happen. This is especially urgent in light of global crises like pandemics and climate challenges. 

 His core ideas:  “Reaction to breakdowns is more expensive, by many orders of magnitude, than prevention… The living is by necessity anticipatory.” 

 “Anticipatory actions are expressed through non‑deterministic processes that unfold in concert with reactions. They engage the wholeness of life, including its interactions with the environment.” 

 “The moment of truth can no longer be postponed. At stake is the future of humankind you and even of life on planet Earth.” 

 “A ‘Second Revolution in Science’ could unleash humanity’s remaking, free of surrendering to want… Science has the opportunity not only to measure everything—life included—and accumulate data and process it for its own sake, but also to realize its meaning.” 

 The peace movement must shift from reaction to prevention.  Why wait for disasters when anticipating them would be smarter and cheaper?  

Embrace complexity and meaning: Move from typical progressive simplicity to objective science to understand reality to achieve real and sustainable progress.

Ethics and foresight underscores the fundamental flaws within the Peace movement’s reliance on the ambiguous word of Peace.  Without a clear and deep reflection of the causes of violence and other even greater threats to human freedom and security, current conditions will only worsen.

The context of Disrupt Science nails the peace movements’ shortcomings in their failure to anticipate and effectively address the root causes of war, genocide, and systemic violence. Combined with the greater lethality of infectious diseases related to poverty (clean water, sanitation, adequate nutrition, access to basic health services and education make the need for championing health instead of peace even more relevant.

Mihai Nadin’s central argument is that life is inherently anticipatory.  He provides a powerful critique of how modern systems (including science, politics, and social movements) repeatedly react to crises instead of preventing them with direct implications for the global peace movement.

Traditional peace advocacy over the decades grows after violence erupts. Demands for ceasefire calls and caring for refugees’ spike, with a focus on diplomacy or protests while largely ignoring the need to dismantle the systemic and structural drivers of violence (like the powerless United Nations to stop wars and genocides or effectively address inequality, resource plundering, border disputes, or identity manipulation.  Promoting “peace” primarily as the absence of war, rather than the presence of justice, foresight regarding the value of healthy literate people, and sustainable security and environmental systems.

Nadin’s anticipatory framework challenges this reactive model when he writes, “Reaction to breakdowns is more expensive, by many orders of magnitude, than prevention.”

Wars and genocides are not spontaneous.  They are predictable given the flawed global governance and economic systems, or the ignored warning signs like exclusion, propaganda, wealth hoarding, ecological collapse, authoritarianism, and historic grievances.

Preventable conditions relying on science, not hope. This is what Nadin’s science of anticipation calls for.  Early detection of systemic stress—political, environmental, social, psychological.  Intervention before escalation, like adequate food supply, clean water, sanitation, access to primary health services, living wage jobs giving citizens and families basic dignity.  Similar to how a vaccine prevents disease, a focus on public, economic, and environmental health prevents wars, genocides, and corruption.   This new health movement requires a holistic and comprehensive approach that was intended in 1948 with the approval of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that must now be accomplished by achieving the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals.  A global advocacy effort uniting the three basic progressive movements (Peace, Environment, & economic/social Justice) and the tens of thousands of organizations within each prioritizing advocacy for funding all 17 goals simultaneously. By integrating ethics, history, cost savings, compassion, and creativity into advocacy for one global policy for human health and a sustainable environment.

A united movement that invests in early childhood development, food security, climate resilience, media literacy, inclusive governance, and justice that embraces our global complexity and interdependence. Not just “peace talks” and clever slogans with regular sound bites about wars costs in blood and coin.

Nadin asserts “The living is by necessity anticipatory.”  And if the peace movements treated societies like living systems, they’d see the peace they have always dreamed of, preventing violence before it appears, while saving more lives and dollars than the disarmament and the banning of weapons they have wasted so much time primarily focused on.

Nadin’s call for a “Second Revolution in Science” that includes meaning and ethics, means the priority of health trumps the call for peace.  This is the revolution the progressive movements must urgently align on.  The Peace movement must adapt and go from: “Stop this war!”  To “Prevent the next one by confronting its roots now.”  From: “Negotiate a ceasefire.” To: “Transform the systems that make violence inevitable.”

This moment of Truth can no longer be postponed. At stake is the future of humankind and perhaps most life on Earth.

Environmental health linked to Human health and security are also benefited by achieving the UN 17 Sustainable Development goals.

 2.     AN EMERGENT PLANETARY HEALTH LAW    ERIC C IP*

Abstract: The health of the planet and its life forms are under threat from anthropogenic climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss, and the extreme weather events, heatwaves and wildfires that accompany them. The burgeoning field of planetary health studies the interplay between humanity and the Earth’s biosphere and ecosystems on which human health depends. Scholarship on law from a planetary health vantage point remains scarce. This article fills this gap by delineating the conceptual building blocks of a planetary health law, which, in its latent form, is dispersed across various hard and soft sources of international environmental law and global health law that converge on the right to a healthy environment, and, to a lesser extent, rights of nature emerging in various domestic jurisdictions. It elucidates how the fragmented regimes of international environmental and global health law could be developed in more coherent ways, driven by an overarching concern for the integrity of the planetary foundations of life. 

INTRODUCTION:  For millennia, during the geological epoch known as the Holocene, humanity thrived on the Earth’s clean air, freshwater, and generally stable climate and temperatures.  Since the dawn of what is being increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene epoch around the time of the Industrial Revolution, the manifold planetary crises of climate change, widespread air and water pollution, biodiversity loss, and the reconfiguration of the biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus have been culminating into an existential threat to the well-being of children now living. Major achievements in global health since the end of World War II could easily be reversed as rainfall patterns change, temperatures rise and extreme weather events happen more frequently.  Countless people have succumbed to rapid changes in precipitation and temperature, for example.

The growing science of planetary health studies how political, economic and social forces across human societies shape the biophysical dimensions of Earth, which in turn determine population health and the enjoyment of human rights. From the vantage point of planetary health, humans are part and parcel of the planet’s life systems, not separate from them, and the flourishing of humanity within safe ‘planetary boundaries’ should take precedence over short-term economic and political considerations.  Underlying the perspective of planetary health is the principle that humans ought to ‘conserve, sustain, and make resilient the planetary and human systems on which health depends by giving priority to the wellbeing of all’.  Studies of law from a planetary health point of view remain surprisingly rare and underdeveloped. This article fills a gap in the literatures on both planetary health and law by setting out a conceptual account of planetary health law, which fosters the reinterpretation of existing, albeit fragmented and under-coordinated, norms in a more coherent way. When this is impossible, it can help understanding of how the existing regimes of international environmental and global health law, understood broadly as encompassing both ‘hard law’ and ‘soft law’, should be integrated in a way that is driven by an overarching concern for rights, be they the rights of humans or the rights of nature.

* Professor, Centre for Medical Ethics and Law, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, People’s Republic of China, ericcip@hku.hk. This study was partly supported by the Outstanding Young Researcher Award of The University of Hong Kong. The author is grateful to anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments and the International & Comparative Law Quarterly editors for their editorial work. All errors remain my own. 1 D Schimel, Climate and Ecosystems (Princeton University Press 2013) 51. 2 S Whitmee et al, ‘Safeguarding Human Health in the Anthropocene Epoch: Report of the Rockefeller–Lancet Commission on Planetary Health’ (2015) 386(10007) Lancet 1973, 1974.  3 See PJ Crutzen and EF Stoermer, ‘The “Anthropocene” (2000)’ in S Benner et al (eds), Paul J. Crutzen and the Anthropocene: A New Epoch in Earth’s History (Springer 2021) 19. © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of British Institute of International and Comparative Law. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. [ICLQ vol 72, October 2023 pp 1047–1067] doi:10.1017/S0020589323000325

3.  The summary of a 1980 U.S. bipartisan Presidential Commission on World Hunger put global development in the context of US national security.  It specifically warned ...“The most potentially explosive force in the world today is the frustrated desire of poor people to attain a decent standard of living. The anger, despair, and often hatred that result represent real and persistent threats to international order… Neither the cost to national security of allowing malnutrition to spread nor the gain to be derived by a genuine effort to resolve the problem can be predicted or measured in any precise, mathematical way. Nor can monetary value be placed on avoiding the chaos that will ensue unless the United States and the rest of the world begin to develop a common institutional framework for meeting such other critical global threats… [measurable] or not... this combination of problems now threatens the national security of all countries just as surely as advancing armies or nuclear arsenals.”

They concluded “promoting economic development in general, and overcoming hunger in particular, are tasks far more critical to the U.S. national security than most policymakers acknowledge or even believe. Since the advent of nuclear weapons, most Americans have been conditioned to equate national security with the strength of strategic military forces. [WE] consider this prevailing belief to be a simplistic illusion. Armed might represents merely the physical aspect of national security. Military force is ultimately useless in the absence of the global security that only coordinated international progress toward social justice can bring.”

We are now experiencing consequences of ignoring those warnings.   Specifically increases in “diseases”, “international terrorism”, “war”, “environmental problems” and “other human rights problems” (refugees, genocide, human trafficking…).   Combined, we see these global forces today continuing to fuel the authoritarian populist movements around the world.   Governments' “self-interests” can no longer be more important than humanity's potential to thrive and survive in the face of these accelerating threats.