Structural violence creates invisible conditions of social and environmental destruction that must be prioritized.

It’ s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace. Without peace countries cannot develop. Although since 1945 there has been no world war, but

• numerous local wars took place,

• terrorism has spread all over the world, undermining security even in the most developed and powerful countries,

• arms race and militarisation have not ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but escalated and continued, extending also to weapons of mass destruction and misusing enormous resources badly needed for development,

• many “invisible wars” are suffered by the poor and oppressed people, manifested in mass misery, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, starvation and malnutrition, epidemics and poor health conditions, exploitation and oppression, racial and other discrimination, physical terror, organised injustice, disguised forms of violence, the denial or regular infringement of the democratic rights of citizens, women, youth, ethnic or religious minorities, etc., and last but not least, in the degradation of human environment, which means that

• the “war against Nature”, i.e. the disturbance of ecological balance, wasteful management of natural resources, and large-scale pollution of our environment, is still going on, causing also losses and fatal dangers for human life.

Behind global terrorism and “invisible wars” we find striking international and intrasociety inequities and distorted development patterns , which tend to generate social as well as international tensions, thus paving the way for unrest and “visible” wars.

It is a commonplace now that peace is not merely the absence of war. The prerequisites of a lasting peace between and within societies involve not only - though, of course, necessarily - demilitarisation, but also a systematic and gradual elimination of the roots of violence, of the causes of “invisible wars”, of the structural and institutional bases of large-scale international and intra-society inequalities, exploitation and oppression. Peace requires a process of social and national emancipation, a progressive, democratic transformation of societies and the world bringing about equal rights and opportunities for all people, sovereign participation and mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a pluralistic democracy on global level with an appropriate system of proportional representation of the world society, articulation of diverse interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-violent conflict management, and thus also a global governance with a really global institutional system.

Under the contemporary conditions of accelerating globalisation and deepening global interdependencies in our world, peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if reduced to a period only after or before war, and cannot be safeguarded in one part of the world when some others suffer visible or invisible wars. Thus, peace requires, indeed, a new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide equal opportunities for sustainable development.

“Sustainability of development” (both on national and world level) is often interpreted as an issue of environmental protection only and reduced to the need for preserving the ecological balance and delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature with overexhausted resources and polluted environment. However, no ecological balance can be ensured, unless the deep international development gap and intra-society inequalities are substantially reduced.

Owing to global interdependencies there may exist hardly any “zero-sum-games”, in which one can gain at the expense of others, but, instead, the “negative-sum-games” tend to predominate, in which everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses.

Therefore, the actual question is not about “sustainability of development” but rather about the “sustainability of human life”, i.e. survival of [hu]mankind – because of ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism.

When Professor Louk de la Rive Box was the president of EADI, one day we had an exchange of views on the state and future of development studies. We agreed that development studies are not any more restricted to the case of underdeveloped countries, as the developed ones (as well as the former “socialist” countries) are also facing development problems, such as those of structural and institutional (and even system-) transformation, requirements of changes in development patterns, and concerns about natural environment. While all these are true, today I would dare say that besides (or even instead of) “development studies” we must speak about and make “survival studies”.

While the monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical, we live in an almost permanent crisis of the world society, which is multidimensional in nature, involving not only economic but also socio-psychological, behavioural, cultural and political aspects. The narrow-minded, election-oriented, selfish behaviour motivated by thirst for power and wealth, which still characterise the political leadership almost all over the world, paves the way for the final, last catastrophe.

One cannot doubt, of course, that great many positive historical changes have also taken place in the world in the last century. Such as decolonisation, transformation of socio-economic systems, democratisation of political life in some former fascist or authoritarian states, institutionalisation of welfare policies in several countries, rise of international organisations and new forums for negotiations, conflict management and cooperation, institutionalisation of international assistance programmes by multilateral agencies, codification of human rights, and rights of sovereignty and democracy also on international level, collapse of the militarised Soviet bloc and system-change3 in the countries concerned, the end of cold war, etc., to mention only a few. Nevertheless, the crisis of the world society has extended and deepened, approaching to a point of bifurcation that necessarily puts an end to the present tendencies, either by the final catastrophe or a common solution.

Under the circumstances provided by rapidly progressing science and technological revolutions, human society cannot survive unless such profound intra-society and international inequalities prevailing today are soon eliminated. Like a single spacecraft, the Earth can no longer afford to have a 'crew' divided into two parts: the rich, privileged, wellfed, well-educated, on the one hand, and the poor, deprived, starving, sick and uneducated, on the other.

Dangerous 'zero-sum-games' (which mostly prove to be “negative-sum-games”) can hardly be played any more by visible or invisible wars in the world society. Because of global interdependencies, the apparent winner becomes also a loser. The real choice for the world society is between negative- and positive-sum-games: i.e. between, on the one hand, continuation of visible and “invisible wars”, as long as this is possible at all, and, on the other, transformation of the world order by demilitarisation and democratization. No ideological or terminological camouflage can conceal this real dilemma any more, which is to be faced not in the distant future, by the next generations, but in the coming years, because of global terrorism soon having nuclear and other mass destructive weapons, and also due to irreversible changes in natural environment.