Err aff. We don’t have to win no war ever; capitalist structures and cultures make peace more likely at every level.

Some interpret the capitalist peace argument as claiming that those that trade will never go to war (van de Haar’s 2020), but a more accurate interpretation is that trade increases the cost, on the margin, of engaging in violent conflict with trading partners (Murphy 2020). A preponderance of the empirical evidence supports this claim although there is no consensus over the magnitude of the effect or the interaction effect between markets and trade and other relevant factors (e.g., political institutions).

While empirical studies are relevant to understanding the liberal peace, they don’t capture the more fundamental point that the freedom underpinning interaction and exchange creates space for people to engage in the process of discovering cultures of peace. Cultures of peace, which refer to the ways which we navigate conflict and live with others, are diverse and open-ended, in contrast to being fixed and given (E. Boulding 2000). Moreover, they are often the result of emergent, bottom-up processes by ordinary people as compared to top-down “solutions” imposed by elites (see Autesserre 2021). The freedoms underpinning exchange also create space for the experimentation associated with discovering ways of peacefully living together.

Appreciating the importance of cultures of peace does not deny the existence of conflict which is ubiquitous across time and space. Instead, it recognizes that there are potentially violent and non-violent means for navigating conflict, and that peaceful order can, and does, exist absent top-down control by a small group of political elite. From this perspective, international trade can be understood as part of a broader ongoing peace project through which we learn to live with others.