Wars For Resources & Good Practices for Just Peace

In Europe, the war in Ukraine is experienced as a “wake-up-call” to re-visit political, strategic, and ethical views on security and peace. This war seems to be a relapse into old patterns of war, colonialism and the struggle for territory – leading back to hostile nationalisms and re-militarization on all sides.

Yet basically, most wars have been and will always be fought over access to resources, especially by societies whose guiding interest is economics. In times of global crises, this struggle is likely to intensify considerably, because access to drinking water and food is already not guaranteed for all. The most vulnerable are already effected severely. And human-made global warming and rapidly advancing climate change are further depleting vital resources, so that a world population of more than 8 billion people will barely have what they need to live.

Thus, these growing conflicts are no longer only about nation-state and economic power interests, but simply about the survival of entire populations. Growing ‘re- settlements’ and refugee movements are probably only a foretaste of the crises facing the world community as a whole in near future.

In this series of public lectures, we want to analyze and discuss together different scenarios, looking from different disciplines and world regions at “wars for resources”, searching to discover interdependencies. In addition, we aim to include “good practices” for contributing to a sustainable just peace – for all. The guiding question is: Which good practices do we discover in order to transform a development, that will potentially lead to a rising number of violent conflicts – also in privileged spaces that until recently seemed to be rather “safe”?

23 March 2023