The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union once kindled hopes for a more peaceful world. Those hopes were brutally tested by the attacks of 11 September 2001, and subsequent crises have continued to expose deep fractures in human behaviour and global governance. Even the collective efforts that contained the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic failed to produce a lasting shift toward cooperation; instead, we keep witnessing again and again a Hobbesian retreat into fear, hostility, self-interest and pompous chest-thumping.

The brinkmanship of short-sighted leaders and flawed decision-making has pushed humanity toward recurring crises testing the moral, institutional frameworks and near collapse of the rules-based global order. One wonders how soon the current status quo would be overtaken by the looming uncertainty namely Artificial Super Intelligence. People everywhere long for peaceful resolution of conflicts at every level – within families, communities, nations, and between countries – but procedural fixes alone cannot heal the deeper social, economic, and political pathologies that fuel conflicts and wars. Time and again, the world has been spared catastrophe more by luck than by design, whether through miscalculation or the failure of nuclear fail-safes. The nation-state system, premised on absolute sovereignty, has revealed its limits in addressing problems that cross borders.

Global markets remain vulnerable to currency volatility and concentrated wealth, with roughly one per cent of the population controlling the vast majority of resources. Many poorer countries struggle to meet basic needs while servicing debt and diverting scarce resources to internal conflicts and disaster relief. These pressures risk cascading into broader economic collapse if the ongoing Middle-East crisis continues for much longer. At USD 2.7 trillion global military expenditure in 2025, the world is increasingly armed with more lethal weapons. Soaring defence spending of major powers in the name of security or dominance exacerbates the suffering of the masses of population. Regional wars and cross-border terrorism have widened fault lines, and the spread of nuclear capability hastens the spectre of global catastrophe.

Movements calling for the abolition of weapons of mass destruction have not yet prevailed, while terrorism – often diffuse and embedded within civilian populations – poses novel challenges to conventional state responses. Education for peaceful coexistence remains a vital but undervalued pillar of prevention. Lest one forget, an important pillar of UNESCO’s Education Curriculum Framework for the 21st century: Learning: The Treasure Within is “Learning to Live Together”. History shows that human societies have evolved from family groups to tribes, city-states, empires, and nation-states. The next logical stage is a form of global governance that preserves cultural diversity while creating institutions capable of preventing war and equitably managing the finite resources.

Advocates of a federated world order envision a system that mirrors the democratic functions of a nation – executive, legislative, judicial, and a free press – without erasing national identities. Such a structure would encourage broader loyalties and global citizenship, subordinating narrow national impulses to the common good. We are rapidly eroding the planet’s safety margins and, in some areas, have crossed the tipping points. Deforestation, soil erosion, air and water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, species loss, ocean acidif ication, and unche cke d population growth, compound the risks posed by disruptive technologies and fragile financial systems. These converging threats make the choice before humanity urgent: continue on a path of fragmented lukewarm responses, or unite to manage shared risks and steward the planet responsibly.

For several decades, members of the Bahá’í Faith along with several other global organizations and institutions have been advocating the creation of “… a world super-state [that] needs be evolved, in whose favour all the nations of the world will have willingly ceded every claim to make war, certain rights to impose taxation and all rights to maintain armaments, except for purposes of maintaining internal order within their resp e ctive dominions…” Such a framework would ensure “a world organically unified in all the essential aspects of its life, its political machinery, its spiritual aspiration, its trade and finance, its script and language, and yet infinite in the diversity of the national characteristics of its federated units.”

This is no small task. The federated order envisioned parallels the four estates that constitute a democratically established nation-state: executive, legislative, judicial and the media. Without undermining the existing order, subverting national loyalty, or suppressing diversity of ethnic origin, language, tradition, or habit, such a global system would inculcate a wider loyalty and promote larger aspiration than any that has animated the human race. It would foster global citizenship leading to subordination of national impulses to the imperative claims of a unified world. The choice confronting humanity is stark but clear.

By subordinating narrow loyalties as well as limiting identities, and embracing consultative, cooperative institutions, it is a now or never chance to build durable peace that reflects both the material interdependence and humanity’s shared spiritual aspirations. Achieving an organically unified world – one that honours diversity while fostering global responsibility – in this dark period of human history whose distant horizon, I believe, is brilliant with the promise of that most glorious day of all, foretold and sung throughout the ages by prophets, seers, and poets destined to lift humanity out of the valley of misery and shame to the summits of maturity, power and glory.

(The writer is a social worker, independent researcher, & member of the Bahá’i Community of India. Views expressed are personal.)

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