The Past century was the most lethal in human history: Over 200 million people were killed in 250 wars and genocidal onslaughts, more people than were killed in warfare in the past two thousand years.* More than six million people have died in war since the end of the Cold War, when things should have changed for the better. The river of human blood is still flowing, searing survivors with crippling wounds and deep personal loss, and sweeping away the painstaking work of generations of human hands and minds. Armed conflict also obstructs efforts to get at the root of organized violence, including poverty, economic equality, social injustice, environmental degradation, and discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity, and religion.

The world's societies and governments already know how to stop the killing. What has been missing is a program for the sustained, integrated, worldwide application of their resources and knowledge. Global Action to Prevent War provides such a program.

Global Action to Prevent War is a comprehensive project for making armed conflict increasingly rare. It is building a worldwide coalition of passionate individuals, civil society organizations, and governments to carry it out. Global Action supplements existing programs of conflict reduction with a unified, integrated approach aimed at a specific goal--making armed conflict infrequent, of short duration, and causing minimal harm.

Step-by-step, Global Action would establish a comprehensive world security system composed of a well-financed UN with its own readiness forces, pro-active in conflict prevention, a fully developed network of regional security institutions, and a more accessible system of international courts. Concurrently, there would be reductions in national armed forces, both nuclear and conventional. As this process continues throughout the next 2-3 decades, we foresee countries establishing a binding commitment with the international community not to send armed forces beyond national borders except under the auspices of the UN or regional security organizations.

The Global Action program will help prevent all types of war and armed conflict. It reduces the possibility of conflict among the major powers through fostering their cooperation in preventing smaller wars and through gradual cuts in their conventional and nuclear forces, eliminating their capacity to attack each other with any chance of success. For conflicts between neighboring states, our program proposes force reductions, defensively-oriented changes in force structure, and a set of confidence-building measures and constraints on force activities tailored to each situation. For internal conflicts, including genocide, Global Action to Prevent War outlines a broad array of conflict prevention measures to be applied by the UN, regional security organizations, and international courts.

If this program--or something similar--is carried out, it can prevent the loss of millions of lives and the vast waste of resources which armed conflicts of coming decades will otherwise surely bring.

*The Global Action definition of war includes interstate armed conflict, internal armed conflict, terrorism and genocide.