When Peace Becomes More Profitable Than War

War does not have to enrich a society to enrich the people capable of starting or prolonging it. A population can lose homes, income, infrastructure, and years of life while particular actors gain territory, contracts, political control, or protection from accountability. Proving that war is collectively ruinous does not prove that the people deciding on it face an incentive to stop.

That is the economic problem a serious theory of peace must confront. The losses and gains belong to different accounts. Recapitalism’s task is to change the return to the decision: give people a durable claim on what continued cooperation produces, and reduce the gains that can be retained through coercion.

Identify whose calculation matters

A defense worker, an arms manufacturer, a political leader, a civilian business, and a displaced household do not face the same incentives. Collapsing them into a single category called the war economy makes the argument easier to shout and harder to use.

SIPRI estimates that military expenditure reached $2.887 trillion in 2025. That is spending, including personnel and operations; it is not a total of war profits. Defense can also protect the conditions under which peaceful exchange remains possible. A proposal that makes aggression cheaper by removing credible protection has worsened the incentive it intended to repair. SIPRI’s 2025 expenditure fact sheet ↗.

The relevant question is narrower: for a particular actor with the ability to sustain or disrupt cooperation, which course offers the more credible return after costs and risks? The answer may include security, power, and ideological aims as well as cash. Money influences the calculation; it does not exhaust it.

Derive the condition for cooperation

Consider a deliberately simplified repeated interaction. Cooperation gives an actor a payoff of 10 each period. Defection produces 18 immediately, but after detection the actor receives only 2 per period. Assume defection is detected with certainty and these consequences are credible and persist. Let δ represent how much the actor values the next period relative to this one, with 0 ≤ δ < 1. The numbers are invented payoff units, not estimates of a real conflict.

Continuing cooperation is worth 10 ÷ (1 − δ). Defecting now is worth 18 + 2δ ÷ (1 − δ). Cooperation is at least as attractive when 10 ≥ 18 − 16δ: in this example, δ must be at least 0.5.

At δ = 0.8, cooperation is worth 50 and defection 26. At δ = 0.2, cooperation is worth 12.5 and defection 18.5. The same actor, facing the same immediate temptation, makes a different choice when the future is sufficiently valuable and credible.

For cooperation payoff C, immediate defection payoff T, and subsequent payoff P, where T > C > P, the general condition is δ ≥ (T − C) ÷ (T − P). This is a result of the stated model. Real conflicts do not automatically satisfy its assumptions, and the consequences following defection must themselves be enforceable and lawful.

The model identifies the work. Increase the recurring benefit of cooperation. Reduce the gain available from predation. Make future benefits credible enough to influence present decisions. An appeal to shared humanity can matter morally; it does not substitute for those changes in the payoff structure.

Give the peace dividend to people who can defend it

Infrastructure offers one route. Reliable energy, trade, water, communications, and transport generate continuing benefits. If those benefits accrue entirely to distant owners while local communities carry the disruption and cost, the project has created little local reason to defend the arrangement.

A different ownership and revenue agreement can give residents, workers, and legitimate local institutions a continuing stake. A port’s uninterrupted operation could fund wages, local distributions, and maintained public infrastructure under transparent rules. A shared energy asset could produce lower bills or income for its participants. The benefits have to survive routine political turnover and be accessible without submitting to the arbitrary favor of a patron.

The mechanism is an increased opportunity cost of destruction: people lose something they actually possess when productive cooperation fails. Shared ownership explains the elementary financial arrangement. Scaling that logic to a conflict-affected setting requires consent, secure rights, and institutions that can prevent capture.

An essential service must not become a hostage. Cutting civilians off from water or power to enforce a political settlement is coercion, not a peace dividend. The credibility of a peaceful arrangement includes protections against its own operators.

Convert dispersed savings into a payer

Prevention has a financing problem. The benefit of an event that does not happen is spread among people who may prefer someone else to fund the work. A shipping firm, an insurer, a municipality, and a household can all benefit from stability while none has an adequate incentive or mandate to pay for the whole intervention.

A funding institution can assemble those beneficiaries and commit part of the expected benefit in advance. The joint United Nations–World Bank study Pathways for Peace argues for prevention integrated with development, diplomacy, security, and inclusion. Its analysis emphasizes grievances involving access to power, resources, security, and justice. That is a warning against reducing peace to an investment product detached from political conditions. Pathways for Peace, 2018 ↗.

Consider another invented example. Assume a prevention program would cost $3 million a year and reduce expected annual losses by $8 million. Assume the $3 million includes administration and evaluation, and the projected savings already account for relevant side effects. The expected collective net benefit is $5 million. But the program can still fail to finance if the people saving the money cannot or will not commit it to the institution doing the work.

The surplus and the payment arrangement are separate problems. A serious proposal names the payer, the source of funds, the service, and the method for assessing its effect. It cannot book every loss that failed to occur as revenue earned by the project.

Do not turn a threat into an asset

Paying an actor because it can credibly threaten violence can create a market for more threats. A scheme that rewards the reduction of reported violence can also reward suppressing reports. Both failures follow from paying for the wrong observable event.

Prevention funding should support legitimate capabilities and civilian outcomes: functioning services, lawful dispute resolution, protected reporting, and reliable access to work. It must not make threatening a community the qualification for receiving an income. Nor should victims be required to exchange accountability for the promise of commercial stability.

The return to predation changes through secure rights, enforcement against corruption and illicit gains, and credible protection from aggression. These measures can reduce the immediate advantage of coercion and make the future benefit of cooperation more believable. They also require public authority capable of acting without becoming another predator.

Peace has to survive its own success

A profitable project can become a target for capture. An agreement can enrich a narrow faction and deepen the grievances outside it. Growth in commercial activity can coexist with severe repression. A durable settlement therefore needs beneficiaries with independent rights, institutions they can contest, and a way to remove managers without destroying the underlying service.

Workers and firms dependent on military activity also need a material transition when appropriate: funded civilian orders, retraining tied to actual jobs, and credible demand for different production. Announcing that peace will create opportunities is weaker than placing a lawful order for the infrastructure people can be paid to build.

Peace becomes the better economic choice when continued cooperation produces a more valuable and defensible future for the actors whose decisions matter, while the gains from violence become harder to obtain and keep. The inequality can be changed. Achieving that change requires ownership, security, enforcement, and organized funding. Expecting moral agreement alone to do their work leaves the original incentive intact.