A Long Shot
- Administrator
- Dec 10, 2025
- 10 min read
Updated: Dec 17, 2025
Luca Belgiorno-Nettis
Luca Belgiorno-Nettis has a BSc and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of NSW (UNSW) and a Dip Urban Estate Management from the University of Technology (UTS) Sydney. In 2007, he founded The newDemocracy Foundation, a not-for-profit research organisation focused on political reform. In 2014 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Western Sydney University (WSU).
War and Peace
“Climate change has been widely viewed as the mightiest threat to humanity but, in the hierarchy of the threats we face, is a Third World War still the more dangerous?” (Blainey G. The Causes of War Macmillan, 1973, Scribner, 2025, viii). In asking that question, Geoffrey Blainey writes that war is as much a feature of human history as is peace. Russia, from the 10th century onwards, has been at war in foreign territories for “46 of each 100 years; England, since William the Conqueror, for 56; and Spain for even more.” (Blainey 2025,3) He says that, if another world war were to occur in the next few decades, “it might result in fewer deaths on the battlefields - national armies are likely to be smaller - but massive deaths in cities and suburbs.” (Blainey 2025, 319)
In 2025, according to The Arms Control Association, “progress on nuclear disarmament is stalled and an unconstrained global nuclear arms race is on the horizon.” The New START - the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – is moribund ever since Russia suspended its implementation in February 2023, with President Putin arguing that, “to resume treaty activities, the United States would need to bring France and the United Kingdom into arms control talks.” Meanwhile, as at the time of writing, the Ukraine conflict continues and President Putin threatens to use any and all weapons at Russia’s disposal; the Palestinians and Israelis have, at best, reached an uneasy truce; and the civil war in Sudan has cost hundreds of thousands of lives so far. Most ominously, China is poised to take over Taiwan, and the USA seems intent on preventing that. Professor Hugh White at The Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University (ANU) said,
It is not inevitable that America and China will go to war over Taiwan, but the risk is real and growing. If it comes, this war would be unlike anything we have seen for 75 years, and quite possibly unlike any war ever seen before. It would be the first conflict between major world powers since 1950, when China and America fought in Korea. It would also be the first serious war between nuclear-armed powers. We must expect that once fighting began, it would swiftly escalate into a full-scale regional conflict, and nuclear war would then become hard to avoid. The consequences for America, for China, for the people of Taiwan and for everyone else in Asia and beyond would be immense and disastrous. And yet no one seems to be seriously trying to reduce the risk of this war happening. (The Australian)
When the Swedish philanthropist, Laszlo Szombatfalvy, established the Global Challenges Foundation (GCF) in 2012, he said,
Even though every nation says it wants to live in peace, we spend every day nearly $5 billion to defend ourselves against each other. This is the worst conceivable waste of money. And that doesn’t even consider all the human suffering caused by the killing, the wounding and the refugee streams. If we solved politically motivated violence, we could free up most of today’s military spending to deal with the other challenges faster (Szombatfalvy L. ‘The Greatest Challenges of Our Time’, Ekerlids, 2010, 30)
Notwithstanding this reality/claim, most countries, including NATO members, have determined to increase their defence budgets. Nuclear programs may have their own multilateral or bilateral regulatory tracks, but all military outlays are inevitably at the expense of social welfare budgets: income support, housing, health care, education, etc.
Democracies and Autocracies
In the latest Democracy Index by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the world’s population is split into two broad blocks: democracies and autocracies. See table below.
The hegemons are each asserting their strength with patriotic bombast. On one side, there’s President Trump spouting Make America Great Again. On the other side, President Xi Jinping urges his people to regain their rightful place as “a moral, political and economic great power.” (Jaivin L. The Shortest History of China, 2021, Black Inc. 239) Then there’s President Vladimir Putin boasting that “Russia has been a great power for centuries and remains so.” (The Collector)
China may not have the vote, but the country’s progress is impressive. “In 2020, the Chinese Communist Party proclaimed to have eliminated absolute poverty (Jaivin 2021, 238).” China describes itself as a “socialist consultative democracy (Ibid)” where freedom of speech is moderated. China is on track to become the world’s largest economy by 2035, and Xi Jinping believes that what is needed to achieve that goal is “discipline, unity and greater adherence to ideology.” (Ibid)
Even in a full democracy like Australia, democracy isn’t all sweetness and light. “Only 30% of Australians believe people in government can be trusted” reported the 2022 ANU Australian Election Study - down from 51% in 1969. In the flawed democracy that is the US, the public is even more cynical. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center Report, “just 15% of Americans think all or most elected officials ran because they wanted to serve the public.” It’s plain that people in western countries are losing faith in their political class. Moreover, voters are now not even turning out as strongly as before. In a 2016 study by The Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), “Voter turnout has been declining across the globe since the beginning of 1990s. Plummeting voter turnout in Europe, which contains the largest number of established as well as new democracies, is a worrying phenomenon.”
The sad fact is that the popular vote isn’t that popular anymore.
The Common Good
Therefore, if political mandates are less effectively established by way of the popular vote, then how else might we discern the public will? The concept of ‘the common good’ was at the heart of Ned Crosby’s work, which he prosecuted for most of his life with his spouse and close collaborator, Pat Benn. Crosby invented the citizens’ jury at the same time, coincidentally, that Peter Dienel in Germany developed a similar model. Crosby was born in Minneapolis in 1936 and earned a PhD in Political Science with a dissertation titled ‘Concern for All’. Crosby said that he couldn’t find a theoretical solution to the question of the common good:
I was disturbed by moral relativism. I spent three years reading meta-ethics to try and find the foundations of a normative discourse. Frustrated, I just randomly selected group of people in 1974 and tried running this process. It worked beautifully. (The newDemocracy podcast)
Crosby reignited a democratic process that had been relegated to history for millennia. At the heart of the ancient Athenian democracy was the Citizens’ Council (Boule). In 2017, at the Athens Democracy Forum, the former Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan said,
We need to make our democracies more inclusive. This requires reforms to bring the young, the poor and minorities into the political system. By selecting parliaments by lot [as in Ancient Athens] instead of election, parliamentarians would no longer be nominated by political parties but chosen at random for a limited term in the way many jury systems work. This would prevent the formation of self-serving and self-perpetuating political classes disconnected from their electorates. (Kofi Annan Foundation, 2017)
Domestic Politics is Foreign Politics
Since Crosby and Dienel’s innovative work fifty years ago, there have been close to 750 citizens’ juries/assemblies undertaken worldwide. In 2023 the OECD wrote, “Deliberative processes can lead to better policy outcomes. When done effectively, they can enable policy makers to take hard decisions on challenging and contentious problems whilst enhancing trust.” National citizens’ assemblies are now regularly undertaken in several European countries, including Ireland, Belgium, France and Germany. Ireland leads the way with two citizens’ assemblies – one on marriage equality in 2015 and the other on abortion reform in 2018 - acting as positive precursors to successful referenda.
A successful citizens’ assembly/jury has the following features:
· 25 to 150 participants are drawn by lot from the relevant population.
· 30 to 40 hours of facilitated deliberations occur over 2 to 3 months.
· Deliberations are in rotating groups of 5 to 6.
· Briefings are provided by a variety of experts, specialists, and/or spokespeople.
· Super majority consensus (>75%) is sought in plenaries.
· Participants write their own recommendations/report.
· Government provides a considered response.
· Communications plan is devised to garner widespread media coverage.
In 2022, the European Commission concluded the Conference on the Future of Europe involving 800 participants, randomly selected across the 27 member states. Split up into 4 groups of 200, they were asked to deliberate on the various issues facing Europe. The European Union has its sceptics, but this process ranged across more than 20 languages and cultures, demonstrating that supranational citizen deliberation is possible. Unfortunately, only 6 member states held in-country citizens’ panels, each rather low-profile, such that the public was mostly unaware of their existence. If countries don’t have internal support for multilateral agreements, then outcomes are often compromised.
As Szombatfalvy said, “The difficulty for political leaders is that they’re elected for short periods and are evaluated locally, not globally (Ibid).” In the same vein, the former US President, George HW Bush, wrote in his 1992 diary: “This concept of separating domestic from foreign policy is an impossible one. The Democrats are appealing to the lowest common denominator and so are the Republicans. I really dread the politics and the ugliness of it all.”
Deliberative Peace Referendums
Professor Ron Levy at the Australian National University (ANU) Law School, together with others, proposes Deliberative Peace Referendums (DPRs) as a valuable process between two warring parties. They write “armed conflict can be traced to scarce opportunities to deliberate in the first place. By drawing on deliberative democracy’s perceived legitimacy, the referendum may help to concretize an agreement. (Levy R., O’Flynn I., Kong H.L. Deliberative Peace Referendums. Oxford Comparative Constitutionalism, Oxford University Press. 2021, 56)”
Blainey writes that leaders, in deciding for war or peace, are generally influenced by several interrelated factors, including “military strength; the predictions of how outside nations might react if war should occur; intelligence and counterintelligence; nationalism and ideology; the personality and experience of the decision makers (Blainey 2025, 315).”
What if the decision makers for war or peace were everyday people? Hugh White says, “If the choice is between humiliation and war, leaders in the past have often chosen war. This is how wars happen, despite neither side wanting nor intending them (Ibid).” It’s an appalling notion that leaders might opt for war because of feeling humiliated? On the other hand, ordinary people - unlike leaders - don’t need to spruik the ‘national interest’. Collectively, they’re neither unbridled warriors nor peaceniks and they’re not obliged to look good on the world stage. They have no campaign to run, and they don’t care about having to get re-elected or re-appointed.
If the citizens of the great powers are likely to be the major casualty in any future world war, then all the more reason for political leaders to involve them. The fundamental issue is as Levy et al put it. “Which classes of people – whether political leaders and other elite figures are best placed to deliberate about public values (Ibid).” Elites often remain sceptical, even when criminal juries have proven their worth. There’s always the need to “confront entrenched doubts about the deliberative capacity of ordinary people (Ibid).”
A Global Peace Assembly
Just as Deliberative Peace Referendums (DPRs) might prove useful in resolving conflict between warring states, that tool may help reduce tensions before conflict erupts. As unlikely as it seems, why couldn’t we imagine the US and China embarking on a DPR now - before it’s too late? Taking it further - given the shortcomings of the various arms control treaties – treaties negotiated between heads of State and/or their delegates - why wouldn’t a less adversarial approach be considered?
Why not indeed? So, here’s a long shot. Let’s imagine 10 countries with the biggest military capabilities agree to convene a global peace assembly with the following remit: “What steps can we take to nurture peaceful relations between states?” Or, alternatively, “What steps can we take to avert armed conflict between states? 10 national panels - each with 100 people chosen by lot - would begin by learning about existing peace initiatives, disarmament programs, new initiatives such as DPRs, and the constraints that would hamper the success of any current or proposed treaties. They’d hear from experts, with the panels exploring ideas that promise practical solutions. Each of the 10 panels would get to see how the other 9 choose to solve the problem - and potentially revise their own ideas.
A global plenary would then need to be convened, bringing together representatives from all the 10 countries face-to-face in Washington, Beijing and/or Moscow. 150 delegates (say) would be selected from the 10 panels: 40 delegates from the USA, 30 from China, 30 from Russia, 15 from Britain, etc. Or it might be 30 from each of the big three and pro rata the rest. Once the 150 delegates are selected for the global plenary, they’d begin by discussing on-line and then travel to meet for the final face-to-face deliberations. By the concluding plenary, they’d have spent several months deliberating amongst themselves, digging into the underlying problems and the proposed solution/s.
Imagine these delegates then returning to their countries and explaining to their fellow citizens and political leaders that they’d found agreement on a roadmap for peace – across cultures and continents. The 10 governments would then seek to find consensus and then each undertake a deliberative peace referendum to endorse the roadmap.
Worth a shot?
References
ANU Election Study - Australian National University, The 2022 Australian Federal Election. Cameron S., McAllister I., Jackman S. and Sheppard J. (2022)
Arms Control Association, ‘Civil Society Leaders Issue: New Call to Halt and Reverse the Arms Race’ Pressroom July 16, 2025, Kimball, D.
Arms Control Association, Russia Suspends New START, March 2023. Bugos, S.
The Australian, George HW Bush diary reveals. June 8th 2024. Bramston T.
Blainey G. (2025) The Causes of War (1973 Macmillan) (Scribner)
The Collector, Shvangiradze T. (2022), ‘Vladimir Putin’s Russia’ April 28, 2022.
Crosby N. website: https://nedcrosby.org/
Democracy Index 2024: ‘What’s wrong with representative democracy? The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited. 2025. Hoey J.
IDEA Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance ‘Voter Turnout Trends around the World.’ 2016. Leterme Y.
Kofi Annan Foundation 14 Sept. 2017. ‘The Crisis of Democracy.’Annan K.
Levy R., O’Flynn I., Kong H.L. Deliberative Peace Referendums. Oxford Comparative Constitutionalism, Oxford University Press. (2021)
The new Democracy Foundation Podcasts ‘Citizens’ Juries with Ned Crosby and Pat Benn. Feb. 2020.
OECD Innovative Public Participation. OECD Guidelines for Citizen Participation Processes. (2022)
Pew Research Center. ‘Candidate Quality and What Drives Elected Officials to Run for Office’. Sept. 19 2023. Doherty C.
Szombatfalvy L. (2010) The Greatest Challenges of Our Time (Ekerlids)
Copyright, 2025, Luca Belgiorno-Nettis
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