About Peace Through Commerce

Peace has many dimensions and there are many paths to peace: from personal, inner peace to the peace pursued by activists, from peace with the environment to peace in interpersonal relations.

Perhaps the most overlooked and yet the most powerful force for catalyzing widespread peace is commerce. International trade, based on the rule of law and secure property rights within nations, encourages a peaceful coincidence of interests.

Commerce leads to peace in various ways, including:

1. Trade requires at least a minimal level of cross-cultural understanding, communications, and collaboration. As it has done for millennia, the marketplace facilitates not only the exchange of goods and services, but also of ideas, beliefs, and customs, including music, food, and fashion. The bridges built between people and cultures through the marketplace foster understanding and peace.
2. Commerce cultivates mutual dependence among trading partners, which leads to a mutual interest in their respective survival and well-being. It also fosters friendship and deeper exchange.
3. Economic growth fueled by commerce leads to increased standard of living, which creates internal political stability, which highly correlates to peaceful relations with geopolitical neighbors.

We invite you to participate in the Peace through Commerce program; to elucidate and celebrate, the profoundly powerful role commerce plays in promoting peace, and to call attention to the role of prosperity and commerce as a path to peace.