In 2013, the African Union made a promise that captured global hope and to silence the guns in Africa by 2020. In 2020, as conflicts deepened from the Sahel to the Horn, to Gaza, Myanmar, Haiti Iran, Ukraine, that deadline was extended to 2030. Today, in 2026, the guns are not silent. They are louder, more digitized, and more deeply linked to livelihoods, identity, and disinformation than ever before.
Global military spending has now surpassed $2.7 trillion, the highest level in recorded history. Global spending on peacebuilding and dialogue infrastructure remains below $50 billion less than 2%. The world is not failing for lack of firepower. It is failing for lack of trust, inclusion, and dialogue infrastructure that can hold societies together when pressure rises.
Prior to the formal establishment of Global Peace in 2018, its founding members conducted exploratory consultations with youth cohorts across multiple continents. The consultations were guided by two central questions: What if peace was built not from directives, but from dialogue? What if security was not something delivered to people, but something built with people? Seven years later, these questions have informed the development of a global framework; Dialogue-Based Security which has since been piloted in communities across Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific.
In response to this global crisis, Global Peace presents a unified call to action: Let’s Silence the Guns Globally to Achieve Global Peace. This is not a slogan for disarmament alone. It is a call to rebuild the foundation on which disarmament can hold.
Why Guns Stay Loud
The dominant model of security worldwide is what we call directive-based security. It assumes that security can be imposed from the centre through deterrence, through sanctions, through intervention, through more weapons and more orders. It is top-down, short-term, and state-centric.
This model has three structural flaws that explain why guns stay loud.
Firstly, it is brittle since peace agreements negotiated exclusively in capital cities, without inclusive dialogue in affected communities, collapse upon implementation. People do not fight because they have not been told to stop; they fight because grievances have not been heard, justice has not been delivered, and futures have not been included.
Secondly, it is exclusive premised on security processes that exclude women and young people who constitute over 70% of the Global South’s population have a documented higher failure rate. According to UN Women, when women are included as mediators, peace agreements are 35% more likely to last 15 years. Yet women remain under 10% of negotiators globally. Youth remain tokenized as participants to be consulted, not co-leaders with decision power.
Thirdly it measures wrong things since we measure security by counting weapons, troops, and border patrols. We do not measure social cohesion, youth trust in institutions, local peace infrastructure per 100,000 people, or resilience to disinformation. A country can have a large army and still be fragile if its people do not trust each other or their institutions. A country with a modest army but high trust is resilient. Our obsession with metrics of weapons blinds us to metrics of trust.
Critics will rightly say that dialogue cannot stop a tank in motion. They are correct but dialogue can prevent the factory that built the tank from believing it needed to, the school that taught hate, and the budget that starved mediation. And when force must be used to protect civilians, dialogue ensures that force is legitimate, limited, civilian-protective, and linked to a political strategy that people own. Dialogue-based security is not anti-hard power but it is pro-legitimate power.
What Dialogue-Based Security Is
We at Global Peace defines dialogue-based security as sustained, inclusive, locally-owned deliberation that is linked to decision-making power, and that builds trust, resolves grievances, and enables non-violent handling of conflict.
For dialogue to qualify as security infrastructure not just a workshop it must meet five standards. It must be inclusive, with women, youth, minorities, and dissenting voices as co-designers, not consulted participants. It must be sustained and institutionalized, not a one-off event funded by a single project. It must be intergenerational, including those who will live longest with the consequences. It must be locally-owned, anchored in cultural forms like Ubuntu in Southern Africa, Baraza in East Africa, Palaver in West Africa, Gacaca, Talanoa in the Pacific, Shura and Jirga not imported templates. And it must be linked directly connected to budgets, decisions, and accountability. Dialogue without linkage is theatre.
From Counting Guns to Measuring Trust
To make this shift real, Global Peace proposes a new global metric: The Dialogue-Based Security Index (DBSI). It measures four things every nation should publish: Social Cohesion Index, Youth Trust and Inclusion Rate, Local Peace Infrastructure Density, and Information Integrity Score. Imagine a world where security reviews begin not with how many weapons a country has, but with how many dialogue mechanisms its communities have and how much its youth trust its future. That is the shift we propose.
Three Practical Steps to Silence Guns Globally
Rhetoric will not silence guns. Infrastructure will. We therefore propose three concrete, fundable, implementable policy that all member States and partners must support.
One, The 1% Commitment: Allocate at least 1% of national security budgets to local peace infrastructure community dialogues, women’s mediation networks, youth governance, early warning by trusted local voices.
Two, Intergenerational Co-leadership: Mandate that every national security strategy review includes a youth co-chair under the age of 35 with actual decision-making power, not observer status.
Three, National Dialogue Infrastructure Audit: Every three years, publish a national audit of dialogue infrastructure where it exists, who it excludes, what it costs, and how it links to decisions. What is not measured is not funded.
The Global Call to Action
Silencing the guns globally will not happen in New York or Geneva alone. It will happen when national budgets prioritize prevention over reaction, when women mediators are funded as essential security actors, when young people co-lead security strategies that shape their future, and when every community has access to legitimate, trusted dialogue mechanisms to resolve grievances without violence.
This is not a call for passivity. It is a call for strategic investment in the only infrastructure that has ever made peace last inclusive dialogue linked to power. This is the new pathway. Peace is the method. Security is the outcome. People are the infrastructure.
About the Author:
Kobla Asamani is the Global Coordinator General of Global Peace
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