Mankind has developed a variety of approaches to facilitate the crucial task of “peace-keeping”, ranging from simple communication tools to more complex contractual agreements between individuals or nations. One of these “tools” conceived in the aftermath of WW2, is the United Nations security council (UNSC). According to its charter, the UNSC is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN) and is charged with ensuring international peace and security. It is difficult to argue that “ensuring international peace and security” is not in the interest of all human beings and therefore an integrity-driven, robust and functional UNSC is objectively speaking of very high importance. However, the evident importance of the UNSC seems to be indirectly proportional to its ability to evolve technologically, which may call for a general update of almost 80-year-old methods and procedures. I want to state clearly that I am not trying to undermine the integrity of the UNSC, however, independently of nationality or political affiliation, I believe that revisiting current shortcomings and suggesting improvements from a crypto-enthusiast’s perspective may be an exciting source of inspiration.
To that aim, I start with the following principle assumptions ranked by priority (1 = highest priority): all participants strive for 1) peace & security, 2) equality, 3) transparency, 4) integrity & coherence, 5) decentralization, 6) fair resource distribution and optimization. I would like to invite you to join me in a thought experiment to design a “DAO peace council” that could be run in parallel to the battle-tested UN security council, facing the challenge to demonstrate in real-life how “we” could do better.
First, imagine that under the consideration of the “equality” principle, the 5 UNSC permanent member countries would relinquish their (for historical reasons still existing) right to veto. A right to veto (if not applied to everyone) is a power centralization tool thus violates principle 5. Next, imagine that through fair resource distribution everyone could have access to technology that allows direct voting in matters of conflict resolution and peace. The people, who are free of any geopolitical constraints or macro-economic agenda or necessity to be re-elected, they get to vote directly on chain for peace or war. I assume that it is less likely that all peoples of the world vote for war, than a hand full of politicians. Furthermore, in case of war, people that voted for war may want to take responsibility and volunteer to fight themselves and cover all associated costs. This terminates the need for large amounts of high-tech weapons and would reduce civilian causalities to zero. However, most importantly transparent and rapid communication of resolution proposals in combination with modern brain-storming and intercultural divergent/convergent decision finding methods can be employed transparently online in real time. Conflict resolution approaches could be tested in mini-sprints on semi-random sample populations to ensure efficacy. Lastly, everyone would be able to 1) easily verify proposal coherence with previous resolutions, 2) access assessments of previous resolutions including conclusions regarding success and failure explanations and metrics.
It is clear that there are many flaws to this experiment, but with all the attention and pressure that such events implicate, even if only a small proof-of-concept could be show cased successfully, that would be absolutely worth it. Crypto kitties are nice, but the time has come to focus on real life issues of which, as we all know, we do have plenty.