Peace and Crisis

Carl Hermann Dino Steinmetz

  • Keywords: Polarization, Femicide, Proxy Wars, Neocolonialism, Indigenous Knowledge, Climate Justice.
  • ABSTRACT
  • In an era defined by deepening fractures, Peace and Crisis confronts the interconnected catastrophes of polarization, aggression, and systemic collapse that define our global reality in 2025. This work traces the roots of these crises to human neglect—manifest in climate destruction, economic plunder by elites, militarized imperialism, and digital landscapes weaponized for division. The Northern Hemisphere, particularly Western powers, emerges as the primary architect of this chaos, exploiting the Global South while evading accountability through proxy wars and neocolonial economic strangleholds. The analysis unfolds across three axes:

    1. Crisis as Consequence: From the Climate Risk Index’s stark tally of 765,000 lives lost to extreme weather (1993–2022) to the $632 billion arms trade fueling conflicts like Syria’s 14-year proxy war, systemic violence is normalized.

    2. Polarization’s Grip: Affective polarization fractures societies, with the U.S. and Brazil exhibiting toxic partisanship, while social media algorithms amplify hostility. Theories of aggression—from Freudian displacement to Bandura’s social learning— reveal how violence permeates institutions and ecosystems alike.

    3. Resistance and Reimagining: Indigenous stewardship (e.g., Maya milpa agriculture, Aboriginal fire management) and Global South feminist movements (e.g., Latin America’s feminicidio laws) model alternatives. Yet their efforts are undermined by Western hegemony, as seen in the dismissal of South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel.

    The article culminates in a radical plea: dismantle the machinery of "hell on earth"— capitalism’s waste-fed inferno—by centering Indigenous epistemologies, demilitarizing diplomacy, and holding the North accountable. Only through such reckoning can we forge a path from crisis to collective survival.
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Published
  • July 23, 2025
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Copyright
  • Copyright (c) 2025 Carl Hermann Dino Steinmetz
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.