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centuries. However, they did so only because social strife stemming from structural harm was effectively mitigated and, when not, it brought about their downfall either from internal collapse or restructuring, or external invasion or amalgamation. Counter-dominant behavior such as non-violent removals from power, ostracism, coups, popular revolts and factionary feuds are answers to questions about why structural harm is perpetuated,but not solutions to the problem in themselves. Power vacuums like power struggles have historically closely coincided with periods of broken peace for two reasons. One, external powers have no authority with which to make and maintain peace, as with Bengal and the British East India Company in colonial times. The other, crises of legitimacy by which wannabe powers lack the authority to internally make and maintain peace, a driver of the Thermidor during the French Revolution. Intra-national peace theories and practices across the political spectrum and collective bargaining have sought to mitigate structural harm when it cannot be minimalized, upon which world peace relies until it can be eliminated.
    Minimal State Harm
    That states must be adequately defended from external threats and properly equipped to deal with internal threats for peace to be secured is not tantamount to affirming that states have always been and must always be war machines. Cicero’s conceptions of just war as self-defense and unjust for those without provocation were held even by the imaginary residents of Utopia, who also practiced Spartan discipline for protection and order. The key difference between Romans and them is that Utopians subscribed to Grotius’ notion of just warfare, or doing the least harm possible, a version of “civilized” warfare as with the Bushido in Shoen Japan. Deterrence, the oldest and crudest means of preserving peace between states, was in the end what kept the Cold War cold, culminating in traditions of states and their leagues decreasing frequencies of warfare by increasing its specter’s scale. International law, balances of powers, neutrality and isolationism, arbitration and coordinated disarmament have been successful in varying degrees in moderating harm between states. Harm caused by states internally is predicated on and perpetuated by their unchecked sovereignty, against which transformative non-violence works but also has its limits. The organized peace movement’s peace-despitestates approach shows that the only way to absolutely guarantee the end of state harm is to eliminate or pacify states altogether. For now, the surest path to world peace is to globally secure minimal use of minimal force.
    Minimal Harm to Nature
    Depletions of natural resources are far from new concerns, and have been related to peace since before humans were humans. Bio-genetic imperatives or peace instincts such as restorative behavior and tension relief in primates have human correlates such as reconciliation and détente, and have as much to do with how we relate to each other as how we relate to ecological systems to which we owe our existence. The Minoan Peace,the longest lasting in European history, ended with an ecological catastrophe of some kind, and inaugurated the fractious First Intermediary Period in Ancient Egypt after a unitive peace of some 700 years. Malthus’ proposition that only checked populations can secure peace within and between nations because if unchecked, nature cannot support them is pessimistic insofar as it is realistic. The doctrine of peace at any price, he suggests, applied to the environment shows how ludicrous it is, as terminal harm to the earth would mean the ruination of the only place we have to be at peace. This simple logic was lent an added intensity in the second half of the twentieth century when nuclear energy was harnessed and burning oil became ubiquitous, reunifying the causes of environmental and peace activists. The