Can Sustainability and Neutrality Lead Humanity beyond War?

This essay analyzes the relationship between war, development, and peace as a central question of contemporary civilization. Starting from the hypothesis that, after the Second World War, humanity could have directed science, technology, and production toward the rejection of war and international cooperation, the contribution examines the link between modernization, poverty, productive dependence, and conflict. It shows how the promise of development is compromised whenever economic growth remains subordinated to armed competition, social marginalization, and the unequal control of strategic resources. From this perspective, sustainability and neutrality are not configured as mere political options, but rather as normative principles for a different organization of international coexistence. Sustainability subordinates growth to the protection of life, the environment, and social dignity; neutrality, understood in an active sense, removes relations among states from the logic of military blocs and permanent enmity. The central thesis maintains that only a global order founded on productive cooperation, food security, technological responsibility, and the reduction of inequalities can transform peace from a moral aspiration into a structural principle of world organization. “Within this framework, sustainability and neutrality should be understood not as contingent political choices, but as enduring normative principles for building a global order no longer governed by the recurrence of war.” The argumentative path of the essay therefore proceeds through several historical and geopolitical turning points in which war, development, and poverty appear closely intertwined: Chinese modernization after the fractures of the twentieth century, the industrial transfer from the West to Asia, competition for natural resources, new forms of wartime mobilization, and the persistence of social masses exposed to marginalization. In this framework, war does not appear as an inevitable destiny of humanity, but as the outcome of an economic and political organization that continues to produce dependence, exclusion, and the availability of poor lives to be sacrificed. The question guiding this contribution is therefore whether sustainability and neutrality can be transformed from moral principles into concrete instruments for freeing contemporary civilization from the recurrence of war and from extreme poverty as one of its underlying preconditions. The essay develops a broad theoretical and historical argument about the relationship between war, poverty,