Peace as an Engineered System: A Research Program of Economic Guarantees of Security (EGS)

This paper proposes to consider international peace as an engineered construction, that is, a system that can be purposefully designed, constructed, and protected by means of specially developed mechanisms. The key existing approaches to ensuring security (diplomatic, political, military, and technological) are analyzed, and it is shown that, despite their significance, they possess common structural limitations: the absence of built-in mechanisms for automatic enforcement of obligations and coercion to comply with peace. International security is considered as a system in which the fulfillment of obligations must be embedded, rather than left to the discretion of the parties. The economic component is considered as the missing link of this system: pre-fixed economic obligations create a stable architecture of deterrence, making aggression economically disadvantageous, reducing dependence on political will, and increasing the predictability of the system. This article outlines a Hilbert-style program and serves as the basis for a planned series of studies on economic security guarantees (EGS). It combines economic, institutional, and behavioral approaches as applied to four interconnected directions of future research. On this basis, a concept of peace as a synthesized system with built-in instruments — indicators, safeguards, and stabilizers — can be developed.