No Flourishing Without Peace or Why the Global Flourishing Agenda Must Confront Wars and Political Instability in the World

Abstract

Any meaningful framework for human flourishing must begin by confronting the foundational necessity of peace. While the Global Flourishing Goals offer an ambitious and human-centred alternative to the Sustainable Development Goals, they both presuppose conditions of geopolitical stability, which are rare in our world, especially today. In times marked by rising numbers of wars, democratic backsliding, and the resurgence of extreme nationalism, the flourishing discourse risks becoming disconnected, irrelevant, and even ethically compromised if it fails to take into account the lived realities of communities in crisis. This chapter argues that flourishing must be reimagined through a politically literate, tension-sensitive lens. Taking war as the main case study, this section develops a phenomenological account of how armed conflict reorganises the existential structures of everyday life, so that flourishing becomes less a project of self-realisation and more a struggle for survival, temporal continuity, mutual trust, and moral endurance. Placing flourishing in dialogue with the demands of political and historical awareness, this chapter proposes a framework for “resilient flourishing” in war, articulated as a tension-sensitive, phase-based approach that culminates in a call for structured pluralism: a universal commitment to dignity coupled with differentiated pathways of flourishing responsive to non-ideal conditions.