The world feels restless. Wars rage in Ukraine and Gaza. Democracies wobble under their own contradictions. Protests fill the streets from across the globe. And just as if we didn’t already have enough to worry about, artificial intelligence (AI) has arrived with the unsettling promise, or threat, of artificial general intelligence within five years.

Naturally, governments and corporations have responded calmly. Just kidding. Their response has been panic and an all-out arms race. The global conversation sounds less like “how do we make AI safe?” and more like “who can build the biggest, fastest, scariest system before anyone else does?

It’s a bizarre time to be alive: watching humanity sprint to build technologies it half-understands, convinced that racing each other to the cliff edge is the only way to avoid falling.

At the root of this absurdity lies neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of the past 40 years. It promised prosperity, freedom, and even peace, so long as we allowed markets to govern not just economies but societies and international relations too.

The story went like this: countries that trade together don’t go to war. Markets would tame conflict. Globalisation would knit the world into harmony.

But peace has not materialised. What neoliberalism delivered instead was deep inequality, weakened welfare states. And who do we blame? The Other’s. Those coming over here in boats and taking our jobs and benefits. Johan Galtung called this structural violence: harm embedded in economic systems themselves. For the Global South, “peacebuilding” often looked like privatisation, austerity and dependency, sold as empowerment, but experienced as control. Unsurprisingly, resentment and mistrust have followed.

Despite these failures, the dominant strategy for global security remains rooted in deterrence. The logic runs like this: if we can prove we are stronger, faster, smarter, and better armed than everyone else, then no one will dare challenge us, and peace will follow.

In other words, the only way to be left alone is to constantly prove we cannot be messed with.

It is ludicrous. We are told to secure peace by stockpiling weapons, to ensure stability by destabilising others, to guarantee safety by creating technologies that could destroy us. It’s like fireproofing your house by filling it with petrol, comforted only by the fact that you’re the one holding the lighter.

This isn’t peace. Its silence enforced by fear: a brittle calm that lasts only until someone blinks.

Now AI gives this farce a new stage. Neoliberalism thrives on speed, competition and efficiency, and these are exactly the values driving the AI race. States and corporations are pouring billions into development, more worried about losing ground than about ethics or safety.

The result? A global scramble to build systems of immense power, with little guarantee they will remain under control. Under neoliberal logics, AI and the forthcoming AGI will not be a neutral tool for human flourishing. It will be weaponised, as military hardware, as surveillance infrastructure, or as algorithms optimised for profit over justice.

And here again, the absurdity shines through: to protect humanity, we are creating technologies that might endanger humanity itself.

This is not peace

So, is neoliberalism even compatible with peace? If by peace we mean the absence of war between great powers, perhaps. Fear can enforce quiet. Economic interdependence may still deter conflict.

But if we mean peace in any deeper sense, justice, cooperation, security for all, then neoliberalism is not just incompatible with peace, it is corrosive to it. The AI arms race exposes the contradiction at its core: mistaking domination for safety, mistaking silence for peace.
What neoliberalism offers is not peace but a precarious stalemate: exhaustion with better branding.

The tragedy is that alternatives exist. Peace could be rooted in cooperation, equity and stewardship. But those values run against the grain of neoliberalism, which insists that markets and competition are the only engines of progress.

The challenge before us is not only technological but ideological. Can we imagine peace beyond the logic of “don’t mess with us”? Can we resist the absurd compulsion to equate safety with superiority?

The poet Nayirah Waheed reminds us: “flower work is not easy. remaining soft in fire takes time.” Peace is not about showing we cannot be messed with. It is about daring to remain soft when the fire insists we harden.

The real question is whether we will continue to mistake domination for safety, or whether we are finally ready to do the harder work of building peace for real