Designing Life-Enhancing Architecture

Strengthening international legal processes and establishing new institutional architecture to enable and require desirable state conduct is probably the most important action that the United States can take to reduce armed conflict and foster human freedom. To design global institutions that can be built now without bringing unacceptable risks and that lead toward more far-reaching structural changes down the road can advance needed system change to achieve human security. Especially promising are opportunities to strengthen global governance with more robust lawmaking and law-enforcing institutions; to establish a more effective global system to monitor weapons of mass destruction, nations’ war-making potential, and gross violations of human rights; to create a standing, individually recruited multinational police force; to establish a world environmental council; to expand economic and educational opportunities enough to end extreme poverty; and to start a democratic global people’s assembly and regular online communication among the world’s democratically elected legislators.