A Message from Jan Oberg
November 6, 2026
Over the past fifty years, I have devoted roughly 175,000 hours to research and public education for a more peaceful world: thinking, researching, writing, organising, publishing, debating, maintaining websites, corresponding, reaching out, leading a foundation, work in conflict and war zones, professorships, teaching courses and giving public lectures and doing media work.
In short, ten hours a day, seven days a week, for half a century.
The focus was on international political peace – analysing and trying to stop wars, address underlying conflicts and making alternative peace plans – at the desk and on the ground. Important as that has been and remains, it is only one kind of peace and it is now in a tragic militarist state compared with what it could have been.
Lately, however, I have found myself thinking about a concept from economics as well as everyday life: marginal utility.
Consider your morning coffee. The first cup is wonderful. The second is still enjoyable. The third adds only a little. By the fourth, the pleasure is negligible, if at all. In other words, marginal utility refers to the value/benefit or results of the next increment of effort, time, money or attention.
Applied to myself, the question becomes:
What additional value do I and the world gain from my spending one more hour working for peace?
After much reflection, I have concluded that the marginal utility of working ten hours a day rather than five or seven moves toward zero.
Peace has not become less important to work for. Quite the opposite. But in a time when military thinking dominates public discourse and independent peace perspectives receive woefully little attention, the additional benefit generated by those last few hours each day seems smaller than it once was.
I still believe that many of the hours are worthwhile. What I am questioning are the final, extra hours.
At the age of seventy-five, I have therefore returned repeatedly to a simple question:
Is the peace utility of the next hour greater than the utility of spending that hour on something else?
For the moment, my answer is no.
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Here we encounter another concept from life and economics: opportunity cost.
Every choice we make involves foregoing something else. Choosing one activity means declining another. When we focus on wars, we don’t focus on peace. We cannot, as the saying goes, both eat the cake and have it too.
Peace researchers often use this concept when discussing military expenditures. What might societies achieve if resources allocated to armaments and war preparation were instead invested elsewhere? This is sometimes called the “guns versus butter” dilemma.
I have realised that a similar question now applies to my own life.
Many people reach a point where they retire not only professionally but psychologically. Having done one thing all their lives, they gradually withdraw from the world.
Having been a freelance person since 1989 when, fortunately, I left Lund University and having engaged in new projects continuously with no formal retirement, I am not one of them.
I have enough ideas, projects and fields of exploration to keep me occupied until I turn one hundred, should life grant me that privilege. For despite wars, crises and political disappointments, the world remains an endlessly fascinating place. And one my curiosity compels me to explore more.
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Growing up in an artful home, I have been deeply attracted to art and culture, throughout my life. Since 2009 I have run my own art photography studio here in Lund and created about 400 works. Out of pleasure and curiosity, not to sell.
Over the years, I have come to believe that art contributes more to intercultural understanding and peaceful coexistence than most of what today passes for strategic, security thinking and foreign policy.
Art is not primarily concerned with power and certainly not with violence and killing. It does not threaten death and destruction against anyone. It seeks meaning, interpretation, beauty, imagination and human connection. It explores dimensions of life that politics and related social science fail to grasp.
And it can provide what I miss most in today’s geopolitical discourse, namely a sense of enchantment: joy, hope, vision, curiosity, new ways of seeing the world and constructive imagination. It can focus on alternative futures and ways of doing things, too. Experimentation is essential. In politics it is prohibited.
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There are other kinds of – and kinder – peace that has fascinated me for many years and that I have spent too little time exploring.
This personal message is not about working less. It is about broadening the meaning of peace. It is about moving from peace as the opposite of violence – negative peace – toward peace as the cultivation of life and its limitless potentials – positive peace.
It is not the international political peace of governments, military balances, security politics and ceasefires based on deal-making, important though these may or could be. It is the peace that can be found in culture and art, in social cosmology, psychology and philosophy, in the social imagination described by C. Wright Mills, in new forms of intercultural understanding, and in ordinary human encounters. In the understanding dialogue, but not in the competing debate.
It is the peace that is macro in time and space, not the one that may have relevance in the news and punditry world of one event and its implications for today and tomorrow.
Reducing peace to the management or reduction of violence risks overlooking some of the most profound dimensions of peace and human coexistence.
I am pointing, in other words, to a larger and much more inspiring peace beyond geopolitical calculations and the negative peace. A convivial, life-affirming and enchanting peace.
Engaging with those other kinds of peace requires a certain intellectual liberation from the endless twenty-four-hour cycle of war rather than conflict analysis, military speculation and predictions of catastrophe. Such things are part of reality, but they are not reality in its entirety. They also miss ideas, innovation of new concepts and theories and, perhaps most importantly, they miss the non-material aspects of our lives and societies – and of peace. The politico-economic strategic ‘base’ is important, yes. But we’ve forgotten the ideational superstructure.
Life and the world is infinitely rich. Why focus only on a violent corner or spot?
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Some of the daily hours I now reclaim will be devoted to preserving, digitising and presenting four decades of true peace research undertaken through TFF, ensuring that its Associates’ production and ideas remain available after those of us who created them are gone – summarising history to secure the future. The foundation turned 40 this year, celebrated with the new TFF homepage that – when ready – will contain about 10,000 original articles and videos. It remains one of the few genuine independent peace and future research institutions in the world.
They will be allocated to my image-creation at Oberg PhotoGraphics – experimenting with ideas, methods, materials and expressions. Enchantingly so. My PhotoGraphics Magazine on Substack is already about peace culture, or perhaps peace through culture.
I also wish to continue writing my non-memoires, which I call “Goodbye Peace. Worldmoires Into A Peaceful Future.” I want to travel, not least in China. I want to spend more time with those closest to me, live intensely and mindfully.
And I want to follow what some call the one-hour rule: setting aside at least one hour every day to read and think and learn something new. Curiosity and learning has nothing to do with age.
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There is no winding down in this. No retirement in any sense. No bitterness or giving up and no turning my back to the real world and its problems. Furthermore, passion and detachment in the Gandhian sense is fully compatible.
I have not changed my overall analysis of the contemporary world. I continue to believe that the present Western-dominated international order is in long-term decline and that a more diverse and genuinely global world will gradually emerge. And peace will then be relevant again. You know, I am no doomsayer but an opportunity-maker.
What has changed is not my view of the world but my assessment of where my next hour creates the greatest value.
Focusing on the 24/7 stream of negative energies, violence and discussion of it can not will never create a more peaceful world, as little as endless discussions about the cancer cells will heal the patient.
The marginal utility of additional peace work varies with historical trends. It can rise and fall, and these years, it is falling.
Should conditions change, should serious political peace thinking and action once again find greater intellectual and ethical resonance, and should the marginal utility of additional effort increase, I will reconsider my allocation of time and energy.
But only time will tell. For now, my next few life hours will be devoted to all the other – positive and enchanting – ‘peaces.’
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Note
Beyond the links above, you may learn more about my work at my mini-blog and my personal blog (just updated).
Images above © Jan Oberg
