IF IT feels like peace has become ever more elusive in our troubled world, that instinct is sadly borne out by the statistics. According to the institutions that research this, there are as many as 110 active armed conflicts in the world right now.

While we are familiar with the most high-profile ones — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s attack on Gaza, Lebanon and now Syria — some of the worst violence is happening in Africa.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, six million are already dead. South Sudan is in turmoil. But these conflicts rarely make the headlines and there seem to be few meaningful diplomatic efforts underway to secure an end to the violence. Racism and colonialism, two of the perpetual impediments to peace, are alive and well.

According to the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, Syria is currently the world’s least peaceful place in a region where, the academy says, there are currently 45 active conflicts. Africa is enduring 35, Asia 21 and Europe seven.

Statistically, if you want to find peace, go to Singapore, Iceland or Switzerland.

But peace is of course about more than abstract data. We cannot reduce crimes against humanity to a numbers game, as if it can all be solved by scratching some chalky equations on a blackboard.

How then is peace to be achieved? That question was asked more than once during a recent seminar held by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that focused on Ukraine, Nato and Trump, but which also pondered solutions to a world embroiled in endless wars across multiple continents.

Lindsey German, convener of the Stop the War Coalition, saw hope in the massive mobilisation achieved by the Palestine solidarity movement. Building from there, she said, would help people understand how grotesque military spending driven by imperialism underpins what ultimately robs us of fundamental social needs. 

CND general secretary Sophie Bolt stressed that we must move to better unite our movements — anti-war, climate, immigration and others —all of which are deeply interconnected. Together, we are stronger. 

So why then, given most of us oppose wars, aren’t more of us out on the street to protest against them? This lassitude opens the way for our governments to ensure war is more likely, by refusing to adequately address runaway climate change, another guaranteed pathway to further conflict, and by clinging to militarism, which only makes climate change worse.

Sitting here on the US side of the Atlantic, full of foreboding as we anticipate an incoming fascistic Trump government, we might reasonably expect both domestic and international strife to get worse. The Trump regime will be populated by supremely unqualified right-wing wrecking balls led by a man who told more than 30,000 verifiable lies during his previous presidency. 

Consequently, we cannot give any credence to Trump’s boasts that he will achieve peace “on day one” — that’s because Trump’s nominees for cabinet positions are loaded with staunch supporters of Israel. His new ambassador to Israel is Mike Huckabee, who most famously declared: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities.” (It’s important to note that most American zionists are evangelical Christians, not Jews).

Not that things were materially better under the Democrats. It took Joe Biden just six weeks from the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine before he called Vladimir Putin “a dictator” who “declares war and commits genocide.” He has never used that word in the context of Gaza, no matter how unrelenting and compelling the evidence.

Instead, Israel’s former defence minister Yoav Gallant was warmly welcomed to Washington earlier this month where Democratic officials couldn’t wait to shake the hand of a genocidal warmonger. His photo op fans included Biden’s Middle East tsar, Brett McGurk, his Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin, and so-called progressive senator, Cory Booker.

In the face of all this, achieving peace may seem like an insurmountable challenge. So we have to start small, because it is at the local level, community by community, where it can and must begin.

If you are looking for a nice Christmas parable, a story to give us hope, then watch The Old Oak. The 2023 film by Ken Loach, now streamable at home, is not overtly such a tale. This is a Loach film in the school of gritty realism, so it does not tie everything up in a nice bow at the end, although it’s one of his most hopeful films and also, regrettably but understandably his last (Loach is 88 now and he is tired). 

But what The Old Oak does do is listen and give voice to all perspectives in the depressed former Northumberland coalmining town where the film is set. We move through the story with the Syrian refugees who have fled there with nothing; the struggling pub landlord who helps them; and a handful of angry community members who, having been abandoned long ago by their government once the pits closed, seize on the Syrians as someone to blame.  

In walking in all of their shoes, Loach allows us to see that everyone in the community effectively shares the same struggles, the same fears and the same disillusionments. Peace, in that situation, can be found, argue the protagonists, by breaking bread at a shared table and by confronting together the injustice they have all been dealt by their respective governments, whether at home or abroad.

That’s not entirely what happens in Loach’s film, but it’s what should, and maybe could. When the parties that are supposed to represent working people — the Democrats in the US, Labour in Britain — abandon them instead, peace is the price we pay. 

Race riots and attacks on British Muslims are just the beginning. But we can end it at home. It’s the first step to ending it everywhere else.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.