The "peace dividend" originally named the post-Cold-War reallocation of military spending to civilian ends. In abundance-era usage, the term has broadened to describe the structural case that cheap, distributed access to energy, food, water, and compute lowers the expected returns to territorial conquest — and therefore, on the margin, the incentive to wage it. The claim is contested and the evidence is mixed.
The mechanism
Conquest pays when the conquered territory holds inputs the conqueror cannot cheaply obtain elsewhere. Energy Abundance erodes this logic for hydrocarbons; desalination erodes it for fresh water; synthetic biology and recycling erode it for many materials. When the same kilowatt-hour can be produced on one's own rooftop as in a contested basin, the expected value of seizing the basin falls. See also Deterrence by Abundance for the strategic extension of the argument.
Evidence and counter-evidence
Proponents cite the correlation between rising per-capita energy access and declining interstate war frequency over the twentieth century, and the fact that post-1990 conflicts have trended toward civil and hybrid forms rather than classic resource grabs. Critics note that the same period saw massive arms buildups, new categories of conflict (cyber, proxy, informational), and that correlation is not causation — wealth and institutional quality are confounded with abundance.
Critiques
Three critiques deserve serious weight. First, abundance can enable new forms of conflict: cheap drones, cheap compute for disinformation, and cheap bioengineering lower the cost of offense as well as defense (see Drone Warfare and Military Innovation Crossovers). Second, status, ideology, and identity drive wars that pure material accounting cannot explain. Third, the transition itself concentrates control of new chokepoints — see Rare Earth Geopolitics — and the transition period may be more dangerous than either the scarcity or the abundance steady state.
Relation to positive peace
The peace dividend as defined here is largely a negative-peace argument: it reduces the incentive for war without addressing the institutions that sustain cooperation. The complement is Positive Peace — the governance, coordination, and distributional infrastructure that turns reduced incentive into durable settlement. Neither half is sufficient alone.