Peace as an Engineered Outcome: Incentives, Risk Asymmetry, and War Decisions. Toward a Complete System of Economic Guarantees of Peace

This working paper is part of the research program Economic Guarantees of Peace, Series IV: Decision-Making and Security Architecture. The paper examines peace as an engineered outcome supported by incentives, institutional mechanisms, and economic guarantees. It analyzes how decisions to war emerge under conditions of risk asymmetry, distorted expectations, and unstable deterrence. The study argues that sustainable peace requires not only sanctions for aggression, but also guaranteed economic incentives for maintaining peace. In this framework, peace becomes a rational and contractually supported equilibrium rather than merely a political aspiration. The paper develops a transition from deterrence-based logic toward a repeated-game framework in which predictable costs and guaranteed benefits influence strategic decision-making. The study is intended as a conceptual contribution to the broader architecture of Economic Guarantees of Security (EGS).