ABSTRACT
the future of peace and harmony in the 21st century is likely to be directly linked to issues concerning five key realities of life: ecology, global warming and climate change; nuclear weapons, emerging technology of warfare and the continuing arms race among nation states; geopolitics and nationalism; religious extremism; and poverty and inequality. Looking at the emerging world in terms of major civilisations, it seems that the four – the Western, the Chinese, the Indian and the Islamic – will continue to influence global geopolitics and culture. Peace, harmony and development will not automatically become integral to our times. But there are enormous possibilities. The concept of the Gross Domestic Product helped us enormously for decades in assessing economic growth, and also to some extent progress and it continues in public discourse to denote measurement of economic growth. The social scene, thanks to globalisation and democratisation of technology, is changing rapidly.
