Abstract

Kant's Perpetual Peace (1795) opens with a prohibition: no treaty of peace is valid if it is made with the secret reservation of material for a future war. Three modern works on why peace holds can be set beside it. In the reading notes used here, Fortna (2004) finds that ceasefires backed by stronger agreements, verification among them, tend to last longer; Walter (2002) places the failure of civil-war settlements at the point where the sides must disarm and can no longer protect themselves, and looks to third-party guarantees; Fearon (1995) names private information with incentives to misrepresent it, and commitment problems, among the causes of war. This article asks when an open record makes peace credible, and answers only as a matter of design. Reading Kant's first article with his second appendix, where publicity becomes a test of right, it distinguishes a secret reservation from a reserve that is declared, reasoned and scheduled for review. It then reads two records from Meridian, the decision-record platform of the RISCON family. Both are modern summaries written by AI about fictional polities; neither reports a real state, treaty or event. In the first, a verification data committee must decide in what unit to publish the result of an arms reduction check. In the second, a public verification committee must decide who may see the evidence in a dispute over an edited video. In both, the thirteen published judgments withhold some material and publish the withholding itself. No outcome is recorded in either case, so the article cannot say whether such a reserve makes any peace last; it shows what such a design writes down, and where Kant's own test stops short.