As James says, this looks like a novel worth looking out for: C.L. Anderson’s Bitter Angels:
So I had a real problem when I decided I wanted to write a story around the idea of a peaceful future. First of all, I wanted a peace that felt achievable by human beings. Furthermore, I wanted to set that peace up in such a way that wouldn’t make people go “oh, BLEEP! If that’s peace gimme my war back.”
[…]
In short, a real, genuine, long-term peace would be a complex, dynamic situation that would have to be constantly maintained. Real peace would require law enforcement, diplomacy, and intelligence services. Real peace might get mistaken for weakness by people who look at places like say, Switzerland and see the cuckoo clocks and the chocolate and don’t see the universal required militia service, and it would have to have plans and training in place to deal with people who might make the mistake of trying to muscle in on its territory.
And that’s just for starters. Then you get to how could you maintain a genuine peace without killing people, without repressing anybody or disappearing people or ideas? Now, that would be tough. That would be dangerous. That would tear an average person apart from the compromises and bleak ideas they’d have to live with and the contact with vile people that you’d just really want to murder but you can’t. Because if you start killing them, their friends and relations might start retaliatory killings and then you’d have to kill more of them, and they’d kill more of you and before you know it you’re right back where you started from.
There’s more at the link, but avoid the comments, many of which consists of internet hard men trying to convince each other how much more clear eyed and level headed they are. What this description reminds me of is the Iain M. Banks Culture stories, only set in a more achievable future. The Culture’s big appeal is that it’s a fantasy at heart, an image of a world that we could never achieve and is therefore safe to dream about. What I hope Bitter Angels will be is a science fiction novel that has this background and uses it for more than just an adventure story.
Because there aren’t that many serious science fiction novels taking place in a near(ish) future that’s recognisable ours with the world in a better shape than it is now. Science fiction tends to prefer darker futures, to go for either utopia or fantasy when writing of futures that are obvious improvements on our own time. You can of course argue that any future that shows humanity spread over the Solar System counts, but all too often you then just get the same old politics and war, just on a larger canvas. If anybody does know of any examples of happy futures, let me know.