I am thinking of making a world, using the Earth as a template, that is in "sort-of" Medieval ages, but at peace. In other words unlike our own Medieval times people and countries are not constantly waging war with each-other, but have settled in a lasting peace, like the world of today (EDIT: I meant that there are no open scale grand wars between everyone, not that today it's all sunshine and rainbows. :) ).
This poses a problem, however. Since I want it to be a fantasy world I want it to have all sorts of fantasy races: elves, dwarves, orcs, etc. But taking the orcs as an example - they are a warring race, not only are they depicted in nearly every work as warriors, but I want mine to be warriors as well. But how do you keep a warring race warlike in times of peace?
We all know that military forces only weigh down a nation in times of peace. Today most of the world's military (ok, disregard recent events) probably performs more rescue/public service tasks than actually fight. And I am also posing this question for warrior tribes. I was thinking, for example, of having a clan of dwarves that are exceptionally warriors and rely on other dwarven settlements to provide them with food and etc. in exchange for protection, fighting and etc. But in a time of lasting peace no one would be so willing to give them free food for nothing.
EDIT: This question has received many wonderful answers and I still can't decide which one to pick as the "correct answer", because there are so many deserving it! Since that I decided to amend my idea a bit and still have various conflicts in my world. Still, the question is very interesting to me and I will rephrase it, so that it is more clear:
What I was initially asking was if we take as an example a tribe of orcs that are pillagers - viking like, but on land only, they survive by fighting with everyone else and taking their stuff for themselves, if suddenly we wave our hand and everyone is at complete and total peace the orcs would be unable to raid anyone, because then everyone else (not just the pillagee) will band against them. So how would such a tribe composed mostly of warriors survive in this new situation?