How to shape peace today

On International Day of Peace, Christine Schliesser counts today’s conflicts, deliberately imagines peace, and recalls an old song.

Christine Schliesser

Christine Schliesser lectures in Theology and Ethics at Zurich University, and is a scientific collaborator with the Center for Faith & Society at Fribourg University.

a dirt barricade blocks a cross roads, behind which stands a roadside cross

A crossroads in Ukraine.

Jonny Gios on Unsplash.

One in four. This is the number of people living in conflict-affected areas on this planet. A record 100 million people have been forcibly displaced worldwide. Psychologists tell us that we can only process numbers in the two-digit realm in a meaningful way. Any number larger than that eclipses our capacities to attach a face, a story, an existence to that number. 100,000,000 is simply too large to picture. So imagine the entire UK population on the run, plus the population of Australia, plus that of Hongkong. In 2022, 16,988 civilians were killed in armed conflicts, which is a 53 per cent increase compared to the year before. And as you read these lines, there are 32 ongoing violent conflicts in the world, including drug wars, terrorist insurgencies, ethnic conflict, and civil wars.

Just as we are overwhelmed with trying to grasp the extent of violence, conflict and war, we are equally at loss with imagining peace. When in 1981 the United Nations General Assembly established the International Day of Peace (IDP), it was recognizing exactly this by emphasizing that “it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed”. Constructing, envisioning, imagining. The tough world of realpolitik, however, seems to leave no place for such kind of romantic games of mind. Helmut Schmidt, former chancellor of Germany, made no attempt to hide his scorn for the imaginary, “Let him who has visions consult a doctor”. This shows a remarkable misconception of reality, however. French philosopher Henri Bergson points to the power of imagination, for to invent “gives being to what did not exist; it might never have happened”. Perceiving and transforming reality thus become mutually supportive forces. And the numbers above make it clear that peace is not the default option of reality, but needs to be envisioned. “Inventing peace”, as film director Wim Wenders calls this conscious effort.

Restoring momentum to the SDGs is a crucial sign of life for global cooperation – and for peace.

So peace begins in our minds, but it cannot remain there. Just as love yearns to be embodied, peace seeks concrete shape. And just as the shape of love is acts of kindness, the shape of peace is acts of justice. In the Jewish and Christian tradition, the term shalom is used to convey this kind of inclusive vision of peace and justice. This year’s International Day of Peace (IDP) coincides with the UN General Assembly. When conceived 78 years ago, a vital part of the United Nations’ raison d'être was the common vision for peace. The experiences of the horrors of two world wars totalling more than 76 million people dead – another one of these unfathomable numbers –united the nations of this world in their quest for peace. Yet the shape of peace is justice. So three years after the conception of the UN, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was born, celebrating its 75th birthday this year.

As the world leaders currently convene for the UN General Assembly, however, the nations assembled there will be anything but united. The demand and supply of international collaboration seem grossly disproportionate as multiple challenges, including geopolitical, ecological and economic crises, eat away on multilateral ties. This year’s IDP also coincides with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) summit, marking the mid-point milestone of the goals.

Endorsed in 2015, the 17 SDGs unfold the vision of a better world, including the eradication of poverty, advancing education and gender equality and environmental stewardship. If justice is the currency of peace, it seems only appropriate that this year’s IDP’s theme is ‘Actions for Peace: Our Ambition for the #GlobalGoals’. “Peace is needed today more than ever”, says UN Secretary-General António Guterres. This, in turn, means that the vision spelt out by the SDGs is needed today more than ever. It is a misunderstanding to conceive of the SDGs as an add-on for better times. Rather, restoring momentum to the SDGs is, as Stewart Patrick and Minh-Thu Pham from the Carnegie Foundation point out, a crucial sign of life for global cooperation – and for peace, one may add.

To dispel the ever-prevalent “myth of redemptive violence” as the still predominant paradigm, we need exactly this kind of active imagination.

One would think that the scale of the challenges spelt out by the 17 SDGs requires the joint collaboration of all actors. Yet one factor that is strikingly absent in this equation is religion. This is all the more remarkable given the fact that 85 per cent of this planet’s population profess adherence to a faith tradition, according to the World Population Review 2022. This makes faith communities the largest transnational civil society actors. Now religion – every religion – is inherently ambivalent. But this means that each religion can not only be used to incite hatred and violence, but also contains potent resources for peace and reconciliation.

Many of the SDGs including peace, justice, equality and care of creation to name but a few align with core concerns of, for example, the Christian faith tradition. Just imagine the potential for transformational change towards peace and justice if faith-based actors worked together, among each other and with secular actors! To dispel the ever-prevalent “myth of redemptive violence” (Walter Wink) as the still predominant paradigm, we need exactly this kind of active imagination. Or as the poet of an ancient song once put it:

“Kindness and truth shall meet; justice and peace shall kiss”.

For more information on the role of religion in the SDGs, read the Open Access book series “Religion Matters. On the Significance of Religion for Global Issues” (Routledge), edited by Christine Schliesser et al.

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Comment

Justice

Trauma

10 February 2025

4 min read

Can life go on after wicked acts of violence?

We can fulfill the law in more ways that just the legal sense.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A montage shows three people, an older man, a young man and young woman.

Ian Coates, Barnaby Webber and Grace O'Malley-Kumar.

Family handout.

It’s an all too human instinct to seek vengeance against psychopathic killers, especially those murderers of children and youngsters. If we’re honest, we can all feel a primal urge to “get our hands on them”, to inflict, in retribution, the pain, death and suffering that they delivered on their victims and their families.

That must be why, shortly after his sentencing, the murderer of the three little girls at a dance class in Southport - Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King – was reported to have been beaten to a pulp by fellow prisoners. It went momentarily viral with the help of the likes of former support-actor Laurence Fox, who writes in short sentences because he thinks in them, claiming he’d heard it “on the grapevine”.

The story was only slightly undermined by such giants of investigative reporting getting the jail where the convicted prisoner is incarcerated entirely wrong.

It’s a kind of wishful thinking, if a herd can be said to think. It’s also why we have a rule of law in what we aspire to call a civilised country. It’s there to bring such perpetrators to justice, while ensuring that justice isn’t impaired by the wholly understandable desire of victims’ families to tear their killers to pieces and the knuckle-dragging, social-media lynch mob who think they know what justice looks like.

Hard for anyone to know how to respond to this. It’s perhaps particularly challenging, for fear of being intrusive and trite, to see how a religious faith can respond. But I want to have a go. And to avoid those charges of hand-wringing solipsism, I won’t speak of hope and love and life in this context, which so often feels like throwing a handful of seeds into a raging storm.

Rather, I think I want to ask what fulfilment of the law might look like. The full 240-page report into the killing In Nottingham in June 2023 by a paranoid schizophrenic of two 19-year-old students, Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, and separately a 65-year-old man, Ian Coates, has been published. Not unnaturally, the headline theme has been that the killer “got away with murder” through a series of chaotic failings by the NHS, in its discharges of its patient into the community, in its absent risk management and failures to medicate him adequately.

Culpability for these crimes is a powerful driving force. But there’s something else going on here. After the report’s publication, the two young victims’ mothers, Sinead O’Malley-Kumar and Emma Webber, went on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour for an extended interview. And, yes, of course they share a campaigning spirit to change the health system so that this kind of tragedy is less likely to happen again. But Emma said that they’re “not witch-hunting with pitchforks” and Sinead observed with crystal clarity that “systems are made up of people”. This was about human as well as systemic change.

The go-to journalistic word here is “dignity” and, yes, these two mothers have it in bucket-loads. But, as I say, there’s something else. Struggling to identify it, I come up with the phrase that life goes on – and not in its platitudinous sense of bucking up and getting on with what’s left to us. There’s a feeling of continuation, not just of ending, dreadful as those endings are for families.

Asked by interviewer Anita Rani (who, in passing, was first class) what sustained them, where their strength came from, Emma answered in a heartbeat “Barnaby”, adding quickly in a heartbreaking throwaway: “It’s that invisible umbilical cord.” Similarly, Sinead said she was strengthened on a “bad day” by the knowledge that she was “doing it for Grace.”

They know, absolutely, that they can’t change what happened, but they’re there for each other. And not just these two mothers. Bereaved parents from Southport have been in touch, as they said, in “awful solidarity.”

A solidarity unconfined to this dreadful cadre of the violently bereaved. When these two mothers visited Nottingham for a vigil for their lost children, they expected “maybe 50” to turn up. In the event, there were “thousands and thousands” in Market Square. One of the two said simply: “There’s more good than bad out there.” Life goes on. Again, not in the sense of pulling your boots up and making the best of it, but in the sense of acknowledging that this is not all there is, that we’re working towards something infinitely better.

I think that’s what fulfilling the law might mean. Not solely changes to human systems, but changes in humanity. And perhaps that makes some sense of the gospel line: “I’m come not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it.” Not just to fulfil prophecy; not just to improve legal processes, but to fulfil the immutable laws of humanity for which these two mothers – and so many others around them – work so tirelessly.

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