Peace is Possible

Two women were sitting side by side reading their newspapers on the rush hour Tube to King’s Cross, one turned to the other and said, “I don’t know if it’s just me but there is a lot of sh*t going on in the world.”  The woman was no doubt expressing what many people feel about the state of the world, with the range of conflicts and disasters that afflict humanity. 

 

When we look at the range and complexity of the conflicts around our world it is easy to be pessimistic. Is the future to be one of interminable conflict after another with all attendant suffering, loss and death of humanity such a reality entails? 

 

 

Evidence exists that during the past fifty years, despite unprecedented political change in many countries, and reflecting many different ideologies,conflict has been resolved without wide-spread violence.  

 

Among the states so affected we may include Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, in Europe; Brazil, Chile, and South Africa - to name a few. More contemporarily peacebuilding strategies are making headway towards resolving  long standing conflicts in Fiji, the Philippines and Colombia. 

 

Peacebuilding and conflict resolution efforts call for extended moral imagination, patience, systemic and critical thinking and empathy. Peacemaking requires an understanding that  all conflicts are different. In each situation multiple forces are at work, and these need to be understood. 

 

Achieving an end of violent conflict means being willing to engage with individuals and groups whose ideas are alien and unacceptable. We have witnessed this reality nearer to home in the construction of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, which paved the way  for the power sharing executive enabling once sworn enemies to share power, something which seemed unimaginable a decade earlier.

 

However, peace is always more than the absence of violent conflict. Conflict in and of itself does not have to be destructive or de-humanising. Peacemakers know that achieving settlements to long-term conflicts requires an understanding not only of history, but of people and their legitimate grievances. Peacemaking places hope over despair in the attempt to achieve a better life.

 

Empathy is integral to peacebuilding. The Chinese General Sun Tzu who lived some 500 years before Christ observed: “The most important thing a would-be peacemaker can do is to get to know their enemies, understand their ambitions, their pains, the resentments that condition their thinking and the traumas that even they do not fully understand themselves.” 

 

Such empathy is not innate, it is something to be learned, and requires entering into the mind and experience of the ‘other’, whoever they may be. As Gabrielle Rifkind has observed in The Fog of Peace, the stories people tell are shaped by their histories, core values and experience, often influenced by the levels of trauma experienced by families, and the number of people killed in their family. Critical too, is the amount of exposure to a world beyond their own, and the way in which their narrative about the world has been constructed, and justifies what they think.

 

Undoubtedly the range and variety of conflicts the world currently faces are complex and perplexing. Many reveal the history of the ambition of empire whether in the Middle East, Africa, the former satellites of the Soviet Union, and such history complicates contemporary reality. 

 

The current conflicts in both the Middle East and Ukraine expose the need for new patterns of behaviour, creative solutions and political courage in dealing with conflicts whose roots lie within the history of colonialism and empire, whether from the West or East. Despite the risks and difficulties, it is better to endeavour to keep conflicting parties in dialogue, wherever possible. In the case of Ukraine, the exclusion of Russia can only provoke ‘mirror behaviour.’ And returning to ‘war’, even if only in terms of airstrikes, is unlikely to create the environment for resolving the Middle East’s complex problems. If we do what we have always done, we will get what we have always got.

 

The things that make for peace take us out of comfort zones and inherited patterns of behaviour. Simply put, states have to learn not to meddle by seeking to further their own interests, by intervention on one side or another. Any intervention should be early, and committed to the ending of violence and facilitating of negotiations. Mediation should be undertaken by people able to establish and facilitate relationships with those in conflict. Inhibiting the flow of weapons is vital, and the most controversial because of the nature of vested interests of governments and arms manufacturers.

 

UN negotiator Giandomenico Pico observes that “Western governments have been a force for both remarkable progress and remarkable destruction.” A safer world requires leadership with a coherent vision; hard edged critical reflection that focuses on what unites us rather than sets us apart. “Humanity has the tools to build something new”, Pico concludes, “the question is, where are those individuals, indeed leaders, with the courage to fill the white pages of the future creatively, instead of repainting the past?” 

 

We also need to learn to listen. Often those living with conflict have the greatest insight into its root causes and ideas to resolve it. Many are working quietly at this even amidst the violence. These are the people who can be the ‘glue’ in societies fractured by conflict. They can help peace agreements stick. External governments and non-governmental organisations have a vital role to play in supporting these constituencies for peace.

 

“If you want peace, prepare for peace”, observed Hans Blix. There can be no better advice if World Peace Day is not to be a forlorn hope.

 

Rt .Rev. Dr. Peter B. Price

Chair, Conciliation Resources