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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Leading

Politics

24 November 2025

4 min read

Covid inquiry: Johnson, Cummings, and the cost of refusing to grieve

The report exposes mistakes, but our real challenge is learning how to face loss without denial

Jonah Horne

Jonah Horne is a priest, living and working in Devon.

Boris Johnson sits, giving evidence to an inquiry.

Boris Johnson giving evidence to the inquiry.

UK Covid-19 Inquiry.

I distinctly remember the sheer confusion of January to March 2020. Should we flee our flat in London? Should we cancel the lease on our workspace? Will I be able to continue breakfast with my friend on Thursday mornings? I ignorantly scoffed that a lockdown could conceivably take place and then, stood devastatingly corrected only a few months later. However, the UK Covid-19 Inquiry reveals that this ignorance induced confusion was not restricted to the personal level but instead enacted on a national stage.

What’s glaringly obvious as you read the recommendations is that the government acted too slowly and too indecisively. If the initial restrictions been introduced sooner, say in January or February, the first lockdown “might have been shorter or not necessary at all.” This, the report suggests, could have saved approximately 23,000 lives. Brenda Doherty, of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, believes her mother could have been one of these. Instead, she and her sister stood by her graveside in March 2020 as her family members waited a few metres back sectioned off by red tape. The report and accompanying evidence call for sombre reading.

In response, those in charge at the time have understandably launched an attack in their own defence. Boris Johnson has labelled the inquiry "totally muddled,” which ironically sounds like the informal conclusion of his leadership in the report. Similarly, Dominic Cummings has hurled a 2,000-word response into the social media stratosphere, which feels almost as long as the 800-page paper itself.

What seems glaringly obvious about both men’s responses is the very thing Brenda Doherty displays with such elegance: grief. There is, in these men’s retorts, a stunning omission of any sense of responsibility or indeed any willingness to admit defeat. And what frightens me most, as we look towards the future, is our refusal to grieve over the things of the past. The threat on Europe from Russia is growing. AI’s disruption on our workforce seems to be being enthusiastically brushed aside. And another, potentially much more violent, pandemic is unsettlingly likely.

However, in the face of these disruptive forces grief is a remarkably generative power. Without grief we remain, much like Johnson and Cummings, frozen in time. Immovable in our ineptitude and ignorance. Grief, I’d argue, is the very thing that enables us to recognise our shortcomings and, when mixed with hope, energises us towards a future which lies on the other side of sorrow. Yet, when we exist in a place of fragility, the idea of imagining that life lies beyond my incompetency, if only I grieve it, is frightening. Devastatingly though, for us humans, this may be the only way to learn and move forward.

Our future and redemption is undeniably bound up in our ability to grieve. Grief is inherently futural. By grieving our ineptitude, we inevitably witness to the places that require growth, mercy and grace. When we fail to grieve, we remain frozen in time—precariously hiding behind the illusion of our infallibility. This is a deeply fragile state. From this position, any assault or critique on our mistakes becomes a personal attack rather than invitation to redemption. We find ourselves lashing out in fear, terrified of being exposed. Johnson and Cummings embody this predicament to a tee.

This situation however is not unique to the Covid iquiry and our late-prime minister’s response. Another character who lashes out in fear is St Peter, one of Jesus’s friends and disciples. There is a rather poetic story that illustrated this at the end of John’s gospel in the New Testament. One of Jesus’s friends Peter rejects him as he’s taken to be murdered. Peter attacks a guard, cuts his ear off and Jesus famously disarms him and heals the man. Moments later, Jesus is taken, Peter flees and we find him standing in a courtyard, by a fire and where claims not to know his friend and master Jesus. To make matters worse, he rejects him not once, but three times. However, when Jesus returns from the grave, he meets Peter again, at a fireside on a beach, and asks him “do you love me?” Not once but three times. The thing that I think is particularly remarkable about this meeting is that Jesus recognises Peter’s future in bound up in the redemption of his past mistakes. Jesus takes Peter to the place of failure, a fireside, and gives him an opportunity to declare his allegiance and love for him, the same amount of times he had rejected him. He reminded him of his wound to heal him for his future.

If we are to take seriously our response to the Covid-19 inquiry, we must take responsibility for our errors. Not begrudgingly but with a grace filled grief. Our future, one that is filled with hope, does not come to us without a confession of past errors. Instead, a hopeful future may only come to us when we confess, recognise and grieve our mistakes. Indeed, to freely grieve over my failures is to grieve believing in life beyond my defeat.

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