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War & peace

16 March 2023

4 min read

Just War and Just Peace

As the Ukraine War passes another milestone, can any war be considered just? Christine Schliesser explores Just War theory and a possible path to Just Peace.

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.

Civilian evacuation across Irpin River during the Ukraine War.

Yan Boechat/VOA via Wikimedia Commons.

Will Germany deliver Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine? No? Yes? When? Media discussion of the war that the Russian Federation started against Ukraine in 2014 and that entered a new stage one year ago, currently centres on questions of weaponry. Who else will send tanks? And what about fighter aircrafts? No? Yes? When?

In classical military ethics, which has long been dominated by the so called Just War Theory, these questions fall under ius in bello, the right conduct in war. This also includes discussions on proportionality, military necessity and the differentiation between combatants and non-combatants.

Just War Theory has a long tradition in Christian thought. Church Father Ambrose argued that whoever does not ward off injustice from his fellow man (or woman for that matter) when he can, is as guilty as he who commits it. Ambrose’s student, Augustine, then developed this thought in more detail as he laid the foundations for what could be called a bellum iustum, a just war.

Even before going to war, the criteria of the ius ad bellum, the right to go to war, must be satisfied. These include, for instance, a just cause, legitimate authority, prospect of success, right intention and last resort. We encounter these criteria again in slightly modified form in our modern international law. In view of these guidelines, of Russia’s breach of international law, and of Ukraine’s right to self-defence, the on-going war in Ukraine clearly seems to be a just war. Or is it?

Nothing holy or just

Two points need to be made in this discussion. Firstly, there are no just or holy wars. Period. Or as 150 churches, after the horrors of the Second World War, put it in Amsterdam in 1948: ‘War is contrary to the will of God.’ Wars are always an evil and an expression of the failure of human beings to strive for peace. This also holds true for the war in Ukraine. And this means that we need a new dimension in the debate, namely guilt.

Every action – and inaction – here involves guilt. As the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was killed by the Nazis for his engagement in a plot against Hitler, put it:

‘everyone who acts responsibly becomes guilty’.

And even if we become guilty for the sake of the other person, our guilt remains just the same. Yet, as Bonhoeffer concludes, we trust in the grace of God, who calls us to responsible action. , Bonhoeffer’s ideas have been considered dangerous and easily misused to justify any crime, as forgiveness is always available. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge the reality of guilt that pervades any war, including the war in Ukraine.

Just Peace

Secondly, recent years have seen a new kid on the block: Just Peace Theory. While Just War Theory looks at a conflict from the perspective of violence, Just Peace Theory puts the focus on peace. This includes adding a third set of criteria. Ius post bellum looks at justice after a war. We know that after a conflict is before a conflict. We therefore need to pay more attention to what happens after the weapons finally fall silent.

Here, the experiences of truth and reconciliation processes worldwide can help. Both dimensions belong inseparably together and both already begin during a conflict, not just after it. Truth, for example, requires the documentation of war crimes committed by all parties to ensure the prosecution of war criminals later on. And reconciliation is the conditio sine qua non for sustainable peace.

Russia’s war against Ukraine and its threats against NATO and Western countries demonstrate, not least that after the end of the Cold War, opportunities for genuine and sustainable reconciliation were missed as latent hatred, prejudices and stereotypes were allowed to linger.

Just Peace Theory emphasizes that building peace is an art and a craft. It requires specific skills, training and preparation. It also requires virtues of grace, persistence and forgiveness, Countless documented examples world-wide supply empirical proof that these methods actually work. Perhaps it is worth devoting some of the $2,113 billion (2021) of global annual military expenditure for training non-military approaches to address conflict resolution? To learn how to build peace as much as how to wage war? No? Yes? When?

Pathways to Peace

One such initiative is Pathways to Peace. Aiming at peace, justice and reconciliation in times of war, this initiative is currently being developed through the Conference of European Churches, a group of some 120 member churches in 38 countries. With their long-term involvement and intimate knowledge at the grassroot level, faith actors in civil society seem uniquely positioned to connect people, heal relationships, offer a new social imaginary and facilitate practical help.

The objectives of Pathways to Peace include among others to facilitate safe spaces for honest exchange between Ukrainian and Russian church leaders, to develop a network of church leaders and other civil society leaders for exchange on the preparation of peace or to bring together European youth, in particular Ukrainian and Russian young refugees.

The immense potential of faith actors in transforming conflict and building sustainable peace seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the public sphere. Given the prominence of faith in this conflict, it is about time that all relevant actors in our societies, including faith-based initiatives, joined forces to counter this major crisis of our time.

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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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