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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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Conspiracy theory

Death & life

29 August 2024

4 min read

A Bayesian theory of death

The sinking of the superyacht displays the probability, and banality, of death.

George Pitcher

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

Rescue workers look at the plan of a yacht.

The search for the Bayesian.

Vigili del Fuoco.

On any statistical calculation, the probability of dying by drowning when your luxury yacht suddenly and inexplicably sinks at anchor in the Mediterranean has to be extremely low.

So it’s the cruellest of ironies that tech tycoon Mike Lynch should so die, along with his daughter and five others, having devoted his commercial life to the application of such statistical probabilities. He had named his yacht Bayesian after the 18th-century theorem that introduced the idea that probability expresses a degree of belief in an event.

That doesn’t expressly mean religious belief. But, intriguingly, it doesn’t exclude it either. According to Thomas Bayes, who published his theorem in 1763, the calculable degree of belief may be based on prior knowledge about an event, such as the results of previous experiments, or on personal beliefs about it.

In essence, you don’t believe your yacht will capsize in the night and sink in seconds, because your experience tells you so. That belief can mathematically be included in the probability of it happening.

We can transfer the method into religious praxis. Christian belief in the event of resurrection, for instance, can be calculated in the probability that the deaths of the Lynches and others aboard the Bayesian are not the end of their existence.

It’s an intriguing legacy of Lynch’s work for theologians. But it’s the sheer lack of probability of the lethal event occurring at all that lends it its random banality. It’s that death visited those asleep on a yacht in the small hours that lends this news story such tireless legs, not just that these were super-rich masters and mistresses of the universe.

There have been bitter observations on social media that the Bayesian’s victims have commanded limitlessly greater attention than the many thousands of refugees who die in small-boat crossings of the Mediterranean every year.

This is a category mistake. And again, Bayesian theory can be deployed. Experience supports our belief that crossing the sea in overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels can all too often lead to tragically terminal events. The probability of death is plain. Again, it’s the sheer randomness of the Bayesian yacht event that sets it apart.

If death can visit at any time, there can be no difference in the valuation of long or short lives.

That randomness brings us back to the banality of sudden death among us, almost its ordinariness, something that just happens, often entirely out of the blue. The prayer book has the funeral words “in the midst of life we are in death”, meaning that death is our constant living companion. But that doesn’t quite cut it for me, because it tells us it’s there, but nothing of its true significance.

The tenets of Christian faith are regularly said to be those of a death cult; that it’s a deep-seated fear of death that leads us to avoid it with assurances of eternal life. But it’s the sheer banality of death, as displayed in the randomness of the Bayesian event, that seems to knock down that idea. In its randomness, death looks ridiculous rather than evil.

Conspiracy theories around the sinking of the Bayesian are a kind of denial of the reality of death too. We want there to be more to it than the utterly banal.

Author Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” when covering the trial of Nazi holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. I’d want to suggest that it’s that same banality, that basic human ordinariness, that is the real nature of the supposed grim reaper, rather than his evil.

None of this can comfort the Lynch family, who mourn the loss of a much-loved father and his young daughter, or the families of the others who lost their lives on the Bayesian. But it is meant to go some way towards an explanation of what we mean in Christian theology when we bandy about phrases such as “the defeat of death”. Because it’s not a wicked serpent that’s been defeated, more of a pointless clown.

There is something especially painful about the death of the young, such as that of 18-year-old Hannah Lynch on the Bayesian that night, a young woman on the threshold of life. And – God knows – the even younger lives we’ve read about being taken lately.

But the concept of banality may lead us to another tenet of faith: The completeness of every life. If death can visit at any time, there can be no difference in the valuation of long or short lives.

A poem, often ascribed to a former dean of St Paul’s cathedral, begins with the line: “Death is nothing at all.” That’s wrong, as an idea. Death is as significant an event as birth. But its defeat is in keeping it in its place.

The dignity in simplicity with which football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson greeted his final illness is a masterclass in this tactic for life. Death isn’t to be negotiated, it’s just there.

In the end, death isn’t a Bayesian probability, it’s a certainty, for all of us. The difference, in Bayesian theory, must be the belief we bring to our personal calculations of the probability of the event.