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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Ethics

Freedom

War & peace

25 August 2025

4 min read

There’s light and darkness in journalism’s truth game

“There’s your truth, there’s my truth and there’s the truth.”

George Pitcher

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

A church altar holds commemorative frames of killed journalists

The Journalists’ Altar.

The Journalists’ Altar at St Bride’s church, on London’s Fleet Street, bears the Perspex tombstones of reporters and their colleagues who have died in wars and conflicts around the globe, in the act of bringing news to us.

This solemn memorial is joined by new ‘stones’s for Anas al-Sharif and his four-man crew from Qatar-based al-Jazeera, who were killed in a targeted strike on their tents at the gates of the Al-Shifa hospital in eastern Gaza City.

It was worth checking that they’re included on the altar, as there’s the sneaking suspicion that someone might have decided that honouring them in this way would be inappropriate or even inflammatory. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF), who killed them, would certainly take this view, having described al-Sharif, one of the few television correspondents bravely to have remained in northern Gaza, as a “terrorist” who “posed as a journalist.”

Journalist rights groups, such as the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), as well as, unsurprisingly, Al Jazeera itself counter that this is baseless. The CPJ adds “there is no justification for [the] killing.”

Of course there isn’t. Al Jazeera is pro-Arab and consequently pro-Islam and, therefore, anti-Israel. Al-Sharif may have had links with Hamas in the past, but he and his colleagues were demonstrably non-combatant. If we start killing journalists who are biased against us, we’re entering very dark moral territory indeed.

I worked for The Observer when it was owned by conglomorate Lonrho and it promoted proprietor Tiny Rowland’s best interests in Africa and in his battle with Mohammed Al-Fayed for ownership of Harrods. News Corporation’s titles aren’t famous for exposing and criticising the activities and opinions of the Murdoch family.

It might be a stretch for even their fiercest critics to suggest that Rowland or the Murdochs had committed acts of terrorism, but the point is that journalism, good or bad, is never truly independent. That al-Sharif and his friends had associations with Hamas is largely irrelevant. Indeed, journalists must have contacts with the dark side.

If we’re at risk for our allegiances, then it’s not just us but freedom itself that is under threat. Imagine if we could be arrested for sympathising with supporters of Palestine Action, currently a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK. That, worryingly, begins not to sound too farfetched.

Journalism, when it works properly, shines as a light in the world’s darkness, revealing what’s really going on. It’s what makes it a less trivial professional activity than many other walks of life. The Journalists’ Altar bears testament to that.

The light shining in darkness is central to the Christian tradition, revealed in the prose poetry of the opening sequence to John’s gospel (a line of which appears on the Journalists’ Altar). It is inextinguishable, exists only because darkness exists and is revealed in the human capacity for love, the triumph of hope over despair and lives led self-sacrificially.

That’s way too much freight for humble old journalism to carry. But it is true that journalism shines a light in human affairs, the better to reveal what lies in the darkness so that we can examine it. In that endeavour, it shares an interest in truth

A late and lamented Observer desk editor of mine once told me dolefully, when I wailed that lawyers were preventing a story I knew to be true, that “there’s your truth, there’s my truth and there’s the truth.” I don’t think he meant to mark the difference between subjective and an objective, absolute truth, but he did define the truth game that we’re in.

As it took Gaza’s territory, Israel’s government long ago ceded its moral ground – quite an achievement given the scale of the atrocities committed by Hamas on Israel’s people on 7 October 2023. It simply cannot afford to allow the light of what is true to shine in the darkness of Gaza. So, it bans foreign correspondents from reporting from within the Strip.

“Democracy dies in darkness” has been the slogan of The Washington Post since 2017, a line it lifted from its Watergate heritage. There’s been a fair bit of chortling and downright rage at this conceit since its newish proprietor, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, declined to allow the Post to back the Democrat candidate against Donald Trump at the last US election (those pesky owners again).

But it’s not really democracy that dies in the dark. It’s just that we can’t see in the dark. We need light to do that. Journalism, for all its weaknesses and absurdities, provides some of that light. Israel, Gaza and the deaths of five Al Jazeera journalists show that it’s a light that isn’t inextinguishable. That’s more than a worry.

Al Jazeera’s anchor Tamer Almisshal nailed it: “Israel, by killing and targeting our correspondents and team in Gaza, they want to kill the truth.” Our democracies need to ensure that doesn’t happen.

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