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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Community

Freedom

Politics

5 May 2025

4 min read

From councils to conclaves, there's a vital common ingredient

Church and state alike need pluralism.

George Pitcher

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

A gate to a churchyard displays a sign saying polling station.

A polling station through a churchyard.

Southwark Diocese

Rumours that Donald Trump may suspend the US constitution in order to seek a third term as president and yet darker threats that his regime may even harbour autocratic ambitions have reminded the West that we should not take democracy for granted.

Parliamentary democracy, we have widely assumed, is A Good Thing. It’s so good that we not only want to share it but impose it on other populations. The Iraq war on which the UK and US embarked in 2003 was fought, we were told, for freedom and democracy, but it didn’t quite work out like that.

By democracy, we tend to mean political accountability, through which parties of government exercise power through the will of the people they serve, expressed in regular plebiscites which ensure that no one can cling unchallenged to power. The recent English council elections are a small example of what we mean by that.

The Trump phenomenon, though, begins to point towards the prospect of a popular will that is in favour of a form of government that doesn’t correspond to our usual liberal assumptions. There are voices, among them that of the writer Margaret Atwood, which anticipate a suspension of US democracy as a consequence of the President’s insanity.

Most of us in the UK might argue that democracy need to be more than a system in which majorities have their way. We want our governments to be under the law too. And then we have to decide not only what law, but whose law. For those of religious faith, that question will partly and significantly be answered by God’s law, on which arguably western civilisation is built.

This is where pluralism comes in, without which democracy can’t operate effectively. A state is a collection of political and civic communities, in which individuals have rights and duties, which are protected in law.

This model is based on Roman legislature, intensely centralised and systemically suspicious of private societies, which is why early Christians were persecuted under it. The collapse of that empire left a legalistic vacuum, into which stepped nation-state kingdoms and the early medieval Church.

Unlike political parties, we don’t compete for control, but form a community that points towards a saved and healed world.

It was this latter organ of state that inherited the basic principles of Roman law, centralised, universal and sovereign, under the Pope. And it is that organ that will meet in conclave to elect a new Pope. To describe that election as democratic is more than a stretch, in that the demos, as in common people, are uninvolved and arguably unrepresented.

So the Church is not a democracy, any more than God is accountable to his creation. Rather the other way around – some denominations speak of God’s “elect”, those he chooses for salvation. In Christian thought, God is a servant king, but nonetheless an absolute and, some who oppose the divine might say, tyrannical authority.

How are we to respond to an undemocratic deity? One answer to that might be found in that pluralistic characteristic of democracy. We’re not good, frankly, as recognising pluralism in our faith systems. At best, we operate in a kind of absolute duopoly – you believe, or you don’t. A pluralistic model would be one in which we learn of the divine will through the entirety of creation, all manifestations of belief and unbelief, rather than simply our own.

Pluralism is healthy, in secular politics as well as in religious observance. It has been observed that the old UK political duopoly of Labour and Conservative has been broken in these local elections by Reform UK and resurgent Liberal Democrats and Greens. It’s the polar opposite of the gathering autocracy in the US and gives a voice to a range of worldviews.

This is not an argument for theocracy, but it is to claim that the Christian tradition rests on the principle that no political order can claim the authority of God other than the Body of Christ. And the Body of Christ incorporates all members of the human race. Unlike political parties, we don’t compete for control, but form a community that points towards a saved and healed world.

The choice here is between a kind of secular citizenship, a form of multi-culturism which strikes an accord between varied communities on universally enlightened principles. Or we can respond to the energy on which that secular utopia might be founded, in building communities of the willing towards global justice and peace. That is a diversity mission for the Church.

So, it’s less about democracy than pluralism. And that pluralism has to become a recognisable characteristic of the body of the faithful, which it all too often historically hasn’t been. One can only hope and pray that it might be a mission that is also at the heart of the deliberations that lead to a puff of white smoke from the Sistine Chapel in the coming days.

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