Just Peace, Just War: New Paradigms in Strategic Peacebuilding   

by Dr. Sharon D. Welch

In two speeches, delivered but a few days apart, President Obama announced a new foreign policy that signals the possibility of a momentous shift in U.S. thinking about the nature of power, the limits of force, and the complexity of building peace and preventing conflict.  In his strategy statement regarding Afghanistan, he redefined the nature and purpose of military engagement in a way that reflects on ongoing paradigm shift within the theory and practice of just war. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he clearly articulated the institutional building blocks for a more just world,  and in so doing,  reflected an ongoing paradigm shift within the theory and practice of strategic peacebuilding.

Both shifts offer significant challenges, as well as possibilities, for all of us, as citizens, as leaders of theological education, as members and leaders  of faith communities, for they ask us to seriously examine, as President Obama stated, "difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other."

Just War

On  December 1, 2009   after three months of intense review, President Obama announced his  administration's strategy for our continued engagement in Afghanistan, stating that, "[there] are three core elements of our strategy: a military effort to create the conditions for a transition; a civilian surge that reinforces positive action; and an effective partnership with Pakistan."

In addition to his call for constructive nonviolent action in the civilian surge and the partnership with Pakistan, there is, at  the heart of Obama's statement a forthright acknowledgment of the limitations of military force for assuring human and national/international security, and a redefinition of the purposes and nature of military engagement. Here we have a tranformative paradigm shift regarding the nature of power and the limited utility of force - if we can hear it, if we can hold it, if we can make it real.

"America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars and prevent conflict - not just how we wage wars. We'll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power....

And, we can't count on military might alone."

Obama's policies for Afghanistan  are shaped by  an ongoing shift in just war theory and military practice.  First, the purpose of military action in Afghanistan is to create the conditions for a transition. This requires a military strategy less focused on killing insurgents than protecting populations  and training Afghan security forces.

This recasting of the role of military force has been under increasingly serious consideration within the U.S. armed forces since the mid-1990s. Colonel Crane, the director of the military history institute at the Army War College and one of the writers of the new counterinsurgency doctrine, describes its genesis: "In many ways, this is a bottom-up change...The young soldiers who had been through Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Iraq and Afghanistan, understood why we need to do this." [1]   In  his assessment of strategies in Afghanistan, General McChrystal acknowledges that he is implementing the counterinsurgency strategy described in the 2006 Army and Marine corps field manual.  This strategy expresses a major shift in just war thinking - violence must be limited, not only on moral grounds,  but for pragmatic and strategic reasons as well. The  conclusions in the manual are stark:

1. "The more force is used, the less effective it is.

2. The best weapons for counterinsurgency do not shoot. (Often dollars and ballots have more impact than bombs and bullets).

3. Tactical success guarantees nothing."

4.  Military actions by themselves cannot achieve success.[2]

 

General Stanley McChrystal illustrates the importance of this shift with a simple thought experiment: there are 10 insurgents in a village. We kill 2. How many do you have left?  [3]

The recognition of the limited utility of violence is matched by a redefinition of the rules of engagement for armed forces, with a focus on protecting populations and training indigenous security forces, prohibiting torture, and upholding the highest moral standards in the conduct of war. These rules of engagement are more similar to ‘just policing' than they are to the traditional waging of war.

The risks, however, of the newly devised strategy are clear and inescapable:

1. This type of military engagement requires more personnel, not less.
2. As military efforts shift to protecting populations, rather than protecting one's own forces and killing insurgents, U.S. and allied casualties will rise.
3. It may not be possible to reframe our presence after eight years into a different one in which we are seen as supportive partners, focused on protecting civilians  and training the Afghan people
4. Success cannot be achieved by the U.S. alone, but requires fundamental changes within the Afghan government at all levels,  ending corruption and assuming responsibility for implementing basic security, protecting human rights, and enabling economic opportunity.  [4]

In addition to redefining the nature and purpose of military force, in the Oslo speech Obama called for the reduction in nuclear weapons and in the Afghanistan speech, for their total elimination: "every nation must understanding that true security will never come from an endless race for ever more destructive weapons; true security will come for those who reject them."

Just Peace

In his speech on Afghanistan, President Obama asked that we show our strength in the way that we end wars and prevent conflict.  In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he describes three ways of building a just and lasting peace, and in so doing, lays out an institutional framework for building a just world:

• Alternatives to violence tough enough to change the behavior of political leaders and governments
• A  Just peace based on the inherent rights and dignity of every individual
• A just peace that encompasses economic security and opportunity.

Many of the readers of Tikkun have spent years and decades working on such institutional efforts to build a just world , the implementation of the International Criminal Court, the creation of UN and regional peacekeeping forces, economic development and resolute support for economic, social and political rights for all people. From our work for just peace we know , however, not only the power of that vision but also  the costs and difficulties of its implementation. .

My fellow workers for peace,  let's be honest. The  words of President Obama are clear, but the concrete means of living out this mandate are far from our grasp. There have been thorough studies of historical  and contemporary forms of nonviolent action -  the work of Gene Sharp, Jonathan Schell, Jack Duvall and Peter Ackerman, the current efforts of Lisa Schirch and John Paul Lederach, the work of Christian peacebuilding teams.  Our challenge is to  take this work,  study it more thoroughly, and apply it with creativity, discipline and self-critical resilience.

While there have been transformative expressions of nonviolent engagement in the past, we have far to go in learning how to craft culturally specific nonviolent campaigns, and as far to go in discovering how to educate practitioners for those campaigns and  how to elicit public support for them.

A key factor in eliciting public support for sustained, institutionalized forms of nonviolence is first understanding the reasons for the lack of that support . We in the peace movement often think that if we can only convince people of the tragedy of war, that they will then turn to concrete and effective forms of peacebuilding. That strategy is most often ineffective, missing the point of genuine disagreement and profound challenge. It assumes what is not the case, that those who have had families in the military, who choose to serve, who support military action, do not know the cost of war. Many do, for they bear those costs in their bodies, in their lives, in souls and psyches ravaged by the trauma of combat.

In my work with conservative students, colleagues and fellow citizens, I find that most are not persuaded by our plans for the peaceful resolution of entrenched conflict. It is not that they doubt the horror and cost of war, or even question our compassion or conviction. No - their concerns are more troubling. Just as many conservatives suspect that we underestimate the depravity and resolve of those perceived as enemies, so they suppose that we overestimate the virtue and competence of peace activists and peacekeepers.  These concerns are not misplaced.

While the use of military force can be counterproductive, strategic peacebuilding may also have unintended negative consequences. Lisa Schirch writes of the internal challenges - technical difficulties in coordinating long and short term efforts,  tensions between the aspirations of insiders and the goals of those within a country, challenges certainly manifest in flawed U.S. development efforts in Iraq.[5] According to  a recent report in the New York Times,  despite "the largest reconstruction effort since the Marshall plan", hospitals go unused, water treatment plants underutilized, all because of a lack of suitable planning and adequate training.[6] 

It is not enough to say no to war. We can say yes to peacebuilding, and acknowledge the complexities and risks of nonviolent, civilian engagement.  In his Oslo speech, President Obama called for an international commitment to just peace with four components: "Agreements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights. Investments in development," and exhorts us to know that this commitment requires a continued expansion of our moral imagination, one that acknowledges our common humanity, our fallibility, and, the possibilities we have of shaping, in our time, and for our children, a more just world.

As we acknowledge both our longing for justice and peace and  our fallibility and shortsightedness in preventing conflict and restoring economic and political security, we encounter a paradox, a lack of parity between the moral certainty of our denunciation of existing forms of military action and our ethically reasonable uncertainty about the justice and feasibility of specific nonviolent alternatives.

President Obama reminded us of the power of Gandhi and King's ideals of love and nonviolence.  We know, however, that to accept his challenge, and to live out those ideals in ways that are not naïve requires that we remain resolutely honest about the multiplicity,  ambiguity and unpredictability of even nonviolent actions.

It is crucial that we also face, without excuses, the risks that we are taking. To say that military might cannot guarantee success, while most certainly true, is not enough. Our nonviolent efforts may also fail, and the failures might be devastating - the return of the Taliban with their repressive control , the growth of Al Qaeda in Pakistan, terrorists gaining access to nuclear weapon, genocide unaverted, and repression left unchecked.

Our challenge as religious communities is to provide the  resources of communal life and spiritual practice  that enable honest engagement and serenity in the face of momentous challenges and ambiguous, life-threatening choices.  While certainty may at times be a creative delusion, uncertainty is the inescapable matrix of all our problem -solving efforts. We cannot know in advance which nonviolent strategies  will spark the imaginations of others, which development projects will prove sustainable, plausible and energizing.  For even our commitment to justice and peace through the exercise of skillful means may lead in directions and result in consequences we can neither predict nor control.

Let us then, as committed advocates of a just peace,  move from the comforts of the prophetic denunciation of military force to the ambiguity and challenge of the strategic implementation of constructive alternatives to war. As we take up this task, we can draw on one of the richest ethical traditions of humankind.

In 1988 Dr. Katie G. Cannon published a groundbreaking exploration of "the moral wisdom found in the black women's literary tradition." [7]We find in the work of African American women a moral wisdom, a tradition of strength and persistence expressed in an ethic of risk, a redefinition of responsible action within the limits of bounded power.  An ethic of risk begins with the recognition that we cannot guarantee decisive change in the near future, or even in our lifetimes. To stop working for justice, however, even when success is unimaginable, is to die - for some, there is the threat of physical death, for most, the death of the imagination, the death of the ability to care.

My own work in this regard, both as an activist and a scholar, is profoundly shaped by my life growing up on a ranch in West Texas, and the ethos that surrounded us in that world - one of responding to the vagaries of human life - whether dust storms, hard freezes or shifting global markets and  farm policies, with an audacious, yet grounded pragmatic creativity. We worked together to bring as much justice as possible, to grow as fine a crop as feasible, within the constraints and with the resources at hand. I continue to learn from this world, and have realized that there is a continuing convergence between the challenges of ranching and work for justice. Talking a few awhile ago with my cousin, Brent Graef, Brent stated that when he first began working horses, his goal was to make the wrong thing difficult. Now, his goal has changed. He finds himself working horses in a way that makes the right thing obvious.

This, then, is our challenge. Let us follow the lead of the feminist economists J.K. Gibson Graham and have the courage to move from the solace of moral certainty  about what is wrong to the uncertainty of  practical curiosity, exploring, with open minds and hearts, creative ways of meeting human security challenges where we are, with what we have. [8] In honor of our obligations to the wider human community, we can do no less. In light of the fallibility of even our best  efforts, we can do no more.

 

Sharon Welch is Provost of Meadville Lombard Theological School (Unitarian Universalist) and is a member of the Executive Committee of Global Action to Prevent War

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[1] Michael R. Gordon, "Military Hones a New Strategy on Insurgency," The New York Times, October 5, 2006, A1, A19

[2] The U.S. Army Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, with forewords by General David H. Petraeus and Lt. General James F. Amos and by Lt. Colonel John A. Nagel, with a new introduction by Sarah Sewall, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 47-52.

[3] General Stanley McChrystal, Commander, International Security Assistance Force and Commander, US Forces Afghanistan, " Special Address" International Institute of Strategic Studies, October 1, 2009

[4] Ibid.

[5] Lisa Schirch, The Little Book of Strategic Peacebuilding, Intercourse, PA: Good  Books, 2004, p.81-82.

[6] The writer for the New York Times, Timothy Walter reports that

 "U.S. Fears Iraqis will not keep up rebuilt projects: an issue in withdrawal" Timothy Williams, The New York Times, November 21, 2009, A 1, A 8.

[7] Katie G. Cannon,  Black Womanist Ethics, Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars' Pres, 1988. Pp. 75-98.

[8] J.K. Gibson Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2006, p.159, 165-196.