Some readers of this journal may know Daniel Philpott as one of the authors of God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (2011). In it, he and his co-authors, Monica Toft and Timothy Shah, attempted to explain, among other things, the conditions under which religion is likely to turn violent. Roughly, their thesis was this: the more a religion is identified with a particular society and the more it is entangled with political power, the more violent it is likely to be. This was also the thesis of David Martin’s important but unjustly neglected book Does Christianity Cause War? (1997). From this explanation of when and why religion turns violent, it follows that the independence of religion from the state, especially if it is consensual and combined with certain theological convictions, is most likely to result in peaceable religion. But can religion do more than just not cause trouble? Can it also contribute to peace, be an agent of reconciliation? Much of Just and Unjust Peace, an important contribution to literature on reconciliation, is devoted to showing how religion can do just that.
Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation (Studies in Strategic Peacebuilding)
OUP USA
352 pages
$58.49
We can distinguish three basic domains in which reconciliation takes place: personal, cultural, and political. Personal reconciliation concerns situations in which individuals, often members of the same ethnic, religious, or cultural group, are at odds with one another. Cultural reconciliation concerns situations in which communities and persons as members of particular ethnic, cultural, or religious groups are in conflict. Political reconciliation concerns situations in which state actors have committed massive injustices, primarily by violating human rights (both at inter-state and intra-state levels). Many books have been written on personal reconciliation. Fewer books have been written on cultural reconciliation (my own Exclusion and Embrace [1996] being one of them). Rare are books, like Philpott’s, which focus on political reconciliation.
Is political reconciliation needed, however? Should we not strive mainly to create conditions for peace so that the fires of conflicts won’t ignite in the first place? So say the proponents of the “liberal, democratic peace,” the preferred approach of international institutions like the United Nations or the World Bank and Western governments to the challenges of post-conflict situations. “Hold and monitor elections, create constitutions that guarantee human rights and establish independent courts, reform military and police sectors, create the structure for free markets, and [perhaps] place human rights violators on trial,” and you’ll have peace, they argue (or, for the most part, assume). This approach, which traces its origins to Immanuel Kant’s famous essay Toward Perpetual Peace (1795), finds support in many circles outside the political establishment and its thinkers. In The Better Angels of our Nature (2011), Steven Pinker has recently argued, controversially, that “violence has declined over long stretches of time” and that “we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.” In Pinker’s judgment, much of the reason lies in setting up, first in the West and then elsewhere, the kinds of political conditions described in the “liberal peace.”
Why then political reconciliation? In part, Philpott argues, because in virtually all societies marked by significant inter-state and intra-state violence perpetrated by state actors, people demand more than liberal peace. They sense a powerful need for “a wider set of measures to ‘deal with the past,’ to borrow a phrase prevalent in Northern Ireland.” As the past partly defines our present through memories and reaches into the future by shaping our hopes, it is not possible to simply disregard it. Reconciliation, with forgiveness as its central element, is the way to deal with the past so as to make a peaceable future possible. Philpott’s mission in this book is “constructing an ethic of reconciliation, discovering its justifications, strengthening its synergies, ironing out its contradictions, and explaining its relevance for political orders.” He doesn’t aim to supplant the key elements of liberal peace but rather to supplement them and partly alter them by placing them into a larger framework.
Rights and equality, the pillars of liberal peace, are central to Philpott as well, but he places pursuit of them into the context of reconciliation, “the broad restoration of right relationship with respect to the wounds that political injustices exact.” Fleshed out in a political setting, reconciliation “is a concept of justice that aims to restore victims, perpetrators, citizens, and the governments of state that have been involved in political injustices to a condition of right relationship within a political order or between political orders.” Its key elements are (1) building just social institutions and relations between states, (2) acknowledgement, (3) reparations, (4) punishment, (5) apology, and (6) forgiveness. Each of these addresses “unique wounds in unique ways.”
From the perspective of the advocates of liberal peace, the two distinctive elements of reconciliation are apology and forgiveness. Philpott makes a significant contribution to thinking about apology and forgiveness as political practices. The two have their more natural place in relations among individual persons, as constituent elements of personal and cultural reconciliation. Matters get complicated when collectivities are involved, when apologies are requested and forgiveness granted by leaders on behalf of a nation or a regime. Such forgiving or apologizing raises hosts of challenges about the nature of forgiveness and apology, about the nature of collectivities and distribution of responsibility, about vicariousness and representation. Philpott negotiates these issues wisely.
His proposal, though, doesn’t amount to merely adding apology and forgiveness to “liberal peace.” The remaining four elements of his notion of reconciliation are not just taken over from “liberal peace.” They are recast in a way to contribute to the restoration of right relationship. Central in this recasting is the interplay between justice and mercy, a topic to which I will return at the end, after I touch briefly on three notable methodological features of his project.
(1) Philpott draws on the resources of religious traditions for the practice of reconciliation. That’s not mainly because religions are often factors contributing to violence, so that reconciliation has a better chance of succeeding if the cause of wounds can be turned into means of healing. Rather, it’s because religious traditions contain significant resources for the practice of reconciliation. Historically, most reconciliation efforts have in fact been inspired by religious traditions, in South Africa, Guatemala, East Timor, or Northern Ireland, to name only some examples.
(2) Religions differ; otherwise they wouldn’t be distinct religions. How will their adherents then agree on an ethic of reconciliation so that the practice of reconciliation can get going? One option is for people to abstract general principles from their respective faiths and use generic language and arguments in hope of finding consensus (an approach resonant with a secular version of political liberalism associated most commonly with John Rawls). Philpott opts for an alternative (resonant with the consocial account of political liberalism developed most compellingly by Nicholas Wolterstorff). Each participant, argues Philpott, should bring to the table “the complete set of their own convictions,” including beliefs “about justice that they have derived from these” convictions. “Through comparing, conversing, listening, seeking to understand, and sometimes revising their own views in light of the conversation, they may arrive at common ground on principles of justice.” The key word here is may—they may arrive at common ground. But what hope is there that they will, given that religions differ?
(3) In a globalized world in which people of multiple religions live under the same roof and in which religious differences present one reason for conflict—one reason, and often not even the main reason for conflict, since people fight primarily, as Thomas Hobbes noted in Leviathan, for gain, security, and reputation—it is important to know not only whether most religious traditions (say most world religions) contain resources for reconciliation but also whether their accounts of reconciliation overlap at least in their main contours. Philpott discusses three major religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and he argues that all three “are generators, hosts, and sources of the distinct concepts of justice, mercy, and peace that reside in reconciliation.” He could have added other religions as well, notably Buddhism and Jainism. Though the accounts of justice, mercy, and peace are distinct in each tradition (and differ within each), Philpott argues that they converge sufficiently to underwrite a common practice of reconciliation (or at least that these concepts can be articulated in a way faithful to each tradition in such a way as to underwrite a common practice of reconciliation).
In all this, I can follow Philpott. And yet I find the central concept of the book problematic. The concrete shape of the project rests on a simple claim: “Reconciliation is justice” (meaning, I take it, not that peace as the result of reconciliation is justice, but that reconciliation as the process of making peace takes place by doing justice). I disagree. Justice is a component of reconciliation; reconciliation requires acting mercifully and not merely acting justly. Let me illustrate my unease with reconciliation as justice by examining the place of justice in forgiveness, a critical element of reconciliation, the one most contested by the critics of reconciliation.
If “reconciliation as justice” is a process of doing what is just, then forgiveness, too, must be justice, a process of doing what is just. But is it? Consider Philpott’s own definition of forgiveness. When a person forgives, Philpott writes, “she no longer counts the perpetrator’s misdeeds against him and she views him as a person in good standing.” Defined in this way, forgiveness has two components, one implicit and one explicit but both essential. The implicit component is identification and condemnation of an act as a misdeed and of the person who committed it as a perpetrator. That identification requires an account of how a perpetrator ought to have acted or how the victim had the right to have been treated. A person should have acted justly and not violated the right of another, but he acted unjustly and therefore his act is rightfully called a misdeed and he a perpetrator (“justice 1”). The explicit component of forgiveness consists in no longer counting the perpetrator’s misdeed against him and viewing him as a person in good standing; that’s what one explicitly does when one forgives. On Philpott’s account of forgiveness and reconciliation, this explicit component of forgiveness should also be called justice; when one forgives one acts justly (“justice 2”). But to name “justice” both (1) “respecting a person’s rights and not wronging her” (“justice 1”) and (2) “not counting the wrong against the person who committed it” (“justice 2”) is not only confusing but mistaken. For if “justice 2” is in fact nothing more or less than acting justly, then a victim would owe forgiveness to a (contrite) perpetrator; not to forgive would be to wrong the per-petrator. But when a person forgives, she is giving a free gift; and when she refuses to forgive she is withholding generosity rather than incurring guilt by wronging the perpetrator. When a perpetrator receives forgiveness, he receives something to which he has no claim; he must always receive it as an undeserved gift. (In the Christian tradition, the victim has a duty to forgive; forgiveness is a gift, though not a supererogatory one. But from the victim’s duty to forgive doesn’t follow that she owes forgiveness to the perpetrator and that the perpetrator can claim forgiveness as rightfully his.)
One way to neutralize this dispute between Philpott and me about justice and reconciliation—he does formulate his position in explicit distinction to mine—is to deem it “terminological.” On my account, “justice 1” is justice, “justice 2” is mercy, and the two together define the right relationship among people and are best termed righteousness (which is equivalent to love). On Philpott’s account, “justice 1” and “justice 2” together make “justice” defined as the right relationship. Our difference may then be about terms but not about substance. From Philpott’s perspective, his way of putting things would have the advantage of letting him organize his proposal about political reconciliation around the key political virtue of justice. From my perspective, on the other hand, just because justice as a political virtue names what we owe other people, it would be misleading to talk of reconciliation as justice, for there are elements of reconciliation we don’t owe others and to which others have no claim.
Irrespective of who is right on the matter of reconciliation as justice, Philpott or I, he has rendered an immensely valuable service by formulating a compelling non-contrastive alternative to “liberal peace.” Just and Unjust Peace is an important guide for responsible action in the wake of massive violations of justice.
Miroslav Volf is Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture (yale.edu/faith). You can follow Miroslav on Twitter @MiroslavVolf and on Facebook.
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