Bronwyn Leebaw, in her post, notes that I seek to stave off the fate of Sophie Wilder, a character in a novel who converts to Catholicism then becomes estranged from her friends and family. Mirabile dictu, unlike Sophie Wilder, my book has met with great efforts to understand it, absorb it, and engage it thoughtfully, this at the hands of six reviewers each of whose own scholarship has contributed crucially to the contemporary conversation about the justice of dealing with past injustice. I am grateful. I am heartened, too, that each reviewer fundamentally “got” the book, grasping and in many ways finding sympathy with what I strove to argue.

The disagreements, though, are more interesting in a forum like this one so herein I focus on them. Two main criticisms appear in the reviews. Both concern the application of the ethic to the real world. One has to do with the overlapping consensus I have sought to construct among four schools and traditions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the restorative justice movement. Leebaw, Colleen Murphy, Leslie Vinjamuri, and Alex Bellamy question whether this consensus leaves out many other traditions and perspectives in the realm of transitional justice. Mark Freeman states a different version of the criticism in asking whether I stretch the terms of the argument too widely in trying to accommodate multiple perspectives. The second has to do with the ethic’s aspiration to holism. Is it not utopian? Murphy, Leebaw, and Vinjamuri each ask this question in different ways, worrying that the ethic is unable to provide guidance, resolve dilemmas, or handle backlash, adverse effects, political manipulation, and other problems of politics as usual.

Let us begin with the question of consensus. Murphy doubts that the ethic will receive the endorsement of secularists who do not subscribe to restorative justice, while Vinjamuri believes the same is true for a range of “local traditions and customs,” “many faith traditions,” some liberals, the Burmese, and communities that have mediated human rights in locally particular ways.

Consensus, however, is not the first or most important criteria by which my ethic—or any ethic—ought to be judged. As Murphy recognizes, my ethic has two tasks, the first of which is prior to the second. This first task is to set forth and defend a concept of justice. This concept, like any other ethic, whether that of Confucius, Kant, or Averroes, should be accepted or rejected, endorsed or argued with on its merits, not on whether a given set of people agree with or disagree with it. A valid criticism of this first task would be, “this is not an adequate notion of justice because it omits, contradicts, fails to specify,” and the like, and not simply “this or that group thinks differently.” The purpose of an ethic, after all, is to judge, practices, actions, and other concepts of justice. This would not be possible if the ethic found “agreement on every side of a multifaceted argument,” to use Freeman’s phrase. Just as we would not expect advocates of racial equality to seek agreement with segregationists or religious freedom with defenders of blasphemy codes, so we should not judge an ethic of restorative justice inadequate because it fails to find agreement with, say a consequentialist or a balance retributivist (two of the competing conceptions that I outline in the book). Now, the disagreement between my ethic of political reconciliation and its interlocutors is not as sharp as in these examples; some of the reviewers remark upon my efforts to find common ground with other points of view. I make these efforts indeed. Still, disagreements there are—with liberalism, consequentialism, balance retributivism, opponents of forgiveness, “agonistic” theorists, and other points of view. Whether the zone of disagreement with these other views can be reduced depends, as with any argument about ethics, on what sort of persuasion takes place in conversation among the viewpoints, not on whether the ethic converges with positions that exist prior to the conversation.

It is only once the substance of the ethic has been developed—the job of the first task—that I am interested in trying to show that it can command widespread endorsement. Because the ethic is generated from particular religious traditions and a school of justice, and because I hope that it will have wide applicability around the globe, I am interested to show that it might achieve endorsement beyond any one of these traditions. Leebaw argues that I draw from the Christian tradition more than any other. She is right; I do. I then try to show that the core commitments of the ethic—its notions of justice, peace and mercy—find resonance in the Jewish tradition, the Islamic tradition, and the restorative justice school of thought. Restorative justice is important because it has secular articulations and thus shows that the ethic is expressible in secular terms—an important trait if the ethic is to travel to the United Nations or organizations that typically operate in secular terms.

It is not my aim, though, that the ethic will be practiced only among these traditions. For the sake of realism I choose to develop this group of traditions. The framework of overlapping consensus, though, is one in which other traditions might join. In my travels in Africa, I have discovered numerous tribal traditions whose rituals and practices of reconciliation deeply resonate with the ethic of political reconciliation. They are holistic and involve several interconnected practices, many of which are the same as those in the ethic. One of the greatest theorists of restorative justice, Australia’s John Braithwaite, argues that restorative justice is the approach to dealing with the past that resonates with the vast majority of the world’s cultures and religions over the course of history. This is a big claim whose validity I am unable to evaluate. But if Braithwaite is even close to being correct, then the potential for overlapping consensus is strong.

None of this is to deny the challenge and the likelihood of partial results in finding resonance on the ethic among traditions. Traditions themselves contain internally conflicting schools; in the book I note these in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as dimensions of the ethic in which convergence between these entire traditions will fall short. It is difficult to say ex ante, prior to the hard work of searching for mutual resonance,how much convergence between the ethic and any given tradition will be possible. No tradition will converge fully. As Murphy and Vinjamuri rightly note, many ethics will not sign on given their currently extant beliefs, prior to a conversation in which mutual persuasion is attempted. Most importantly, the pursuit of consensus, the object of the second task, is a pursuit based upon a fixed set of commitments, those developed in the first task. Given these commitments, given that they will converge and diverge with the range of views out there in the world, how wide can the zone of agreement be extended?

The real world is also the subject of the other major concern raised in the symposium. I do not account adequately, the criticism runs, for what will likely happen when the practices hit politics: backlash, backfire, manipulation, strategic use on the part of the powerful, and breakdown in moving from practice to product. The ethic’s notion of justice is too encompassing of everything to make hard choices and resolve dilemmas about anything and is unable to show in what sequence practices ought to be adopted. My response is threefold.

First it is all true! That is, politics is replete with all of these dynamics. I might add to my interlocutors’ litany the constraints imposed by the balance of power between rivals during a transition as well as the effects of time, over which possibilities for justice expand and contract. Here it is worth quoting a passage from the book:

Commending reconciliation does not deny the difficulty of reconciliation any more than advocacy of human rights or economic equality denies that both of these values are massively violated in the world today. One practice but not another will occur in one country while another combination of practices will occur in another country; any practice will occur in pieces and in parts and will remain imperfect and fragmentary. While the justifications for the practices will show how, in principle, they might be restorative, none of these rationales warrants assurance that these restorations will be successful where citizens have suffered colossal injustices. Political reconciliation will be compromised by the obstructions of the powerful, the destruction of institutions, the chaos of the aftermath of war and dictatorship, and by the simple complexity of the practices. (61)

I might add that I argue for political reconciliation, the kind that applies to citizens in the political sphere, and not comprehensive reconciliation, relevant to all of life. Political reconciliation is more circumscribed and limited and less ambitious.

I suspect, though, that my interlocutors will not be satisfied by my admission that the ethic will be partially achieved. They seem to be asking that my theory predict, explain, and provide guidance through these complexities. I am doubtful, though, that this is possible, precisely because of the utter complexity and variability of these factors. Let me add to the above litany of breakdown a further complexity: the real world is also replete with breakthroughs. Though all of the six practices in my ethic are fraught in their application, all of them have taken place abundantly all over the world in the past generation: truth commissions, reparations settlements, apologies, acts of forgiveness, trials, and so on. In my reading of the cases, I discovered that along with unintended effects and perverse incentives, there are truth commissions for which polls show victims approving, cases of victims whose demand for revenge is dampened by effective acknowledgment, acts of forgiveness that victims report as healing and that sometimes change the hearts of perpetrators, and so on.

Once the range of malfunctions and successes alike are factored in, it becomes an extremely ambitious task to account for what sort of dynamic is going to obtain in what sort of situation. I do make some limited claims about sequence. For instance, I note that practices like forgiveness and acknowledgment best take place after a war has ended or a dictatorship has fallen. This is a weak claim, though, and even it is too simple. The anti-apartheid movement in South Africa espoused reconciliation even during the struggle against apartheid, a theme that would have great effects after the transition. Even the premise behind sequencing—that events are discrete phenomenon with a clear beginning and end—may prove questionable.

It is really social scientific knowledge that is needed to understand these dynamics of application, not ethical reasoning, which is the sort that I take on in the book. Perhaps social scientists will make progress in offering strong and useful generalizations about what sort of dynamics obtain under what sort of conditions. In that case, ethics and social science could be complementary. Vinjamuri, for example, has done valuable comparative case study work showing that trials undertaken during war rarely facilitate and often hinder the achievement of piece—a useful thing to know. Still, my sense of the potential of social science to yield broad generalizations—a sense that I have developed in over two decades in political science—is that even the best empirical work will not yield laws and patterns that are strong and robust enough to tame the vastly situational judgment that decisionmakers must bring to their choices. Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but this is my strong sense.

Does this mean, then, that the framework is so vague, abstract, and removed from political reality that it provides no guidance? Such a conclusion would be disappointing, for one of my hopes for the book is that it would reduce the gap between theory and practice. My second response to my interlocutors is that the ethic does in fact provide significant guidance for just action. It cannot and should not supplant the zone of choice in which a decisionmaker must apply prudential judgment but it does point the way to some approaches rather than others. What the ethic does for the justice of dealing with the past is much analogous to what the just war theory does for war. Its norms definitively rule out some courses of action like the intentional killing of innocents and preventive war and offer other criteria for action like proportionality, last resort, and right intention. Even these criteria, especially the latter ones, leave substantial room for judgment as to whether they are fulfilled, while no criterion can substitute for strategy, battle plans, or the likely effects of choosing one course of action over another. Even if a given attack is just in principle, will it likely inflame the enemy population into a debilitating counterattack? Even if a plan secures a just victory, will its losses so harm the morale of the troops that the war will be lost and its just cause defeated? No ethic can answer such questions. I follow Aristotle and Aquinas in bequeathing them to the virtue of prudence. Still, though, the ethic provides criteria that will rule out some choices and narrow down others. It certainly provides far more criteria than Realism’s open-ended notion of the national interest.

So if my ethic of reconciliation provides concrete guidance, of what does this consist? Here are eleven illustrative resultant conclusions:

1) We should reject a “cheap reconciliation” that lacks human rights, the rule of law, accountability and other values. This stands as a sharp critique to numerous leaders who have advocate reconciliation in just these terms.

2) The ethic has an answer to the question of amnesty and the dilemma of peace vs. justice. It says that amnesty is always a sacrifice of justice but one that might be justified (though still as a second best) if necessary to secure peace or a transition to democracy and that ought to be accompanied by other restorative measures.

3) We should reject the dichotomy of punishment vs. forgiveness that has been deployed by a wide range of practitioners in the international community, usually to the detriment of forgiveness. Showing how these practices are compatible opens the door to a wider practice of forgiveness (judicial punishment already has strong support).

4) The ethic also addresses numerous other objections to forgiveness that stand in the way of its advocacy and practice.

5) Community justice forums as a mode of practicing punishment ought to be expanded and improved (while less ought to be expected from the International Criminal Court).

6) Apology and reparations are complementary. One ought not to be practiced without the other. Examples show victims rightly complaining when one appear in isolation.

7) Reparations ought to focus less on restoring victims to their status quo ante and focus more on acting as a symbolic communication. This has implications for determining reparations’ magnitude and mode of delivery.

8) Acknowledgment is at its best when it involves victims in an active, personal way. Local community forums perhaps perform this best. A commission that offers a report in which victims are little but statistics performs this worst.

9) Collective apology is ethically justifiable but ought to respect the right to dissent from it.

10) Collective forgiveness, a practice that is rare, is justifiable and might become more widespread.

11) It is entirely appropriate for religious actors and religious actors to be involved in transitional justice; the record shows that they have much to offer in terms of leadership and resources. They should not be sidelined by secular arguments for “public reason.”

Again, none of these conclusions can tell us, say, when a leader should agree to amnesty rather than continue to fight and pursue prosecution, what to do in the face of backlash and denial, and the like. The conclusions do offer judgments, though, that favor some courses of action and disfavor others and that ally with some existing paradigms and stand opposed to others.

Third and finally, we do well to remember that the purpose of ethics is not simply to prescribe specific courses of action. One of its purposes is to guide judgment and assessment, whether or not one is directly involved in the action. Again, a passage from the book, this one from the conclusion, helps to make the point:

What does justice consist of in the wake of its massive violation? I chose this as my framing question for a deliberate reason: because justice matters for its own sake, as an end in itself, even apart from whether or how often it is enacted and with what results. To hasten to results is to ignore this intrinsic importance or else to adopt, perhaps unreflectively, an ersatz consequentialism. Two friends sit in a café hotly debating the death penalty. Neither is an employee in the criminal justice system, an activist, or a friend or relative of a victim or defendant. Their country’s death penalty laws are not about to change; each of their votes matter infinitesimally. Still they argue, cajole, and rejoin, ever more heatedly. It matters to them a great deal what sort of justice their government renders, what sort of society in which they live. Conversations like this one take place continuously, ubiquitously, over innumerable issues. To the people who engage in them, justice matters. Justice matters all the more if one believes, with philosopher John Rawls, that it is the first virtue of social institutions. (286)

In countries confronting past injustices and seeking to move forward, too, thousands of ordinary people simply want to know how to think about justice. They turn to their frameworks, religious, cultural, and philosophical. So, the frameworks are important.

Even for those involved in the action, though, ethics is not simply a matter of making hard choices and confronting difficult dilemmas, though it is importantly that. It is also a matter of reconceiving the field of possibilities, of thinking creatively and expansively so as to open up pathways that might not have been conceived otherwise. Thinking of justice, peace, and mercy in a new way does not merely show us what move to make within a game but also helps to restructure the game—that is, the ends and means of politics. As Nukhet Sandal recognizes most directly, this is what I believe religious traditions can help us do.

Not without reason, then, Daniel Philpott starts from the assumption that war leaves behind wounds of injustice. These are not just physical bodily wounds—though they are paramount—but are wounds in the form of violations of human rights, wounds of ignorance about the source and circumstance of injustice, wounds derived from lack of acknowledgement, and what Philpott describes as “the standing victory of the wrongdoer’s political injustice.” Taking a somewhat Kantian line, Philpott notes that wrongdoers are also themselves wounded by their acts, a view that also finds strong resonance in the religious traditions that he examines.. Their wrongdoing creates a moral sickness that inhibits fulfilment and happiness. As Philpott reminds us, the technology of the gas chamber was first developed as a way of saving German firing squads from the trauma caused by their deeds.

When all the wounds of war and oppression are taken into account, it is perhaps unsurprising that so many peace processes—as many as half by some calculations—are doomed to fail. Sometimes, the victory of the wrongdoer is allowed to stand. Those, who like I, have visited post-war Srebrenica understand the palpable sense of injustice felt by the mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters of the more than 7,600 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who were massacred when that town was “ethnically cleansed.” Today, Srebrenica is an almost 100% Serbian town. The victory of injustice was allowed to stand. Other times, victims of rights abuse may resent the absence of acknowledgement or reparation; perpetrators may be reluctant to acknowledge their wrongs or relinquish their gains. Whatever the precise nature of the tension, the social bonds and contracts that knit societies together will have been destroyed; trust broken; resentment amassed. No matter how much effort and how many resources are dedicated to the rebuilding of institutions, infrastructure and homes, peace is unlikely to be durable unless it rests on the firm foundation of genuine reconciliation. This is why Just and Unjust Peace is such a welcome, and important, read. It makes both a well-reasoned argument in favor of a politics of reconciliation in the face of war and oppression and sets out six principal methods for achieving that goal: building socially just institutions, acknowledgement of past wrongs by the perpetrators, reparations, punishment, apology, and forgiveness.

At its heart, this book is a passionate and compelling defense of political reconciliation written in the spirit of some of the great peacemakers of our time. Desmond Tutu and some of the controversies he has aroused is a frequent point of reference, but the tenor of the book also reminds us of the logic behind Ramos Horta’s decision to privilege the normalizing of relations with Jakarta above retribution and punishment after the bloodshed in East Timor. The central points—and the tools for restoring societies to balance—will be familiar to students of peace studies. Mark Amstutz’s work on political forgiveness springs to mind. But what this book adds—brilliantly to my mind—is a deep and well-argued account of why communities, states and international organizations should pursue this path, and an account firmly rooted in political philosophy and religious tradition.

Naturally, there are points that could be quibbled with in terms of the logic of some of Philpott’s argument. As other reviewers have pointed out, reconciliation is not necessarily a prerequisite to peace—if we understand that term to mean “the absence of war.” There are plenty of cases where peace has prevailed without reconciliation. North and South Korea, Japan and Russia, and Bosnia are conflicts where there has been little evidence of reconciliation of the sort espoused by Philpott but also no resumption of armed conflict—yet. However, I am less worried than others about this possibility because whilst what Johan Galtung described as “negative peace” (i.e. the absence of war) may prevail without reconciliation, “positive peace” (i.e. the absence of fear, the fulfilment of human rights) almost never will. Without reconciliation and the forging of positive peace, communities will always be wary, always insecure, always unsatisfied and—for the utilitarians among us—will always misdirect precious resources and energies away from productive and fulfilling activities and towards their own protection from future threats. As scholars in International Relations know only too well, this can in turn create “security dilemmas” in which one group’s preparations for self-defense appear aggressive to another, sparking that group to step up its own preparations. Herein lies one of the ways in which negative peace can degenerate back into violent conflict. What is more, peace without reconciliation is much easier when the unreconciled parties have an international boundary or ocean between them. Where the lines of dispute are communal and fuzzy, as they often are in the aftermath of civil war (by far the most common kind of war today), the day-to-day necessities of engagement make reconciliation all the more pressing.

Another source of criticism has been that Philpott grounds his ethic of reconciliation in three major religious traditions—Christianity, Islam and Judaism—and a secular ethic he describes as the “liberal peace.” The cornerstones of the politics of reconciliation he sets out are derived from what Philpott claims to be an “overlapping consensus” across these traditions. Of course, though, this remains a decidedly partial account of justice principles, none of which originate from Africa for example. This problem worries me less than it worries others primarily because most of the ethical traditions I’m familiar with embrace most of the values that Philpott includes within his account of reconciliation and because Philpott himself acknowledges two key caveats to his argument—that reconciliation will never be complete or perfect and that the precise form that it takes should differ according to the context. Philpott is right, in my view, to recognize that religious traditions have ethical content that can be useful to reconciliation. We need to recognize, however, that the application of religious arguments and concepts may be more helpful in some circumstances than in others, and that Philpott’s own reading of the essential aspects of those traditions is itself partial and downplays elements that are antithetical to reconciliation. As Norwegian diplomats engaged in the Oslo peace process in the Middle East would attest, contested claims to ownership over sacred sites rooted in a theological epistemology that knows no compromise are one of the few utterly impenetrable obstacles to reconciliation.

Yet these strike me as issues that present themselves in particular contexts. Of course—as Philpott acknowledges—the politics of reconciliation must make sense in the time and place in which it occurs; it must be rooted in the locale. Tutu’s use of religion during his time as chair as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was right in that time and place. It was right, precisely because it was Tutu. It may not be right in other settings. Whatever the configuration, however, it is clear that the politics of reconciliation should be front and center of any attempt at building peace in the aftermath of war and grave injustice.

Philpott suggests that the ethic of political reconciliation can succeed on two grounds where the liberal peace, and its alternatives, has failed. The first is in its ability to generate widespread consensus, and the second to deliver a more robust peace. Here Philpott is on to something. Undoubtedly, there has been significant domestic opposition in multiple cases to the incursions of the International Criminal Court, the international ad hoc tribunals, and other practices associated with liberal peacebuilding. Sometimes opposition has been grounded in the claim that international justice does not resonate with local understandings of justice or domestic traditions. But Philpott’s efforts at generating consensus may err in assuming that a prescribed ethic which is compatible with that “zone of agreement” between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and also restorative justice can surmount this critique. In one sense, this is a minimalist approach that recognizes the need for bringing on board followers of a small number of major traditions with considerable global influence. In another sense, though, the basis for consensus is quite thin. Local traditions and customs as well as many faith traditions remain excluded or at least not explicitly included in justice and reconciliation efforts. At the level of practice, an ethic that embraces human rights as central to reconciliation may also be more problematic than Philpott acknowledges. Much attention has been devoted to the crucial role of agents in negotiating norms and introducing practices that resonate locally. Brokers, norm entrepreneurs, vernacularizers, and the like, who are capable of adapting, translating, negotiating, and articulating norms and practices into local contexts, are not part of this account any more than, perhaps, a negotiated consensus among stakeholders.

Scholars and practitioners cast their gaze on transitional states in the Global South when they think of peacebuilding. But, in the current international environment, generating consensus on the value of Philpott’s six practices among leaders in the North may be difficult, even when these practices sit comfortably within the zone of agreement that Philpott identifies. The liberal peacebuilding that Philpott critiques includes practices that liberal democratic states in North America and Europe have frequently shunned. Only weeks ago Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe threatened to withdraw Japan’s apology, one of the ethic’s core practices, for its World War II sex crimes. Whether naming, shaming, persuasion, or some other tactic by proponents of reconciliation and justice will be enough remains to be seen. Tougher sanctions from the international community may also prove crucial to generating consensus, as they did when softer efforts by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and its NGO supporters to persuade the Serbs to deliver Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague failed.

More important than consensus, for Philpott, political reconciliation aims to generate a more robust peace, one that goes considerably beyond simply ending violence and delivers restorations for the injustices incurred. The restorations that reconciliation strives for are important on their own terms, and so Philpott rejects the sparse frame of a consequentialist ethic. Consequentialism is not problematic, he claims; it is just incomplete. But Philpott does not attempt to articulate a causal theory for how to bring these restorations about, which is problematic, since the political context and the sequence in which his six practices are deployed may affect the outcome. For example, the relationship between socially just institutions and the use of punishment is hotly debated by consequentialists and liberal peace advocates. Consequentialists have argued that in the absence of robust institutions that can contain spoilers, punishment may trigger adverse effects that are harmful to any form of peace, let alone reconciliation. As another example, human rights are central to the political ethic of reconciliation, but forcing human rights into the conversations about reconciliation too early in a transition may well backfire. In Burma, civil society advocates have been reluctant to embrace the language of human rights for fear it will undermine their efforts to engage constructively in fostering a democratic transition. They also fear that premature engagement with human rights initiatives led by the state will lead to co-optation.

In many cases, peace and democracy have flourished without the kind of restorations Philpott refers to. Philpott may claim that the ethical conditions for political reconciliation have not been satisfied in such cases, but the relationship between practices (apology, for example) and product (a restored relationship, for example) cannot be assumed, and many things intervene along the way—a fact that Philpott will be painfully aware of given his extensive fieldwork and engagement in the real world of peacebuilding. Still, restorations may sometimes be settled through the satisfaction of democratic participation, may require renewed violence, or may be best settled through the apologies and reparations that Philpott prescribes. There are also fundamental sequencing questions that force us to look beyond the six practices of political reconciliation and toward preconditions that may determine their effectiveness. For many, reconciliation has been prescribed by the powerful as a means of co-opting revolutionaries and putting out rebellions. A just peace may depend on rejecting reconciliation until those who reject repression have succeeded in the violent overthrow of a repressive regime. Even those with benign intentions may seek to negotiate a peace that mitigates violence in the short term only to generate protracted repression and subsequent outbreaks of violence. The robust peace that Philpott’s ethic of reconciliation aspires to achieve may well presuppose a just war fought to a decisive end.

Political reconciliation sets the bar for post-conflict peacebuilding high. It encompasses much of what the liberal peace does, but asks for far more. At the same time that its efforts to generate consensus may not be ambitious enough, it may also simply be too ambitious. Just and Unjust Peace gives us a highly sophisticated, careful, rich, and persuasive conception of justice by which to evaluate post-conflict peacebuilding. Few works have attempted such a daunting task, and those that have do not compare. If, however, one accepts its aspirational—even utopian—qualities, Just and Unjust Peace articulates a vision for post-conflict states that will undoubtedly generate important debate and raise our expectations.

The meaning of political reconciliation for Philpott centers on what he calls the “restoration of right relationship.” When a society emerges out of war or dictatorship, it is full of wounded relationships: among citizens, among communities, and between the state and its citizens and communities. These wounds are created by political injustices, the particular sort of injustices that transitional justice, at its best, seeks to address. Philpott argues that an effective conception of political reconciliation must address such injustices, and he roots his conception in a mix of religious and legal doctrines and traditions: human rights, restorative justice, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He offers a conception of transitional justice that goes well beyond the liberal peace.

Philpott’s project is to find the points of commonality between these traditions. Some scholars see Islamic notions of punishment as antithetical to human rights, or Christian notions of forgiveness as antithetical to punishment, or restorative justice as antithetical to the prevailing penalistic account of transitional justice. Philpott offers a different point of view, one that acknowledges the tensions within and between these traditions, but that ultimately highlights how—in relation to political injustices—each of them is geared toward righting relationships that have been wounded. He also shows how the liberal and religious transitional-justice vocabularies are fundamentally convergent. The former uses terms like civic trust and social capital, and the latter terms like harmony and reconciliation, but for all intents and purposes they focus on the common end-game that Philpott calls “right relationship.”

I believe that Philpott gets it right by viewing transitions out of war and dictatorship as being simultaneously, and fundamentally, about the treatment of wounds and the restoration of relationships. Societies in transition require fixes that go far beyond the technical or individual levels. They are societies broken on moral, legal, and political levels, perhaps even on spiritual levels. Whole new relationships need to be reimagined, reconstructed, and reconfigured. This is the most important priority in achieving the kind of beyond-liberal “just peace” that Philpott refers to in the title of his book. And it is clear that Philpott sees transitional justice as an integral part of the exercise because of its capacity to transform the human and institutional relationships that are the basis for any stable society. As he states in the book: “One of the most important goals of practices of political reconciliation is to change the judgments that people form in response to political injustices….” (46).

In addition to offering a coherent framework for his ideas, Philpott introduces a number of memorable terms, such as “overlapping consensus,” “rooted reason,” “personalism,” and the “standing victory of the perpetrator’s injustice.” The latter is of particular interest. Philpott uses this to express the idea that right relationship (i.e., political reconciliation) cannot be achieved as long as there is a perception of political injustice. This leads him to embrace rather than reject punishment and atrocity trials as part of his overall theory. But his embrace is not a maximalist one: he favors a “presumption of punishment” but contests the assertion that punishment and atrocity trials can never give way to competing priorities. I share this view, which is a rational one if you start from the premise that successful transitions may in some cases require principled suspensions of criminal justice.

However, while I am in broad agreement with Philpott’s argument, let me also express some reservations.

First, I believe that the book may hold limited value for the transitional justice practitioner. The debates that it summarizes, and the case studies and examples cited, are not sufficiently new or original. They will be familiar, with the smallest of exceptions, to anyone knowledgeable about the core transitional justice literature of the last fifteen years. For example, Philpott makes reference throughout the book to major experiences of the field in the 1990s, such as those of Germany, Chile, South Africa, and Rwanda. Yet there is hardly any reference to the more complicated and well-covered cases that dominated the last decade of transitional justice discourse and practice, such as Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Colombia. This gap leaves the book feeling somewhat dated and, however unintentionally, cherry-picked. It is even a greater shame that the book, despite being published in 2012, makes no reference to the Arab world’s revolutions and transitions, which have special relevance for a theoretical framework that seeks to reconcile Islam with a universalist rights-based account of political reconciliation.

Another reservation I have about Philpott’s book has to do with a feeling of “overreach.” In advancing an all-encompassing theory of political reconciliation that seeks to synergize traditions as diverse as human rights, restorative justice, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Philpott sometimes needs to stretch the ordinary meaning of certain terms in order to make them fit his theory—for example, by arguing that justice and political reconciliation, following his philosophical dissection, are one and the same. This kind of stretching of terms and traditions feels overwrought at times, giving the occasional sense that the book is as much a work of word-smithing as one of ideas. This is an understandable consequence of trying to advance a theory that will find agreement on every side of a multifaceted argument.

Finally, as much as I agree with the book’s substantive content, there are a few points with which I disagree. For example, Philpott boldly argues toward the end of his treatise that forgiveness of the perpetrator by the victim is necessary in order to fully overcome the standing victory of a perpetrator’s injustice. This is one of the only unconvincing, and arguably unnecessary, parts of his otherwise compelling treatise. He simply does not make the case convincingly enough that political reconciliation is incomplete without forgiveness. Other minor quibbles I could note are of less consequence to his overall thesis. For example, there is very little discussion about vetting—a crucial tool for righting the state-society relationship—and what little discussion he includes is oddly located under the section on punishment rather than the one on “building socially just institutions.” Similarly, Philpott’s treatment of apology as an entirely separate section from the one on reparations is surprising, as is his treatment of amnesty, which he mistakenly describes as a subcategory of pardon rather than the reverse and which he oddly locates within the section on punishment rather than on forgiveness.

Ultimately, though, I cannot but admire the ambition of Philpott’s book and the sheer breadth of topics it covers. His formulation of “political reconciliation” is generally convincing and in time may come to influence transitional justice theory and terminology. His more integrated approach to the issues is one that ought to be widely endorsed, especially in a time when the theory and practice of transitional justice have become counter-productively and illogically synonymous with the fight against impunity.

Before we come back to the epistemic status of religious interpretation and diverse public theologies, we should highlight the current status of peacebuilding and post-conflict justice initiatives. For years, we have followed the failure of an understanding that solely focuses on finding the culprits and punishing them for the past injustices. The operational successes of the international courts do not usually translate into positive peace, stable governance, and sound economic development. Conflicts erupt again or at the very least, structural violence continues. We can even say that we are in a state of crisis and the recipes developed in the offices of international organizations are not of much help. Philpott’s book emphasizes these gaps in our understanding. His concept of “restorative justice” and review of six practices of political reconciliation (namely, building just institutions, acknowledgment, reparations, apologies, punishment and forgiveness) remind the ideals one should pursue in peacebuilding. However, such a holistic approach to complicated processes requires us to overcome our biases in the field and one of the biggest steps towards this goal is taking religion seriously.

One widespread bias in the field is manifested through dismissing religion as an emotional, irrational and arbitrary element. Liberal skeptics dismiss the role of religious “knowledge” and the significance of reconciliation in attaining a long term peace. I have argued elsewhere that religious leaders and networks constitute epistemic communities with their expertise, competence and policy relevant knowledge in theology. Religious traditions offer insights in multiple fields ranging from development to human rights. In that sense, religious knowledge follows Weberian “value rationality” and it is part of the Foucauldian post-modern episteme that champions the spiritual dimension while acknowledging the scientific advances. The mere existence of conferences, conventions, and peer-reviewed publications in theology shows the presence of a structured expert community, criticisable, and refutable knowledge in text analysis, interpretation, and application. One can even claim that theology comes close to following a Weberian “formal rationality” when it comes to hermeneutics and exegesis.

Religious epistemic communities of peacebuilding and reconciliation have become much more prominent in the last couple of decades. These networks are familiar not only with the sources their respective traditions provide, but also with the local conditions, sensitivities and expectations. Given that a significant portion of the peacebuilding terminology is borrowed from scriptural sources, religious leaders should be seen as natural contributors to debates surrounding healing of wounds. Unfortunately, religious roots of reconciliation and forgiveness are often conveniently forgotten. Philpott brings these roots back to the scene and he traces the development and transformation of some vital concepts of restorative justice within theological frameworks. Examples in the book include the concept of “solidarity”, and how Jurgen Moltman, among others, contributed to the concept as a theologian; the meanings of shalom (peace) and teshuva (repentance) in Judaic tradition and how they are manifested in different writings; and the possibilities sulh, the concept of conciliation in Islam, provides in post-conflict settings. Beyond this epistemological dimension, reconciliation means addressing traumas and recovery of what has been lost both materially and spiritually. It means restoring trust and hope. Such a sensitive process requires a wide array of methods, tools and dimensions, including practices associated with religion. Philpott’s conceptualization of restorative justice shows that such an integrated approach is possible and each practice of political reconciliation can not only easily be located in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, but also sometimes directly emerge from religious traditions.

One common misjudgment in conflict transformation is that religion is illogical and irrational, and it cannot be part of policy debates due to its arbitrary nature. However, religious actors and secular ones can converse using similar standards. As Philpott notes, arguments solely from fiat or private revelation “typify bad religious arguments, not religious arguments per se” (111) and religious arguments are “amenable to examination, understanding, consideration, criticism, partial agreement, contradiction and argument…” In many official settings, religious language is ruled out from the very beginning. This is unfortunately a loss for those of us who work towards peace—those who initiate violence are more willing to tap into religious justifications than those who want to bring justice and stability.

The second important contribution I mentioned in the beginning—and an important distinction—that the book makes is the recognition of the changing nature of public theologies, or in Scott Appleby’s words, the “ambivalence of the sacred” in peace processes. In his work on religion and comparative politics, Philpott has already elaborated on political theologies and differentiation of political structures. This work is significant as it tackles religious manifestations on an institutional level and does not assume that a given tradition has fixed traits. In settings ranging from Argentina to Rwanda, religious institutions have supported dictatorial regimes or did nothing to intervene in the human rights violations. Once again though, this is more of an institutional deficit rather than a norm that can be attributed to a religious tradition. To put it bluntly, discarding religious resources due to bad institutional practices and narrow ideologies is as meaningless as doing away with the field of economics altogether because some banks contributed to a financial crisis.

Unfortunately, many academics and peacebuilders still leave out religion in conversations about justice and stability. Once again, this is mostly due to frustration with institutions. I observed this lack of confidence in religious institutions when I was conducting research on the role of religious actors in conflict transformation in Northern Ireland. There were courageous and quite influential religious leaders like Fr. Alex Reid, Cardinal Cahal Daly, Rev. Harold Good, Rev. John Dunlop and Archbishop Robin Eames who played roles in realizing a stable Northern Irish society. However, members of the civil society working on the peace process expressed their disappointment with the churches as institutions while acknowledging the contributions of individual religious leaders and their theologies of co-existence and peace. Another observation I made as an outsider was that elite members of the civil society, political parties and academia were much more resistant to exploring the full potential of religious discourse in reconciliation than people on the street. I also experienced such an instance of resistance on a panel about Israeli-Palestinian peace process I once chaired. I asked the participants (prominent Israeli and Palestinian civil society representatives) about the potential role of religious actors in conciliation and building alternative communication channels. In one voice, five panelists turned to me and said that “there is no place for religion; whenever religion comes into picture, things get worse.” It was a bit ironic that the panel was organized by a Judaic Studies department—the religion dimension was there even if the participants had not thought about it.

To conclude, Philpott opens the way for a healthy discussion of the role of religious traditions and actors by introducing an ethic of political reconciliation. Just and Unjust Peace is a fascinating piece of work that is in the intersection of religious studies, conflict resolution and peacebuilding. It takes religious knowledge as well as experience of reconciliation and peacebuilding seriously; it reveals many possibilities religious traditions contain within themselves towards achieving restorative justice. Most importantly, the book does not bring in religion at the expense of the secular approaches but as a necessary complement to them. That is why it is a required reading for social scientists, religious studies/theology scholars who are interested in reconciliation as well as NGO officials who are in search of inclusive ways of attaining a long lasting peace.

Four guided missiles packed with explosive material hurtled into the morning sky. Though the day was brilliant blue and cloudless, no one saw them coming. They were aimed at a nation that did not see itself at war. Moreover, it was a nation convinced that missiles fired in anger no longer posed a serious threat to its security. The weapons were conventional in the strict sense: they did not carry nuclear warheads.

But the weapons and the attackers who launched them were anything but conventional. The 19 hijackers who commandeered four civilian jetliners on the morning of September 11, 2001, were not sent by a state or nation. They were not motivated by any purely secular or political cause. Born of religious zeal, they sought to strike a blow against a power they believed was in thralldom and service to Satan. Motivated by faith, they wanted to strike a blow for Allah.

Religion, which was supposed to have been permanently sidelined by secularization, suddenly appeared to be at the center of world affairs. Seemingly without warning, faith had transgressed the neat boundaries that organized the thinking and planning of our best and brightest policy makers, policy analysts, and scholars. Religious believers were supposed to stay confined to one side of the boundary that sealed private faith off from global public affairs—a boundary that separated the irrational from the rational, the mystical from the purposeful. However, guided by an astonishing combination of zealous faith and coolly calculating rationality, September 11 showed that organized religious believers could act with purpose, power, and public consequence.

And we—not only America, but the whole world of professional policy-making and analysis—were unprepared. As Robert Keohane, a leading international relations scholar, had the humility to admit shortly afterward:

The attacks of September 11 reveal that all mainstream theories of world politics are relentlessly secular with respect to motivation. They ignore the impact of religion, despite the fact that world-shaking political movements have so often been fueled by religious fervor. None of them takes very seriously the human desire to dominate or to hate—both so strong in history and in classical realist thought. [emphasis added]

In his own post-9/11 analysis, however, Keohane also had the honesty to say: “Since I have few insights into religious motivations in world politics, I will leave this subject to those who are more qualified to address it.”

This edited volume picks up where Keohane left off. In the light of religion’s global resurgence, most dramatized by 9/11, it attempts a radical rethinking of the relationship between religion and world affairs, hence the title. It brings together scholars who are eminently qualified to analyze how and why religious motivations, actors, ideas, and organizations matter for contemporary world affairs. It addresses some of the reasons that theories of world politics and world affairs have been slow to address religious factors, how and why religious factors are influencing important global dynamics, and how we need to adapt our theories of world affairs to the realities and implications of this resurgence.

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There was once a virtually unbroken consensus in the foundational works of social science about modernization and religion. One part of this consensus was empirical or factual. The other was normative or ethical. The empirical assumption was that with economic modernization or “development,” religion would decline. The ethical assumption was that with political modernization and its attendant “democratization,” religion should be confined to the private sphere. Description and prescription went happily together.

Both parts of this consensus are now in question. The September 11 attacks clearly demonstrated that the consensus was wrong. Well before and apart from September 11, however, the consensus was increasingly difficult to sustain. A multitude of simultaneously developed and vibrantly religious societies—starting with the United States—explodes the empirical assumption. A multitude of simultaneously democratic and luxuriantly faith-saturated societies—including India, Turkey, and Indonesia—explodes the ethical assumption. And ten years after September 11, 2001, religious militancy remains a powerful force—in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and numerous other locales—that individual governments and the international community have proven unable to defeat or even contain.

This old consensus is nevertheless stubborn. It still structures much of our study and understanding of the role of religion in world affairs. It does so because many of the concepts and conceptual distinctions on which it was founded remain firmly lodged in the minds of international relations scholars, as Bryan Hehir describes in chapter 1 of this book. The meaning of concepts such as “secularism,” “modernity,” “power,” and “public life” is assumed without hesitation or complication. With equal confidence, a sharp boundary is drawn between these concepts and phenomena assumed to be their polar opposites: “religion,” “tradition,” “theology,” “faith,” and “private worship.”

Much classical thinking and practice in world affairs is thus a form of border patrol. It is concerned with policing and strengthening the fence between two worlds. The first world is the “secular” and “public” world in which international actors—nation-states and the multilateral organizations that bind them together—are presumed to make rational choices in the pursuit of political and economic power. The second world is the “spiritual” and “private” world in which religious actors—everything from church hierarchies to clerical councils to violent organizations such as Al Qaeda and Hizbollah—are presumed to make faith-based choices in the pursuit of nonrational or irrational goals. As with the empirical assumption about religion and economic development, the factual assumption about these two worlds is that they are two separate universes, with little to no mutual contact or interaction. As with the ethical or normative assumption about religion and political democratization, the ethical or moral assumption about these two worlds is that they should be kept as far apart as possible.

However, it is true that what could be called classical secularization theory recognized the reality and legitimacy of some traffic between these two universes. Classical secularization theory assumed the descriptive and prescriptive forms noted at the beginning: it expected the automatic decline of religion in the face of development and required the hermetic isolation of religion in the face of democracy. On one hand, the forces of development and progress would so impinge on the world of religion that religion would have little to do and less space in which to do it. Modern progress would make the security and comfort offered by religion increasingly unnecessary. Modernization, in other words, would infiltrate, occupy, and diminish the world of the spirit, fostering the “disenchantment” that Max Weber made central to his understanding of modernity. On the other hand, secularization theory held that the forces of democracy should reform and regulate religion to make it compatible with freedom—to inculcate habits of autonomy and rational reflection and encourage individuals to forge new identities as democratic citizens. On closer inspection, in other words, classical secularization theory imagined that the religious and political worlds would and should interrelate to a significant extent.

The crucial point, however, is that the secularization theorists who assigned themselves the task of managing the points of contact between the public “secular” world and the private “spiritual” world allowed—and expected—traffic to flow in only one direction.

The result of this stringent and one-way boundary maintenance has been the long-standing exclusion of religion and religious actors from the systematic study of world politics in general and international relations in particular. This has created a paradoxical situation: religion has become one of the most influential factors in world affairs in the last generation but remains one of the least examined factors in the professional study and practice of world affairs.

For example, the lead journal for political science in the United States is the American Political Science Review (APSR). In its 100th anniversary issue, an article concluded that “prior to 1960 only a single APSR article sought to use religion as a variable to explain empirical phenomena” and that in APSR “from 1980 on, just one article in American Government put religious factors at the center of analysis; and just two in Comparative Politics.” A similar neglect marked the international relations literature. Daniel Philpott, a contributor to this book, judged that in his survey of leading journals of international relations from 1980 to 1999, “only six or so out of a total of about sixteen hundred featured religion as an important influence.” This neglect of religion in research is echoed in teaching. One of the coeditors of this volume, Alfred Stepan, teaches at one of America’s largest and oldest schools dedicated to training graduate students for international careers in government, political analysis, international organizations, the media, human rights, the private sector, and academia: the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is currently teaching the first general course on the role of religion in world affairs in the school’s fifty-year history.

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Rethinking Religion and World Affairs represents a collective effort to rethink religion and world affairs by questioning the sharp empirical and ethical boundaries that have separated the two. A working group of leading scholars and policy practitioners concerned with religion in the contemporary world was convened by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in New York, with the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation, to devise strategies to transcend this state of affairs. It soon became apparent that thousands of professors never trained in religion and world affairs would be asked to design and teach new courses, media newsrooms to report on religion in greater depth, and legislators, foreign policy makers, humanitarian organizations, development agencies, and feminist and human rights groups to devise new and more appropriate approaches to religion.

In May of 2010, I sat down for a conversation with the legendary human rights advocate Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group. Jones and I had just come out of an intense two-day workshop at the SSRC on religion, peacebuilding, and development in Mindanao, organized in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on religion and international affairs. Participants in the workshop included scholars and peacebuilders from the United States, Mindanao, Japan, and Indonesia.

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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David Kyuman Kim: This is David Kim from the SSRC’s Program on Religion and the Public Sphere. And I have the pleasure of engaging in a conversation with Sidney Jones from the International Crisis Group, in a segment for the Rites and Responsibilities series for The Immanent Frame. We have just come out of a two day SSRC workshop on the crisis in Mindanao, funded by the Luce Foundation, and part of the SSRC’s project on religion and international affairs. Sidney, before we get into your work, and because the conversations from workshop are still fresh in our minds, I’m curious to hear your perspective on and your characterization of what the Mindanao crisis is. Speak, if you would, not just as someone who’s been involved with the Mindanao crisis for some time. How would you describe the situation to someone who knows nothing about it?

Sidney Jones: I would say that, in some ways, we’re dealing with a fundamentally ethno-nationalist insurgency, but what makes it so much more complicated than many other areas is that there are several insurgencies going on at the same time, including the old Communist insurgency, which spills over into Mindanao. We have three guerilla groups that identify themselves as Moro, plus the NPA [the National People’s Army, the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines], which is still active. We also have three different peace processes going on at the same time, and any success on one track will have negative implications for the others. So, trying to fit all those things into some kind of overarching peace process is extraordinarily difficult. And on top of that, even if you were to settle all of those insurgencies, you would still be dealing with clan conflicts and structural problems of warlordism and feudalism, which would continue to account for what is currently 30 or 40 percent of the violence in Mindanao even if you got the peace processes signed, sealed, and delivered. So, that’s what the crisis in Mindanao is about.

DKK: As you know, the Rites and Responsibilities series is focusing on questions of sovereignty and authority and religion. And among the things that the folks in the workshop seemed to be wrestling with was how to account for the religious factors and influences in Mindanao. You yourself had very portrayals of the religious factors and influences, specifically, your insistence of not wanting to stick to an account in which the portrait was primarily about the disputes between Muslims and Christians. How would you describe the role that religious groups play, how religious actors play in Mindanao? What language would you use to describe them? What are the inadequacies of the characterizations that have been put forth?

SJ: There’s no question that there is a fundamental issue of religious identities involved. But it’s also true that the fundamental conflict is not religious. It’s about control over power and resources. And that control issue extends beyond Christian and Muslim communities to different ethnic identities among people who are Muslims. It also, like many of the conflicts in Indonesia, has an overlay of “indigenous-versus-migrant.” Some of these fundamental power relationships relate to people from upland areas in Mindanao who have been displaced by people from northern parts of the Philippines, who are mostly Christian, coming in and taking over land and political power from the Muslims themselves. The problem, for instance, in the agreement that failed in August 2008, which was trying to define “the Bangsamoro homeland,” was that the MILF [the Moro Islamic Liberation Front] was basically including Lumads, or indigenous people, in their definition of Bangsamoro. And the Lumads objected to this! They didn’t want to be part of the Moro concept of who was defined as a Moro. They wanted a separate identity. There were very definite ancestral land issues that were at the root of why they wanted a separate identity, and the MILF didn’t understand, or didn’t appreciate it fully. So that’s another part of the complexity of the whole process. And it’s why it’s a mistake to see this conflict as “Christian versus Muslim,” or to believe that appealing to religious leaders, such as the Catholic Church or Muslim ulama, will somehow be able to settle it.

DKK: As I hear you describe it, and also and on my reading of the white paper that Myla Leguro and Scott Appleby wrote for the workshop, there seems to be a structural problem that is fed by religion. Right? In other words, there is the structural problem that determines which groups are recognized, and which are not recognized. I think you objected at one point, in your response to their papers, saying “Well, it’s not even simply questions about conversion, but it’s claims about re-version.”

SJ: Yes.

DKK: Which is to say, it is a set of disputes over claims about original identities, originary identities. And these disputes involve appeal to religion to fortify the respective claims about identity. I guess I’m a little stuck, then, on the following. It’s one thing to say, “Well, there are all sorts of mischaracterizations of and misuses of religious identities.” But there are certainly resources in religious communities and religious traditions that could be used as sources of resistance––sources that don’t have to subsumed under the broad dichotomy of “Muslim v. Christian.”

SJ: Yes, let me give you a couple of examples. We had a major massacre in Maguindanao, in central Mindanao, in November 2009, in which one clan killed fifty-seven people—actually, fifty-eight, but one victim was never identified. And there was a sense that, first of all, it was Muslim-on-Muslim violence, in that this one clan leader carried out the massacre as a way of sending a message to his political rival, who was head of another Muslim clan. But there were thirty journalists killed in the process, and most of the journalists were Christian. And some of the Muslims in Mindanao were saying, “If there hadn’t been Christians killed, this issue never would have gotten the international attention it did, because there’s a sense that Muslims are always killing Muslims. So it would have been a horrendous massacre, but it wouldn’t have gotten the same level of attention.”

DKK: There’s a difference in the moral indignation or moral valence in the global community in response to violence against Muslims versus violence against Christians.

SJ: Yes! And then, afterwards, I was talking with the Archbishop of Cotabato, who was saying that there was a sense among his parishioners that the massacre intensified stereotypes of Muslims as violent.

DKK: Hm.

SJ: And therefore it would intensify resistance to any peace agreement that involved power-sharing with the Bangsamoro. So, in that sense, there was definitely a religious element, and stereotypes, involved, and it suggested that there was a role for the church, for example, to try and diminish the force of those stereotypes.

DKK: Yes.

SJ: But it was also true that there was a clear issue of clan rivalry among Muslims that wasn’t necessarily going to be able to be addressed by Islamic ulama. One of the people at this workshop was saying last night that he is a victim of one of these blood feuds among Muslim clans, or between two Muslim clans, I asked him if there was any way that the ulama could play a role in settling those feuds. And he said “No, because the ulama are all situated within the clans. And they wouldn’t accept somebody coming in from outside the clan.” So where is the role of religious leadership in settling that aspect of the violence in Mindanao? And it’s a critically important part of the violence, because the clan structure perpetuates it.

DKK: But when you say “religious leadership,” do you mean local religious leadership? Do you mean transnational religious leadership?

SJ: When I talk about religious leadership in Mindanao, I’m talking about local leadership—except that there’s a big difference between the Islamic and the Christian leadership, or at least the leadership within the Catholic Church. And I think it’s also important to underscore that inasmuch as we’ve been talking about Christians, we’ve only been talking about Catholics. There is also the whole issue of Christian evangelicals, which is a growing community within Mindanao, and their impact has been completely ignored. But when we talk about Catholic leadership, we’re often talking about priests or bishops who come from outside the community. The Catholic Church has a way of posting priests where they’re not necessarily native sons. But within the Islamic clergy, if it’s fair to use that term, there’s no tradition of having anybody from outside the community. And not only that, but one’s sphere of influence is much, much more limited than that of the equivalent role of a priest in the Catholic Church, because the priest, by definition, is part of a broader hierarchy. One of the problems I often see is that Catholics tend to view their Muslim counterparts in their own image, and to assume that Muslim leaders have the same ability to exercise this hierarchical chain-of-command structure, down to the village level, that the Catholics do. It’s a huge mistake to see it in those terms—and it’s one of the weaknesses of the Bishops-Ulama Conference—because they’re not equivalent.

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on Religion and International Affairs.—ed.

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NS: Can you tell me about how you first got involved in peacebuilding?

ML: Living amidst the conflict in Mindanao, if you’re concerned about changing the situation at all, peacebuilding almost automatically becomes a part of your mission. I started early in my university days with student activism work, using music and other forms of cultural outreach. During that time, the People Power Revolution was going on, and I wanted to explore the ways that I, as a student, could take part in it. I became involved in a church-based organization called Citizens’ Council for Justice and Peace, where the focus was on human rights education. Right after college, I joined the organization in order to do justice education with urban poor communities in Davao City. Then, because my degree is in agriculture, I tried to work with a government program assisting farmers in southern Mindanao. But I found that my passion drew me more toward non-governmental organizations, and so I joined Catholic Relief Services after that. My religious commitment and my professional life dovetailed and became integrated at CRS.

NS: How much does CRS, which is mainly an aid organization, see peacebuilding as a part of its purpose?

ML: When I began at Catholic Relief Services in 1991, our focus was on development. I worked on agriculture and enterprise development programs. In 1996 CRS decided to establish a peace and reconciliation program to help support the peace agreement signed between the Philippine government and the Moro National Liberation Front. I was very happy about this change in the organization, so I transferred from development to peacebuilding in 1997.

NS: How does CRS approach its peacebuilding work in Mindanao?

ML: We understand our purpose mainly in terms of bridge-building. We’re fostering relationships that, if conflict arises, will offer an alternative mechanism to fighting. This begins with governance at the local level, but we also keep in mind the larger peace process in the region. On the one hand, we help local governments implement the national government’s peace program, which they’re mandated to do anyway. On the other, we assist grassroots organizations in setting up and strengthening conflict-resolution mechanisms. As we understand it, the conflict in Mindanao is not just one between the government and rebel groups—there are also issues at a more local level, such as clan feuds over land and other resources. We try to address these small-scale disputes while, at the same time, helping to resolve problems facing the country as a whole.

NS: What are some examples of particular programs you have been involved in implementing?

ML: The current focus of our programs is making sure that village-level development plans account for the concerns of the most vulnerable groups in the community, which often include Muslims, indigenous people, women, and youth. For example, the indigenous groups don’t have a revolutionary front, so they are not as well-organized as the Muslims or the Christians. We’re helping to create a network of different indigenous organizations that will be strong enough to make their voices heard. We’re also working to promote peace education in schools and madrasahs, as well as in the mass media, in order to help make the peace process more a part of mainstream culture.

NS: And how do you measure success—or progress, at least?

ML: When we begin a particular initiative, one measure of success is whether it can actually sustain itself and grow. The indigenous peoples’ network that I was talking about started with small-level, core-group meetings. A number of indigenous leaders had brought up the concern that it was very hard for them to be heard in peace negotiations with the government and, for some of them, with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. We began setting up meetings and doing some consultations, and now it has become a network of its own. Our strategy is to use small activities as catalysts for larger ones. When tensions flared up between Muslims, Christians, and indigenous peoples about the Memorandum of Agreement in 2008, we were actually able to contain some of the violence, and that was only because of years and years spent nurturing relationships at the grassroots level.

NS: So, a little well-placed effort can go a long way?

ML: Yes. Part of what we do is nurturing “peace champions” in certain sectors. It was very hard at first to engage the military in the peace process in Mindanao, for instance. But we had an international peace training program, and in 2005 we invited a military official to attend. Soon, that official became an advocate for the peace process within the military structure. Because we are a small organization, we realize that we can’t instantly transform the whole system in Mindanao, or even the Philippines. But if our approach is to strategically target individuals in particular communities, we can help influence the system as a whole.

NS: Can it become problematic, especially in the eyes of rebel groups, that you’re helping to carry out the national government’s peace program? How can the government come to the table and call for peace without being perceived by some as wanting a peace that is unjust?

ML: We cannot build a sustainable peace if the critical stakeholders aren’t part of the process, and the government is a critical stakeholder. Of course, we have to maintain credibility among the various other stakeholders, which can be difficult. We’re not naïve about the unequal power relations among them. There are times when we need to act as advocates for particular vulnerable groups, as we have for the indigenous; if a vulnerable group is going to engage in negotiation or dialogue, they need to have the necessary preparation to do it.

NS: By the same token, does being a specifically Catholic organization make it difficult to work with other religious communities?

ML: In years past, we had real difficulties collaborating with Muslim communities because of our name. We had to reach out and build relationships with them to show we didn’t intend to convert anybody and that we only wanted to be a partner in the peace process. Over the years, we have been able to win their trust. We began with only a few Muslim partners, and then they became our spokespersons. Now, if we enter a Muslim community, it’s not just us; we do it together with a Muslim organization. We never enter any community without a local partner. This puts on display the kind of collaboration that we want to encourage. As we work with one group of people, we try to help teach them how to work with others.

NS: Is there strong support for what you’re doing within local Catholic communities?

ML: Because of the longstanding conflict in Mindanao, we have to foster this same kind of openness among Catholics as well. We’re continuing to do interreligious dialogue, but now we’re actually focusing more exclusively on bringing fellow Catholics into the peacebuilding process—exclusively, that is, so they’ll become more inclusive.

NS: Have there been secular organizations involved—organizations that aren’t affiliated with particular religious groups? Or do you think that peacebuilding can only succeed through efforts grounded in religious communities?

ML: The conflict in Mindanao is not a religious conflict as such, but it certainly has a religious component, and religious identity is very important for all the participants. But secular organizations might play more of a role in peacebuilding in other contexts. Take, for example, the communist insurgency elsewhere in the Philippines, which I’m also involved in helping to resolve; that conflict is founded in a grievance against the state, and the issues are very secular. But even in that case, religious leaders are taking part as well.

NS: When you say that this is not a religious conflict, what does that mean, exactly? How do you know it’s not, especially if the divisions are drawn along lines of religious identity?

ML: It’s not just religious identity, but ethnic identity also. When we think about the conflict in Mindanao, it’s important to look back to the history of colonization and how it affected the political, economic, and social challenges we’re now dealing with. It led to the marginalization of Muslims and indigenous people, not only at the political and economic level, but also in terms of demography. Religious or ethnic identity becomes a marker, but other factors are really responsible for the conflict.

NS: How has your time at Notre Dame affected how you think about and carry out your work?

ML: Well, I’ve only been back for three months—

NS: So you’re still getting over the jet lag?

ML: Yes, getting over the jet lag and trying to transition back into the CRS peace and reconciliation program. I was away for two years, but it also feels like I haven’t been gone very long. People in Mindanao are facing the same issues now as when I left in 2008. We did just elect a new president, actually, and there are high hopes for him. But part of what I have brought back is the desire to share with my colleagues and our partners the benefits of reflection. For the past decade or more, it has always been work, work, work, and practice, practice, practice. There isn’t enough value placed on stepping back, reflecting, and trying to gather lessons from what we’ve been through. I’d like to do this more intentionally and systematically than it has been done in the past.

NS: Did you feel that what you were studying at Notre Dame actually spoke to the situation on the ground where you are?

ML: Being exposed to various theories of peacebuilding certainly expanded my range of vision. As a practitioner I have always relied on a bottom-up theory of change. But, in the end, there are other ways of doing it too. Getting to know, for example, democratic-peace theory, which is a more high-level, elite approach, has helped me understand how those of us working on the ground can address elites. The experience, however, strengthened my own conviction that I am where I belong. On a personal level, the time at Notre Dame also helped reinforce my sense of identity as a woman and as a Christian.

NS: What does that awareness of identity help you bring to your work?

ML: Being conscious of one’s identity can make one stronger and more effective. I’m convinced that I, as a peacebuilder, need to touch the hearts and minds of people I work with, and part of doing that is being able to connect with who I am. When you do this kind of work, you’re in it for the long haul. You can’t just stop one day and change jobs. There is a lot at stake, and the whole person needs to become involved in order to endure disappointments and keep working for success. Self-awareness also helps me understand the power relations I’m dealing with. As a woman, my gender always becomes a constraint because of how my culture tends to view the role of women. Reflecting on that helps me to understand the constraints others feel.

NS: Are there many women involved in this kind of work in Mindanao?

ML: Many women are involved, but unfortunately not as visibly as men in the formal leadership structures. Women do a lot of work in terms of preparation and facilitation, but it is mostly invisible. The actual peace negotiations are done publicly and formally, and women don’t necessarily have access to them. Part of my own advocacy is to help give women more of a voice in the public processes. My research in the master’s program focused on the role of women in peacebuilding—both visible and invisible.

NS: Are there ways in which being a woman enables you to operate in a way in which, perhaps, a man in your position couldn’t?

ML: I think it does give me a distinct way of looking at things compared to others. I always work for complementation, which comes partly from my standpoint as a woman. Integration comes naturally to me. I’m always asking myself how I can connect people and groups, activities and initiatives. That, I think, has been my contribution as a peacebuilder and as a woman.

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on Religion and International Affairs.—ed.

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NS: In your experience with the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, what were the biggest challenges that you faced?

EG: Peru organized a truth commission after twenty years of conflict and dictatorship. During that time, the stories of victims, particularly victims of the Peruvian army, had been subject to disbelief and stigmatization. Those who accused the army, people would say, must be either members or sympathizers of the Shining Path insurgency. Our first big challenge was to establish conditions for listening to victims in a way that would preserve their dignity and empower their voices.

Second: it was also very important for the commission to conduct itself in a way that was seen as even-handed and objective. Though the Peruvian army defeated the Shining Path, that victory was instrumental to the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori. When the commission was established, neither the Shining Path nor Fujimori were on the scene anymore, but it was still an environment of enormous political fluidity. The commission had to have a finger on the pulse of the nation all the time, carrying on a very complicated investigation while analyzing the political developments in real time.

NS: Were criminal investigation and punishment part of its objective?

EG: The commission was established to contribute to judicial clarification, but it did not have prosecutorial powers. Our task was to indicate presumptive responsibility and to offer a course of action for the prosecutors. Criminal justice was supposed to be dealt with by the judicial branch after the commission’s work was finished.

NS: And was it?

EG: Yes, to a certain extent. The commission provided the prosecutorial agencies a list of 47 cases that the commission considered absolutely egregious, involving a few hundred perpetrators and a few thousand victims. Prosecutors have made some progress on those cases, but there have been significant political difficulties in doing so. Cases that involve the police, for example, make progress because the police aren’t as powerful as the army. Cases involving the army don’t make much progress. The commission took a first step, but now Peru’s prosecutorial services need to overcome enormous pressures in order to do their job.

NS: You’ve described the truth commission process as, in some sense, a performance. What does it take to create a compelling, effective performance that is also an authoritative arbiter of truth?

EG: When I talk about a truth commission as a performance, that is not to suggest that it is some kind of fictional show. In fact, people opposed to truth commissions suggest just that. I prefer to talk about performance in a different way, referring to the language and codes utilized by victims to tell their stories. The language of victims, particularly those who come from marginalized groups, is rarely the language of the public sphere or the state. They do not typically come to a commission with written evidence or lawyerly arguments. The language of victims is oral and performative, transmitted through the family and the community. These performances may include storytelling, demonstrations, religious ceremonies, and vigils for those who were killed. Truth commissions need to provide an appropriate setting for people to channel those performances. We did that in Peru through public hearings, which I had a role in developing. The hearings were specifically designed to enable people to express their views in a way that they found appropriate, and that way was typically performative.

NS: What did you do to make the hearings more hospitable to these performances?

EG: Beforehand we examined videos of the Ghanaian, South African, and Nigerian truth commissions. We were pretty unsatisfied with what we saw. Truth commissions in those countries had decided to utilize the visual language of courts in order to gain credibility. A courtroom is supposed to convey majesty, authority, and impartiality. But we thought that if a truth commission is to take seriously the right to truth and the duty of memory, it needs to do everything differently. Rituals in a court of law revolve around the accused and the parties whose testimonies converge on the accused. The judge and/or the jury have the ever-present capacity for unleashing violence, because the end result of a trial can be a punishment. In a truth commission, however, the role of the commissioners is entirely different; they are presiding over a healing ritual for the victim. Their role is one of accompaniment, of support. For that reason, we had victims and commissioners sharing the same table. Instead of everyone standing up when the judge comes in, the commissioners and the public stood when a victim came in.

NS: How does what happens in those rooms then go on to have a broader impact in society?

EG: Most people will not learn about what a truth commission did by reading the final report. The final report is just one element of what a truth commission does. The other element of a commission’s work, which I find especially important, is that it unleashes processes of dialogue, memory, and interpretation. After truth commissions in countries like Peru and Argentina, for example, there has been widespread memorialization through art, architecture, museums, and sites of memory and reflection. Normally, we associate memorialization with state-sponsored monuments; it usually means a statue of a man on a horse. But memorialization in the wake of atrocious human rights violations, and in the wake of truth commissions, is taking on a new meaning. It is becoming a more performative activity led by civil society—and especially young artists—not just government. That means more literature, more movies, and more plastic arts. I have seen many, many powerful cases of this in Peru.

NS: Now you’re part of an international organization working with commissions around the world. What role should the international community play in establishing a commission’s credibility and effectiveness?

EG: Because truth commissions have gained so much attention and become so widespread, the international community is very interested in setting standards. This is a welcome development, because it reduces the chances that truth commissions could be politically manipulated by local powers. At the same time, I fear that establishing complex, extremely detailed standards and “best practices” may thwart creativity. Truth commissions are still novel, flexible institutions, and they should keep that flexibility. There is a fine line here. The international community needs to set standards while also encouraging and celebrating creativity.

NS: How does religious language take part in that balance? In South Africa, such language came to play a major role. What role are religious institutions and terms playing in this new paradigm?

EG: Religious ways of deciphering moral issues are inevitably important in any public examination of wrongdoing. They offer conceptions about victimhood, innocence, crime, sin, culpability, and reconciliation. Religions are very much a part of how people perceive and understand a human rights framework. In a pragmatic sense, though, it doesn’t matter whether someone stands for human rights out of religious convictions or out of secular, liberal convictions. The important thing is that we all find an overlapping consensus about the intrinsic dignity of human beings, whether we do so from a religious or a secular viewpoint. At times, though, religious traditions can pose challenges to the logic of human rights.

NS: How so? Take the category of the victim, for instance, which is so vital to the truth commission framework you’ve sketched. What’s the most reliable way for a commission to discern who the victims are?

EG: In Abrahamic traditions, the victim has often been thought of as an expiatory, innocent depository of the guilt of a community. That translates into cultural assumptions, and even legal assumptions, about who a victim is. Therefore, in many countries, people have enormous difficulty believing that the person who is not innocent of a crime could be a victim, because a victim is supposed to be innocent. When you read Primo Levi’s descriptions of the Holocaust, it is pretty clear that, for him, the roles of oppressor and oppressed can never be interchanged. But, if you started a truth commission in Liberia or in Sierra Leone, you would have to deal with the case of child soldiers. They are members of armed groups that commit horrendous crimes, and they commit those horrendous crimes themselves. Yet, they do so as a result of being victimized themselves. Obviously, in that case, our cultural conceptions of who is a victim and who is a perpetrator need to be subject to critical analysis. I think that the best way to go about establishing parameters about victims is by recourse to international law. Law is quite clear about who a victim is, and it should govern the activities of a truth commission by establishing the parameters of the discussion.

NS: Earlier, though, you spoke of the need to distinguish the truth commission from a court of law. Where do you draw the line between legal frameworks and extra-legal performance?

EG: Commissions are not opposed to judicial systems; they can be complementary by helping to facilitate the legal process. They need to use certain legal parameters and norms, but as part of a wider mandate that encompasses, very explicitly, cultural and ethical concerns. Meanwhile, a truth commission should utilize law in order to establish facts, uphold rights, and facilitate interactions with other institutions—for example, prosecutorial agencies—that will take up the same questions in purely legal terms.

NS: How are truth commissions evolving today around the world, and do you have a vision for their future?

EG: Personally, I think that we are witnessing the birth of an approach to justice that will someday be as important as courts of law are now. People will come to recognize that the right to truth is an autonomous right, alongside other basic democratic values, such as the transparency of the state, legal protections for the individual, and freedom of information. Truth commissions will, undoubtedly, become more legalistic; that is unavoidable. At the same time, they will evolve in diverging ways, according to different schools of thought. In some parts of the world, for instance, truth commissions have always been thought of as an integral part of judicial processes. Elsewhere, people think of truth commissions as an alternative to criminal justice. That is a clear tension. Just as we have different systems of law—common law, civil law, and many others—different kinds of truth commissions will emerge. It is incredibly exciting to see that happening. Truth commissions are becoming not just emergency solutions to extraordinary cases like dictatorship and genocide, but versatile tools for addressing many kinds of human rights violations.

Photo: Evan Cantwell

Andrea Bartoli is currently director of the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. He also directs U.S. activities for the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Roman Catholic lay organization that has led successful peacebuilding efforts in conflict areas around the world. Extensive experience in the field makes his research on peacebuilding deeply rooted in on-the-ground practice.

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on Religion and International Affairs.—ed.

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NS: How did you get involved in peacemaking work, and how did your career bring you from Italy to the United States?

AB: In a way, I’m a gift of Mozambique, through Italy, to the United States. I stumbled into conflict resolution because I’m a member of the Community of Sant’Egidio, which was instrumental in bringing about peace in Mozambique. Between 1990 and 1992, we negotiated an agreement that brought together the FRELIMO government and the RENAMO opposition group, which had been fighting for sixteen years. The agreement led to a significant shift, not only in the politics of Mozambique itself, but regionally; it fostered a collective understanding of what a successful peace process looks like. I was in charge of the relationship with the UN for Sant’Egidio during that time. Because Sant’Egidio is an all-volunteer organization, I kept my teaching job at a university in Italy. Then I was asked to open an office in New York to monitor the peace process. The agreement was signed in Rome on October 4, 1992, but the implementation phase of the agreement was to be done under the aegis of the UN. I had to look for a job in the United States. I found Columbia University first, and two years ago I was asked to come to the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason. It was an unusual path—a path from practice to theory, from doing to reflecting.

NS: Was your research in Italy also about conflict resolution?

AB: Not really. I’m trained as an anthropologist, but it was only when I moved to the United States that the intellectual work and the practical experience came together as a new career. In Italy, I was interested in studying violence, but not in the context of conflict resolution. Actually, we in Sant’Egidio were surprised to discover that, in the United States, the literature on conflict resolution had developed so much. We had been experimenting with it as we went along, but the literature provided us with an interpretive frame that was quite helpful, and still is.

NS: In terms of that kind of reflection on practice, what do you think is the factor or set of factors most responsible for Sant’Egidio’s success in Mozambique and elsewhere? How important is its religious identity?

AB: The religious identity is fundamental. Sant’Egidio would not have been there if it were not for very specific ways of interpreting its religious commitments as an organization of the Catholic Church: solidarity with the poor, friendship, and peace. These motivated a small group of friends in Rome to become involved in this adventure and to find ways of thinking about Mozambique that went beyond the violent conflict in which the country was engulfed. Sant’Egidio’s work in Mozambique expressed, on the one hand, a religious commitment, and on the other, an appreciation for the capacity of political, religious, and cultural institutions to bring about change. We had the spirit of 1968 in us—a willingness to embrace what is new. We weren’t constrained by the idea that peacemaking is for someone else, someone in power, to do. There was a sense that what many would consider impossible was possible. By embracing that opportunity, Sant’Egidio contributed a dose of hope that the Mozambicans could seek, find, establish, and realize a solution for themselves. It is a wonderful case of self-determination. Since then we have been involved—without success, unfortunately—in Algeria, and very successfully in places like Albania and Ivory Coast.

NS: Does Sant’Egidio’s Christian identity ever become a problem, particularly when it works with non-Christians?

AB: Our own motivations aside, I would say that Sant’Egidio operates in a totally secular context. The world in which we live, after all, is fundamentally secularized. Even in Italy, which has a large nominally Catholic population, there is a de facto secular majority. Even those who try to build a theocracy in Iran or a Jewish state in Israel recognize the need to acknowledge some kind of secular universality. In whatever form you try to get there, you have to allow for the kind of human rights elaborated after World War II. Without them, you end up having all the anguishes that we see around the world when political structures are not capable of representing the interests of all of their citizens. Sant’Egidio sees itself as a creative minority, not as a Christian majority, and it appreciates what the secular state has to offer religious communities. The fact that Christians now participate in ecumenical dialogues with one another is phenomenal, because not long ago it would have been unthinkable. The secular state creates the occasion for Christianity to explore the breadth of the human experience without the temptation of using political power to dominate and oppress others. Wherever Sant’Egidio works, the orientation is always to encourage the development of secular institutions.

NS: It was partly Sant’Egidio’s ease in the secular order that caught the attention of Harvey Cox, as he said in my recent conversation with him. He contrasts its approach to that of Pope Benedict XVI. Yet, last December, the pope dined with the poor at a Sant’Egidio house in Rome.

AB: I admire Harvey Cox. His book The Secular City captured our attention when we were young, as did his later books that spoke about the liveliness of the spirit. But Benedict, I think, cannot be easily caricatured as a pope who is simply trying to reimpose an outdated kind of Christianity. Benedict is clearly aware that the Church doesn’t have control of the political machinery, especially through the papacy, as it once did. He also speaks about Christians as a creative minority, and Sant’Egidio exemplifies this for him. We have always been careful about being part of the Catholic Church—that is, not inventing a new church, but being an expression of a two thousand year-old tradition. When Benedict XVI comes to eat at the soup kitchen the Community runs for the poor, he’s saying that the Church actually starts with the poor. In his encyclical Caritas and Veritas, there is a call for a global social policy that is far to the left of any progressive policy. This is something that is difficult to appreciate if you look at the world only from a U.S./Western perspective, but it’s much easier to understand if you’re in Africa, Latin America, or Asia, where the majority of the human family is. The Catholic Church, these days, is one of the most powerful forces for the representation of the poor in the world.

NS: Do you think Sant’Egidio is changing how the Catholic Church as a whole approaches international conflict?

AB: Though the Church has been on the side of power, on the side of the oppressor, on many occasions, I think that there are many instances in which the Church has been openly and boldly, on the side of peace. Many bishops have done so very creatively, especially in Africa in the last century. A few years ago, I counted more than 28 cases of African bishops involved in peace processes. Sant’Egidio wants to support them and walks in that stream of peacemakers that has always been present in the Church and that now we think has reached a new momentum. Rather than pointing fingers and blaming others, we encourage change in the Catholic Church by recognizing and supporting those already making it happen. We do this both symbolically and operationally. Operationally, in addition to our work in conflict zones, we continue to organize the Prayer for Peace that John Paul II began at Assisi in 1986. That was the first time that a Catholic pope prayed together with representatives of so many world religions. Sant’Egidio makes sure that this gathering happens every year. Symbolically, we also insist on recognizing people like Oscar Romero and Franz Jagerstatter, the recently beatified conscientious objector who refused to serve in Hitler’s army. Sainthood and collective recognition have been very important in Catholic tradition, so we find this way of serving the Church to be appropriate as well as fruitful.

NS: Have there been conflicts between the Community and the hierarchy?

AB: As I mentioned before we have always thought of ourselves as part of the Catholic Church—that is, not as inventing a new church, but being an expression and fruit of a two thousand year-old tradition. In the reforms promoted by the Second Vatican Council, Sant’Egidio has advanced causes that the Vatican would not have, or would have advanced differently. But, generally speaking, we certainly don’t want to ruffle anybody’s feathers. The relationships we have had with the hierarchy have always been established on the ground of a very open dialogue, in which the Community has often expressed the side of the poor and marginalized.

NS: Since Augustine, Catholic tradition has upheld just war theory. Does Sant’Egidio see itself, like the Catholic Worker movement in the United States, as a challenge to that tradition? Or does its approach to peacebuilding fit within the just war framework?

AB: Augustine discusses peace about 2,500 times and war a couple of dozen. Everybody discusses what Augustine said about just war, but they usually fail to recognize that he speaks about just peace much more. Sant’Egidio focuses on the parts of Augustine that focus on peace. War is a possibility. War is a human choice. But from our perspective, the Christian position cannot be but a peaceful one, both in terms of being peaceful ourselves and in terms of being peacemakers. We don’t begin with theories. We work for peace because, to the poor, war is the worst of all conditions—Andrea Riccardi called it “the mother of all poverty.” Rather than holding a theoretical argument in favor of, or against, war, we need to be bound to practice. We’re more concerned with orthopraxis than orthodoxy. We want to be orthodox, but we have an even greater desire to actually practice the gospel.

NS: You have written that “the basic Christian injunction to peacemaking derives from the dying Jesus,” specifically from his desire to forgive those who crucified him—and not, for instance, from the Beatitudes. Why do you think forgiveness is so primary? And is forgiveness always possible? Or just?

AB: First of all, it is important to observe that, for Christians, forgiveness is offered, not commanded by a political structure. Jesus’ words on forgiveness, even the most radical, were always an invitation, a liberating message addressed to men and women to be free and saved. His words and his life show a possible path in the midst of adversity. Jesus speaks about forgiveness as something that one should always consider, and it has to be freely given. As the practicing Jew he was, Jesus knew perfectly well the Scriptures. Echoing the Psalms, he could have called for vengeful justice from above on his enemies. Jesus doesn’t do that. Jesus chooses to introduce a peace that is different than what you can achieve by killing people, so the last words of his life were words of forgiveness, life, future, and hope. The fundamental Christian experience is to try to make sense of those words. This kind of forgiveness gives us the capacity to think of a future different from what seems determined by the conditions of the present. Forgiveness freely given—not mandated, not legislated, not forced—has a lot to do with our collective capacity to imagine a better future.

NS: What role has your identity as a Christian played in your academic work? Does research on peacebuilding at a secular university differ very much from practicing it in a religious organization?

AB: I have much less self-censoring prudence about calling myself a member of Sant’Egidio in the United States than I would have in Italy. There, as in much of Europe, the difference between one’s professional life and one’s spiritual life is much sharper, especially in public discourse. Having an explicitly religious identity is less accepted. In the United States, I never really had that problem. I taught for many years at Columbia University, and I teach now at a state university. I have been very transparent about my religious identity, and I never sense that there is a problem with that. However, it’s very clear that the kind of work that I do, in terms of my research and my intellectual commitments, is not itself specifically religious. My analysis of the case in Mozambique isn’t Christian per se.

NS: Tell me about the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason.

AB: The institute is the preeminent academic center on conflict resolution, established more than thirty years ago. It was a pioneer in offering degrees in conflict resolution, which was then a new field. In many ways, it operates like a professional school: the components of research, theory, and practice are blended together in our undergraduate, certificate, master’s, and PhD programs. It is a fascinating place because we have vertical integration among the programs, which isn’t available elsewhere. There are a lot of master’s programs in conflict resolution now and a number of undergraduate programs. But it’s rare to find all four programs together like at George Mason.

NS: What do graduates go on to do? Do they tend to work in government and diplomacy?

AB: There is a certain number that go into government and diplomacy. Others stay in academia; conflict resolution is growing as an academic field. For those who don’t go into government or academia, there is a wide variety of options. Any field can benefit from conflict resolution expertise.

NS: So it’s really not just about international relations, it’s about conflict resolution in a variety of contexts.

AB: Some students focus on international relations, and there is a specific curriculum for that. The field of conflict resolution developed in the aftermath of World War II because of the need for thinking beyond the hyper-competitiveness of the Cold War. Consequently, there is an emphasis on the international system, especially in the older generation, but the field is certainly not exclusively about that. It draws from different resources—social psychology, sociology, law, and mathematics—to address many different kinds of conflicts.

NS: What does your own research focus on now?

AB: I’m working on genocide prevention, mostly. Still, 60 years after the Holocaust, the institutional structures that respond to this prospect are insufficient. States need to take the challenge of preventing genocide much more seriously than they have so far. I think that religious communities can lead the way, beginning with a reflection on their own pasts. Christians in particular should be much more self-reflective about the instances in which they have participated in genocidal violence during their history. I’ve been working on this with my colleague Greg Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch. Our hope is to build an interreligious alliance that can help make the genocide prevention system that many are longing for a reality.