More often, there is the gradual transformation – sometimes over generations – of enmity and hostility to respect and trust. In a culture that often expects instant results and gratification, this work does not happen overnight. Our challenge is to put in place the infrastructures of reconciliation and the architecture of peacebuilding that enable disagreement to happen robustly, but not violently. The effort we are rightly making to support Ukraine in defending itself against aggression needs to be matched by efforts towards negotiation, dialogue, reconciliation and peace. ![]() ![]() The result is we think hard about how to fight, but not about often how to build alternatives to fighting – how to resolve the conflict and competition that are an inevitable part of being human. We accept that peace doesn’t need justification we all know inherently that peace is good. But we have no equivalent “just peace” theory. In Christian thought, we have the concept of just war theory, which attempts to understand how conflict might sometimes be morally justifiable. It is the transformation of violent conflict into non-violent disagreement. No, peace is the ability to deal with discord by non-violent means. That doesn’t mean that peace is unanimity, a shared conformist identity. When we fall into the trap of defining ourselves by who we are not, or we attempt to forcefully define the identities of others, we set ourselves up for serious ruptures in the fabric of our relationships. ![]() Identity can be inherited, it can be imposed – but most of all, when it comes to conflict, identity is about our relationships with others. The question of identity is core to any understanding of conflict. So why do we keep making the same mistakes, repeating these cycles of conflict at every level of our society? And all of us have experienced personal conflict with close friends or loved ones, relationships that are often deeply painful and can bear lasting scars. There is no shortage of political and cultural conflict and turmoil in this country and around the world.
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