The word “peace” has been thrown about these last few days, often at the expense of productive working hours, and to the tune of traffic. It’s an attractive word to invoke, especially when we have to deal with the everyday noise of the mess of life.
It’s likewise understandable that most people, even researchers and scholars, would intuitively define peace as the absence of war.
Paul Diehl, in a 2016 paper published in International Studies Quarterly, calls this concept “negative peace.” It is the kind of peace that one might imagine occurring between periods of armed conflict when countries are not engaged in loud battles of tanks and guns.
Such a definition, Diehl says, shortchanges how we treat peace as a goal, how we define our objectives to attain peace, and how we ultimately claim that we have achieved it. Instead of merely framing peace as the absence of war, Diehl offers alternative, richer definitions.
Sustainable peace, for instance, is not merely a long period without war, but contains within itself indicators that have to do with the citizens’ quality of life. These indicators include well-being, the ability to manage and resolve conflicts, equitable access to security and resources, cooperation within the state and with other states, and the ability of the state to govern itself.
Notice that in this definition, citizens are not merely united with each other, harmonious, singing and holding hands. Nationhood isn’t a drunken festival where everyone is too inebriated to care about each other, let alone fight for what they believe in. The nation—a healthy one at least—is a marketplace of ideas bustling for the common good.
Peace, therefore, and as with all words that are contentious or constructed in varying ways by different interest groups, should be defined based on what it is, and not what it is not. Peace is an active process, not a bed into which we dream of simply falling.
Jeanne Woods, in a 2013 article for Human Rights and International Legal Discourse, takes the conversation further by elaborating on the right to peace. It is not merely the right of people to live without war, because that would qualify all countries, even those where starvation, oppression, and abuse run rampant.
The right to peace, Woods argues, should be compatible with both state rights and religious laws (which often conflict with each other) because religious laws—or spiritual traditions—thrive on a sense of solidarity.
If we look closely at this concept of the right to peace, we can also see that a country that wants to have peace must also be a country where people actively function as a community: where we, as a group, are concerned for each other’s rights, advocate for each other’s well-being, can govern ourselves because we recognize our differences as gifts for the common good rather than seek to erase them into a homogeneous whole.
Not unity, but active solidarity.
Peace, moreover, cannot thrive in abject poverty. Poverty is a problem that is not solved by simply throwing money at it; it is a problem that has to be solved through an acknowledgment that centuries of colonization have enabled the plunder of the impoverished many by the privileged few. It means holding the powerful to account, not erasing their sins in the interest of maintaining the status quo.
Not unity, but active justice.
This means that peace has to exist within the framework of laws. And when we speak of laws, we must ensure that they are designed not for the few to progress, but for the many to benefit. As with Diehl, Woods agrees that peace is not simply the absence of war, but the presence of care and equity. The fight for peace is always the fight for justice.
The right to peace, therefore, is not inimical to the right of people to fight against tyranny, to speak out against oppression, to demand the truth from those elected to govern them.
A protest rally that calls for a person to be held accountable for their corruption might be noisy, but it is not a lack of peace. It is actually a call for the law to be implemented, for justice to be enacted, for peace to be possible.
Consequently, to silence the call for accountability is to curtail justice, to hide one’s discomfort when discovering lies and deceit, to cower behind romanticized ideas when one actually means, “I don’t like how this makes me and my vote look wrong.”
In defining and fighting for peace, we have to look beyond the peace between individuals and look toward the peace to which we as humans need to live in, the right to peace to which all citizens are entitled.
Justice is hardly ever meted out in calm conditions, and the call for it is hardly ever subdued—but one must not confuse the uproar with violence. One should not mistake auditing, accountability, and investigation as mere performances to add to the noise of our daily lives.
If one just wants peace to be the absence of noise, then one should just rally for silence.
The kind of silence that is injustice’s best friend.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu