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The normative commitments behind peacemaking
Political Geography 30 (2011) 200e201
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Commentary
The normative commitments behind peacemaking Ethan Yorgason* Department of Geography, Kyungpook National University, 1370 Sangyeok-dong, Buk-gu, Daegu 702-701, Republic of Korea
Keywords: Peace Geography Justice Morality Proposition 8 Korea
Like Nick Megoran, my interest in peace owes much to religious commitments. As a Mormon attempting (however poorly) to honor the hope Jesus offers, I feel that learning, understanding, valuing, and practicing peacemaking is a key responsibility and opportunity. I hope my scholarly work illuminates the difficulties and achievements my Mormon community has in creating positive peace (‘okayness’ in relations) with others. I appreciate Megoran’s insistence that peace goes far beyond a lack of overt violence, as well his suggestion that peacemaking implicates the way we, as individuals and group members, conduct our own affairs. I value Megoran’s normative vision, but hope to more explicitly flesh out a few key dilemmas Megoran admits to eliding. Many Mormons believe that the key to creating a more truly peaceful world is for everybody to accept and follow (our Mormon version of) the gospel. Not all Mormons hold this belief and there are idiosyncratic elements to the Mormon expression of it. But I think the impulse behind the belief is widespread, animating many more people than just Mormons. The path to positive peace for many, perhaps most people around the earth is found in the ideals of justice and morality to which they most strongly subscribe. To take a few over-generalized examples: For feminists there can be no ‘okayness’ without appropriate respect and opportunities for women. For socialists, true peace requires greater economic democratization and equality. For Confucians, peace comes with a well-ordered (and properly hierarchal) society in which an individual’s worth largely depends on carrying out the roles society gives them. Muslims see little hope without submission to Allah. Americans bank on the rule of law and individual freedom as the key to peace. Nationalists insist that peace can only come if their
* Tel.: þ82 53 950 5232; fax: þ82 53 950 6227. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0962-6298/$ e see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.04.004
nationality thrives and appropriately controls its national territory. Examples could go on and on. The point is that positive peace makes little sense without a conception of justice and morality, and that different groups’ conceptions differ (often quite substantially) from one another (on such differences even within a single religious tradition, see McNeal, 1992). Geographers, too, have their own conceptions, which may, as Megoran points out, implicitly cohere into something large numbers of us share. These conceptions often differ significantly from those dominant in our own places and elsewhere. These differing conceptions create a three-fold challenge for a non-violent peace agenda e a challenge of how we link peace to justice and morality; justifying our conception of a just peace; and figuring out collectively, as geographers, what that conception might actually be. The first aspect relates to how we link a nonviolent peace to other elements of our conceptions of justice and morality; in other words, whether non-violence is an end in itself or a tool to reach more fundamental ends. Megoran points to both possibilities without acknowledging potential incommensurability. In suggesting why those outside his Christian tradition might want to embrace non-violence, he posits that the logical culmination of critical geopolitics is a commitment to non-violence. In the next paragraph he makes a case for committing to non-violence because thinkers from various ideological positions hold it in high regard as an effective tool. (Both of these arguments could be questioned individually: is it actually so clear that non-violence is the culmination of critical geopolitics when so much of that field’s attention goes toward the narrower issue of hegemonic state militarism; and where does the fact that non-violence is advocated across ideological spectrums really get us, after all strategic violence is similarly advocated?) Non-violence seems to be an end in the first argument, while in the second it is a means. Means and ends might overlap for many people, but this overlap is a harder sell to others. Many, perhaps most, will find non-violence a highly desirable good, but some might not be willing to prioritize it as a top commitment. For these latter people, non-violence becomes a tool e perhaps a valuable one, but still a tool. It becomes negotiable based on empirical evidence. I think a scholarly group’s commitment to nonviolent peacemaking only contains transformative potential if the group regards it as non-negotiable, something fundamental to justice/morality. If enough of us agree that non-violence is fundamental to our broader vision of a just and moral peace, a second difficulty
E. Yorgason / Political Geography 30 (2011) 200e201
confronts us: justifying our vision over others (or at least figuring out how our visions can work effectively with others; for some sense of the difficulties, see Warren, 1998). Over the past ten years, I have lived in Taiwan, Hawaii, and South Korea, places each with their own rather different debates over social justice and morality. What strikes me from living in these places is how partial and contextspecific the political and moral/justice commitments that dominate among western critical scholars seem to be. In each of these places, many people advocate non-violence of course. But the debates to which this advocacy relates differ considerably from place to place. If substantial violence were to disrupt the not-very‘okay’ peace that now exists between North and South Korea, for example, a whole range of identity issues most Anglo geographers (myself included) can hardly fathom will spill out among Koreans. Even advocacy of non-violence will surely be socially subsumed within what to many Koreans is the more fundamental issue of national identity. I may wish to warn Koreans that nationalism rarely forms the basis of a just peace. But on what grounds, other than a western, critical academic discourse that derives from very different contexts of identity, can I make this argument? This is not to say that we should not try to make such arguments. Proselytizing comes with risks, carries thorny issues of social positioning, needs to be done with great care, and itself derives from particular views of justice and morality. Nevertheless I think geographers committed to non-violent peacemaking have much to offer the world. But as geographers a third, perhaps most fundamental, problem stands in our way: figuring out what our vision of justice and morality is, and whether we share any coherent vision. I do not mean to imply that we need complete unity, but the meaningful collective voice Megoran desires must be based on some minimally shared elements. Unfortunately, our preference for critical methodologies works against identifying those elements. The dominance of these methodologies masks the possibility that we may hold very different visions of positive peace among us. Critiquing various operations of power, as valuable as that is, does not require that we reveal much about how we envision a more just society. We value resistance and subversion much more than forgiveness or compromise. What socialegeographicalepolitical elements are required for a just peace (Israel, 2010)? We pay attention to what stability masks, not what it achieves. If we have anything approaching a common vision of positive peace, our methodologies obscure it, allowing us to at most allude to failures of peace but not elaborate on the hard steps, decisions, and compromises that could help us create peaceful social structures. Megoran wonders why geographers pay very little explicit attention to peace. I suspect that much of critical geography derives from desires for positive peace. I also think most of it can aid the peace building project. But without a more open discussion of what that positive peace entails e its visions of justice and morality, as well as the relationship of those visions to other visions of justice and morality e we are left merely with isolated critiques of anti-peace. This discussion will be enriched by studying peacemaking episodes, as Megoran advocates, but for reasons beyond the ones he mentions. In 2008 California voters passed Proposition 8, disallowing gay marriage. The episode illuminated a clear division between LGBT and Mormon communities. A few cases of very small violence reportedly ensued in connection with LGBT protests following the vote. Nevertheless, neither side had much incentive to escalate beyond rhetoric and normal political action. Yet this was clearly a non-‘okay’ peace, with intense charges that continue today of injustice from each side toward the other. It’s the kind of situation I think Megoran suggests deserves more attention. I didn’t research
201
this conflict, though I would have liked to since geo-political issues were clearly central. I might have studied how Mormon money and political organizing gave the church’s view power far in excess of Mormonism’s small percentage of California’s population. Conversely, I might have examined how some LGBT rhetoric rendered Mormons, even California Mormons, as illegitimate outsiders in the debate, drawing upon the assumption that Mormons belong only in Utah. I might have looked at how elements on both sides constructed the other side as enemies of the home. I could have explored Mormon spatial strategy as the church tries to expand its moral influence within the United States. I might have examined the spatial strategies involved in LGBT targeting of Mormon interests through protests and boycotts. Each of these and many other topics might have contributed toward critiquing conflict. But peacemaking efforts also took place. Within Utah, an LGBT organization, Equality Utah, worked quietly with the Mormon Church to elicit stronger support for non-discrimination than the church had previously given on such issues as housing and employment. Equality Utah said its understanding of local culture (especially how to work positively with the church) made the modest breakthrough possible. In California and elsewhere, Mormons who felt pain for their church’s involvement in the Proposition 8 campaign organized in support of same-sex marriage. Groups such as Mormons for Marriage build bridges with the LGBT community where possible and attempt to explain their support for same-sex marriage to the Mormon community through Mormon ideals of justice and morality. Yet these attempts at peacemaking are far from large success stories. Equality Utah has been criticized for being too accommodating to the Mormon Church. Many Mormons regard Mormons for Marriage as dissenters from the faith. Both groups approach the other side with a level of respect and patience many within their larger community feel they cannot offer the other side. Large-scale physical violence between Mormons and the LGBT community is still quite unlikely, but many on both sides feel that peace can only come if the other side’s vision of justice and morality is obliterated, or at least rendered impotent. With its limited success, it is questionable whether this peacemaking effort points the way to a more positive peace. But even if lessons are uncertain, I think research into such cases is important. The value lies in how the researcher would be forced (or at least encouraged) to examine and explicate her/his visions of a just peace. In much of critical research, it is too easy to ‘choose sides’ based on the immediate issue. We demand (what appears to us to be) justice, not peace. We might never really ask ourselves what it would mean for the LGBT and Mormon communities to come to a more ‘okay’ relationship. But through research into even unsuccessful peacemaking efforts, we may start to figure out how to better bring our own partial visions of justice into peacemaking discussions. I don’t know the likelihood of geographers pursuing a peace agenda. But unless we more seriously discuss the visions of justice and morality that lie behind our desire for positive peace, even collectively intended commitments are likely to produce only the influence that scholars can individually muster.
References Israel, J. (2010). Religion, world order, and peace: Jewishness and global justice. Cross Currents, 60(3), 319e327. McNeal, P. (1992). Harder than war: Catholic peacemaking in twentieth-century America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Warren, K. J. (1998). Peacemaking and philosophy: a critique of Justice for Here and Now. Journal of Social Philosophy, 30(3), 411e423.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Commentary
The normative commitments behind peacemaking Ethan Yorgason* Department of Geography, Kyungpook National University, 1370 Sangyeok-dong, Buk-gu, Daegu 702-701, Republic of Korea
Keywords: Peace Geography Justice Morality Proposition 8 Korea
Like Nick Megoran, my interest in peace owes much to religious commitments. As a Mormon attempting (however poorly) to honor the hope Jesus offers, I feel that learning, understanding, valuing, and practicing peacemaking is a key responsibility and opportunity. I hope my scholarly work illuminates the difficulties and achievements my Mormon community has in creating positive peace (‘okayness’ in relations) with others. I appreciate Megoran’s insistence that peace goes far beyond a lack of overt violence, as well his suggestion that peacemaking implicates the way we, as individuals and group members, conduct our own affairs. I value Megoran’s normative vision, but hope to more explicitly flesh out a few key dilemmas Megoran admits to eliding. Many Mormons believe that the key to creating a more truly peaceful world is for everybody to accept and follow (our Mormon version of) the gospel. Not all Mormons hold this belief and there are idiosyncratic elements to the Mormon expression of it. But I think the impulse behind the belief is widespread, animating many more people than just Mormons. The path to positive peace for many, perhaps most people around the earth is found in the ideals of justice and morality to which they most strongly subscribe. To take a few over-generalized examples: For feminists there can be no ‘okayness’ without appropriate respect and opportunities for women. For socialists, true peace requires greater economic democratization and equality. For Confucians, peace comes with a well-ordered (and properly hierarchal) society in which an individual’s worth largely depends on carrying out the roles society gives them. Muslims see little hope without submission to Allah. Americans bank on the rule of law and individual freedom as the key to peace. Nationalists insist that peace can only come if their
* Tel.: þ82 53 950 5232; fax: þ82 53 950 6227. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0962-6298/$ e see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.04.004
nationality thrives and appropriately controls its national territory. Examples could go on and on. The point is that positive peace makes little sense without a conception of justice and morality, and that different groups’ conceptions differ (often quite substantially) from one another (on such differences even within a single religious tradition, see McNeal, 1992). Geographers, too, have their own conceptions, which may, as Megoran points out, implicitly cohere into something large numbers of us share. These conceptions often differ significantly from those dominant in our own places and elsewhere. These differing conceptions create a three-fold challenge for a non-violent peace agenda e a challenge of how we link peace to justice and morality; justifying our conception of a just peace; and figuring out collectively, as geographers, what that conception might actually be. The first aspect relates to how we link a nonviolent peace to other elements of our conceptions of justice and morality; in other words, whether non-violence is an end in itself or a tool to reach more fundamental ends. Megoran points to both possibilities without acknowledging potential incommensurability. In suggesting why those outside his Christian tradition might want to embrace non-violence, he posits that the logical culmination of critical geopolitics is a commitment to non-violence. In the next paragraph he makes a case for committing to non-violence because thinkers from various ideological positions hold it in high regard as an effective tool. (Both of these arguments could be questioned individually: is it actually so clear that non-violence is the culmination of critical geopolitics when so much of that field’s attention goes toward the narrower issue of hegemonic state militarism; and where does the fact that non-violence is advocated across ideological spectrums really get us, after all strategic violence is similarly advocated?) Non-violence seems to be an end in the first argument, while in the second it is a means. Means and ends might overlap for many people, but this overlap is a harder sell to others. Many, perhaps most, will find non-violence a highly desirable good, but some might not be willing to prioritize it as a top commitment. For these latter people, non-violence becomes a tool e perhaps a valuable one, but still a tool. It becomes negotiable based on empirical evidence. I think a scholarly group’s commitment to nonviolent peacemaking only contains transformative potential if the group regards it as non-negotiable, something fundamental to justice/morality. If enough of us agree that non-violence is fundamental to our broader vision of a just and moral peace, a second difficulty
E. Yorgason / Political Geography 30 (2011) 200e201
confronts us: justifying our vision over others (or at least figuring out how our visions can work effectively with others; for some sense of the difficulties, see Warren, 1998). Over the past ten years, I have lived in Taiwan, Hawaii, and South Korea, places each with their own rather different debates over social justice and morality. What strikes me from living in these places is how partial and contextspecific the political and moral/justice commitments that dominate among western critical scholars seem to be. In each of these places, many people advocate non-violence of course. But the debates to which this advocacy relates differ considerably from place to place. If substantial violence were to disrupt the not-very‘okay’ peace that now exists between North and South Korea, for example, a whole range of identity issues most Anglo geographers (myself included) can hardly fathom will spill out among Koreans. Even advocacy of non-violence will surely be socially subsumed within what to many Koreans is the more fundamental issue of national identity. I may wish to warn Koreans that nationalism rarely forms the basis of a just peace. But on what grounds, other than a western, critical academic discourse that derives from very different contexts of identity, can I make this argument? This is not to say that we should not try to make such arguments. Proselytizing comes with risks, carries thorny issues of social positioning, needs to be done with great care, and itself derives from particular views of justice and morality. Nevertheless I think geographers committed to non-violent peacemaking have much to offer the world. But as geographers a third, perhaps most fundamental, problem stands in our way: figuring out what our vision of justice and morality is, and whether we share any coherent vision. I do not mean to imply that we need complete unity, but the meaningful collective voice Megoran desires must be based on some minimally shared elements. Unfortunately, our preference for critical methodologies works against identifying those elements. The dominance of these methodologies masks the possibility that we may hold very different visions of positive peace among us. Critiquing various operations of power, as valuable as that is, does not require that we reveal much about how we envision a more just society. We value resistance and subversion much more than forgiveness or compromise. What socialegeographicalepolitical elements are required for a just peace (Israel, 2010)? We pay attention to what stability masks, not what it achieves. If we have anything approaching a common vision of positive peace, our methodologies obscure it, allowing us to at most allude to failures of peace but not elaborate on the hard steps, decisions, and compromises that could help us create peaceful social structures. Megoran wonders why geographers pay very little explicit attention to peace. I suspect that much of critical geography derives from desires for positive peace. I also think most of it can aid the peace building project. But without a more open discussion of what that positive peace entails e its visions of justice and morality, as well as the relationship of those visions to other visions of justice and morality e we are left merely with isolated critiques of anti-peace. This discussion will be enriched by studying peacemaking episodes, as Megoran advocates, but for reasons beyond the ones he mentions. In 2008 California voters passed Proposition 8, disallowing gay marriage. The episode illuminated a clear division between LGBT and Mormon communities. A few cases of very small violence reportedly ensued in connection with LGBT protests following the vote. Nevertheless, neither side had much incentive to escalate beyond rhetoric and normal political action. Yet this was clearly a non-‘okay’ peace, with intense charges that continue today of injustice from each side toward the other. It’s the kind of situation I think Megoran suggests deserves more attention. I didn’t research
201
this conflict, though I would have liked to since geo-political issues were clearly central. I might have studied how Mormon money and political organizing gave the church’s view power far in excess of Mormonism’s small percentage of California’s population. Conversely, I might have examined how some LGBT rhetoric rendered Mormons, even California Mormons, as illegitimate outsiders in the debate, drawing upon the assumption that Mormons belong only in Utah. I might have looked at how elements on both sides constructed the other side as enemies of the home. I could have explored Mormon spatial strategy as the church tries to expand its moral influence within the United States. I might have examined the spatial strategies involved in LGBT targeting of Mormon interests through protests and boycotts. Each of these and many other topics might have contributed toward critiquing conflict. But peacemaking efforts also took place. Within Utah, an LGBT organization, Equality Utah, worked quietly with the Mormon Church to elicit stronger support for non-discrimination than the church had previously given on such issues as housing and employment. Equality Utah said its understanding of local culture (especially how to work positively with the church) made the modest breakthrough possible. In California and elsewhere, Mormons who felt pain for their church’s involvement in the Proposition 8 campaign organized in support of same-sex marriage. Groups such as Mormons for Marriage build bridges with the LGBT community where possible and attempt to explain their support for same-sex marriage to the Mormon community through Mormon ideals of justice and morality. Yet these attempts at peacemaking are far from large success stories. Equality Utah has been criticized for being too accommodating to the Mormon Church. Many Mormons regard Mormons for Marriage as dissenters from the faith. Both groups approach the other side with a level of respect and patience many within their larger community feel they cannot offer the other side. Large-scale physical violence between Mormons and the LGBT community is still quite unlikely, but many on both sides feel that peace can only come if the other side’s vision of justice and morality is obliterated, or at least rendered impotent. With its limited success, it is questionable whether this peacemaking effort points the way to a more positive peace. But even if lessons are uncertain, I think research into such cases is important. The value lies in how the researcher would be forced (or at least encouraged) to examine and explicate her/his visions of a just peace. In much of critical research, it is too easy to ‘choose sides’ based on the immediate issue. We demand (what appears to us to be) justice, not peace. We might never really ask ourselves what it would mean for the LGBT and Mormon communities to come to a more ‘okay’ relationship. But through research into even unsuccessful peacemaking efforts, we may start to figure out how to better bring our own partial visions of justice into peacemaking discussions. I don’t know the likelihood of geographers pursuing a peace agenda. But unless we more seriously discuss the visions of justice and morality that lie behind our desire for positive peace, even collectively intended commitments are likely to produce only the influence that scholars can individually muster.
References Israel, J. (2010). Religion, world order, and peace: Jewishness and global justice. Cross Currents, 60(3), 319e327. McNeal, P. (1992). Harder than war: Catholic peacemaking in twentieth-century America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Warren, K. J. (1998). Peacemaking and philosophy: a critique of Justice for Here and Now. Journal of Social Philosophy, 30(3), 411e423.