Chapter 10 - Peace

Summary

Just as history by and large is the history of wars, so in political philosophy more is written on war than on peace. In political philosophy, peace is most often a negative concept, being the absence of something else—the absence of war. More fruitful for political philosophy has been the analysis of conditions for, conduct of and the justice of war, with an assumption that war, if not a necessary aspect of social life, is more common than not. Yet, peace is the backdrop to the commonly discussed areas within political philosophy—human and civil rights, contracts, justice, property rights and law. Without peace, these aspects of common human life make little sense.

Nonetheless, despite the predominance of war in political affairs, peace and nonviolence were central ideas behind much political activism in the twentieth century. M. K. Gandhi was the first to use techniques of nonviolent resistance, first in South Africa (1893–1914) and then in India (1915–1947). For Gandhi, nonviolent protest required as much courage as warfare. The satyagrahis—those who practice satyagraha, “truth force” or “love-force”—were to resist oppressive sanctions by absorbing the violence of their oppressors in their own persons (2001 , 3ff). In time, the oppressor would cease violence, having had a fill of it. He called this the “law of self-sacrifice,” the “law of nonviolence” and the “law of suffering.” Just as the requirement of the military is training in how to use violence effectively, satyagrahis needed to be trained in how not to be violent (Ibid., 92ff). Gandhi even called for an official “non-violent army” of trained volunteers numbering the thousands who could put themselves in harms way to end violence (Ibid., 86).

Martin Luther King Jr. relied extensively on Gandhi's developed nonviolent techniques (see his “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in 1986, 54–62). In his “My Trip to the land of Gandhi” King says,

True nonviolent resistance is not unrealistic submission to evil power. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be a recipient of violence than the inflictor of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.