Progressing love for one’s enemy as a primary motive for the politics of peace

Mitchell, Roger Haydon (2014) Progressing love for one’s enemy as a primary motive for the politics of peace. In: The Conflict Research Society Annual Coference, 2014-09-02 - 2014-09-04, University of Leeds.

Abstract

This paper will challenge the prevailing tendency to assume that we are shut up to a violent future with war and diplomacy as the only way to peace and call for a more hopeful counter-politics of love. Taking as its starting point Christopher Coker’s recent Can War Be Eliminated (Cambridge: Polity, 2014) and John Dear’s The Nonviolent Life (Long Beach, California: Pace e Bene Press, 2013), the paper will juxtapose evolutionary determinism and practical theopolitical re-imagination as explored by William Cavanaugh in Theopolitical Imagination (London and New York: T. & T. Clark, 2002). Resisting both the reduction of imagination to ideas and the acquiescence of politics to cultural evolution, the paper will draw on the work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) to argue from contemporary grassroots nonviolent experience and its recent historical genealogy that the key to eliminating war is a recommitment to applied nonviolence. In the attempt to further earth the discussion in the realities of current endemic conflict situations the paper will conclude with a brief evaluation of developments in practical nonviolent peacemaking emanating from Christian Palestinians and Israeli’s in Bethlehem and the West Bank and draw on emerging literature from the contemporary Christian Palestinian movement for peace and reconciliation such as Salim Munayer and Lisa Loden Through My Enemy’s Eyes: Envisioning Reconciliation in Israel Palestine (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2014).