NJPN Blog: Peace work is care work

Henrietta Cullinan

'The peace movement is dead!' a veteran activist and Catholic Worker I once knew, liked to say. Disappointing for me to hear, just when I had decided to devote my writing and activism life to peace...

Perhaps he meant the anti geopolitical war movement, that tells our government not to attack Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria. Nowadays, governments inflict suffering on populations, including their own, in perpetual wars that are invisible and secretive. For activists, it's not always clear who to challenge. When the huge amount of violence around the world cannot described by a simple binary, peace work must be responsive and quick to challenge fossilised perspectives.

Peace, we are reminded during Mass, is a gift. It contains a vision for the future. Drone Wars director, Chris Cole, quotes the line about everyone under their vine and fig tree, (Micah 4.4) Bruce Kent describes peace as children playing safely in the street, getting along together.

For something so abstract, and a bit utopian, peace has a lot of practical applications. Like that other great abstract, love, peace bears real physical fruit, if not an actual baby. Peace brings gifts at all levels, whether you're thinking of family and neighbourly life, or in geopolitics. In preserving life, it protests against destruction.

When I went to Afghanistan for the first time, I experienced how peace, in the sense of freedom from fear and daily violence, is essential for life, for work, for livelihoods, for communities. Without peace, travel, education, meeting up, weddings, funerals - all the things that build strong communities - are difficult and dangerous. Basic necessities, such as the COVID-19 vaccination programme, are hampered by violence and corruption.

With the withdrawal of the last few thousand US troops, the war in Afghanistan is officially finished. The last Afghan prisoner in Guantanamo has a new legal basis on which to petition for release. But, with a weak partisan government, many Afghan friends fear the country is in danger of tipping into civil war.

A young Afghan woman wrote to me: "[Biden] should know that this country needs life. Women are so tired of this war solution. If you're not here to offer education, health, life, work, we're not interested. We don't need guns. Women need to be able to feed their children, find work for their families."

Whether in Afghanistan or North London, along with all the other things we need for life, is peace. A peace movement as such cannot exist without an end hunger movement, an access to clean water movement, a justice movement, and, especially now, a climate change movement. None of us can wait for perfect peace before we eat, and yet without freedom from violence, it is not possible to build a livelihood. Importing everything from pencils to oranges is expensive and vulnerable to border closures.

Peace work needs to be responsive. It is about preserving life as much as preventing destruction. Peace is a dynamic thing, but also something we need for daily life. It's not possible to work for peace in a stuck, unquestioning, unreflective way. "Harden not your hearts" as Paul says.

Henrietta Cullinan is a member of Pax Christi and Afghanistan Peace Projects (formerly Voices for Creative Nonviolence UK).

LINKS

Pax Christi: https://paxchristi.org.uk/

A few places are still available for the Annual Conference of the National Justice and Peace Network (NJPN) 23-25 July 2021 at: www.justice-and-peace.org.uk/conference/