Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation (Studies in Strategic Peacebuilding) PB
By:Daniel Philpott
| Product Details | |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Year | 2012 |
| ISBN | 9780190248352 |
In the wake of massive injustice, how can justice be achieved and peace restored? Is it possible to find a universal standard that will work for people of diverse and often conflicting religious, cultural, and philosophical backgrounds?
In Just and Unjust Peace, Daniel Philpott offers an innovative and hopeful response to these questions. He challenges the approach to peace-building that dominates the United Nations, western governments, and the human rights community. While he shares their commitments to human rights and democracy, Philpott argues that these values alone cannot redress the wounds caused by war, genocide, and dictatorship. Both justice and the effective restoration of political order call for a more holistic, restorative approach. Philpott answers that call by proposing a form of political reconciliation that is deeply rooted in three religious traditions--Christianity, Islam, and Judaism--as well as the restorative justice movement. These traditions offer the fullest expressions of the core concepts of justice, mercy, and peace. By adapting these ancient concepts to modern constitutional democracy and international norms, Philpott crafts an ethic that has widespread appeal and offers real hope for the restoration of justice in fractured communities. From the roots of these traditions, Philpott develops six practices--building just institutions and relations between states, acknowledgment, reparations, restorative punishment, apology and, most important, forgiveness--which he then applies to real cases, identifying how each practice redresses a unique set of wounds.
Focusing on places as varied as Bosnia, Iraq, South Africa, Germany, Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste, Chile and many others--and drawing upon the actual experience of victims and perpetrators--Just and Unjust Peace offers a fresh approach to the age-old problem of restoring justice in the aftermath of widespread injustice.
Reviews
How do we need to rethink the requirements of justice in contexts of political reconciliation? And what resources do the great theistic religions provide for the kind of rethinking that issues in effective political practice? Both for those urgently confronted by these questions and for the rest of us trying to understand their predicaments, Daniel Philpott's impressive book will be indispensable. ― Alasdair MacIntyre, author of After Virtue
Dan Philpott's Just and Unjust Peace is easily the most thorough and vigorous defense presently available of the view that peacemaking, after a period of massive political injustice, should aim not just at punishing offenders but at that far more comprehensive state of affairs that Philpott calls 'political reconciliation.' Philpott skillfully interweaves his articulation of this ethic for dealing with past injustice with careful attention to the objections that might be lodged against it. What makes his discussion especially compelling, however, is that it does not remain at the theoretical level but is enriched by wide-ranging references to how states and other political entities, over the past fifty years, have in fact tried to deal with past injustices and to move forward to a just and peaceful society. ― Nicholas Wolterstorff, author of Justice: Rights and Wrongs
provocative and innovative....Philpott makes a compelling case for placing reconciliation at the core of our thinking about justice and for theorizing justice in a more comprehensive manner." ― Ethics
