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Cross Riddle, Christian Responses to Violence and Conflict                                                                                        108 

 

Christian Responses to Violence and 

Conflict: Introduction to CRDA’s Special Issue  
 

Karie Cross Riddle 
 

 
American poet Robert Frost (1963) said that “a 

poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, 

a homesickness, a lovesickness.” This is also an apt 

description for peace work. Several of the pieces in this 

issue feature just such a lump in the throats of ordinary 

people who confronted violence, many of whom did 

not even intend to do the work of peacebuilding. These 

authors and the organizations some of them represent 

had the audacious courage to believe they might be the 

people who could respond to urgent wrong, extending 

mercy instead of perpetuating harm, and promoting 

healing instead of vengeance. I am honored to present 

their work for this audience.  

This journal typically focuses on global 

development work from a Christian perspective, asking 

important questions about topics such as poverty 

alleviation, hunger, the development of strong political 

institutions, and power relations between the Global 

North and Global South. A special issue focused on 

violence and conflict may seem a bit far afield from its 

regular purview. As someone who has worked in both 

fields, however, I have come to the conclusion that a 

substantive understanding of violence, conflict, and 

peacebuilding is not only relevant but vital for Christian 

work in relief and development. Keeping these issues 

siloed from development work would hinder 

scholarship and practice in both fields.  

The relevance of one field to another may come 

down to terminology. Academics love to define terms, 

and for good reason; our definitions of concepts and 

the way we draw boundaries around fields have 

enormous implications for the work that follows. Is 

development merely the pursuit of economic growth, 

or is it much broader—the pursuit of freedom, for 

example, or of the transformation of the whole person 

(Sen 1999; Myers 2011)? Is peacebuilding merely 

putting a stop to direct violence via ceasefires, or does 

it encompass building new, post-conflict institutions and 

developing new norms that replace violent structures 

with better ones (Galtung 1969)? 

In both cases, if Christians wish to pursue God’s 

kingdom on earth, broad conceptions of both 

development and peace will serve us well. In fact, the 

fields of development studies and peace studies have 

made similar strides towards inclusive rather than 

exclusive definitions. Throughout this process of 

conceptual expansion, both have likewise broadened 

the range of actors and issues they address. This is good 

news for Christians who want to be active in one or both 

fields. As development and peace work both move 

away from elite-centered models that offer narrow 

policy prescriptions, we can create much more space 

for the distinctive, creative, and even mysterious work 

of religious actors.   

Before turning to the valuable contributions 

Christians can make to peacebuilding, I will briefly 

review a number of resonances between development 

studies and peace studies, showcasing the opportunities 

for mutual learning that lie before us. I am not calling 

for us to collapse the distinction between the two types 

of work; poverty remains different from violence. Still, 

a good understanding of both fields will be relevant for 

many of us, whether our development work is disrupted 

by violence or our long-term peacebuilding work 

includes development. Such a review also serves to 

highlight areas in which Christians can offer unique 

perspectives and practices that might produce more 

effective strategies.   

 

A Review of Development Studies: What Is 

Development, Who Does the Developing, 

and Where Does Development Happen? 
International development, as US President Harry 

Truman’s 1949 Point Four of his inaugural address 

defined it, was intended to be a sharing of technical 

expertise in the direction from an advanced economy 

to a developing one. According to historian of 

development Gilbert Rist, this speech made 

development “transitive” for the first time—something 

that could be done to or for a country. In his estimation, 

this approach fundamentally changed relations between 

the Global North and Global South (Rist 2019, 71–73). 

Global North economists were now encouraged to 

directly interfere in the policies and practices of poorer 

countries (many of whom were decolonizing), urging 

them to follow the modernization strategies that had 

undergirded economic successes in Western 

industrialized countries (Rostow 1991). What’s more, 



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these poorer countries were meant to welcome this 

intervention as beneficent, objective, and therefore 

apolitical, signaling goodwill and equality among 

countries that could all expect to rise together on the 

tides of unfettered economic growth (Rist 2019, 73–77). 

Thus, initially, development required technical 

assistance overseen by Western economists in newly-

decolonized developing nations.  

Inhabitants of the Global South had some things to 

say about this approach. In the 1960s, dependency 

theorists in Latin America, such as Raul Prebisch, 

critiqued the imposition of modernization as 

perpetuating inequality, rather than enabling 

developing nations to “catch up.” Such theorists called 

for the wealthier nations to leave Latin America alone 

to develop on its own terms (Kingsbury et al. 2016). Yet 

far from leaving Latin America and other regions alone, 

the development industry doubled down on 

interventionist measures such as structural adjustment 

programs, inspired by the rise of neoliberal thought. 

Economic thought leaders established the “Washington 

Consensus” platform, arguing that austerity and the free 

hand of the market would help nations develop (Peet 

and Hartwick 2015, 98–101). The so-called lost decade 

of neoliberal development in the 1980s led post-

development theorists in the 1990s like Arturo Escobar 

and James Ferguson to question the enterprise of 

development itself, arguing that it had resulted not only 

in economic harm but also the hurtful erasure of 

diverse forms of knowledge and culture (Kingsbury et 

al. 2016, 68–69; Sahle 2012, 82–83; Ferguson 1995; 

Escobar 1995). These thinkers tended to favor 

alternatives that featured local social movements 

undertaking collective and cooperative action (Sahle 

2012).  

At a similar time, through the 1990s and early 

2000s, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others 

were likewise critical of top-down development, but still 

insistent that development could make people’s lives 

better. They understood development to be the 

expansion of human capabilities—what humans are able 

to do and to be (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2000). Human 

development, as it came to be called, captured the 

attention of the United Nations Development 

Programme, which began releasing annual human 

development reports that centered not what nation-

states had achieved but rather the capabilities of  

individuals living in poverty within them (“What Is 

Human Development?” n.d.). Sen, in particular, 

insisted that development had to be defined and 

pursued at the local level, because participation itself 

was an important element of freedom (Sen 1999, 33, 

78–79).    

                                                        
1 It remains to be seen what will happen to USAID’s role in global poverty alleviation with or without faith-based 

groups, in light of the Trump administration’s cuts to its funding and workforce in early 2025. See Kakissis et al. 2025.   

Powerful international actors who had 

implemented state-centered, top-down development 

programs for several decades slowly heeded these 

critiques and began reframing their work in important 

ways. First, they shifted their work from state-focused 

economic adjustment measures to individual-focused 

poverty alleviation (and in doing so, according to 

Christine Schliesser (2024, 4), made much more room 

for partnerships with faith-based actors who had long 

worked in service to the poor). Second, they explicitly 

tried to incorporate local-level voices in their work, 

exemplified by the World Bank’s Voices of the Poor 
study which surveyed poor people all across the Global 

South (Narayan and Petesch 2002).  

Critical scholars have raised their eyebrows at these 

efforts, noting the continued reign of neoliberal 

prescriptions (Cornwall and Fujita 2012). The turn to 

the local within development work has certainly been 

imperfect, but my sense is that few in the development 

industry would now agree to the definition of 

development as technical assistance sent from the 

Global North to the Global South. Thanks to critics 

coming primarily from the Global South, development 

is now seen as far broader than economic growth, and 

it incorporates many more people than the experts who 

control the levers of economic policy. International and 

domestic non-profit organizations, including faith-based 

organizations; local-level political leaders; grassroots-

level social movements—all have a role to play in 

expanding human development and addressing 

poverty.  

Importantly for readers of this journal, this 

expansion of actors has entailed paying much more 

attention to religious thought and action. While 

approaches like human development and the United 

Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are 

not explicitly religious, they make plenty of room for 

religious values within their conceptions of 

development and the range of relevant actors. 

Schliesser (2024, 4–5) notes an uptick in partnerships 

between secular organizations like the World Bank and 

the US Agency for International Development 

(USAID) and faith-based organizations (FBOs), 

beginning around 2000.
1

 A recent United Nations 

report tracks the important contributions of FBOs to 

six of the SDGs (specifically goals 6—clean water, 7—

clean energy, 12—responsible consumption, 13—

climate action, 14—life below water, and 15—life on 

land) (Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender 

and United Nations Environment Programme 2020). 

Emma Tomalin and her co-authors analyze how faith 

actors have contributed to the development of local, 

contextual indicators to establish progress on the SDGs 



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Cross Riddle, Christian Responses to Violence and Conflict                                                                                        110 

(Tomalin, Haustein, and Kidy 2019). Clearly, 

development is a space that is increasingly by and for 

religious actors from multiple traditions, particularly 

following the industry’s expansion from economic to 

human development and from top-down to bottom-up 

initiatives.  

 

A Review of Peace Studies: What Are 

Violence and Peace, Who Does the 

Peacebuilding, and Where Does it Happen?  
I suggested above (following development scholar 

Gilbert Rist) that international development as we know 

it began in the wake of World War II, with President 

Truman’s Point Four of his inaugural address. Peace 

studies scholars locate the creation of their field within 

a similar timeframe, noting the horrors of nuclear 

warfare and the Holocaust and the international 

community’s urgent sense that something must be done 

to limit such destruction (Morsink 1999; Lauren 2011; 

Hoglund and Oberg 2011). Although there was some 

interest in peace research following World War I, the 

true start of peace studies as a field coincided with the 

beginning of global governance at the close of World 

War II and the creation of the United Nations (UN) 

(Wallensteen 2011; Harris 2008).  

Herein lies perhaps the greatest difference 

between development studies and peace studies. While 

the development industry has never been divorced 

from politics, neither has it been as explicitly political as 

the preservation of international peace and security, 

located within the UN Security Council (UNSC) 

according to Chapter VII of the UN Charter (Berdal 

1996). According to the Charter, the UNSC alone can 

authorize the use of force, supposedly controlling the 

monopoly on violence within the international system 

(Whittle 2015; Weber 1965). In sharp contrast, 

development was supposedly technical in nature, 

though never apolitical in practice, with many donors 

claiming they were staying well out of the internal 

politics of the recipients they targeted. While this 

“technical” assistance proceeded to surge after WWII 

and throughout the Cold War (often used as a tool of 

the war, putting the lie to its characterization as 

apolitical), the politics of the Cold War cut off 

international cooperation on the maintenance of peace 

before it could even begin (Moyo 2008, 23–25). With 

bitter rivals both sitting as permanent members, the 

UNSC could conduct almost no peace business without 

either the US or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 

(USSR, now loosely Russia) vetoing whatever the other 

wanted to accomplish (Berdal 1996, 72–74). 

Therefore, very few high-level peace negotiations and 

almost no peacekeeping operations occurred before 

the end of the Cold War, whereas development 

practice grew throughout the post-WWII era 

(Wallensteen 2015, 4).  

Obviously, peace work does not occur only at elite 

levels, among the leaders of states, and violence does 

not occur only on battlefields. Although the new, post-

war international architecture for peace suffered from 

relative paralysis during the Cold War, scholars in this 

era got to work defining and measuring peace and 

working out policy recommendations that would flow 

from their findings. This led to new understandings of 

types of violence and new arenas in which peace work 

would be relevant. Importantly for our discussion here, 

the reconceptualization of both violence and peace also 

brought concerns of peace studies closer to 

development studies.  

Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung has been 

instrumental in developing new definitions of violence 

and peace, establishing foundational concepts such as 

structural and direct violence (and also cultural violence 

in later years), as well as positive and negative peace. 

Rejecting the narrow definition of violence as direct 

injury stemming from traditional interstate warfare, 

Galtung (1969, 168) broadened violence to include 

structures that are “the cause of the difference between 

the potential and the actual, between what could have 

been and what is.” Another of Galtung’s statements on 

structural violence characterizes it as “that which kills, 

although slowly, and un-dramatically from the point of 

view of direct violence” (Galtung and Hoivik 1971, 73). 

If violence is not only direct but also structural, then 

peace would have to be much more than the absence 

of direct violence, or what Galtung referred to as 

negative peace. A thicker conception of positive peace 

would include opportunities for people to reach their 

potential. Positive peace, Galtung argued, was the 

appropriate goal if peace studies scholars were to care 

about people’s quality of life amidst all forms of 

violence (Galtung 1969, 171; Wallensteen 2011, 15).  

Scholars quickly took up this admittedly vague 

definition of structural violence to try to operationalize 

it, and while models and measures differed, they 

supported Galtung’s (1969, 173) claim that “there is no 

reason to assume that structural violence amounts to 

less suffering than personal [direct] violence.” Whether 

looking at “number of life years lost” due to economic 

inequalities or an egalitarian model that measures how 

many deaths would have been avoided if global wealth 

had been equally distributed around the world, scholars 

have shown again and again that many more people 

come to harm via preventable disease, poverty, and 

discrimination, than via warfare (Galtung and Hoivik 

1971, 73; Kohler and Alcock 1976, 344). Positive peace 

in response to this structural violence, then, entails—

among other things—economic development, better 

access to medical care, and building new norms about 

equality among different identity groups. In sum, it 

begins to sound a lot like human development as Sen 



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Cross Riddle, Christian Responses to Violence and Conflict                                                                                        111 

(1999) defines it, as the expansion of people’s 

freedoms.  

Positive peace also has much in common with the 

biblical ideal of shalom, a concept promoted by, among 

others, Reformed philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff. 

The idea of shalom emphasizes right relationships, 

enjoyment, and flourishing, within a context 

characterized by both peace and justice (Wolterstorff 

1983, 69). Many of the authors in this special issue cite 

the importance of a positive, thick conception of peace 

as well, including John Barton, Michael McKoy, Anne 

Figge, Carlos Castañeda, and Janna L. Hunter-

Bowman. 

While many peace studies scholars began using 

terms like structural violence and positive peace 

through the 1970s and beyond, that did not necessarily 

extend into the halls of power. Once the peace industry 

emerged from the shadows of the Cold War, “the 

liberal peace” came into its own. Decades behind the 

establishment of international development, UN 

Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali published 

An Agenda for Peace in 1992, conveying the jubilant 

optimism about what global governance could finally 

accomplish for peace and security after the fall of the 

Iron Curtain. Focused on preventive diplomacy, peace-

making, and peacekeeping, Boutros-Ghali imagined a 

world that could establish peace through international 

cooperation and even well-placed intervention 

(Boutros-Ghali 1992). Now that Francis Fukuyama’s 

“end of history” had arrived with the victory of liberal 

democracy, the UNSC could use Chapter VII of the 

UN Charter to oversee state-building projects that 

would presumably diminish the risk factors for future 

armed conflicts (Fukuyama 2006; Goetze and Guzina 

2008).    

Scholars have characterized the liberal peace as 

global consensus in the early 1990s. Tantamount to the 

development industry’s Washington Consensus, 

practitioners and scholars alike, comprising what 

Séverine Autesserre has referred to as “Peace, Inc.,” 

have assumed that forced transitions to democratic 

politics, the rule of law, and market economies would 

propel the globe to sustainable peace (Autesserre 2021; 

Campbell, Chandler, Sabaratnam 2011). The UNSC 

and other actors like the US Department of State 

moved with new purpose, deploying the liberal peace 

in over 50 states such as Somalia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, 

and Timor Leste, from the 1990s-forward. This 

deployment has “remained without challenge, at least in 

mainstream international fora,” according to Oliver 

Richmond (Richmond 2011, 1–2).  

Just as post-development thinkers challenged the 

Washington Consensus, critical scholars formed a 

school of thought called post-liberal peace. Lobbing 

criticisms that paralleled those of post-development 

scholars, this group called attention to the harms of top-

down peace policies and the penchant for the Global 

North-dominated UNSC to intervene primarily in 

Global South locations, implying that the Global South 

is inherently violent (Richmond 2011, 6–7; 2014). Part 

of the larger “local turn” within peace studies, post-

liberal peace scholars and other critics using decolonial, 

feminist, and anti-racist lenses, promote alternatives to 

the liberal peace, and particularly local-level 

peacebuilding that addresses everyday injustices from 

the viewpoints of differently marginalized groups (a 

point raised particularly by author Anne Figge in this 

special issue) (Berlowitz 2002; Huaman 2011; Mac 

Ginty 2014; Leonardsson and Rudd 2015; Azarmandi 

2018; Zembylas 2018).  

Mennonite sociologist John Paul Lederach looms 

large within the turn to the local and merits particular 

attention. Famous for his conflict transformation 

approach, Lederach locates peacebuilding away from 

the negotiating table and within regular relationships. 

For people who live side by side, he argues, conflict 

(understood as friction and disagreement) is inevitable. 

To try to resolve it forever would be foolhardy, because 

people simply cannot live in community without 

disagreeing. Practitioners of conflict transformation, 

therefore, focus on building sustainable, nonviolent 

mechanisms that help communities navigate contention 

while maintaining relations across difference (Lederach 

2003, 31; 2005, 138–47). While he is a mainstream 

scholar and indeed a giant in the field of peace studies, 

Lederach has never shied away from the Christian 

influences on his work (2014). Certainly a non-

Christian could use conflict transformation, but 

Lederach’s emphasis on mercy (1995, 20) (an idea 

unheard of in the self-interested approach to 

international relations known as realpolitik) and his 

understanding of the important roles of the mysterious 

and the serendipitous within peacebuilding (2005) 

resonate well with many Christians, who believe that 

God cares about and intervenes in our earthly pursuits. 

Indeed, many of the Christian authors in this special 

issue cite Lederach as important to their work, 

including McKoy, Barton, Castañeda, and Hunter-

Bowman. 

Not everyone in the peace industry is comfortable 

with explicit religious values in peacebuilding, however, 

due to the belief that religion itself has been, and may 

continue to be, a driver of violence. (This is a quandary 

that Barton captures in this issue with the help of 

theologian Miroslav Volf (2017), asking whether 

religion has been a poison or a gift.) As mentioned 

above, secular organizations like the World Bank and 

the US Department of State started to partner with 

religious actors in the development industry particularly 

around the year 2000, when they turned their attention 

to poverty alleviation (Schliesser 2024). Similar 

partnerships are not unheard of in the peace industry, 



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but they have been slower to form and, in my view, 

remain more contentious, due to the ambivalent role 

that religion has played in violent conflicts (Appleby 

2000). This is closely tied to the explicitly political 

nature of peacebuilding, which engages with the very 

function of a state—controlling violence within and at its 

borders (Weber 1965).  

Differences between peace and development in 

the early 21
st

 century demonstrate just how difficult it 

can be for religious actors to engage in peacebuilding 

which is necessarily and explicitly political. Just as the 

development industry was getting a boost from the 

Millennium Development Goals, the peace industry 

was contending with the realities of the 9/11 terrorist 

attacks on US soil, which US President George W. 

Bush and many others linked inextricably with Islam 

(Shaw 2011). Many peace studies and religious studies 

scholars published accounts of religious actors, 

including Muslims, working for the common good, but 

at the same time, political scientist Samuel Huntington’s 

(1996) controversial argument proposing the “clash of 

civilizations” seemed to be borne out by the events of 

9/11. More recently, religious right-wing movements in 

places like India and the United States appear to 

correspond with a rolling back of rights and increasing 

injustices against minority groups, leaving observers 

again wringing their hands about the interpolation of 

religious principles into politics (Basu 2020, 3). Must 

peace be secular to succeed?  

As theologian Volf (2017, 13) argues (with another 

nod of thanks to Barton’s piece appearing in this issue), 

religions are “an indispensable part of the solution” to 

violence. Indeed, the pieces in this special issue reveal 

the radical and potentially paradigm-shifting nature of 

Christian responses to violence and conflict. When a 

world driven by self-interest would expect retribution or 

at least putting up walls between enemies, Christians 

promote mercy, forgiveness, and enemy love, often at a 

very high cost to themselves. 

 

What Will You Find in this Special Issue?     
The pieces that follow adopt a wide range of 

formats and are rooted in many different locations. 

Readers will find academic analyses, personal memoirs, 

and dialogues by Christians working against both direct 

and structural violence in Israel/Palestine, India, 

Ukraine, South Sudan, and the US. Despite the wide 

variety among the pieces, we can tease out three major 

themes from the collection, which are all important for 

sensitive Christian responses to diverse forms of 

violence.  

Theme 1: Who Is My Neighbor? 
First, many of the pieces address the thorny 

question: “Who is my neighbor?” This question is not 

that difficult to answer if your neighbor looks and acts 

just like you and is on your side of an armed conflict. 

When one’s neighbor is a current or former enemy, 

however, a loving Christian response becomes much 

more difficult. Michael McKoy’s jus post bellum (after 

war) argument in favor of enemy love, illustrated with 

the case study of relations between South Africa and 

Libya, suggests that state leaders can act in more and 

less loving ways, producing better and worse outcomes 

in the wake of armed conflict. This argument may seem 

overly idealistic—can states really love, and in Christian 

ways? Yet Augustine’s Just War principles have long 

played important roles in the laws that govern warfare 

and humanitarian intervention, so perhaps Christian 

love among states is not so far-fetched (Burkhardt 

2017). The two pieces that consider the resurgent 

violence in Gaza, one by Rev. Dr. Mae Elise Cannon 

and the other by Rev. Sally Azar, also reference ideas 

found in Just War theory, indicating that these 

principles are widely relevant for contemporary 

populations living through violent conflict.  

Both Cannon and Azar also look well beyond Just 

War theory to offer compelling ideas about 

peacebuilding with enemies-as-neighbors. For Cannon, 

the Executive Director of Churches for Middle East 

Peace, the idea of collective liberation captures the 

difficulty of loving someone who has hurt you. Neither 

Israel nor Palestine can be free, she argues, without the 

liberation of the other side. Azar, a Palestinian Christian 

pastor from Jerusalem, similarly calls attention to 

Palestinian liberation theology, which pairs faith with 

justice. A triumphant but unjust result for Palestinians 

is not the goal, but rather care for the marginalized. 

Finally, the interview with a Christian woman from 

Manipur, India (name redacted for her family’s safety) 

shows how radical Christian love can appear in the 

sharing of a soup pot or even floorspace to sleep on, for 

a displaced neighbor. Even though members of the 

ethnic groups known as Nagas and Kukis have a history 

of violence against each other, our interviewee reports 

Nagas welcoming Kukis with open arms now that their 

lives are threatened by a third group, the Meiteis. With 

some Nagas hosting entire Kuki families for several 

months, these Christians are learning how to live, pray, 

and hope together in the midst of ongoing violence that 

state leaders have not worked particularly hard to quell. 

Theme 2: Trauma healing may be the most 
important thing we can do for peace and development 

Many of the pieces herein remind us that trauma 

may get in the way of promoting human flourishing, 

particularly in areas troubled by armed conflict. 

Development workers focused on poverty alleviation 

may not necessarily have trauma at the front of their 

minds, but trauma may impede both development 

work and peace. The discussion of trauma healing for 

women’s savings groups in South Sudan, by Anne 

Figge, as well as the dialogue with Gregory Gibson 

about SALT’s work in Ukraine, provide examples of 



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organizations that pivoted to meet the needs of the 

traumatized populations they were serving. Trauma 

healing may not have been part of their initial plans, but 

it became an important step along the way.  

Many approaches to both peace and development 

tend to ignore the psychological dimensions of 

flourishing, in favor of social and economic change, but 

these pieces remind us that business-as-usual cannot 

proceed until at least some psychological healing has 

occurred. According to our anonymous dialogue 

partner from India, this type of aid is often overlooked 

within development work, but in her experience it plays 

a vital role in helping people cope and start to thrive. 

Both she and Figge also point to particularly Christian 

dimensions of trauma healing, in the form of forgiving 

those who have done you harm. Whereas secular 

peacebuilders may wish to stop short of recommending 

this Christian custom, these Christian practitioners note 

the importance of forgiveness for moving forward into 

transformation.   

Theme 3: Choose your words wisely 
Third, our terminology matters greatly when we 

are dealing with emotionally, socially, and politically 

sensitive issues like violence and peacebuilding. This is 

a very academic argument, but is nonetheless hugely 

important for practice. This theme relates to one of the 

main points I made in my comparative review of the 

fields of peace studies and development studies. 

Violence and peace are explicitly political, with the 

potential for producing real winners and losers in 

regard to power and influence. Any intervention in such 

issues is thus necessarily political, and religious actors, 

in particular, must take great care when taking sides 

(even as our faith demands that we stand on the side of 

justice).  

Given the political morass that anyone engaging in 

peace work might encounter, what kinds of terms are 

helpful? John Barton’s contribution offers an excellent 

overview of key arguments in the literature on religion 

and peacebuilding, revealing several terms and 

corresponding ideas to avoid, as well as more 

constructive terms that we can use. Among other 

helpful recommendations, he makes a plea for religious 

actors to get away from making essentializing, evaluative 

statements about entire religious traditions as 

“peaceful” (or violent) in favor of seeking out specific, 

“peaceable” elements. This work of careful excavation 

matches well the concerns of Rev. Azar who, from her 

viewpoint as a Palestinian Christian, notes that both 

Israel and Palestine can “claim historical and 

theological justifications for their actions.” When that is 

the case, Barton tells us that interreligious 

peacebuilders should not try to claim that their own 

religion is inherently peaceful (and therefore superior 

to others), but should rather privilege those elements 

from their theological traditions that would lead to 

peace.  

Our terms reveal our beliefs, which drive our 

actions. In the participatory action research dialogue 

between Carlos Castañeda and Janna L. Hunter-

Bowman on Movimiento Cosecha, a nonviolent 

immigrant-led social movement in the US, they discuss 

the difference between framing a relationship as 

“helper/helped” or as a partnership grounded in 

solidarity and invitation. In their dialogue, Hunter-

Bowman reports a provocative question that should 

challenge white Christians in the US while Immigration 

and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goes after our 

undocumented neighbors: “Excuse me, What if what 

we want and need is not to go into your churches but 

for you to join us in the streets, would you do that?” 

(posed by Dara Marquez at a meeting Hunter-Bowman 

led in 2016). Here, the terms matter greatly. One 

framing sees the church as “helping” but remaining in 

control, by offering its spaces as sanctuary to immigrants 

in need. The other frame sees immigrants in more 

control of their own destinies, and being joined by 

Christians who show up when invited. Such 

partnerships can be hugely important for fighting the 

kind of structural violence that undocumented 

immigrants face in the US every day.   

Many more interesting ideas and stories abound in 

the pieces that follow, from Gibson’s notion of the 

ministry of presence, coming physically alongside 

someone in their suffering; to Cannon’s advocacy for 

proximate justice when ideal justice is not attainable; to 

Figge’s promotion of Roger Mac Ginty’s asset-based 

“everyday peace” that covers household conflict as well 

as broader armed conflict. I will leave it to you, the 

readers, to discover these nuggets of wisdom in the 

pieces that follow.   

My primary goal in gathering these diverse pieces 

together is to share a wide range of arguments and 

practices that have circulated within the peace studies 

space but that may be new to scholars and practitioners 

in the development space. Not every piece will speak to 

every reader, but hopefully at least one of these will 

spark a new idea that aids each reader with their own 

work, whether it be in humanitarian aid, disaster relief, 

long-term development, or human rights advocacy. If 

we define development broadly, and if we define peace 

broadly, then we are partners together in many shared 

efforts.  

My secondary goal is to encourage readers who 

find themselves struggling to respond to violence with 

hope. Many of the stories and arguments found in the 

pages that follow can inspire us to do the next right 

thing, and then the next right thing after that, even when 

we would much rather fire back at those who harm us 

and members of our communities. Pacifists often look 

to the Sermon on the Mount for inspiration, in which 



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Cross Riddle, Christian Responses to Violence and Conflict                                                                                        114 

Jesus commands us to turn the other cheek (Cortright 

2006, 67). Turning one’s cheek is not an act of passive 

capitulation but rather active resistance. Some of the 

radical Christian responses to violence we see in this 

issue have the ability to disrupt cycles of violence. 

Unexpected acts of radical love can help people pause, 

reflect, and reform their behavior. As Lederach (2005, 

165) says, when violence is what is known, peace feels 

like a risk. Castañeda and Hunter-Bowman in this issue 

also refer to trust as a risk. Both require vulnerability, 

which is inherent in creating something unknown and 

new. The pieces in this issue demonstrate that these 

risks are well worth taking. 

 

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Karie Cross Riddle is an assistant professor of political 

science at Pepperdine University, where she teaches 

courses in global development, women and politics, 

international ethics, and South Asian politics. She is 

the author of Critical Feminist Justpeace (Oxford 

University Press, 2024). 

 
Author email: karie.riddle@pepperdine.edu 
 

mailto:karie.riddle@pepperdine.edu

