Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(3), Spring 2025 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, Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(3), Spring 2025 Cross Riddle, Christian Responses to Violence and Conflict 109 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 Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(3), Spring 2025 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 Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(3), Spring 2025 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, Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(3), Spring 2025 Cross Riddle, Christian Responses to Violence and Conflict 112 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 Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(3), Spring 2025 Cross Riddle, Christian Responses to Violence and Conflict 113 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 Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(3), Spring 2025 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. References Appleby, R. Scott. 2000. The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Autesserre, Séverine. 2021. The Frontlines of Peace: An Insider’s Guide to Changing the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Azarmandi, Mahdis. 2018. “The Racial Silence within Peace Studies.” Peace Review 30 (1): 69–77. Basu, Anustup. 2020. Hindutva as Political Monotheism. Durham: Duke University Press. 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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