How Am I to Write?

How am I to write about peace? Should I write about the broadly shared hope for the end of all war? That is not a good approach for me because I fear the people who lead the world’s war-capable or war-provoking states and non-states are institutionally unable to create anything closer to peace than provisional cease-fires.

Is there another approach for me to write about peace? Instead of imagining a world without wars, can I imagine a world where the current wars end in peace, and new wars do not start? That means imagining a world with a lot of good peace treaties. That seems like a good approach.

I ask myself, “When was the last peace treaty signed?” I cannot remember. “Who would keep track of such agreements?” The United Nations! So, I look at the United Nations’ site for information on peace treaties and quickly arrive at the Peacemaker site (https://peacemaker.un.org).

I find and download data about the 828 peace-related documents filed with the U.N. Secretary-General there[1]. “Over eight hundred documents?”  It stands to reason that transforming armed conflict into peace takes a lot of work, right? However, my gut reaction oscillates between, “That’s a lot of peace-making activity, thanks be to God!” and, “There must have been more wars than I was aware of!” I do not know whether to read a psalm of thanksgiving or lament.

A caveat is in order here. The Peacemaker repository is a collection of documents “that can be understood broadly as peace agreements and related material” (United Nations 2024). Documents related to the end of wars in which one party was defeated (such as Germany in World War II) are not in this document collection.

A second caveat, this one about me. I confess that getting my hands on a trustworthy data set on a topic of interest is one of life’s greatest joys (althoughit doesn’t even compare to God’s gifts of faith, hope, and love.) Tabulating information from such a source is a favorite activity and my method of last recourse, as at least one of my seminary professors can attest to. Last fall, I was stumped by the task of creating a textual analysis of “Book VIII” of Augustine’s Confessions. I resorted to a tabulation of the scripture Augustine cited, which did not result in the grade I’d hoped – live and learn.

Misguided attempts to avoid intractable tasks aside, tabulation can teach us something about peace-making from the Peacemaker. The repository comprises a multitude of uni-, bi-, and multi-lateral documents about negotiated cease-fires, borders, border waters, humanitarian crises, reconciliation, cooperation, and peace. To have more wars end with peace, we need more experts in resolving conflicts about these matters. I pray that many seminarians are getting training in conflict resolution.

The earliest document is the 1897 arbitration agreement between Great Britain and Venezuela about the border of British Guinea; the latest is a 2017 memorandum among Iran, Russia, and Turkey about advancing conditions for the political settlement of the conflict in Syria. If those factoids do not whet your historical curiosity, perhaps this one will. Only a twentieth of the documents precede 1975. Roughly half of the rest are from the 50 years between 1951 and 2000, and the other remaining half are from the year 2001 on.

The past 20 years have generated as many peace-making documents as the previous 50. I don’t know if the number of conflicts increased or if the rate that they ended in negotiated agreements increased, but I would like to know.

Where does that leave us, dear friend? I need to learn more. That may not be your cup of tea, and that’s OK. However, I hope we can agree to be more curious about this verse in the book of Matthew: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (5:9 NRSVUE).

[1] I downloaded the dataset on June 12, 2024.

Ximena Leroux, Master of Divinity Student, Columbia Theological Seminary