PEACEMAKERS
Building stability in a complex world
By Peter Dixon. IVP. 164 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978-1-84474-402-2
Peter Dixon is a former RAF pilot who, as director of a conflict resolution charity and a doctoral student, now has both practical and academic interests in his subject. In this book, which originated in four talks in the London Lectures series, he attempts to help ‘non-specialist Christians better understand how they can apply their faith to these complex matters’.
He asks two fundamental questions. First, why should we work to bring peace or stability to distant conflicts that may seem not to concern us and, second, how should we get involved? In the process of answering them he argues that, although war is ‘nasty, brutal and distressing’, Just War criteria provide a framework which helps moral men determine their approach. For instance, there is a requirement to consider all alternatives before resorting to military action, and we must always apply Just War principles to the conflict’s end state, focusing, even while fighting and stabilisation operations are in progress, on our objective in becoming involved in the first place. He is, I think, wholly right to observe that we cannot assume a responsibility for righting the wrongs of the whole world: ‘It is enough for us to do what we can, when we can, where we can’.
