Abstract
The product of seven years of research, The Distinction of Peace draws from social theory and the cumulative and corrective knowledge of peacebuilders to explain the relationship between peace, war, and justice as rooted in inequality. Early in the book, Goetze references Pierre Bourdieu’s four forms of capital – economic, cultural, social, and symbolic – to support a framework that exposes the complexities involved in peacebuilding in opposition to injustices. ‘From World War II through the Cold War, the UN understood peace as the avoidance of armed conflict between states and given the threat of nuclear attack mainly as avoidance of a superpower clash’ (p. 48). Goetze does not aim to critique the United Nations for its truncated connotation of peace but acknowledges the idea that capital deprivation has historically played a significant role in terms of various global atrocities, which Galtung and other peace studies scholars have described as a lack of ‘positive peace.’ Goetze stresses that superpowers have engaged in various forms of third-party conflict, intervention tactics, and proxy wars. The author devotes part of the book to present demographic patterns of peacebuilders and the role that social institutions and structures play in cultivating prospects for the profession.
The Distinction of Peace provides the reader with peacebuilding accounts from multiple geographic regions while drawing from a variety of postconflict scenarios. Goetze devotes a significant portion of the book to describing sociological characteristics of professional peacebuilders as overall middle-class and well educated. If one were to recontextualize Thorstein Veblen’s concept of ‘the leisure class’ to professional peacebuilders it would become evident that the ‘sub-middle class,’ which Veblen defines as ‘the industrious class,’ lacks access to peace-brokering and participation in peace missions as an industry, because the formal requisite training would result in pecuniary loss that would compromise their immediate needs. ‘Access to quality education is extremely unequal around the world, and it is almost impossible for a resident of a country in the global South to compete with residents in the global North’ (p. 103). Overall the Global South has lacked what Galtung and other peace studies scholars consider as ‘positive peace’ due to aristocratically constructed maldistribution of resources and internal repression.
Within the context of black activists in Africa and the African diaspora the actors typically have a degree of distinction from their ascribed group, but unlike the peacebuilders described in the book there lies less distance between the actors and their communities. The common ground between activists and peacebuilders across social race and social class rests in social capital, which refers to ‘the wealth of private and professional connections a person can mobilize’ (p. 81). Although formal training in peacebuilding functions as beneficial for attaining the necessary theoretical knowledge and means to apply mediation strategies in praxis, Goetze makes it evident that the academy does not have a monopoly in terms of equipping individuals for such endeavors.
The book’s primary audience includes scholars and students within the subdiscipline of international relations, public administration, and peace studies. Despite the author’s acknowledgment that peacebuilding is unable to escape the confines of neoliberalism or the Weberian concept of the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratization, Goetze emphasizes the idea that societies such as the United States collectively have a high moral responsibility to prevent human atrocities. However, professional peacebuilders, activists, social scientists, and general audiences with some familiarity with public policy and NGOs will find the book relevant. Although the book contains a wide variety of charts and tables that reflect advanced methodological sophistication, Goetze explains each of them in lay terms such that the findings can become applicable beyond academic settings.
Although the author acknowledges that the leading employers of professional peacebuilders consist of the UN and nongovernmental organizations, a careless reading would unintentionally give a reader the impression that the field requires extensive formal education and training but with limited prospects for job opportunities. There is an element of transferability of various skills for various vocations and endeavors such as business negotiation, business management, and law enforcement strategies of de-escalation. Goetze clearly supports that idea that trained peacebuilders have marketable skills such as research and analytical skills, and the ability to develop a strategic vision and clear goals. The author makes the case that the profession has evolved beyond the embryonic stage and has become a legitimate occupation with a useful purpose for meeting the 21st-century challenges.
Just as local and international politics contain polarized ideological factions ranging from progressive to ultraconservative, Christian groups, especially in Latin America, reflect such divisions because some support peacebuilding processes whereas others side with military juntas. Reading this book, one feels a degree of pessimism about the future of peacebuilding with regard to its ability to transcend the confines of the globalization of capitalism. If markets continue to function as a significant driving force behind institutions that affect war, conflict, and civil and human rights, then it remains questionable whether or not peacebuilding can exist as the ultimate exception while remaining effective.
The book’s greatest strength is that it ignites the need for further research in the area of the risk of intervention. As domestic and international alliances become increasingly subject to shifting, along with the destabilization of the global climate, the failure of peacebuilding can escalate conflict. ‘A social contract based on respect for procedures of justice is the most reasonable solution to the dilemmas that arise when many individual wills have to cooperate and live together in a collective’ (p. 182). The Distinction of Peace builds on John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971) by making such theoretical findings applicable to a global era of prolonged readjustment from a bipolar to a unipolar global order with multiple competing factions heightened by increased interconnectedness through globalization.