Abstract
Within the traditional typology of ‘just war/holy war/pacifism’, it is far and away just war that has received the lion’s share of attention. But a new volume by Anna Floerke Scheid has returned attention to a less treated theme within Christian ethics and conflict: the conditions and means of a just revolution. Rooting her study in the transformation of South African politics, Scheid offers a new assessment of a modality of conflict that has often been either neglected or treated as a sub-political form, and offers an intriguing way forward for evaluation of the moral weight of revolutions.
Methodologically, Scheid takes many of her cues from the Just Peacemaking paradigm pioneered by the late Glen Stassen. Just Peacemaking sought to address conflict in what Stassen termed a ‘realistic’ perspective, drawing out of social science, empirical studies and social psychology a ten-fold paradigm for fostering just societies; by attending to the roots of conflict, Stassen hoped, wars would become less frequent. The ingenuity of the approach was, as Scheid describes, that it began from a nonviolent assumption of resistance, dialogue and praxis, while leaving open the possibility that such practices may not work in all circumstances.
It is at this point—when nonviolent means fail to produce social change—that Scheid points to the just war tradition as providing guidance for thinking through the conditions and means by which a revolution by the people against their oppressive government might be conducted, a revolution that will include violent means toward the end of justice for the people. Drawing from just war hallmarks including just cause, right authority, last resort, and protection of non-combatants, Scheid exposits the ways in which revolution both revises some of these classic marks and is strengthened by resort to just war categories. She then tests her methodology with the case of the political transformation of South Africa. She shows how revolution there illustrates this trajectory of nonviolent beginnings and limited use of violent means toward the establishment of a just society. Tentative evaluations are offered in the concluding chapter for this approach for current events across the Middle East.
With respect to the field of Christian ethics of conflict, Scheid’s book offers an important evaluation and rereading of a tradition of thought that has rarely taken seriously what a just revolution might consist of. Advocacy of revolution in the late 1970s and 1980s often sought justification in theological appeals to the judgments of God in history, or to the apocalyptic appearance of the kingdom of God, but the difficulty with such approaches is that they assumed an internal justification of revolution that could not be externally assessed. What Scheid’s book—in evaluating revolution by the classic restraints present in just war thinking—has provided is a far thicker vision of revolution than its predecessors.
Methodologically, there are two aspects of her work that I want briefly to interrogate. The first is the description of Christian nonviolence that she provides, as well as its place vis-à-vis the just war tradition. For Scheid, Christian nonviolence is not rooted in a divine command, but in its practicability and contextual validity. While she is certainly correct that ‘the object of nonviolent direct action is not so much to create tension, but publicly to expose and directly to confront injustice’ (p. 41), she supposes—in keeping with Just Peacemaking’s description—that nonviolence is, in Stassen’s term, a transformative initiative subject to use when appropriate. That is to say, nonviolence in Scheid’s description is tactical practice consistent with Christian teaching, used prior to ‘last resort’. Christian practitioners of nonviolence would contest this emplotment of nonviolence as a precursor to justified forms of violence, for two reasons. First, nonviolence, as discussed theologically, has broadly been developed as an alternative to just war, not a precursor to it. And secondly, nonviolence, while enacted tactically and intentionally, is more than a set of prudential actions, and most often a deontological commitment not subject to the probability of success. Recent developments such as Just Peacemaking have pushed Christian nonviolence to think proactively about what it might look like in practice beyond, simply, opposition to war, but to describe Christian nonviolence as a precursor to violence would not be recognized, by its proponents, as an entirely accurate description. Her inclusion of nonviolent means within just war discussion depicts it in nearly tragic terms as a result. This emplotment raises a number of genealogical questions about the development of nonviolence as a Christian tradition, issues outside the scope of the book. But it also raises a significant question worth taking up in the future: does revolution, in fact, call the entire traditional genealogy into question as an outdated paradigm? In an age of non-state actors, is revolution the future, and the ‘just war/holy war/pacifism’ paradigm a thing of the past?
The second aspect of Scheid’s argument I wish to examine is to do with the ways in which revolution pushes the just war framework to consider some of its internal tensions, most notably around discussions of right authority. Aquinas’s dismissal of revolution in the Summa Theologiae turns on his preference for monarchy as the form of governance that most closely mirrors the divine perfections, with democratic revolutions being prone to mob mentality rather than just order. In a particularly compelling move, Scheid reframes just authority in terms of the democratic authority of populations seeking to be able to live under non-authoritarian conditions. There are other qualifiers that she introduces, but the move to read democratic impulses into the traditional statist/monarchical category of right authority both invigorates the category for populist movements and opens the category up to possible abuses. What are the limits to populist actions? Scheid assumes a democratically responsive framework for revolution, but could populist revolutions that do not have such democratic intentions be justified by this framework? ‘Right authority’ has been transposed beyond its monarchical roots without question, but could it be transposed back into non-democratic movements, only on the popular level?
As conflicts across the world continue to be perpetrated more and more by non-state actors, Scheid’s work is an invigorating example of how to think constructively in a new era without throwing out the traditions of the past. More work remains to be done, as indicated above, to continue clarifying the degree to which past traditions remain usable in the present, the manner in which they are still usable, and what it might mean to build a just world in the presence of competing notions of what a just and populist movement might look like.