wfn.org | General Assembly Backgrounder: "Just Peacemaking"

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18-May-1998 
98178 
    General Assembly Backgrounder: 
    "Just Peacemaking" 
 
    by Julian Shipp 
 
LOUISVILLE, Ky.-The 1998 General Assembly will be asked to approve "Just 
Peacemaking and the Call for International Intervention for Humanitarian 
Rescue," a resolution that explores the moral and ethical requirements for 
"just peace" in the world in the wake of the collapse of the former Soviet 
Union and end of the Cold War. 
 
    After generations of examining "just war" theory - what moral and 
ethical criteria justify the waging of war - the paper calls the church to 
look at the moral and ethical criteria that must be applied in seeking 
peace with justice. 
 
    At its core, the document is about taking transforming initiatives - 
political, economic and humanitarian - designed to foster peace and 
justice. The emphasis on initiatives seeks to preclude the circumstances 
that deteriorate into genocidal, civil or international conflict. 
 
    However, "Just Peacemaking" recognizes there are human disasters that 
call for an emergency response. The resolution seeks to develop criteria 
for evaluating international intervention for humanitarian purposes in the 
context of "just peacemaking." 
 
    Among the criteria: 
 
      *  Intervention must respond to real and genuine need that cannot be 
         met by other means. 
      *  Intervention must have a reasonable chance of alleviating the 
         conditions it seeks to overcome. 
      *  Intervention must constitute humanitarian rescue and not cloak the 
         pursuit of the economic or narrow security interests of the 
         intervening powers. 
      *  Intervention, whenever possible, should have international 
         auspices in order to achieve the greatest presumption of 
         legitimacy. 
      *  Intervention should advance the general welfare of all the 
         inhabitants of the region in question and not become a tool by 
         which powerful elites further cement their power. 
      *  Intervention should involve the minimum degree of coercion 
         necessary to achieve the purposes of the action. 
      *  Intervention in the forms of punitive sanctions should be targeted 
         against those in authority rather than against broad population 
         groups. 
 
    "Just Peacemaking" is the result of action by the 207th General 
Assembly (1995) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which called for a 
discussion of numerous global human rights violations and the appropriate 
international response to them. 
 
     In 1996, the denomination's Advisory Committee on Social Witness 
Policy (ACSWP), in consultation with the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program 
and other Presbyterian and ecumenical agencies, published a study document 
by which local study groups contributed to the development of the 
resolution. 

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