With Pope Francis’ 2017 World Day of Peace message urging nonviolence as a habitual way of life, this would seem to be a timely text, especially for those more interested in the political than the theological foundations of just war theory and nonviolent action. Much in the style of political science offerings, the prose is straightforward, almost clinical in its prescriptions.
The first two sections of the book, treating just war theory, Christian realism, and moral arguments against war, are grounded more firmly in extensive research than the middle section, which offers sweeping accounts of other examples of institutionalized violence (slavery, lynching, duels, and trial by ordeal and combat). Combining these middle chapters as shorter case studies or eliminating them altogether would lend greater cohesion to the book overall.
In general, the analysis of institutionalized violence merits greater development. In discussing the example of slavery, there is little mention, for example, of Jim Crow or of the “new Jim Crow,” as Michelle Alexander puts it, of hyperincarceration, aside from a brief allusion (158). Was slavery abolished, or did it give way to subtler forms of institutionalized antiblack violence? Does systemic trafficking in brown human beings to do backbreaking agricultural work in US fields count as slavery? These would be important questions to flesh out further in the interest of advancing the author's argument that war can be abolished, just like other forms of institutionalized violence in the past.
In a similar vein, the author offers a sanguine account of mature democracies refraining from war with one another (183ff.). But there is no mention of covert operations or the surrogate wars so prevalent during the Cold War. Chile, for example, was home to the longest-running democracy and the first democratically elected socialist president in Latin America when US corporate interests and the CIA backed the 1973 coup that left its president dead and Pinochet in dictatorial power for seventeen years. The United States was not at war with Chile, but the effects of the coup on the majority of the population were much like those of war—torture, disappearance, pervasive repression, and sharp declines in human services and economic opportunities for the most vulnerable people. Similar cases involving violent US intervention in other democratic countries without a declaration of war would include El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, not to mention indigenous peoples’ territories in North America. Some acknowledgment of this reality would serve to nuance and strengthen the argument for the abolition of war, declared and otherwise.
Chapter 9, “Lawlessness, Disorder, and Dehumanization,” would benefit from a deeper theological analysis. Augustine's insistence on mourning as the proper disposition when faced with the prospect of killing another person in war would seem appropriate to mention. In an era of soaring PTSD rates among those returning from armed conflict, the moral injury caused by war would also be another fruitful theological thread to explore in greater detail, by way of supporting the author's thesis.
These theological considerations would also invite greater attention to the moral grounding of active nonviolence in Scripture and in moral principles. Dorothy Day receives a brief nod near the beginning of the book, but the wellspring of her commitment to nonviolence in the Sermon on the Mount is not acknowledged. Accounting for the theological and moral underpinning of nonviolence would temper the tendency to reduce nonviolent options to their instrumental value (188–89). Asking, “How effective are they?” is very different morally from considering their intrinsic value as a dignified, principled, and faithful response to violence.
This text's treatment of the development in Catholic teaching of a strong presumption against war, and its summary of the neoconservative critique of this position (chapters 4 and 5), represent its strongest contribution to the existing literature. For undergraduate courses treating war and peace, these chapters could serve as a general introduction to the main interlocutors and issues at stake.
