Excellence and Peace

By Dr. H. Richard Friman
Eliot Fitch Chair for International Studies
Professor of Political Science
Director, Institute for Transnational Justice

Web Posted: Feb. 1, 2005

Marquette University is committed to the “pursuit of excellence in all things as a lifelong endeavor.”  How then shall we as a community pursue “excellence” in peace? Though warmly embraced in, often vague, principle, peace in practice is and always has been controversial. In the politically charged atmosphere of the War on Terror or the areas of seemingly intractable violence around the world and at home, calls for peace and the exploration of paths to peace have become even more contested. 

“Constructing Peace,” the focus of this year’s Mission Week, requires excellence in teaching and research on the nature of peace, its sources, and its challenges. We are far from living in a world of harmony where common interests are the norm and conflicting interests the rare exception. The pursuit of excellence in peace requires our community to identify and explore why conflicting interests at times erupt into violence between groups within a community or warfare between countries, and to discover paths to preventing such violence. More broadly conceived, the pursuit of excellence in peace requires us to identify and explore the sources of conflicting interests, the extent to which they are embedded in social, economic and political inequalities and inequities, and to discover paths to redressing these sources.

The pursuit of excellence in peace, however, extends beyond scholarly exploration. The Marquette community includes those who are committed to negotiation, mediation, or nonviolence as well as those committed to the deterrent, defensive, or preemptive exercise of violence all in the name of peace. The Marquette community also includes those who are committed to addressing structurally embedded inequalities and injustices at home and abroad, some through working for institutional reforms and redistributive justice and others through working for existing frameworks to be used to their full potential.

Dialogue is necessary to construct peace. Drawing on strengths in scholarship and experience, where better than a university to explore the tension between the renunciation of violence and the extent to which there are uses of violence that are just? Drawing on strengths in scholarship and experience, where better than a university to explore the tension between competing understandings of justice and human rights and paths to their realization?

Constructing a more peaceful world would be easy if everyone agreed on what should be built and how to build it. As Gandhi so aptly demonstrated, however, the pursuit of excellence in peace is a difficult task—one that requires persistence in the face of controversy and willingness to bear the price of the path.

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