Slow Violence, Religious Peacemaking, and Climate Justice

Although peacemaking has concentrated on resolving armed conflict, it can further climate justice when appropriately amended.  For example, Glen Stassen’s religious version of just peacemaking prioritizes efforts to realign economic incentives—now climate justice’s foremost obstacle—by reforming regulatory regimes.  Such reform is crucial to redressing climate change because the slow violence of this change can only be remedied through long-term coordination.  Nevertheless, Stassen’s reliance on mutual self-interest and economic interdependence for such regulatory reform leads him to emphasize prudence.  This emphasis compromises his peacemaking’s ability to mitigate climate change, since as conventionally understood prudence intensifies the intergenerational conflicts of interest that accelerate such change.  However, religious traditions have resources to broaden conventional understandings of prudence and render interests unrelated to one’s own worthy of consideration.  Religious peacemaking that harnesses these resources may thereby moderate the slow violence of these intergenerational conflicts and so advance climate justice.