The views expressed in these blogs belong to the authors, not necessarily LICC. In this series, we’re hosting a conversation in blog form, bringing diverse perspectives into dialogue.

Editor’s introduction

‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. … 
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.’
(Matthew 5:5, 9) 

By God’s grace, this will ultimately be so. But right now, we need courage to hold on to this hope and wisdom to model another way, as the risk of world war seems to grow daily.

Currently, there are over 40 countries locked in conflict that destroys lives and devastates community and creation alike.

As international conflict escalates, how would Jesus have us seek shalom wherever we stand?

That’s the question this five-part blog series explores. Our contributors include military advisors, global relational peacebuilders, educators, humanitarian aid workers, academics, activists, and political aides. Some work overseas, directly engaging on the frontline. Others are serving on UK soil, dealing with the repercussions of unchecked violence come home to roost.

The articles are designed to help you become a ‘wise peacemaker’ where you are. Each author models how to:

• Listen to what’s going on and why as wartime impinges on their context and calling
• Imagine what should be going on, with biblical insight to join God’s peace-full mission
• Create practices and a response of healing action that brings God’s shalom near
• Communicate the gospel that Christ reigns even over dictators, without firing a bullet

The series also accompanies our Wisdom Lab: Peacemaking in Wartime event, at which the authors will engage in honest dialogue that will help us squarely face war’s consequences in a Christlike way.

In this penultimate piece, you’re dropped right into the middle of myriad disaster zones as Alex Fergusson, a humanitarian aid worker for Medair, seeks to make the best of truly awful wartime situations. His day job is literally to save and sustain lives in times of crisis. Seeking the shalom of ‘terrorists’ and the people living under warlords is an ethically tricky business, to say the least. How can one be rightly related to God, neighbour, nature, and self, when they brandish a sword and you do not? But perhaps, especially in hotspots like Sudan, Chad, and Yemen, the peacemaking way of Jesus can find a path through the violence to rebuild trust and strengthen diplomatic channels where power politics ‘as usual’ has failed.

While few of us will ever face the danger Alex has to navigate in his role, I’m sure you’ll find wisdom here to help you respond under duress, wherever God has called you to be fruitful in everyday life.

Dr Dave Benson, Director of Culture & Discipleship, LICC

 

Searching for God’s image in war criminals

‘Abraham breathed his last and died at a good old age, an old man and full of years; and he was gathered to his people. His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah near Mamre, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite.’
(Genesis 25:8–9)
 
‘… seek peace and pursue it.’
(Psalm 34:14; 1 Peter 3:11)

Stories from the frontlines

Some would say my work is pretty extreme. A couple of stories may help set the scene.

It’s 2014 and my wife and I are part of a Medair team running a refugee camp in South Sudan. The civil war, which had started in Juba and quickly spread around the country, has not directly touched the area we are working, but everyone is suspicious and fearful. The community that’s hosting the refugee camps decide that soldiers from Ethnic Group A* in the army barracks are fifth columnists – a subversive group aligned with external enemies, believed to be stoking the conflict from within their ranks. Not only those soldiers but all people from Ethnic Group A present in the community must be chased out.

Roadblocks go up. Innocent humanitarian aid workers from Ethnic Group A are dragged from their vehicles and executed at the side of the road. Civilians are pursued and killed. A colleague of ours is in the market when the militia turn up. He runs with his friend. His friend is shot in the back and killed. He survives. The local militia start to surround the compounds of NGOs, asking for Ethnic Group A staff members to be handed over.

Several days pass and an evacuation flight arrives. We still have one Ethnic Group A colleague on our compound, but we deem it too dangerous to get him to the airstrip. A vehicle pulls up at the front gate of our compound. It is the local Commissioner – the person in charge of the community – the same community that has been killing Ethnic Group A civilians. He says he can take our colleague to the airstrip and get him on the plane. After a deliberation, our colleague agrees that he should go with the Commissioner to the airstrip. He gets on the flight and is still serving people across South Sudan to this day.

Race forward to April 2022. I am with Medair in Bucha, Ukraine, right after the Russian troops had pulled out. Amidst the demolished Russian tanks, the destruction of infrastructure, the mass graves being exhumed, the acute trauma of people’s stories, and the strange smell in a place just after conflict, I get speaking to a church leader.

He had decided to stay with his community rather than flee, and is sheltering 175 people in the basement of the church premises. Russian soldiers had barged in, screaming, swearing, and brandishing their guns, with everyone expecting they would be killed. And yet, some peaceable spirit came over them as they entered the church building. The church leaders were able to de-escalate the soldiers, and the aggressors just walked out, leaving everyone unharmed. The soldier who had been leading the team into the basement turned out to be the main proponent of many of the documented human rights violations that happened in Bucha during that time.^[1]

As humanitarians, we do not engage in the formal process of political peacekeeping or peacemaking. But we are privileged to operate in conflict settings, to observe and interact with people perpetrating violence, to try to understand them, and their motives so that we can operate and bring lifesaving assistance to women and children impacted by war. Conflict is caused by individual people making decisions. It is carried out by individual people acting on orders.

Referencing Reinhold Niebuhr, Tim Keller says that nations have corporate egos; and, just like individuals, national cultures can have superiority or inferiority complexes.^[2] If we can understand what drives individuals towards conflict or towards peace, then we are better placed to understand conflict at the communal, national, and even international level. And if we better understand those drivers, then we can foster better-informed ways to move conflict situations towards shalom, the holistic flourishing in right relationship we were created for.

Warzones are surprising places. What follows below is not an academic argument exploring theological or philosophical justifications for war. Given everything happening across the world right now, we mustn’t be naïve, seeking some Christian kumbaya retreat from reality. The line I take is based on observations of human nature, grounded in theological convictions about the true nature of things. It is about a hard-nosed way to operate in warzones, borne from first-hand experience that we need to understand the root causes of conflict in order to bring peace into situations.

The stories from South Sudan and from Ukraine reveal a surprising truth that we can find in conflict settings: however deeply hidden, each person carries within them the divine image. And if we consciously look for this image in people, we can appeal to it, call it forth, and be surprised by what happens. If we do this and it works at an individual level, then my provocation is: can we use this anywhere we find ourselves, and at communal and national levels of peacemaking?

Listen – what’s going on and why?

Listening to those embroiled in conflict seems like a revolutionary act, especially if they are on the other side of the battle to me.

One of the core principles of humanitarian action is that we seek to be neutral – not that we are indifferent to the claims of justice from either side, but in order that we can provide lifesaving healthcare, nutritional supplies to malnourished children, and clean water and shelter to any civilian who needs it. Whilst of course having our own private opinions, it means that we get to listen to narratives on both sides of a conflict.

Typically, each side will make a set of moral claims that manifest around a set of grievances: governance (often around how power is distributed between the centre and peripheries); ethnic and racial divisions; competition over resources (water, oil, gold, minerals); elite political power struggles, including over the control of the legitimate use of violence; governing doctrine (should we be secular or Islamic?); interference by external actors and the legacy of historical, colonial, Cold War interference; and relative economic disparity and poverty.^[3]

Each side of a conflict will likely reason from and appeal to any of these grievances, and typically employ an argument based in some form of metaphysical ethics emerging from the larger story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration they believe they’re in. One of the questions for peacemakers is how to reconcile competing versions of justice, whether between two individuals, two nations, or two factions within a civil war.

The above list of conflict drivers can seem all-encompassing and can be where peacemaking efforts focus, but they are symptoms of a deeper issue. If groups, clans, and countries have corporate egos, it is instructive to listen to voices that seek to understand the root causes of conflict.

Amanda Ripley, a journalist and founder of the Good Conflict Course, describes ‘high conflict’ – conflict that is all-consuming and destructive^[4] – as stemming from fear, humiliation, and moral certainty. Conflict exists because it serves psychological and social needs, like belonging and validation. If these needs are not met in healthy ways, they will be met in unhealthy ways.^[5]

Driving this deeper, Jamie Winship, a law enforcement officer and international conflict resolution expert, argues that ultimately conflict is driven by people misunderstanding their identity, leading to people acting out of fear towards others. This is undergirded by each person’s fundamental worldview – do I live in a world of abundance and connection, or of separation and scarcity?^[6] These individual traits can become collectivised in kin groups, gangs, communities, and nations.

From an academic angle, Brené Brown, a social scientist and celebrated speaker and author on vulnerability, argues that disgust, created by dehumanising our opponent, is the core emotion that drives genocide.^[7] As humans, we like to think of ourselves as rational, clear-thinking beings guided by reason and logic, but moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s picture of the elephant and the rider shows us the limits of human reason, and that we are driven far more by emotion, especially intuitive and uncontrolled thought processes.^[8] It’s out of the human heart, not simply our heads, that evil proceeds, polluting everything and perverting shalom with pride and violence (Mark 7:20–23).^[9]

In an article of this length, it’s not possible to go further into exploring these ideas. But these diverse authors all agree that conflict is really driven by a combination of misunderstanding our core identity, fear, humiliation, moral certainty, disgust leading to dehumanisation, and unknowing irrationality. As I reflect on the different war-torn settings where I’ve worked, I can see how these underlying drivers of conflict also lead to the symptoms I discussed at the start of this section.

Imagine – what should be going on?

Holding the right theological anthropology – the right understanding of human nature informed by God’s word – is key to understanding conflict and how to resolve it, fostering peace in wartime.

All people, no matter how seemingly evil, are made in the image of God. I was once sat across a table from a colonel who was on the UN sanctions list, negotiating to allow us to work in the area his troops controlled. His troops had attacked the town where we were, abusing civilians and destroying homes. I use this war criminal as my mental yardstick when saying this to avoid making cheap statements. Recognising that all people are made in the image of God, however far short we fall of this calling, is the key to understanding the human condition.^[10]

Before we add any layers of identity and culture, the state of humankind is common to all. We were made good (Genesis 1; John 1; Romans 1) but have rebelled and lost our way (Genesis 3; Romans 3). We are equally in need of divine grace to overcome the separation between us and God and his created world, the separation that exists between us and other people, and the separation that exists within each one of us, which we intuitively know. When I recognise that I need divine grace in the same way as Colonel UN Sanctions List, that I have no claim to righteousness, something happens. Space to engage opens up between us. When I act morally superior to Colonel UN Sanctions List, he is defensive and will never engage with me.

The cross, the place where death and defeat meet resurrection and victory, is a place of paradox. It is a place where seemingly contradictory facts of reality can be held in tension. It is the place where apparently opposed realities can be true at the same time – where justice and mercy meet, and where retribution and forgiveness both occur (Psalm 85:10; Micah 6:8; Romans 12:19).^[11] The modern world, with all of its polarising tendencies, pushes us to accept one thing and not another, as though it’s too complicated for us to hold two truths in tension alongside each other, cohering in the better story of God in Christ redeeming all things, even reconciling natural enemies.

The Christian message teaches us that we are not God, that we do not have perfect knowledge, and that we are not the measuring stick against which my enemy’s righteousness should be evaluated. It teaches us ‘epistemological humility’ – we don’t know everything, and we cannot know everything.^[12] This applies to all things, including my side’s claim to justice in the conflict. One of the tasks for our time is how we reconcile equal, insistent, and competing claims to justice, where both sides hold these claims in an absolute way. I can claim justice, hold onto my principles very tightly, but do it in a way that is not absolute, understanding that my enemy is also making a justice claim.^[13]

Create – how will we respond?

So far, I’ve argued that conflict is essentially driven by a misunderstanding of identity, fear, humiliation, moral certainty, and disgust, with more than a dash of irrationality muddying the waters. And I’ve painted a biblical picture where each person is made in the image of God, though we’re fallen and our knowledge of reality – including the fight we’re embroiled in – is far from perfect. If we’re tracking together, then what opportunities might present themselves for seeking shalom in equitable relationships between people and even nations? What I share below is a series of practical peacemaking stories and examples that (imperfectly) align with these truths, but in real life brought shalom, even if only at a small scale, into violent situations.

Let the image of God within us connect with and draw out the image of God in others. We were trying to land a helicopter on the edge of a swamp in order to bring relief supplies to people who had fled into the swamp to escape fighting. I needed to speak with militia commanders on each side of the fighting. My boss looked at me and said, ‘Alex, everyone is made in the image of God – your job is to draw it out.’ Encountering considerable resistance, I entered the negotiation with this mindset, and perhaps by providence as much as judgment or theological clarity, was able to negotiate in such a way that we were able to land the items and to provide a lifeline to the people in the swamp.

Asking for help can defuse conflict. In July 2016, conflict broke out in Juba, South Sudan, between two warring factions. There was a complete breakdown of any form of law enforcement across the city. In the middle of this, I found myself at the gate to our compound with my boss, trying to defuse a situation in which 20 armed and drug-fuelled local militia members pointed their AK47s at us, threatening to overrun our compound. We tried multiple tactics to defuse the situation, and in the end – guided by God’s protection and wisdom through especially fervent prayers(!) – it was de-escalated by asking for their help and promising the situation would be sorted out when the fighting in the city was over.^[14]

Actively serving people across ethnic lines foreshadows the new humanity we look forward to as Christians. I have a friend who was recruited out of a refugee camp into a militia when he was under the age of 10. He was given a stark choice: fight ‘the enemy’ or be killed by his own side. He has the air of a child soldier – stunted growth and an ability to be simultaneously present and not present – but has lived an amazing life as a humanitarian, bringing assistance to people across the ethnic divide in his country. When conflict coalesces around ethnic identity, this is a revolutionary act, and the act of serving people who are different to you, brings shalom.

You can engage with a person, actively listen to them, even negotiate with them, without validating what they’ve done. I sat across the table from another colonel to negotiate access into an area so we could come in and work. His soldiers had raped, murdered, torched houses, and destroyed water points. He was disturbingly charming, and we shared our views on what was happening in the Premier League. I left morally conflicted, wondering if I had validated what his troops had done by the way I interacted with him. But the very act of engaging with him meant that we were able to provide health services to people who desperately needed them. The aim in this ethically borderline situation is simply to maximise shalom and minimise sin, not make absolutist moral judgments that end the opportunity to make things better before we even begin.^[15]

Being confident and non-defensive in your own identity, look for areas of agreement. I was Medair’s Country Director in Jordan, working with refugees from Syria. In conversations with the team, which was predominantly Muslim, I would accentuate things that we had in common, happy to talk about prayer, faith, and God/Allah in the understanding that although we might mean slightly different things by those words, it was a way to bring our worlds together.^[16] It was not pretending that we have the same views and beliefs, but recognising how to accentuate the things that unite us, in shared pursuit of a common good.

Drawing out the image of God in a person through positive affirmation, setting positive expectations, and asking questions. These are techniques that we promote in our negotiation training and find they forge a connection with even the hardest interlocutors. Ask questions like, ‘Can I ask your advice?’, ‘How do you expect me to do that?’, and ‘How can we solve this problem?’, and make statements like, ‘I’m sure I can count on you to do your utmost to ensure our teams do not encounter any difficulties.’

Communicate – where’s the good news?

Can there be good news in a time of war? We get to see the best and the worst of people. We know instinctively that each person contains a shadow side, and that can become unleashed in a time of war. But we can also see hope in the human condition and can celebrate those victories, however small, that show the pathway to deep healing in ourselves and with each other. As children of Abraham, looking to his descendant and our saviour, Jesus, even murderously opposed siblings like Isaac and Ishmael can learn to bury the hatchet in a face-to-face encounter with a fellow image-bearer (Exodus 25:8–9).

Even as the challenges of the world seem insurmountable, let us remember that we each can have a role in moving us closer towards peace or further away from it. Let us remember that each of us can impact violent circumstances and war-torn situations by searching for that inner goodness in the other – by seeking to hold complex and seemingly contradictory ideas in tension, and by being humble in how we hold our own opinions and listen to others.

Alex Fergusson
Alex is a humanitarian aid worker for Medair, operating as Head of Country Programme for Chad  and Sudan. He sits on a global board of agencies working with the United Nations to improve the effectiveness of humanitarian diplomacy.

*Name of ethnic group changed for security reasons.

Discussion questions

1. It is 1995 and you are in Khartoum, sent to speak with Osama Bin Laden, with the task to understand him and to draw out God’s image in him. What questions do you ask him?
2. Think of a conflict that you’re embroiled in, or a global conflict that you care deeply about. Think of your position and the position of your interlocutor/opponent as a Venn diagram. What issues, values, beliefs, and needs are in the overlapping area in the middle of the diagram? Where can you find common ground?
3. What drives conflict in your own life? Do you see parallels in international conflict or civil wars?
4. Think of a situation where you’ve been in conflict with another person. How might it have been resolved differently if you’d followed some of the steps mentioned in the ‘create’ section above?
5. Ishmael and Isaac came together to bury Abraham (Genesis 25:8–9). Why is this interesting? Does it change your view of the story to know that in the Qur’an, there is no recorded conflict between Ishmael and Isaac?

Endnotes

[1] Human Rights Watch, ‘Situation in Bucha, Ukraine, Worse than Hell,’ 1min25s YouTube Video and article on ‘Ukraine: Russian Forces’ Trail of Death in Bucha: Preserving Evidence Critical for War Crimes Prosecutions,’ 21 April 2022. This is an example of one of the reports.

[2] Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods: When the Empty Promises of Love, Money and Power Let You Down (Hodder and Stoughton, 2010).

[3] This is not an exhaustive list. It is based on observations from various wars, particularly civil wars, but also applies to inter-state conflict too. I am thinking in particular of Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Ethiopian wars.

[4] This is opposed to healthy conflict, which Ripley (end-note 5 below) argues is sorely needed.

[5] Amanda Ripley, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out (Simon and Schuster, 2021).

[6] Jamie Winship, Living Fearless: Exchanging the Lies of the World for the Liberating Truth of God (Baker Publishing Group, 2022). For more of Jamie’s work, see his website and programme, ‘Identity Exchange’.

[7] Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience(Vermillion, 2021).

[8] Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Arrow, 2007); also his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (Penguin, 2013). For more of Jonathan’s academic and popular work, see here. And for his work on Moral Foundations Theory, mapping our competing models of intuitive ethical reasoning, see here.

[9] Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Eerdmans, 2009).

[10] J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Brazos Press, 2005). For more on the what it means to be the image of God, see the Bible Project videos and articles here and here (further developed with the animation ‘Royal Priests of Eden’ and related podcast), and their complete podcast series here.

[11] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Eerdmans, 1983). See also his book, Justice in Love (Eerdmans, 2015).

[12] Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing (Cascade Books, 2014). For a helpful review by Ryan McIlhenny of ‘epistemological humility’ in Meek’s book, see Themelios, vol. 40 iss. 2 (August 2015). See, also, John G. Stackhouse, Jr., Need to Know: Vocation as the Heart of Christian Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2014). 

[13] It’s beyond the scope of this article to explore how we should act when one of the ‘Parties to Conflict’ acts in a way that clearly contravenes international law, norms, and rights. For broad guidance, see the International Committee of the Red Cross, ‘Frequently Asked Questions on the Rules of War,’ ICRC blog, 20 July 2023.

[14] My wife was watching this on CCTV, which on balance I would not necessarily recommend. There were atrocities recorded across the city during that moment, including an attack on the Terrain Hotel, which you can read about via the BBC, ‘South Sudan Soldiers Jailed for Rape and Murder,’ 6 September 2018.

[15] For a helpful theology of maximising shalom and minimising sin – that is, Christian realism – see John G. Stackhouse, Jr., Why You’re Here: Ethics for the Real World (Oxford University Press, 2017). The case studies in his extended academic version of this book are worthy of attention, considering Reinhold Niebuhr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and C. S. Lewis, each of whom grappled with being a wise peacemaker in wartime. See Stackhouse, Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World (Oxford University Press, 2008).

[16] For more on the complexities of interchanging ‘God’ and ‘Allah’, see Miroslav Volf, Allah: A Christian Response (HarperCollins Publishers, 2012). See also his classic book on just reconciliation, Exclusion and Embrace, revised and expanded edition (Abingdon Press, 2019).

Helpful resources

– Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa (Polity Press, 2015)

– Hugo Slim, Humanitarian Ethics: A Guide to the Morality of Aid in War and Disaster (C. Hurst & Co., 2015)

– Amanda Ripley, High Conflict (Simon and Schuster, 2021)

– Jamie Winship, Living Fearless (Michigan, Baker Publishing Group, 2022)

– Jérôme Tubiana, ‘Darfur: A War Within a War,’ The New York Review, 2 February 2025