Idris

The search for peace is used as a means to defend the idea of war, vilify enemies or gain political points. But the concept of peace remains elusive. Political thinkers and philosophers have sought to defend and redefine it as early as the time of Plato, said Murad Idris, a postdoctoral associate in the government department and a Mellon Postdoctoral Diversity Fellow.

"The claim that war is waged in order to attain peace appears as one of the central justifications for mass violence across the histories of political thought," said Idris at a March 8 campus lecture sponsored by the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. "The claim that war is for the sake of peace is meaningful not because it's true or false, but because of what it covers up or masks, because it's so frequently repeated, and because it means different things across time, place, language and context."

This year at Cornell, Idris is completing "Genealogies of Peace," a book that explores peace across the history of political thought. Idris argues that as an ideal, peace is embedded in cultural and political structures that reflect and facilitate antagonisms and anxieties. These anxieties are simultaneously about the fear of having become someone other than whom one claims to be, and about groups ambivalently included in peace, if at all -- like the Persian for the Greek thinkers, the Turk for Renaissance Christians and the Muslim for Enlightenment secularists.

As early as Plato's "Laws," likely written between 460 and 450 B.C., thinkers were arguing and discussing the idea of using war as a vehicle to bring about peace, Idris said, and these are truisms we hear today. "Laws" shows how the goals of war or peace can structure the laws, practices and spaces of a city.

Idris became interested in studying historical writings about peace after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he noticed American and European politicians using peace as a justification for war, while others characterized Islam as either a peaceful religion or a violent one.

"A lot of frameworks we use to speak about peace are coping mechanisms that prevent us from seeing things about ourselves that we would rather not admit," said Idris. "I'm not saying, 'stop using the term peace,' but I do want to encourage us to think more critically and historically about why it is that peace seems either ideal or impossible to us, why we think the desire for it is a part of the human condition, and what alternatives we might pursue."

Idris' book will also include chapters on Abu Nasr al-Farabi, Thomas Aquinas, Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas Hobbes, Ibn Khaldun, Hugo Grotius, Immanuel Kant and Egyptian Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb.

"My book brings together a series of thinkers who are separated by time and geography, to offer a comparative and historical look at the idea that peace is a universal ideal, to show what it means that it is neither universal nor quite so ideal," Idris said.

Kathy Hovis is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.