McGrath,

The troubles with humanitarian, non-violent and pacifist responses to political violence are complex, particularly in the changed post-Cold War world, where there is often an expectation that the good UN and peace loving humanitarians everywhere can solve armed conflicts with peaceful intentions.

If that were the case, I'm sure the 5.5 million people killed in armed conflicts worldwide between 1990 and 1996, over 75% of whom were civilians, would be alive today, wouldn't they?

This magical non-violent, humanitarian impulse, shared by the majority of middle class Westerners, too often ignores the realities on the ground which must be considered before any sort of effective interventions can take place, non-violent or otherwise. Most "just wa" theory developed in the past 50 years doesn't even take into account those realities of what can be done before the operational and financial issues are confronted.

There are ethical and political questions to be asked, which are themselves reflected at the operational and economic levels of intervention. The political problems Western governments face lie in the balance of risk entailed in choosing either to use resources (including domestic political capital) on risky and costly intervention or to stand by and do nothing in the face of public outrage at injustice and suffering. This political calculation is made on the basis of the strength of competing ethical claims that Westerners crying out for peace have no notion of, and even worse, have little to no patience for sorting out.

Isn't it time we all got our well-intentioned, but disturbingly narcissicistic humanitarian impulses under control, and looked deep for some of the root causes of these complex problems? Like the global small arms trade, just for one?

Many of the armed conflicts active in 1996 are protracted: over 60% have lasted more than five years, and one-third have lasted longer than 20 years. Most of these wars are fought with relatively low-technology weapons, and most of the killing in them is done at close quarters – quite unlike the high-tech media event of the 1990–91 Gulf War with its video-recorded, computer- and laser-guided missiles. In these wars the sophistication often lies in the techniques of selecting victims and manipulating terror, rather than in the technology of killing.

How do you suppose non-violence can address those sorts of violent conflicts? There is no way to educate the people currently involved in armed conflicts how to effectively use non-violent strategies to defuse violence in their midst, and that is the only non-violence can be made to work--through mass educational efforts of the populace. You will only ever find a handful of martyrs willing to sacrifice their lives for the supposed "higher" principles of non-violent resistance, so it can never be effective enough against state militias particularly, once violence has become entrenched in a society. El Salvador remains one of the most violent societies in the Western hemisphere, despite the supposedly successful "peace process" forced upon the country without justice. The current president is a son of a death squad commander, the poverty and squalor remains unchanged, small arms continue to proliferate, women and children continue to be terrorized and brutalized by intimate family members--that is exactly the kind of "peaceful solution" that comes from peace being imposed by Westerners with no interest in the region where the violence occurs, beyond the fact they don't like watching people suffer on their nightly news?