When Calm Costs Justice

Peace without Liberation is Hollow

“There’s a difference between peace and liberation, is there not? You can have injustice and have peace… so peace isn’t the answer; liberation is the answer.” (Kwame Ture – formerly, Stokely Carmichael).

I’ve been carrying this line with me for the last two years! Every time I hear it, I’m reminded why abstract calls for “peace” can feel so disabling: it’s because they are detached from justice!

Martin Luther King Jr. also made the same point contrasting negative peace (the absence of tension), versus positive peace (the presence of justice). He warned against the “moderate” impulse to applaud order over equity, even when basic rights are sacrificed for the sake of calm.

Across Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, Iran, and beyond, this mirage of peace asks us to accept blockades, displacements, systemic inequities, destruction, death, killings, and silencing of dissent, in exchange for a quiet headline.

This is also the brand of tranquility that is compatible with gag orders at our workplace. When the oppressed are constrained to speak, the dominant group can proclaim “peace”, equating our silence with harmony.

I notice the same pattern with people who readily condemn colonialism in textbooks and in theory, but suddenly recoil when living movements, often without viable channels for redress, are labeled as “violent.”

Calm can be counterfeit! If our version of “peace” depends on suppressing the very people whose liberation is at stake, then we have not ended conflict… we have merely hidden it!