Just as history by and large is the history of wars, so in political philosophy more is written on war than on peace. In political philosophy, peace is most often a negative concept, being the absence of something else—the absence of war. More fruitful for political philosophy has been the analysis of conditions for, conduct of and the justice of war, with an assumption that war, if not a necessary aspect of social life, is more common than not. Yet, peace is the backdrop to the commonly discussed areas within political philosophy—human and civil rights, contracts, justice, property rights and law. Without peace, these aspects of common human life make little sense.

Nonetheless, despite the predominance of war in political affairs, peace and nonviolence were central ideas behind much political activism in the twentieth century. M. K. Gandhi was the first to use techniques of nonviolent resistance, first in South Africa (1893–1914) and then in India (1915–1947). For Gandhi, nonviolent protest required as much courage as warfare. The satyagrahis—those who practice satyagraha, “truth force” or “love-force”—were to resist oppressive sanctions by absorbing the violence of their oppressors in their own persons (2001 , 3ff). In time, the oppressor would cease violence, having had a fill of it. He called this the “law of self-sacrifice,” the “law of nonviolence” and the “law of suffering.” Just as the requirement of the military is training in how to use violence effectively, satyagrahis needed to be trained in how not to be violent (Ibid., 92ff). Gandhi even called for an official “non-violent army” of trained volunteers numbering the thousands who could put themselves in harms way to end violence (Ibid., 86).

Martin Luther King Jr. relied extensively on Gandhi's developed nonviolent techniques (see his “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in 1986, 54–62). In his “My Trip to the land of Gandhi” King says,

Introduction

This chapter arises out of a larger project in moral philosophy with a working title, Love as a Guide to Morals. My task is to examine love as a sufficient basis for moral life. In this chapter, I address one facet of the larger moral picture: the important critical framework of intersectionality as a means of understanding layers of domination and oppression that contribute to human suffering. My suggestion is that intersectionality, as theoretically descriptive, alone does not provide a normative approach to human relationships. It needs a way of thinking about how normative moral commitments are shaped. My assertion is that love provides a useful compass to steer through the complexities of this particular moral maze.

Moral philosophers since David Hume have grappled with the difficult relationship between the empirically descriptive and the morally prescriptive. Hume's analysis has become known as “Hume's Law,” “Hume's Guillotine” (Black 1969, 100), or the is/ought question (1969, 421). His assertion was that it is impossible to derive “ought statements” from “is statements.” What is the case will never tell us what ought to be the case. Theoretical, sociological, political and critical analyses, though so important in helping us understand what is actually true rather than what merely seems true, are indispensable. However, alone it cannot move us to moral commitments without some way of forming value judgments.

Hume thought that values derive from the innate human sympathy people have for others and from common sense benevolence. In contradistinction to Immanuel Kant, he argued that moral commitments couldn't be rationally justified. Hume established a trajectory in moral philosophy that would have profound influence in the twentieth century. George Edward Moore, building on Hume, likewise rejected any rational defense of morality and preferred an intuitive basis (1905).

In the early to mid-twentieth century, the trend continued. Many agreed with Hume and Moore—that morality had no rational basis—yet rejected both intuitionism and innate sympathy. All that was left of the moral project was emotivism: moral statements are merely expressions of emotion and have no truth value.

This book began life as a talk at Nottingham Trent University in February 2023. The audience was appreciative and the discussion lively and engaged. However, I discovered later that complaints were raised about the event. The content of the talk was criticised, even though it was presented more in the form of an open-ended enquiry into the causes, course and consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian war than an ex-cathedra statement of dogma. The complaint carried threatening implications, not least for Dr Antonio Cerella, who had invited me. Fortunately, the audience feedback on the session was very favourable, and the matter was laid to rest without any serious consequences. The more positive outcome was that Antonio suggested that I write up the lecture to become the inaugural publication in his series on International Security and Sustainability for Anthem, which I was honoured and delighted to do, and the outcome is this book.

Unfortunately, the incident at Nottingham is far from the only instance in which the ‘cancel culture’ which accompanies and aggravates Cold War II has affected me. In 2016, I was invited to teach a course on European international relations at the College of Europe in Natolin, on the outskirts of Warsaw. Over the years I had taught the subject many times, accompanied always by lively and healthy debate. This time, from the outset I noticed something different, with a solid phalanx of Polish and Ukrainian students staring aggressively and refusing to participate in discussions. In the end, I asked one of the brightest students, from Germany, what was going on. She told me, glancing around to check that we were not being overheard, that ‘we have been thoroughly brain-washed’. There could be no questioning of the righteousness of Western actions, the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was an unmitigated good, and the European Union (EU) was the repository of all the virtues. By contrast, Russia was the fount of all evil, and any questioning of these postulates was not only illegitimate but effectively prohibited. This does not make for a healthy scholarly environment. The line between education and indoctrination, analysis and advocacy, is dangerously blurred.

How successfully can we name and define a work of art? Doesn't an art experience “prick” us? We name, but the naming is just not enough to express it. The art moments betray an incapacity to name, which, then, as Roland Barthes points out, becomes “a good symptom of dis-turbance.” Putting their work in context, artists Judith Selby Lang and Richard Lang write:

There is an art-making to the moment. One can identify a focused curation in the way the installation got arranged, something that spells of a permanent “diagram” and design. But art's afterlife is in constructing “asignification,” which means how curation or attention to artistic details cannot oversight the inexplicable sites of appreciation and reception. The Plastic Food Art installation inculcates imagination, a wide panorama of emotions, and aesthetic bafflement. Art exists; it entices.

The ethics of care are one of the most creative and hopeful developments in ethics in contemporary thinking. The subject is just 25 years old, having its birth in Carol Gilligan's In A Different Voice. Gilligan suggested that most ethics, most of the time, has been done by men and have demonstrated those aspects of ethical thinking that have been in the province of men: justice, contract, rationality and principle at the expense of relationships with those closest to us. Women have traditionally thought and practiced in different ways: relationally, with responsibility for others and rooted in care. Others picked up Gilligan's challenge including Noddings, Ruddick and Manning. More recently, Virginia Held has presented an overview and critique of the ethics of care after a quarter century of development and discussion. In this chapter I will demonstrate that the ethics of care (as addressed in the literature) are helpful in explicating a nonviolent critical theory if modified in certain ways.

The Elements of an Ethics of Care

The ethics of care begins with the assertion that ethics is rooted in human affective response—that is, in the emotional response to people, other sentient beings and situations.

Though a new and needed emphasis, this perspective is not unique to feminist ethics. In the ancient traditions, both the Buddha and Jesus present an ethics of compassion or loving kindness. It favors relationships between people over abstract principles. It is an ethics of the heart, rather than the mind. Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith argued that ethics are a function of sentiment. For Smith, it was “fellow-feeling.” We are hardwired with sentiment, compassion for others. It is part of the human condition. This is the opening of Smith's work on moral sentiments:

In 1989, an inner city Virgil guided film audiences through the inferno of race relations in America. Most left theaters shocked and surprised after viewing the film—and few were without a strong opinion about it.

In this regard, my first experience viewing Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing was no different than most. The moment of first viewing this masterpiece of American cinema has remained vivid with me for now over 40 years. The shock of the film has never left me. It was like a lightening bolt to the tree of my being. Nevertheless, many of the surprises of the film (e.g., the murder of Radio Raheem and Mookie throwing the trash can through the window) have long since faded over a lifetime of repeated viewing.

A good description of the first experience of viewing this film was given by Barry Michael Cooper, who says that it left him completely disoriented:

Released in the United States on June 30 of 1989, the film had this effect on many people. It depicted a single day in Brooklyn where racial tensions between its African American residents and the Italian American owner of a neighborhood pizzeria culminated in violence so shocking that for many it forever changed their view of the world.

Unfortunately, the responses to Cooper's questions are both affirmative. The world is as mean and mixed-up as director Lee depicts it, and the recent unchallenged rise of the alt-right has shown how we have let it go from bad to worse. It seems as though every week another person-of-color is being murdered through a hate crime in America.

Over the last century or so, nonviolence as a concept and a practice has become more popular than at any other time in human history. This is due in no small part to the example set by Mahatma Gandhi, the “great soul,” as the Indian poet Tagore called him. From the mid-twentieth century to present, that popularity has only grown, due to many circumstances: the example of Martin Luther King Jr., the publication of Gene Sharp's 1973 work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, the release of Richard Attenborough's 1982 film Gandhi, and a series of video productions commissioned by the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, most notably the one-hour film “Bringing Down a Dictator.” These people and events have inspired many people to adopt nonviolence either as a tactic for doing battle or as a way of life, or as some course of action or conduct in between.

The recent upsurge in the popularity of nonviolence has coincided with the life of Andrew L. Fitz-Gibbon, and in this collection of essays and chapters written over the course of his philosophic career, Fitz-Gibbon reveals his own developing understanding and practice of nonviolence. His path toward nonviolence began, interestingly enough, with an early idealism about nations and the glory of war. But that idealism was tempered by a sense that all is not right with the mass killings that are a part of war. Coupled with his Christian beliefs, this sense led him to pacifism, a rejection of the violence that is war. The various paths that the world has taken toward nonviolence over the last one hundred years or so have provided rich soil from which Fitz-Gibbon has woven his own approach to nonviolence, and as a result Fitz-Gibbon's work provides a mature and insightful approach to nonviolence that remains, remarkably, idealistic and pragmatic at the same time.

Principled nonviolence has always been subject to charges of idealism, of a lack of realistic approaches to problem-solving and justice. How can one always stand on a principle of nonviolence when one sees another person unjustly set upon? Does nonviolence require that one refrain from intervening, allowing the injustice to continue? And if one does intervene, what if the nonviolent intervention fails to stop the attack?

Directing has always been

There is little point and not much joy in directing if you are not prepared to dig deep into the text in order to meet at least a part of yourself in it. The more you invest in this exploration, the more you feel that you have only begun to scratch the surface. Staging Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya has been one such visionary moment of artistic exploration for me, a journey of mental and psychological discoveries, where subliminal moments of creativity alter-nated with profound personal reflection.

I started working on the play in class, exploring its themes with MA direct-ing students at the Open University of Cyprus. In February 2023, I also conducted a practical workshop with theatre students at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Though originally skeptical about “doing Chekhov in the 21st century,” most students gradually became drawn to the play, responding warmly to its existential themes. Whether the play documents Vanya's process of disillusionment or is a tale of acceptance of human frailty for all characters is a matter of interpretation. My understanding of the text, which became the conceptual basis of the production I directed in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 2023, is that nothing much has changed between Vanya's time and ours. In this respect, there is no hope to share. Through Vanya, the spec-tators are bound to experience the failure of letting life simply pass them by, together with a sense of urgency, a “now or never” chance to free oneself from one's imprisoned self.

There is a list of plays in every director's mind—gifts for artists and for audiences alike. Uncle Vanya is certainly one of them. That said, I’ve always been both attracted to and estranged from Chekhov's infamous atmosphere, the notorious “heaviness” of mood, the intensity but—also—opacity of emo-tions. Most directors are aware that the play's reputation is its main enemy.

In the very beginning, when I first envisaged this book, I hadn't initially thought about having a separate chapter on intelligence. But as time went ticking along and the book started to come together, I figured it would be clinically insane not to have a chapter on intelligence. So, here we are—a chapter on intelligence, and this of course is another quality that is vital for successful leadership. Sometimes you can have intelligent leaders do something unintelligent, but the simple fact remains that it is far unlikelier for an unintelligent leader to do something intelligent. Just by dint of pure luck, an unintelligent leader may do something intelligent, but it is rather unlikely in most situations. However, by the same yardstick, intelligence isn't always universal—there are times when one form of intelligence works better than another form of intelligence, and leaders often have to choose which kind of intelligence they need to rely on given a situation.

There is a plethora of types of intelligence, and a majority of them can be categorized into either cognitive intelligence or emotional intelligence types.

I will be focusing the discussion and explanation in this chapter around these two main categories of intelligence. In some ways, the conversation around intelligence parallels the conversation around the nature versus nurture element of leadership. There are some who believe that intelligence is something people are born with, while others believe that intelligence is something people can and do learn. I will argue that the truth (like most things in life) is somewhere in the middle. There are elements of intelligence that we are naturally gifted at, and there are elements of intelligence that we have to work at in order to improve. This chapter posed a wee bit of a struggle for me to be able to decide which dogs to write about here, as there are far too many breeds which I could talk about. Some of the intelligent breeds have already been discussed in preceding chapters (e.g., German Shepherds, Poodles, etc.), and it is my aim to discuss wholly unique breeds in every chapter. Else, we’d be running the risk of having the entire book focus on Otterhounds and Dachshunds, which would be jolly for those breed lovers, but not so jolly for other breed fanciers.

Introduction and Assumptions

If for Nietzsche “philosophy is self-confession,” and for Paul Ricoeur “philosophy is narrative,” then autobiography—as self-confession and narrative—is a particular form of philosophy.

It is, also, a useful way of ferreting out assumptions. I have been convinced for some time by Hans-Georg Gadamer's understanding that presuppositions are best laid bare at the beginning of a conversation (Gadamer [1975], 1989, 1976). His worry, and mine too, is that assumptions, when unacknowledged, can exercise a “tyranny of hidden prejudice.” New students come to class with assumptions, which only through careful analytical method are uncovered and their tyranny exposed. It is only fitting, then, for me to be candid from the start. The presupposition I bring to this chapter is a developing nonviolent critical theory.

It is a moot point how anyone develops foundational moral commitments: sometimes through a long period of inner struggle and sometimes as an existential moment of enlightenment, often as an unthinking internalization of social mores. As a young trainee Christian minister in 1983, I attended a weeklong workshop hosted by the Royal Army Chaplain's Department at Bagshot Park in Surrey, England. Bagshot Park is a marvelous old hunting lodge dating back to the Stuart monarchs of the seventeenth century, owned by the Queen and, at that time, leased to the British army. As a civic-minded young man I was conscious of public duty and wanted to do something useful with my life and I wondered about becoming an army chaplain. It was toward the end of the week, after being wined and dined by Her Majesty's finest, that I concluded that I could not become an army chaplain. Above the ornate fireplace at the lodge was a grand depiction of the cap badge of the Chaplain's Department. The motto on the badge reads “In This Sign Conquer,” above a stylistic Christian cross. I had studied enough history by then to realize that the inscription was a reference to the supposed words that the Roman Emperor Constantine had seen in his vision of the clouds, after which he converted to Christianity.

As the exemplar for this collection, I have chosen a letter written by a disgraced public official. It exhibits little in the way of style, employs no great literary flourishes, and shows even less in the way of artistic invention or originality. Yet despite its shortcomings and the unreliability of its author, this epistle possesses what I shall call the quality of magical génoise.

For Proust, it was a petite-madeleine that prompted his famous episode of involuntary nostalgia—a taste from childhood that thrust him back unexpectedly into the ruins of memory. For me, it was Niccolò Machiavelli's Letter to Vettori of 1513, read quite by accident, in the fall of 2020.

Machiavelli wrote the letter in trying circumstances. He had been imprisoned and tortured by the new political regime in Florence. Upon his miraculous release, he retreated to his father's house in Sant’Andrea in Percussina. He found himself alone. For diversions, he read poetry, tried to fall in love, and played cards. But in the Letter, each evening he tells his friend, the diplomat Francesco Vettori:

Machiavelli spent his evenings in conversation with the dead.

Introduction

Eleven in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time, on November 11, 2018 marked 100 years since the end of World War I. Known as the “war to end all wars” by those who waged and wrote about it, the war demonstrated the foolishness of toxic nationalism harnessed to an unfettered nativist pride that resulted in the killing of a generation of young men. The war saw the deaths of 9 million combatants and 5 million civilians. Four empires collapsed—the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman—and cracks appeared in a fifth, the British, which would lead to its eventual demise 30 years later. The war ushered in economic crisis in Europe, the era of Soviet Communism and the arrival of the United States as a world power. It proved not to be the war to end all wars, but rather, with hindsight, the first installment of a world bloodbath separated by 20 years of economic and social turmoil. One hundred years seems an auspicious time to reconsider how the war ended, and what we might learn with regard to economics and peace from its ending and its aftermath.

In this chapter I consider John Maynard Keynes's (1883–1946) searing critique of the Paris Conference of 1919, and the conclusion of its work, the Treaty of Versailles. Given the current turn in Europe and the United States toward a populism and nativism, I pay particular attention to Keynes conception of nationalism as a cause of the war and as an unmistakable element in “the peace.”

I begin with an observation: perhaps paradoxically, those of us who work in the philosophy of peace need to understand war, its preemptions and its causes and its nature and its ending, in order to truly understand peace. Of the many wars of humanity, I have always had a morbid fascination with World War I. My introduction to it came as I listened to stories of the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign, in the then Ottoman Empire, while I sat as a young child on my grandfather's knee. Such were his accounts of derring-do that my impression of the Dardanelles was a glorious victory by British and Anzac forces who routed “Johnny Turk” and the “Bosch.” It was, of course, one of the many disasters of the war.

The Political West usurps the rights and prerogatives of the international system. The rules-based order set itself up as an alternative to international law. This in effect means that the Political West has become revisionist, although it is a revision of a system that it had itself earlier established, generating what has been called ‘internal revisionism’. This self-defeating revisionism undermines the foundations of the system that allowed the Political West to exercise its hegemony in a flexible and multidimensional manner. Hegemony is becoming the assertion of a divisive and militaristic dominance. In response, resistance not only challenges US primacy but also more broadly the hegemony of the Political West in its entirety. A global anti-hegemonic world order is emerging. Russia, China and other countries insist that they are not challenging the UN-based international system, and hence are status quo, even conservative, powers. However, their challenge to the rules-based sub-order means that in the sphere of international politics they are indeed revisionist – resisting the primacy of the Political West and its presumed usurpation of the privileges and prerogatives of the UN-based international system. This hybrid form of anti-hegemonism is neo-revisionism: opposing the claims of the Political West at the level of international politics, but supporting the institutions and norms of the international system in which international politics is embedded.

The Political East

The Eurasian powers of Russia and China are at the core of the challenge, and the two increasingly aligned as Cold War II intensified. Both fear the defeat of the other at the hands of the United States and its allies. Unless they stand together, they are liable to be hanged separately. The two Eurasian powers are part of what can be called the Political East, the counterpart of the Political West but operating according to very different principles. The characteristics of the Political West include militarism, hermeticism and ontological closure, issues that will be explored in more detail later. By contrast, the rhetorical focus of the Political East is on development and peace. It is anti-hegemonic, repudiating the logic of hegemonism in international politics, rather than simply counter-hegemonic, challenging the specific form of hegemonism represented by the US and its allies. However, in the intensely competitive culture of Cold War II, the nascent Poltical East generates hegemonic strategies of its own.

Looking back now, it is hard to recall all of the things that made me angry upon first reading Byron's poem The Prisoner of Chillon, but some of them remain clear. It wasn't the poem's romanticism, which might strike some now as sentimental or contrived (I find it neither). Perhaps it feels like just one more instance of “gloomy” romantic poetry. But I didn't care about any of that when I happened upon it as a 13-year-old girl in Southern California who had never really encountered poetry before (apart from A Child's Garden of Verses and the A.A. Milne collections of my early childhood). Byron's poem was included in what seems from this distance to have been a fairly ambitious freshman anthology required by my high school English class. I was a year younger than most, having learned to read at the age of 3 and starting high school when I was 13. My high school years were distinguished by a tendency to defy authority, based on what I now realize was probably a lot of not very successfully repressed anger. We were assigned three poems in the first semester: “The Road Less Taken” (Frost), “Mother to Son” (Langston Hughes), and “The Listeners” (Walter De La Mare). In a response typical of my angry teenage years, I resented the fact that we were being told what to read, and I was determined to choose my own poem out of the anthology. I chose the longest: The Prisoner of Chillon. Of course, I came back to the Frost, the Hughes, and the De La Mare, and like the Byron, all three have stayed with me all of my life in one way or the other. But they didn't affect me the way the Byron did because they didn't make me angry. And they didn't make me angry because they made such sense to me.

It is hard to understand the strength of my response from this distance, but I can still recall exactly what it was that made me so angry. The first was having to work at the poem in order to follow the narrative. I wanted the kind of ease I had found in Milne and then, eventually, Frost or Hughes, whose poetic language felt conversational. Byron's language struck me as difficult and remote, although when I read it now it seems fairly straightforward.

A quote by Maya Angelou which I keep seeing on people's walls, talks about how people remember how you made them feel instead of the specifics of what you actually said or did. I am absolutely on board and in concordance with the meaning of that quote. One may or may not remember specifics, but one always remembers if someone was kind to them. And, there is no doubt in my mind that kindness matters and has a whole host of possibilities attached to it. Take a moment and think about someone in your life whom you always remember fondly and picture that person in your mind. Think about whether that person was kind to you. I’m fairly confident that a majority of people who do that will pick someone who was kind to them.

Sadly, kindness is not an attribute that one associates much with leaders or leadership. You rarely find someone professing to be a kind leader—usually, they’ll insist that they are hardworking and performance driven or some other such attribute. I believe that a case could be made for leaders to instead focus on being kind leaders, as their kindness could have both direct and indirect effects on their followers and even the organizations that they lead. Of course, like everything in life, being kind does not mean that you should be a pushover. Kind is not a synonym for being a doormat, but I’ll explain that in a bit more detail further on in the chapter.

Now on to our pooch pals—kindness is perhaps one of the biggest attributes or qualities one can learn from dogs. I could honestly fit in a hundred different breeds right here in this very chapter, but one must pace oneself. No point in bunding all the breeds into one huge chapter—that wouldn't be very kind, would it? Let me start off by describing the first dog that comes to mind when I think of the word “Kindness.” Just a little explanation for this chapter's title—a lot of the dogs I’ll refer to in this chapter hail from royal backgrounds, that is, they originally were only meant for royal families to possess, so it makes sense to refer to the royal pedigree in the title.