Peace is not signed into existence. It is chosen, and then kept.
There is a pure peace in forgiving your enemy. Harmony arrives only through forgiveness, while revenge breeds chaos. Call it bona fide peace: peace made in good faith.
But forgiveness must be genuine. If it is a performance, it is a trick, and it will bring no peace. You cannot disguise it. It has to be an honest act that blossoms with time, part of a continuing process. Genuine forgiveness is not merely conciliation but a solemn pact to abstain from destruction.
The cost of enmity
Enmity spills blood. It never resolves a dispute; it inflames it. It is not a solution but a problem in itself, and it draws in innocent people who never chose to join the quarrel.
Consider two tribes. Someone shoots dead a member of one tribe without any due process of law. No individual may take the law into their own hands, so the killing is a grave wrong, yet the victim’s side demands revenge. What follows is a cycle in which each side keeps taking the lives of the other’s members. The cycle drags in people who never participated and never consented, because circumstances demand it: refuse, and people brand you a coward. Eventually the feud becomes a matter of pride, violence becomes a measure of strength, and people treat restraint as shame.
To a law-governed society, such disputes may look absurd. Yet in many parts of the world they remain a living reality.
In Somalia, lineage, language and culture often shape clan identity, which has long defined loyalties and rivalries. In some communities, where clans declare each other enemies, ties sever almost entirely, and a person who enters a relationship with, or seeks to marry into, a rival clan can face serious retaliation, and in some cases death. The same mindset, in some cases, forces women into marriage without consent and punishes anyone who objects: the collective places its honour above the individual’s life.
Yet the same tradition holds a remedy. The Somali customary law of xeer includes diya, a system of collective compensation for killings, which communities have long used to end feuds without further bloodshed. Even where enmity runs deep, societies have found ways to choose peace over revenge.
When nations inherit the feud
Look at the world broadly and nations often mirror the tribal pattern.
An armistice, not a peace treaty, still divides the Korean peninsula. India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed neighbours, have fought wars and still live in mutual hostility. A conflict in which regional powers, Saudi Arabia among them, are deeply involved has devastated Yemen. Israel and Iran have exchanged direct missile strikes, tensions between Iran and the United States have repeatedly pushed the region towards wider war, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to claim civilian lives.
Every party has grievances it can justify. But one thing is common to all: each has come to define itself as the other’s enemy. Generations not yet born will inherit that enmity unless the parties choose forgiveness, in the name of humanity.
What the law can and cannot do for bona fide peace
International law does not ignore this problem. Article 2(3) of the UN Charter obliges member states to settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and Article 2(2) requires them to fulfil their Charter obligations in good faith. Article 33 lists the tools, including negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration and judicial settlement.
At the centre of it all sits pacta sunt servanda, the principle that parties must keep their agreements. Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties states it plainly: every treaty in force binds its parties, and they must perform it in good faith. Article 31 goes further, requiring that parties interpret treaties in good faith too.
The phrase “good faith” appears at both ends of the process for a reason. A law can compel performance, but it cannot manufacture sincerity. A treaty remains legally binding even when one party acts in bad faith, and breach is what opens the door to remedies. But a treaty signed by parties who still want the other’s destruction is not peace; it is a pause that lasts only until one side finds it convenient to break it. The text may be flawless, but the will behind it decides whether it lives. An agreement that one side makes mala fide may bind on paper, yet it will never deliver real peace.
This is why forgiveness matters even in a world full of lawyers. The law gives peace its structure. Bona fide peace needs both..
Proof that bona fide peace is possible: France and Germany
Few rivalries looked as permanent as the one between France and Germany. In under a century the two countries fought three major wars: 1870-71, the First World War and the Second World War. Millions died, and by 1945 much of Europe lay in ruins. Few would have predicted friendship.
Yet within a few years, the two nations chose a different path. In 1950, French foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed pooling French and German coal and steel production under a shared authority, so that war between them would become practically impossible. The 1951 Treaty of Paris then established the European Coal and Steel Community, which grew into what is now the European Union.
The two nations then built reconciliation step by step. In 1963, Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer signed the Élysée Treaty, committing both countries to regular consultation and cooperation. The treaty also created the Franco-German Youth Office, which has since brought millions of young people across the border to meet each other. In 1984, François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl stood hand in hand at Verdun, the site of one of the First World War’s bloodiest battles.
Two things made this possible. First, Germany came, gradually and often painfully, to confront its past rather than disguise it. That reckoning was slow and contested, and much of it took place in the 1960s and 1970s. Second, both sides bound themselves through shared institutions and lasting commitments rather than a single gesture. The Cold War and the American security presence in Europe helped, so this is no formula that works everywhere. But it is a powerful example of bona fide peace: honest, gradual forgiveness, with binding commitments that both sides keep in good faith.
Bona fide peace rests on good faith
If France and Germany, after all they inflicted on each other, could build peace, then no enmity is too old to end. What it takes is good faith: law to give peace its shape, and forgiveness to give it life.
Only in good faith can we give forgiveness, and only in good faith does it last.