Abstract

The persistence of violent conflict despite an abundance of peace declarations, diplomatic initiatives, and institutional interventions exposes a fundamental gap between the rhetoric of peace and the disciplined practices required to sustain it. This chapter addresses that gap through Liberative Realism, drawing on Januarius Asongu’s Critical Synthetic Realism, Synthetic Theological Realism, and Critical-Liberative Theology. It argues that conventional peacebuilding remains constrained by state-centric conceptions of sovereignty, epistemic fragmentation, geopolitical asymmetries, and approaches to liberation that underestimate human fallibility, institutional complexity, and the tendency of power to reproduce domination. Against both political resignation and revolutionary absolutism, Liberative Realism conceptualizes just peace as an ongoing, corrigible, and institutionally mediated practice rather than a singular political event. The framework advances five interrelated principles: epistemic integrity, human dignity, nonviolent moral discipline, institutional responsibility, and strategic realism. Grounded theologically in the imago Dei and philosophically in realist and fallibilist accounts of knowledge, it maintains that resistance to oppression must remain accountable to truth, moral limits, institutional formation, and practical wisdom. The chapter ultimately contends that sustainable liberation requires more than defeating oppressive structures: it requires developing the moral and institutional capacity to exercise freedom without reproducing domination. Just peace therefore emerges as a disciplined historical practice in which faith is joined to responsibility, moral courage to prudence, and the pursuit of emancipation to the enduring demands of truth, dignity, and justice.

Keywords: Liberative Realism; just peace; peacebuilding; Critical Synthetic Realism; Critical-Liberative Theology; epistemic integrity; human dignity; liberation; institutional responsibility; strategic realism; Januarius Asongu