It is a strange and almost embarrassing fact that most of us will live and die without ever having had a proper conversation with the majority of people who shape our lives.

The grocer who quietly keeps us fed. The bus driver who gets us to work. The construction worker who builds our homes and infrastructure.
The nurse's aide who cares for the elderly or sick in our communities. The librarian who curates knowledge and provides a community space. The protester we see in the street, whose cause we never quite took the time to understand. These are not enemies. But nor, for the most part, are they friends. They are something far more mysterious: strangers with whom we share a political destiny.

This is where the idea of political friendship becomes both unsettling and beautiful. For it asks us to reimagine friendship—not as affinity, not as affection, but as a deliberate commitment to strangers, made not out of sentiment, but out of respect for the conditions of peace.
Political friendship is not about liking each other. It is about staying with each other, especially when it would be easier not to.

The philosopher Aristotle, when he spoke of political friendship, did not mean brunch companions or holiday card lists. He meant something sterner, and more demanding: a commitment to the good of the other, because their good is tangled up with our own. He recognized that cities are not made of buildings or borders, but of relationships—fragile webs of trust, loyalty, and the will to keep going, together.

In our modern world, such trust can seem absurd. We are encouraged to find our tribe, to avoid difficult people, to block, unfriend, cancel. We are told that politics is war, and that strangers are threats to be managed, not companions to be befriended.

But peace (I mean the real deal peace) is not the absence of conflict. It is the presence of relationship, even among those who disagree. It is what happens when we look at the stranger across the table, not with suspicion, but with the difficult generosity of curiosity.
Political friendship begins when we agree to stay in the room.

Solidarity, then, is the emotional infrastructure that allows this kind of friendship to endure. It is what we practice when we show up for someone whose pain is not our own, but whose dignity matters to us nonetheless. It is what makes us march for the rights of workers we will never meet, or vote to protect refugees we may never see. It is not charity. It is not pity. It is the recognition that none of us can live well when others are abandoned.

In the context of peacebuilding, these ideas are not luxuries. They are the raw material of a different variety of politics that knows that justice cannot be engineered without empathy, and that laws will not hold if they are not also held together by shared feeling. Political friendship among strangers is not a utopia. It is a strategy for survival. It is also a daily choice. It happens when a mother in a war-torn village shares food with a displaced neighbor. When an activist listens—truly listens—to someone who once fought for the other side. When a policymaker writes a law not to please her base, but to prevent the next cycle of violence.

These acts are not dramatic. But they are revolutionary.

And yet we should not be naive. Political friendship will not solve all conflicts. Solidarity will not dissolve all hate. But they will allow us to keep trying, without needing to erase our differences. They give us the courage to coexist without collapsing into silence or revenge.

We often imagine that peace will come from treaties, or reforms, or charismatic leaders. But it is just as likely to come from small, slow commitments: listening more than we speak. Admitting we were wrong. Refusing to humiliate. Defending the rights of those we do not understand. Practicing hospitality in our politics.

In this light, political friendship is not merely an ethical ideal. It is the daily miracle of a society still willing to hold itself together—one thread of solidarity at a time.

And perhaps, in this fractured world, the most radical act of all is to make friends with a stranger not because they are like us, but because they are not like us. And yet, we are willing to stand with them anyway.

We often picture peace like a signed paper, a big event with handshakes and cheering. We think of it happening in meeting rooms and official places. But real peace, the kind that truly helps and heals, doesn't start with signatures. It starts with regular people who choose to live together even when things are broken. And most often, this happens right where we live, in our communities.

Our communities aren't perfect. They carry old hurts, memories, disagreements, and problems. But they are also the places where we learn to get along. It's where a child first understands what is fair, where neighbors begin to feel safe with each other, where hurt people can talk and be heard – not just as an idea, but looking each other in the eye.

What gives communities their quiet strength in building peace isn't big ideas or popular leaders. It's something much simpler: the steady, determined act of building connections that don't give up.

When there's conflict, who we are – our background, our faith, even how we talk – can be used to push people apart. But communities, when cared for, can become places where we see each other as human again. They remind us that the "other side" isn't just some scary thing, but could be a teacher, someone's grandma, or the person running the corner store. In these places, stories can do what politics often can't: they can soften hearts made hard by fear.

Communities can handle complicated feelings and different viewpoints. Everyone doesn't need to agree; they just need to show up and be part of things. Sharing a meal, doing local traditions, or helping fix something together – these are ways people remember what it feels like to belong. This kind of belonging isn't about being the same. It's about being involved.

One smart thing about communities is they can change. They aren't stuck. They grow and adapt with what people need, what they've been through, and how relationships change. When times are tough, they can step up – helping people understand each other, taking care of those in need, or being the first to offer kindness. Even a community that's been hurt can still find its wisdom to stop more violence, to rebuild trust when official systems fail.

But none of this happens by itself. Communities can also be pulled apart, made angry, and broken. That's why building peace in communities has to be done with purpose. It means listening more than judging. It means protecting people who speak uncomfortable truths. It means finding ways to hold each other accountable and offer forgiveness, even in small, everyday ways.

Sometimes, peace looks like a community meeting where people who were once against each other sit together and plan the next harvest. Sometimes, it looks like kids in the same classroom learning new stories about themselves and their neighbors. Sometimes, it's a group of young people cleaning up the streets after a protest. These aren't small things; they are powerful signs of strength and togetherness in our towns and neighborhoods.

Putting energy into communities isn't ignoring bigger politics. It's making politics real by connecting it to how people actually live. It's saying: if we want peace that lasts, we must practice it not just in government buildings, but also in shared kitchens, local meetings, and neighborhood gardens.

Communities show us that justice needs to be felt to feel real. They show us that being treated with respect is built not just through rules, but through how we relate to each other. And they teach us that peace isn't when everyone agrees – but when the connections between people are strong enough to handle disagreements.

In this way, communities don't just receive peace. They build it. They create peace not by making everyone the same, but by making room for differences – so that these differences can become part of the shared future we are building together.

In a world where nothing possesses a fixed essence, where identities are strategies rather than intrinsic truths, and where permanence is an illusion we cling to for comfort, peace cannot be understood in the traditional sense — as the stable, natural, or final state of society. Instead, peace must be seen as an ongoing, fragile, and strategic construction: an imperfect achievement that must constantly be remade, not an endpoint we can finally and fully arrive at.

Peace, in our view, is not an essence to be uncovered.

It is not the "natural" state of humanity, buried under layers of corruption and just waiting to be restored. There is no original "Eden" state to return to. Human beings, with all our conflicting desires, fears, and interpretations, have never known a time of pure peace. What we call peace has always been a constructed, negotiated, and contingent arrangement — a kind of ceasefire between endless contests of will, meaning, and power.

Thus, peace is an agreement to resist the worst possibilities of ourselves, even when those possibilities can never be fully eliminated.

In an impermanent world, peace is an impermanent project.

We cannot expect peace to "stay" once achieved. In fact, it has no foundation of permanence to stand on. It is always under threat from new fears, new grievances, new misunderstandings. This doesn't mean the struggle for peace is meaningless; it means peace is precious precisely because it is fragile. You may even think like a sand mandala, it must be built lovingly even as we know it will one day dissolve.

In this sense, the real commitment to peace is not a commitment to a static outcome, but a commitment to the repeated work of repairing, rebuilding, renegotiating, and reconciling.

In an absurd world, peace is a heroic absurdity.
If the universe has no intrinsic meaning, then creating peace is itself an act of existential defiance. To forge solidarity among beings condemned to loneliness; to offer goodwill in a cosmos indifferent to suffering — these are absurd acts, yet they are acts of immense dignity.

Peace is not justified because it fulfills a cosmic plan. It is justified because, even amidst absurdity, it is better to build fragile bridges than to revel in destruction.

Strategically, peace must be understood as a common good that requires construction and curation.
Since identities, interests, and even "the good" are not fixed, peace cannot rely on essential unity. It relies on strategic solidarity — a conscious, critical choice to cooperate, coexist, and forgive, despite recognizing that differences and conflicts will never completely disappear.

We temporarily and knowingly treat certain things as common for the sake of building peace — shared rights, shared rules, shared spaces — even though we know no identity, no belief, no state of affairs is ultimate.

In other words, we "pretend" certain truths for peace, not out of delusion, but out of wisdom. We agree, for example, that "human dignity" matters — not because dignity is written into the fabric of the universe, but because acting as if it is sacred makes possible a better, less cruel life together.

Therefore, peace in this context is:

• Constructed, not discovered.
• Maintained, not guaranteed.
• Strategically chosen, not naturally emerging.
• Grounded in goodwill, humility, and vigilance, not in any fixed order of things.
• An absurd yet noble endeavor that dignifies human existence.