“I am not interested in reform; I’m interested in revolution.” Leon Waters
Traveling with a group of peacebuilders with the Global Immersion Project, Mr. Leon Waters just finished providing a tour of the unseen markers of the rich tapestry of African history, struggle, and self-determination that helped shape New Orleans. He spoke these words with the authority that only comes from both intellectual pursuit and a lived activist experience. He spent the last few decades bringing to light the truth of how white supremacy shaped the contours of Louisiana’s social, spiritual, economic, and political realities. Marginalized people and places are created through power dynamics. Tinkering on the edges for reform always leaves the powerful in power. Reform is too quaint, too small, too timid. Mr. Waters reminds us; only revolution will do, anything else falls short of the dream of justice realized.
The hope of revolution has been a touch point in my peace pursuits across the world. We often think of peacebuilding as the work of nation-states, dignitaries, and international mediators, but the truth is that peacebuilding is always neighborly work. It rests in and is contingent upon the ordinary practices of neighbors and the system in which they live. These systems, and sometimes the neighbors, create marginalized people. Those on the margins dream of radical change; change in their economic futures, change in the dignity they deserve, change to be free from violence.
Last month, Juan (1) waited with my wife – an elementary teacher – for his dad to pick him up from school. Only on this day, his dad couldn’t come. He was rounded up by ICE agents, alongside 18 others, when he had gone to work in the Kona coffee fields. The violence they had fled in Honduras was now meeting them here, in the violence of family separation and detainment. For years, republicans and democrats have talked of reform in the immigration system. I have listened to friends share their trauma of losing their parents – 1986, 2017, and now 2025. They are separated by decades and yet share the same story of grief and loss. We’ve been tinkering with reform when only revolution will do.
Mahmoud poured us tea as we sat in a circle on the roof of his house outside of Hebron. He pointed to the Israeli settlement down the road and remarked how each year it gets closer and closer – expanding its borders on Palestinian land. The gate to the settlement was now a mere 50 yards from his land. I looked over the olive trees as he talked about settler violence. The week before, his irrigation lines were cut. The week before that a bulldozer uprooted a row of his olive trees. Israeli soldiers conducted night raids on his home and family; he’d been arrested several times – never with a reason or due process. We drank tea and he shared about the fear of violence that rested over him. And yet everyday was a day to resist the occupation – resistance looked like planting new trees. For me, Mahmoud represents the 1,191 Palestinians in the West Bank displaced from their homes since January. Only revolution will do.
The story of Juan and Mahmoud are connected; intertwined by humanity’s addiction to violence. Nation states are built through a mythology of violence that rests in the understanding of power as domination. I’m currently less interested in critiquing the monopoly that Nation-States have on violence. I’m more interested in the underlying story of violence that holds our imagination – and the strategies to interrupt it. I’m more interested in what Emmanuel Katongole shares when reflecting on the genocide in Rwanda:
When the patterns of violence have become so naturalized as a way of social interaction and as a means of settling differences within a social history, Christians and Christian Churches also end up getting fully drawn into that performance, such that being a Christian does not make any difference (The Sacrifice of Africa, 49).
Reform files off the edges of our unjust systems – making violence more palatable. But a revolution rests in the power of nonviolent love. For Christians, nonviolent love finds its power within the story of Christ’s life for the world – whose refusal of violence on the way to the Cross proclaimed God’s victory over the very deaths that violence claims. It is to the cross that we cleave – or, rather, it is in a movement of solidarity toward and with the world’s victims of violence that we find ourselves in fellowship with Christ.
While nations continue to exert a will to power, Christians see their power in a will to communion. Peacebuilding starts with the things you can touch. The mustard seeds of revolution are planted in the bonds of uncommon friendships, the acknowledgement of harms done, rebalancing the scales of power, and the cultivation of new stories of love, grace, and empowerment. Reform keeps violence humming – a revolution of love upends it.
(1) Names and stories have been slightly altered to protect their identity.
Author’s Note: In collaboration with Global Immersion.
