Originally published in the Unashamedly Ethical newsletter, January 2025.
“I strive to commit to be a peacemaker.”
There is a difference between keeping the peace and making it.
Keeping the peace often means avoiding conflict. We stay quiet in the meeting. We let the comment pass at the family gathering. We smooth things over so that nobody has to deal with what is actually wrong.
It feels peaceful. But the tension does not disappear. It goes underground, and it usually returns later, larger and harder to resolve.
Our sixth commitment does not ask us to keep the peace. It asks us to make it. And making peace is far more demanding.
Peacemaking requires truth
Real peace cannot be built on silence. It is built when people are willing to name what has gone wrong, listen to one another and look for a way forward that both sides can live with.
In my work as a mediator, I have seen how much changes when people feel genuinely heard. Positions that seemed fixed begin to move. People who arrived ready to fight start to look for solutions.
Very often, the breakthrough is not a clever proposal. It is the moment someone finally feels understood.
That is the heart of peacemaking. It requires the courage to speak honestly and the humility to listen properly, often in the same conversation.
We have seen what it can do
South Africans do not need to be persuaded that peacemaking matters. We have lived it.
We watched Nelson Mandela choose reconciliation when many expected revenge. We watched Archbishop Desmond Tutu lead the Truth and Reconciliation Commission through some of the most painful testimony this country has ever heard.
Neither of them pretended that the wrongs of the past had not happened. Their peacemaking began with the truth, not with forgetting it.
Mandela put it simply: “Courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of peace.”
Peacemaking is ordinary work
It would be easy to think that peacemaking belongs to statesmen and archbishops. It does not.
Most peacemaking happens in ordinary places. The colleague who calmly says what everyone else is afraid to say, without attacking anyone. The parent who stops an argument long enough for each child to explain. The neighbour who reaches out after a falling-out. The manager who brings two teams together instead of letting the rivalry harden.
It also happens in what we refuse to do. We refuse to spread the gossip. We refuse to escalate the online argument. We refuse to treat people who disagree with us as enemies.
Why this is an ethical commitment
Peacemaking belongs among the ten commitments because division is costly. Divided workplaces make poor decisions. Divided communities cannot solve shared problems. Divided countries struggle to build anything at all.
Every act of genuine peacemaking makes the next conversation possible. And in a country still learning how to live with its history and with one another, that is not a small contribution.
If you want to be a peacemaker in your home, your workplace and your community, make this commitment your own at unashamedlyethical.com/commitment.
Yours in ethics,
Ilene Power