David Carroll Cochran is professor of politics and co-director of the peace and justice minor at Loras College. He is the author or editor of five previous books, most recently The Catholic Church in Ireland Today and Catholic Realism and the Abolition of War. The University of Notre Dame Press is thrilled to publish his newest book, The Catholic Case against War: A Brief Guide (March 2024). He recently answered some of our questions about his research and writing processes.
When did you first get the idea to write The Catholic Case against War?
Looking back, it was December 2020, over Christmas break, that I jotted down the first set of notes outlining a possible project that ended up becoming the book. I had been researching and writing about Catholic teaching on war and peace for about a decade, and my recent involvement in the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative had me thinking about the need for a brief, accessible book that both introduced the Vatican’s case against war and connected it to what we know from empirical and historical research about the nature of armed conflict.
Certainly these are unprecedented times in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and around the world. What can readers find in your book that will resonate with them in our current political landscape?
The book’s initial chapters—on the terrible scale of human suffering that war unleashes, and on the powerful myth that more war is the path to security and justice—will certainly resonate with today’s headlines. I also hope the book’s second half—which details concrete and realistic ways to build a more peaceful world—can help provide an alternative to the despair that those same headlines often cause.
How did you research for this book?
Loads of reading! The Vatican has written a lot on war and peace over the last century, but the secular literature on armed conflict and its prevention is, as you can imagine, really enormous. Fortunately, I have been doing research in this area for some time, so I was able to build on that for this book.
What did you learn while writing it?
I was continually struck by how strange it is that we as humans commonly accept warfare, where we intentionally inflict so much violent suffering on so many people on such a vast scale, as somehow inevitable and out-of-our-hands, like earthquakes or tornados.
Who are some of the most important influences on you and your work?
I’ll mention two big ones. The first is Margaret Mead’s famous essay, “Warfare is Only an Invention,” which, when I first read it many years ago, really opened my eyes to why we don’t have to accept war as an inevitable part of human nature, but can instead see it as a form of institutionalized violence like chattel slavery or dueling or trials by ordeal. The second is the line of empirical research sparked by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan in their 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works, one that has systematically compared success rates for both warfare and alternative methods of nonviolent resistance (spoiler alert: warfare is significantly less effective).
What was your writing schedule like while working on this book?
I work at Loras College, a Catholic liberal arts institution whose primary focus is on teaching (which it does very well by the way—you should check us out!), so I don’t have a lot of time for research and writing during most semesters. I did most of the research over a summer and a Christmas break and then wrote the manuscript the next summer. My older son had just graduated from college and moved out, so I commandeered his room to spread across every surface all my marked-up church documents and boxes of notecards summarizing armed conflict research. I tried to boil it all down to four short chapters but was unsuccessful, so instead I ended up with five.
Who would you like to read The Catholic Case against War and why?
Erasmus wrote that while wars are started by the powerful, their death and destruction so often wash over ordinary people “who have no interest in war and gave no occasion for it.” We still see this today. So, first, I hope that anyone, Catholic or not, who cares about the toll of war around the world will benefit from reading it. Second, I hope those who just want to know more about what the church says about war and peace will find it useful. Third, I hope those who consider Catholic teaching on war and peace naïve or unrealistic give it a read, since the book draws on armed conflict research to show that this isn’t actually the case.
What books are you currently reading?
I’m currently reading Danielle Allen’s Justice by Means of Democracy (for a class I’m teaching), James Fearnley’s Here Comes Everybody: The Story of the Pogues (for nostalgia reasons), and Jane Harper’s Exiles (because she writes great crime novels).
What project are you working on next?
Anti-war arguments, or pacifist objections to participating in any war, or calls for an end to all war eventually run into the Hitler objection. I think it is a tough objection to meet, since World War II really is a difficult case for a consistently anti-war position. So I have begun researching a book that explores this problem tentatively titled “So How Would You Stop Hitler?”