 If, like me, you're a fan of the ABC television news channel, you will have marvelled at its computerised subtitling service that by sheer sophisticated software it can give a rendering in text of what people are saying. And the other day, Ukraine's President Zelensky was once more in the news. Only the subtitling algorithm obviously searched in vain in its repertoire for his name because it rendered it as Rene Zelvega. And I thought at the time, it's a good job it wasn't Monica Lewinsky. Otherwise it might have revealed rather more about the nature of the relationship between the Ukrainian government and its chief weapons supplier than the ABC would have been completely comfortable with. But I'll come to that a bit more later. Look, the fact is that the way in which this conflict is presented to us has unfortunately taken on many of the characteristics of a classic Hollywood narrative. We have the goodies and the baddies and you can recognise the baddies because they're the ones wearing the black hats. So even to the extent, I mean Stuart's talking about the universalisation of human rights, building on that principle, we also have the laws of war that are supposed to apply to all parties to all conflicts, juice in bellow, that is the justice in the conduct of war. But in this present atmosphere of witch hunts when Amnesty International, a week or two back, raised concerns over Ukraine putting civilians in harm's way in contravention of the Geneva Conventions. They were met with a complete firestorm on social media and howled down. So unfortunately we're in that kind of atmosphere of witch hunts. That makes it very difficult to talk about or to discern the outlines of what might eventually emerge just peace with justice. And I say that let me digress for a moment into conflict theory. So some of the theories that we share with students in peace and conflict studies include the ABC of conflict. So the ABC of conflict stands for attitudes, behaviours and contradictions. And the proposition is that conflict actually is a set of relations manifest in relationships across a social formation which is characterised by incompatible goals. So conflict is not synonymous with war. War is a form of behaviour which is a response to conflict. It's by no means the only possible response to conflict and let's be thankful for that. But it's always very difficult to get at the contradictions, to open up the contradictions amid a situation of hardened and extreme attitudes and that's what we've got at the moment. So let's try to roll that back a bit. We have to reopen the distinctions between efforts to explain the behaviours or understand the behaviours of parties to conflict on the one hand and attempt to excuse or justify them on the other. So to make it very clear what I'm about to do is to try to help us think why the behaviour of President Putin and the Russians may be explicable as part of a sequence of discernable causes and consequences in a search for clues as to how we might envisage and fashion peace with justice. And I think we have to begin with the strategic question, why is Russia still the enemy? Okay, over 100 years, nearly 150 years ago now, we were in a situation in Europe with the breakup of the last of the gunpowder empires of the late medieval and early modern periods, namely the Ottoman Empire. There was an uprising in Bulgaria for independence and it was put down with extreme force and violence against civilians by the Turks, not only with regular troops but also with these bashy bazooka brigades and they left the bodies of people heaped in the streets. So the Bulgarian emigre community in Constantinople persuaded the U.S. and the U.K. ambassador to visit Sofia to see this for themselves and they were accompanied by journalists and indeed they duly recorded this as a major atrocity. What happened next was that William E. Glaston was running a bio-election campaign in the constituency of Midlothian in Scotland and he took up this theme as the dominant one of his campaign and he successfully shamed the British government into renouncing its military alliance with the Ottoman Empire, which it relied on 20 years earlier in the Crimean War, thus opening the way for a humanitarian military intervention to roll the Ottomans back to the very outskirts of Constantinople and liberate the Bulgarian people from the dividend for their suffering and the lead country in this humanitarian intervention was Russia. So back then Russia was the enemy, then wasn't the enemy, then of course the events of 1917 made Russia the enemy once again, then in World War II Russia was not the enemy then it became the enemy. So there's a set of ready made reasons why Russia has been the enemy, has played the role of the enemy in all these situations. What is puzzling is why after the fall of communism Russia remained the enemy. Indeed one might go further and ask the question if Russia, if there was no good reason for Russia to be the enemy why do we still have NATO? NATO after all characterised itself as a purely defensive alliance. So the Russians after the fall of communism and after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact were left to scratch their heads over why NATO was continuing and they were left to interpret it in no other way than as an alliance against them, especially when they're semi-official if not official offers or applications to join NATO were persistently turned down. Fast forward to 1999 the Kosovo crisis NATO changed its rules previously it had only been allowed to act as NATO on the territory of a member state that rule was changed to allow it to carry out 90 odd days of bombing on the territory of the federal republic of Yugoslavia. The Slav brothers, the Serbs. So now you've got an alliance that is no longer purely defensive but now has an avowed offensive capability pointed out the Russians and this is after a decade when former members of the Warsaw Pact have joined NATO violating assurances given to Soviet leaders by a glittering array of western statespersons, François Mitterrand, Hans-Thiedrich Genscher, even James Baker that NATO would not expand eastward. What happened in fact was that the newly liberated countries Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania kept saying yes you know you keep on pestering us to join NATO we can't afford it because we haven't got the money to spend on our military to upgrade it to the standards NATO would require. Very well the US Congress said we've had all these meetings with these eminent weapons manufacturers they persuaded us to enact legislation to provide for taxpayers to pick up the bill for all these weapons that we're going to send to these countries so hey presto there's NATO expanding eastward. So through all this period NATO is encroaching it looks like a hostile alliance with a remit for offensive action and then suddenly the last domino begins to wobble namely Ukraine. Let's be absolutely clear at this stage the reason there are good reasons why Ukraine is not presently a NATO member. Even now amid the hysteria we've seen nobody has suggested that Ukraine become a NATO member and there are good reasons for that. One because Germany doesn't want to risk Berlin, Paris doesn't want to risk London to keep that blue and yellow flag that we now all know so well fluttering about the territory of the Donbas. Neither should they it would be completely disproportionate so nobody is suggesting that Ukraine become a NATO member. Now therefore we got to this position of stalemate we got to this gradually kind of grinding progression of NATO ever further eastwards dangerous talk about Ukraine's right to make its own security arrangements. Forget that okay because no country has the right to join NATO it has the right to apply to join NATO then it needs a unanimous decision by all existing NATO members to let it join NATO and that's never been forthcoming and it wouldn't be. So now we've reviewed some of the reasons for understanding and explaining why Russia under Putin lashed out we have distinguished that carefully from any suggestion of excusing or justifying it because it remains inexcusable and unjustifiable so let us try to discern what we can amid this potted history of the prospects for peace with justice and I could talk about three forms of justice justice is multifarious of course but let's talk about three forms of justice political justice socio-economic justice and climate justice with regards first to the climate justice and it is a significant blot on the otherwise impressive record of Angela Merkel that Germany planned for new hydrocarbon infrastructure to come online in the Europe of the 2020s whatever the provenance of the gas okay so now that Nord Stream 2 pipeline is mothballed what's being built instead is an LNG liquefied natural gas terminal at Germany's deep water port Wilhelm Tavern and it's going to be a molecular facility so its immediate task will be to take delivery of shiploads of LNG from the United States as a short-term replacement for this coming winter for the gas that is not now flowing from Russia but it's being claimed at least that it will then transition to handling liquefied hydrogen as part of Germany's commitment to meet a net zero target by 2045 so that is one promising augury for peace with justice to cut out of the Ukraine crisis there are of course two arguments being made one argument is that with the jeopardy that we have of which we have now been apprised which is a condition of supplying oil and gas from Russia we should all rush to increase our own capacity and our own supplies or source them from elsewhere instead that is to be deprecated what is altogether better and is in there in the mix somewhere is the impulse which says we must bring forward the moment when we cease to rely on hydrocarbons in the interests of climate justice because as people here will be well aware global heating is not only a danger in itself but is also exacerbating existing axes of disadvantage and injustice all over the world so there is one glimmer of hope for climate justice that could come out with this second one social economic justice now it's been a persistent feature of the transition from state communism that the variant of capitalism which people have attempted to instantiate in his place has borne all the worst characteristics for capitalism because of course there are many different capitalisms there is the variety familiar from the the anglosphere show is that the casino capitalism you know the kind of variety that Stuart's talking about where international flows of arantia finance are seeking out parasitically opportunities to profit probably to whisk away the ill-gotten gains into a tax haven that is the dominant form in the uk it's it's a very prominent form in the u.s. and it's has made many more inroads than we should have allowed here in australia but there is also the other another form of capitalism sometimes called renish capitalism particularly associated with the german economy which is inscribed deeply into the rules and regulations of the european union so one of the encouraging auguries from this is that ukraine's application to join the european union has been accepted to the extent that it's now a candidate member and it would be all together better to to develop the ukrainian economy along those lines what a change that would be from the disastrous period of the 1990s when the former soviet space was subjected to what was called economic shock treatment when price controls were abandoned overnight public services were immediately shut down and everyone thrown out of work associated with inflation in the thousands of percent and those unforgettable scenes that are seared deeply into the psyche of the russian and ukrainian peoples of having to gather up meager possessions display them on the pavement outside your home in exchange for a few coins to get food for your family that was the result of the economic shock treatment that was imposed on the former soviet countries after the fall of communism no we mustn't go there and to that extent the rather more sinister and less propitious developments in ukraine include the adoption of these laws which were passed by the parliament only last month just over a month ago which will deregulate industrial relations to the extent of allowing employers with under 250 staff to hire and fire fire and rehire in fact which is inimical to the kind of ranish capitalism of the EU and indeed is outlawed by social provisions in the EU charter of fundamental human rights and this incidentally is why the british tories wanted out of the EU because to them it represents an interference in the god-given right of orantea capitalists to accumulate and reproduce capital without any responsibility to anyone but themselves so ukraine's candidate membership of the EU is another good sign now let's come on to the say the most difficult one to last the political justice in the schema set out of conflict theory by johan galton one of the chief propellers chief theorists of conflict and he characterizes peace as the absence of violence so because if you remember conflict is a relationship between two or more parties within compatible goals we're never going to get rid of conflict we went around demanding an end to conflict as the definition of peace it would be too big a ask you can say so let's instead define it as an absence of violence what does violence mean galton's influential definition is of violence not by the form it takes but by the effect it brings about the abrogation of human potential and violence can be direct cultural or structural structural violence includes structures that oblige people to live together that don't want to or live apart that do want to and so taking that cue the outlines of a peace deal for ukraine must surely involve some international supervision preferably un supervision of some kind of exercise to settle to everyone's satisfaction just exactly what arrangements are desired by the populations of the cramier donbas and new hansk as to the flak the flutters over there all what is the status of the border which may very well divide them from their friends and family and how they want to cross it and how they want that to be set up now it's it's very important to keep talking about a peace deal because of course that is one way in which a war can end another way i would say the other way but another way in which a war can end is for an outright victory was by an outright victory by one side over the other side and there seems to me to be far too loose and far too liberal an assumption that that is a feasible outcome among a great deal of commentary especially media commentary about this crisis is it feasible fierce critics of wicked old president putin like the guardians simon tisdle for instance for my favorite media whipping boys that he's such a he's so down he's down on president putin but somehow somewhere along the line president putin will discover some hitherto unheralded restraint or sense of proportion and not start a nuclear war instead he will accept complete military defeat and humiliation that seems to me to be a gamble too far so it seems to me that we need to talk about a peace deal we need to talk about a peace agreement an agreement is not with oneself it is with the other by definition so we need to think about what is agreeable not only to ask them to Ukraine but also to the Russians and some mechanism to determine the status of those territories which is taken out of their hands preferably given to the united nations would be part of it another one would be for everyone to acknowledge what everyone actually already agrees which is that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO and once you've got those two building blocks in place you have the potential for political justice you have the potential for socio-economic justice and you have the potential for climate justice and that could be that could fulfill what the same Johan Galton always said about conflict which is that it's an opportunity to use a vogue phrase to build back better