In a short, provocative essay in First Things, political scientist Daniel Philpott argued that there is a new international theology. He called that theology “the liberal peace.” The liberal peace is an approach to international peacebuilding and transitional justice that emphasizes criminal trials alongside the rapid establishment of a market economy and a liberal democracy, especially in the form of elections. According to Philpott, this “theology” has its own cathedral in The Hague, its own pope (Luis Ocampo, the first Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court), magisterium (speeches by UN secretary generals, beginning with Boutros Boutros-Ghali's 1992 document An Agenda for Peace), saints (Woodrow Wilson), and doctrinal tradition. The doctrinal tradition is composed primarily of the writings of liberal philosophers (Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Rawls, etc.) who highlight individual rationality as the ground of human rights and the protection of individual rights as the solution to the dangers of living in the state of nature.
