Reading War and Peace in Harry Potter

Abstract

This chapter shows how J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter tales offer two visions of peace. The first is a hybrid idealist-liberal peace of elites and institutions pursuing just wars, and the second is gendered-relational peace, symbolized by nurturing home spaces, unconditional love, transgenerational transmission of knowledge and memory, political coalitions across difference, and nonviolent youth action. In the context of the War on Terror, Rowling exposes readers to some quite radical rejections of conventional wisdom. She gives her heroic protagonists a toolbox of nonlethal and defensive spells, and she has Harry choose nonviolence in opposition to his own older compatriots’ example and pressure to conform to just war norms. Both state and insurgent violence are critiqued and tolerance for difference is celebrated.

The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden. If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better. (Rowling 2008)