Dangerous Peace-Making

Rating:
Summary: Beyond Platitudes
Review: In Dangerous Peace-Making, Meyer-Knapp offers an intelligent, exhaustively researched, and brilliantly argued analysis of complicated and often unpredictable factors that must be understood if one wants to understand how wars end. While acknowledging the passion and commitment of "ordinary people committed to peace," Meyer-Knapp's case studies of wars in Rwanda, Bosnia, Ireland, Palestine, and South Africa illustrate her contention that "the peace-oriented should lay . . . responsibility squarely at the feet of . . . the political leaders," those with the power to sanction war and to end it. Her concluding chapter about justice, mercy, memory and peace offers mercy, especially, not as "forgiveness," but as deliberate decision and action. "Without mercy, without the willingness to desist from the punitive and destructive acts that remain within their power, there is no way for leaders in a war to bring their fighting to an end." This is an important book, one that thoughtful citizens should read, particularly those who want to move beyond over-simplified analyses to one grounded in historical and political realities.