A valuable reminder of the value of fighting for peace.
A collection of in-depth interviews with peacemakers of all kinds.
“Peace mediation itself,” writes Jonathan Cohen, executive director of Conciliation Resources, “needs to evolve and demonstrate its contemporary relevance and effectiveness, amid rapid changes in how wars are fought and in the face of destabilised international security.” These modern challenges, and the various organizations dedicated to meeting them, are the focus of this assemblage of interviews with people working for peace in the world’s dozens of conflict zones. A common denominator, as professor Oliver Richmond writes in his foreword, is an approach to peacemaking that transcends “old boundaries of thought and practice” in attempts to “bridge both distant scholarship and the polemics of politics.” In these interviews, serious and probing questions are put to people in peacemaking roles, and their answers speak more directly to those polemics than any standard narrative could convey. Mohammad Latif Fayaz, for example, who is currently director of the Hazara Cultural House in Finland and formerly served as NATO’s Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan, talks about the “very hard moment” in 2021 when he learned that the international community intended to withdraw from the country “without considering on-the-ground realities,” thereby undermining decades of peacebuilding work. Sandra Melone, founder and CEO of Zancora Consulting, touches on the subject of peacemaking as it relates to supporting women’s rights. “When a government claims that girls and women have the right to health and education,” she attests, “I would say, show us where the health services and education actually are.” The assemblage of these voices makes for valuable storytelling; these are men and women who have faced what Helen Kezie-Nwoha describes in her introduction as “the growing complexity of achieving negotiated settlements” in an increasingly fragmented and extremist world.
A valuable reminder of the value of fighting for peace.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2025
ISBN: 9781913641429
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Aurora Metro Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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