Waging War, Making Peace

"...Waging War, Making Peace brilliantly exposes the complexities of reparation, restitution, and post-conflict remedies. It also takes an unflinching look at the daunting legal, political, economic, and cultural obstacles standing in the way of justice for those who have suffered from human rights abuses and war crimes committed by nation-states, corporations, and other non-state actors. Drawing upon research conducted in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, the contributors to this book break new ground by using ethnography to describe the herculean efforts of those who pursue long-term peace by working for justice, and the creative roles played by anthropologists contributing to their labor. As international courts, tribunals, and truth commissions expand their mission, this book stands as an indispensable guidebook for those seeking a lucid understanding of what is at stake."... - Roberto J. Gonzalez, author of Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking out on War, Peace and American Power, and American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain "...This book offers profound and compelling evidence of the enduring international need for reparations of past wrongs and the unique role anthropologists can play in keeping community needs and desires at the forefront of reparations debates. This is a must read for anyone interested in transitional justice."... -- Victoria Sanford, Lehman College & The Graduate Center, CUNY; author of Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala "...No one knows more about 21st century issues of war, human rights, and peace than Barbara Rose Johnston and Susan Slyomivics. This is scholarship you can trust-gripping, theoretically rich, socially responsible. Fourteen leading scholars illuminate the dark corners of global insecurity and hone an understanding of peace that includes the tantalizing promise that the breathe of life will return in the aftermath of horror. Waging War, Making Peace explores this emergent promise: It examines the constructs and processes used to \repair\"... the consequences of cataclysmic violence. With an anthropological focus on the dynamic tension between the political compromises that produce peace plans and the on-the-ground struggle for social justice, this book is essential reading for political actors, students, scholars, and citizens."... - Carolyn Nordstrom, Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame; author of Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World "...Waging War, Making Peace is more than a well-organized, thoughtful collection of essays focused on various reparation campaigns: Barbara Rose Johnston's opening essay provides an anthropological frame to issues of reparations, and the concluding chapter by Alison Dundes Renteln provides a synthetic human rights framework that significantly adds to our understanding of these issues. This important work establishes that (as Johnston writes) "...making the case for reparations requires exposing the truth, producing evidence of responsibility, producing evidence of injury, damage, and loss, a rights-protective space or forum to present claims and a viable judiciary to make a determination, and the political will and economic means to ensure that remedial agreements are actually implemented."... This volume will be a welcome addition to course on social justice, dispute resolution, applied anthropology, and peace studies. These essays draw on anthropological methods and theories to explore efforts to seek remedies for past wrongs. Because reparations wrestle with issues of restorative justice, it is a vital topic for our discipline."... -David H. Price, Journal of Anthropological Research