Give Peace a Chance

Book excerpt: In Give Peace a Chance, the distinguished Dr. Hamburg teams up with his filmmaker son to tell the story of selected significant peace achievements over the past 25 years. Including lessons from personal experience, pithy quotes from interviews with international dignitaries, and the insights of a documentary sensibility, this book reflects upon striking moments in peace history and inflects them with the perspective of preventive medicine. From Jane Goodall's rainforest research station, to a hostage taking in Eastern Africa, to the Reagan-Gorbachev post-summit epiphany in Reykjavik, the Hamburgs take us there. They then distill the wisdom of these and many other encounters into an essential "six pillars of prevention"-education, early action, democracy building, socioeconomic development, human rights, and arms control. These six pillars are essential not only to reflections upon the past, but to future prospects emerging from recent challenges to peace-the Arab Spring, the violent repression in Syria, and the brewing faceoff with Iran. Features of this engaging text: Combines personal experience(including involvement in a hostage rescue mission) with ongoing research in a variety of areas over 50+ years. Includes feature quotes and vignettes from international figures including Kofi Annan, Sam Nunn, and Hillary Clinton, among many others. Builds upon six key pillars of prevention: education, early warning, democracy, development, human rights, and arms control. Concludes with prescriptions for peace action in four key areas: the US and Western democracies, the UN, the EU, and NATO. Offers carefully selected Recommended Readings for every chapter. See Stanford University's website for twenty-nine videotaped interviews with world leaders in the prevention of mass violence at http://lib.stanford.edu/preventing-genocide/list-interviews