How Wars End: A Hopeful History Of Making Peace

Description

Do boycotts work? Should arms sales be stopped? What about supplying weapons to the good guys? In How Wars End an international expert explains how we can act to bring about peace in an age of escalating war.

In 2003 Jan van Aken almost helped stop a war. But as he was preparing to go to Baghdad to search for biological weapons, he got a message: the US was determined to avenge 9/11 and wouldn't wait for UN inspections to take place. The invasion went ahead, and only years later, the world discovered that Iraq had had no biological weapons at that time.

From this experience and the many others he has had as a weapons inspector, conflict analyst and activist, in How Wars End van Aken shows how conflict resolution really works. From disinformation and dodgy dossiers to chemical weapons and murderous drones, he identifies why wars start and spiral. And he looks at the alternatives, including civil initiatives, diplomacy, sanctions, and international interventions.

Interweaving the latest findings from peace research with stories and examples from Northern Ireland, Serbia, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, Israel-Palestine and more, How Wars End lays out evidence-based strategies for moving from violent conflict to ceasefire, and from ceasefire to lasting peace.

Translated by Jo Heinrich.

About the Author

Jan van Aken, who holds a PhD in biology, worked as a genetic engineering expert for Greenpeace and as a biological weapons inspector for the United Nations from 2004 to 2006. From 2009 to 2017, he was a member of Parliament in Germany for the Left Party. He then worked as a Policy Advisor in International Conflict Analysis at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in the Middle East. Since October 2024, he has served as co-chairman of the Left Party.

Jo Heinrich lives near Bristol with her family and translates from German and French. Her translations include Katja Oskamp's Marzahn, Mon Amour, which won the 2023 Dublin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. She has also translated Oskamp's Half Swimmer and The Invention of Good and Evil by Hanno Sauer, and she was part of a team translating Angela Merkel's memoirs, Freedom.