Foreword

The wider peacebuilding field has long suffered under the weight of an intriguing paradox: Violence has never been more studied, understood in terms of its dynamics and patterns, and officially identified as a policy challenge than it has in the past twenty years. And violence continues to unfold with extraordinary resilience in too many communities around the world.

In this book Joe Bock makes a significant step into unpacking and suggesting creative ways to respond to this dilemma. I say that as a practitioner-scholar with thirty years of experience in community conflict and as a critic of the difficulties that this promising area of exploration – all too often misnamed as conflict prevention – has failed to deliver. From the standpoint of the practice of strategic peacebuilding several key contributions are worth highlighting from this book.

First, let me elaborate on why this book has innovation…