Peace First: A New Model to End War

Uri Savir has an ambitious but indispensable goal: to modernize peacemaking. In the follow-up to his award-winning book, THE PROCESS, he exposes and deconstructs the many ironies and anachronisms in our current, deeply flawed approach to peacemaking. “Little in today’s world,” he writes “is more progressive than modern warfare. Yet little is more archaic than today’s peacemaking strategies.” While the social, political, and economic elements of societies have evolved to encompass issues of globalization, hi-tech and communications, peacemaking as a strategy has remained stagnant.

Savir makes many radical observations, including the long-denied fact that war-makers cannot also be the peace-makers, and that we mistakenly believe that security guarantees peace when the inverse is true: peace guarantees security. Our outmoded approaches to diplomacy, he argues, actually ensure failure; while our preparations future wars reflect current, ever-changing circumstances, our preparations for the next peace process are habitually and fatefully based on the previous peace process. Witness: of the approximately 70 partial and full peace agreements signed over the last two decades, a vast majority face severe sustainability issues or have simply drowned.

As an alternative to a world in which peace is just the pause between wars, Savir urges readers to acknowledge that, just as we accept the fact that there are sometimes “necessary wars,” we must accept the imperative that there is always a “necessary peace.” When we make this mental shift, peace becomes not merely a strategic objective, but instead a core, internalized value—a value that stems from our internalized commitment to equality between human beings, and from the realization that we all have similar needs, fears, hopes and weaknesses.

To illustrate his four-point plan for sustainable peace-making, Savir draws on his own deep, first-hand experiences, most notably during the Oslo Peace Process, but also working to build peace between enemies and former enemies in the African nations of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone, the European regions of Northern Ireland and the Former Yugoslavia, and in Asia – Afghanistan, India and Pakistan.