AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: THE ART OF MARY GLADSTONE

_{An appreciation, by Jamie Arbuckle, with Ingrid Lehmann, for Peacehawks}

_INTRODUCTION

_{Since the inception of Peacehawks in January of 2010, we have posted 41 articles, essays and reviews, all on the subject of international peace and security.} _{Recent events: the pandemic, war in Ukraine, Jamie’s 80th – have summoned us to an accounting. Our balance is showing us that we have written not about peace and security, but rather we seem mostly to have been concerned with the exceptions which are not exceptional, but which prove the misrule: unrest and insecurity. While traffic and parking regulations are enforceable and are usually enforced world-wide, genocide is not preventable and is rarely punished – world-wide. A permanent member of the United Nations Security Council is rampaging over the rubble it has created in a neighboring country; their head of government has been indicted for war crimes.}

_{A deadly combination of apocryphal history (the Battles of the Alamo and of the Field of Blackbirds, the revanchist myth of a just-recently-eclipsed Russian Empire) coupled with the strivings of regents whose crowns sit as uneasily on their heads as do their heads on their shoulders, can make war seem necessary and inevitable – it’s the Milosevic-Bush syndrome. Vladimir Putin was}cleary irresistibly tempted but, Ukraine in 2023 having proven to be so unlike France in 1940, he has been forced to stronger measures.

_{And, as seemingly powerless as the international community is to deal with interstate conflict, it is no better able to manage intrastate conflict, witness the more or less constant uproar in Sudan, as protracted and murderous as it is pointless – and to us, so far, equally unmanageable.}

As the late Amitai Etzioni, the founder of Communitarianism, wrote:

_…despite my confidence that the message I have hammered out would do the world a lot of good—no one seems to be listening.[1]

We think it time we wrote about something completely different – what about peace?

And, thinking thus, we encountered the art of Mary Gladstone.

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The Fog of Peace: A Memoir of International Peacekeeping in the 21st Century

by Jean-Marie Guehenno[1]

Reviewed by James V. Arbuckle, for Peacehawks

Introduction

Jean-Marie Guehenno was appointed United Nations Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations (USG PKO) in 2000, and held that position until 2008. A “scholar-diplomat”, as one blurbist has characterized him, he was until his appointment without direct experience of the United Nations.

The Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) was created in 1992 from the Department of Special Political Affairs, which had been responsible for PKOs since their inception in 1948. The then USG for that Department, Marrack Goulding, assumed the leadership of the new DPKO until he was succeeded by Kofi Annan in 1993. Annan was replaced by Bernard Miyet of France in 1997 when Annan became Secretary-General[2]. Since then all DPKO USGs have been French, and on 1 April of this year Jean-Pierre Lacroix will replace Herve Ladsus.

The book is engagingly written, and conveys well the feel of the immediacy of high diplomacy, but careful readers may find some things missing.

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GIVING PEACE LITERATURE A CHANCE: a book review

The Question of Peace in Modern Political Thought, Toivo Koivukoski and Edward Tabachnick, eds.. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario, 2015

- by Jamie Arbuckle

Introduction

At a very early stage in my career as a soldier, I had amassed a very comprehensive collection of classical war literature: Sun Tzu, du Picq, the Brodies, Ropp, Earle, Liddell-Hart, Keegan, Taylor, and more, spanning more than two-and-one-half millenia. I thought I knew what war had been, was now and might be. Nearly half a century later, I have them all still on my shelves, and have often referred to several of them in these pages.

I have never read a book about peace, and I don’t actually know much about it. So the arrival of this book for this review was, for me, timely. Perhaps for you as well?

What is peace? Is it merely the absence of war? Or is it the absence of violent conflict? Was the period between the two World Wars a peace? Is scale involved, that is to say, was the NATO-led action in Serbia and in Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1999 a war (it is commonly called one)? Can we have peace without justice, or must those responsible for unjust wars be pursued beyond the cessation of hostilities? And is there such a thing as a just war?

I think we need some answers to these questions and more, and I hoped this book would help me to understand peace at least as well as I once thought I understood war.

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