Book Review: "Across the Lines of Conflict: Facilitating Cooperation to Build Peace"

Howard Wolpe, to whom this book is dedicated, was an MIT-trained political scientist specializing in Ibo politics in Nigeria who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1979. He served as chair of the Africa Subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs Committee and subsequently as U.S. Special Envoy to the Great Lakes Region of Africa. When the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi, signed in August 2000, failed to bring an end to the hostilities there, Wolpe, who had helped to negotiate the accord, undertook to engage key political, military, and civil-society actors in Burundi in a series of workshops involving role playing, simulation, joint problem analysis, and other related exercises, with the aim of building trust and ultimately transforming relationships among the parties. These efforts are credited, in part, with having contributed to the establishment of the fragile peace in Burundi in 2005 that is holding (albeit only just) to this day. This volume represents an attempt to articulate the kind of approach that Wolpe employed in his peacemaking and peacebuilding efforts and to assess systematically the effectiveness of this approach. Edited by Michael Lund, a leading scholar of conflict and conflict resolution, and Steve McDonald, a former director of the Africa Program at the Wilson Center who worked with Wolpe in Burundi, Across the Lines of Conflict provides a systematic analysis of this important but largely underexamined dimension of peacemaking and peacebuilding. It is exceptionally well edited and achieves a coherence that often eludes edited volumes, beginning with the exposition of the conceptual framework by Lund, followed by case studies by country specialists of trust-building initiatives in six conflict-affected countries, and concluding with a discussion by Lund of the findings and implications drawn from his analysis of the case studies.