PEACEBUILDING AND RECONCILIATION CONTEMPORARY THEMES AND CHALLENGES

Abstract

It is said that the reader of any book brings his or her own reality to that book, which then generates a new, richer reality. This book review of Peacebuilding and reconciliation: Contemporary themes and challenges has been written from the Centre for Trust, Peace and Reconciliation (CTPSR), Coventry University, by a South African. Ruins and reconstructions in Coventry city speak of the destruction of war and conflict over centuries. They also speak of the potential for peacebuilding and reconciliation against severe odds, of a city rising from the ashes – and not just rebuilding, but reinventing itself for the greater good, thus going beyond reconciliation. This town’s history as recorded formally and living in the minds of people, statues, living monuments and current practices, most notably its rich global ethnic diversity and related ways of life, reveal the human drive to forgive, reconcile and prosper in peace in spite of, and in the case of the CTPSR, one of its living monuments, because of its diversity.