A review by jasmineqzou
The Frontlines of Peace: An Insider's Guide to Changing the World by Séverine Autesserre

hopeful informative inspiring slow-paced

5.0

 I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants a more nuanced understanding of international intervention and how it can succeed. I have so much respect for the way that Autesserre approaches peacebuilding—a thorny and often painful topic in the past half-century—in this book. She criticizes the conventional top-down peacebuilding approaches where foreign peacebuilders run the show and socialize in insular peacebuilder circles, focusing on arranging handshakes between leaders and scheduling elections instead of the quotidian causes of violence that affect the communities that peacebuilders are supposed to protect. These criticisms of what she calls “Peace, Inc.” are grounded in Autesserre’s brutally honest reflections on her own experience as a foreign peacebuilder following guidelines that perpetuate neo-colonialist/neo-imperialist dynamics between peacebuilders and locals. 

However, Autesserre does not just focus on the myriad ways that peacebuilding has failed over the past decades, but instead she has valuably outlined what strategies *have* worked. Drawing from organizations and initiatives in the Congo, Colombia, Somaliland, and Palestine/Israel, Autesserre emphasizes the importance of bottom-up strategies in successful peacebuilding—of listening to locals explain where the source of violence is, of respecting the expertise of insiders instead of assuming they are not as capable as foreigners at analyzing the problems, and of committing to local, grassroots initiatives for peace, projects that require long-term investment, and are certainly less glamourous than negotiating a handshake between leaders. 

Ultimately, this book helped me feel hopeful that there are tools that dedicated individuals can implement to foster peace in their communities. Her vivid anecdotes helped me see the leaders and activists hard at work in foreign lands, using strategies that I feel empowered to replicate in my own communities.