I had the opportunity to hear professor Séverine Autesserre lecture about her new book The Frontlines of Peace. She stresses the need to put “local actors in the driver’s seat.” Séverine paraphrases Paul Lederach, who believes that the best solutions to any conflict come from the people experiencing it. Nevertheless, she believes that top-down building remains crucial, because it can help to reinforce the achievements of local inhabitants.

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Here I Am, is my book about my experiences with psychosis, depression and forced hospitalization. You might wonder why this book is paid attention to on the website of Peace SOS? During my psychosis, God showed the world through his eyes. His love for everything that lives. The bushes that seemed to want to touch me, the soil in the ground and all the organisms living in it, the snails communicating with each other. That is why I often say that we need to respect and cherish life. Life on earth is all interconnected.

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In his book World Peace: And how we can achieve it, Professor Alex Bellamy states that he thinks of peace as the absence and prevention of war and the management of conflict through peaceful means, implying some form of legitimate civic order. By ‘world’ peace he means the extension of these ideas globally. World peace doesn’t come from institutional arrangements or economics alone, but must also live within the hearts and minds of people.

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Dr Scilla Elworthy starts her book by putting the costs of war into perspective. She mentions that the global spending on war is $2 trillion dollars (see for the current figures SIPRI, red), while World Beyond War calculated that only about $30 billion is necessary to end starvation and hunger around the world.

Inequality has created a world in which the eight richest individuals worldwide own as much as half of the world’s population.

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