Book Reviews

Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas. David Cortright. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

“Warmakers are often wrong. ... Peace advocates are sometimes right, especially when their ideas are not only morally sound but politically realistic” (4).

Book Reviewed by: 
Jodok Troy, University of Inssbruck, Austria

The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation, and the Dilemmas of Transitional Justice. Daniel Philpott, ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.

The contributors to The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation, and the Dilemmas of Transitional Justice are motivated by a desire to bring religiously g

Book Reviewed by: 
Rebecca Johnson, Georgetown university

Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. Jimmy Carter. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

When it comes to the topic of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, most of us will readily agree that the situation in Israel and the occupied territories is not encouraging.

Book Reviewed by: 
John Berteaux, California State University Monterey Bay

Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa. Ussama Makdisi and Paul A. Silverstein, eds. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Explanations of conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa often consist of facile, ahistoric arguments framed in the language of democratization and the “war on terror.

Book Reviewed by: 
Pepijn van Houwelingen, Royal Holloway University of London

Belief and Bloodshed: Religion and Violence across Time and Tradition. James K. Wellman Jr., ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.

The modern age was rife with examples of religiously motivated violence well before September 11, 2001, from the large-scale conflict in Northern Ireland to the murder of abortion

Book Reviewed by: 
Guy Lancaster, Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture

__Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence.__ Hector Avalos. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2005

Believing that religious and academic leaders have tried for too long to minimize, justify, or explain away religion’s violent tendencies, Hector Avalos counters this trend in his book Fighting Words. His theory of religious violence attacks the way religions profess special divine favor for themselves, over and against other groups. Avalos believes this tendency leads to violence because conflicting claims to superiority, based on unverifiable appeals to God, cannot be adjudicated objectively.

Book Reviewed by: 
Joshua Thomas
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Journal of Religion, Conflict, and Peace. Copyright © 2013.
Published by Plowshares: a Peace Studies Collaborative of Earlham and Goshen Colleges and Manchester University. Supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.
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