Rethinking Peace: Discourse, Memory, Translation, and Dialogue, edited by Alexander Laban Hinton, Giorgio Shani and Jeremiah Alberg. Reviewed by Mohammed Moussa.

Abstract

Peace is a protean concept that equally eludes academics and practitioners on the one hand and perpetrators and victims on the other hand. However, this conundrum has not discouraged the preoccupation of peace and conflict studies with fixing the definition of peace once and for all for immediate export to war zones. In this essay, I review the timely book of Rethinking Peace: Discourse, Memory, Translation, and Dialogue which explicitly aims at not only rethinking peace but also providing self-reflexive viable alternatives. My review proceeds according to two steps: first, I identify the key themes of each part and of each chapter; second, I situate the edited volume in a context characterized by two increasingly significant conversations, the interpretivist turn and the decolonizing of knowledge, that at times overlap.