Peace is Everybody's Business: A Strategy for Conflict Prevention | Arjun Ray (retd)
Peace is Everybody's Business is about conflict prevention, hope and peace for the oppressed and alienated, and the imaginative use of soft-power to win back estranged communities into the social and political mainstream. Past strategies in managing alienated societies have been derived from two extreme ideological positions-imprisoning those who take up arms against the stage, or ultra-liberalism, which is denounced as impractical. The author suggests an alternative strategy to reconcile these two extreme positions-a three-pronged strategy to achieve success by preventing conflict by addressing human security through human development, pursuing a policy of atonement and forgiveness, and eliminating trust deficit between the State and the marginalized. The central focus of this strategy, which the author in his capacity as a General successfully executed in Operation Sadhbhavna, is the people. The author believes that killing is counterproductive and the army must change its role from 'winning wars' to 'preventing wars'.