Cambodia Peace Is Possible (2020)

Peace is Possible: Echanging Weapons for Development and how we disarmed the Khmer Rouge with wit, bluff and balloons

LETTER introducing my latest book:

Dear friends

This is a book about Lessons Learned in peace building, and it describes a successful SSR and WfD project in Cambodia. It is also fun to read. Weapons for Development is a mechanism that is well known, widely used but seldom well understood.

We want this book to become well known, well used and widely discussed, simply because it is a valuable resource for peace builders and was conceived for use in peace operations.

The pictures are valuable too, both as a partial record of the EU-ASAC peace building success story, and also because they also illustrate important points.

Peace is Possible is an amazing story, and easy reading. Robin Poulton – a Senior Fellow of UNIDIR Geneva and an expert in micro-disarmament and SSR - takes readers into rural pagodas along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, traveling along tracks threaded between fields of landmines and rice paddies. This is peace journalism at its best, peace anthropology at its most creative: it is an uplifting and amusing story proving that even in a civil war, Peace is Possible. From Amazon.com

It has been written is such as way as to encourage non-academic people with average reading skills - like soldiers and policemen – to read the story and think about the lessons they might apply in their own environments.

Tools for peace makers are included in the book:

- 21 Lessons Learned from peace building in Cambodia (p 40)

- Spending money more efficiently (p 53)

- Weapons management checklist (p 54)

- Conditions for Success (p 55)

- Security First and the UN Programme of Action on SALW (p 58)

- Evaluating Weapon Programmes (p 59)

We are sending you copies of the book with a request that you distribute them through your contacts in the UN and eslewhere: the book needs to reach people in the UN Dept of Political Affairs, UN Disarmament Division, UN Dept of Peace Keeping, and the military Chiefs of Staff. The best way to get the book known is for the book to be passed on between people who know each other, and with a recommendation. That is why we are asking you to distribute these copies through your internal UN network.

It would also be great to have the book reviewed in internal or other journals: if you have an idea on this, we can easily write a text for you to amend, sign and publish.