How Do War-Torn Societies Transition to Peace?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: What made you come up with this. What — after years and years, and we’ve been doing it together, covering wars, made you make this link towards peace?

GARY KNIGHT, DIRECTOR, VII FOUNDATION, EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, “IMAGINE: REFLECTIONS ON PEACE”: Well, Christiane, I came back from the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I was looking through my pictures and started to imprint (ph)in how on earth could peace be made in the country, you know, with an occupying force, the beginning of a civil war growing. And from there, I thought, well, it would be really interesting to go back to many of the countries that we’ve all covered during wartime, and look at what peace really meant, what the result of peace processes were for the people who had to live with it. And from there, of course, the project grew.

AMANPOUR: You know, I want to just read the dedication. It says, this book is dedicated to those who are living in war while imagining peace and those who are brave enough to build it. So, let me just turn to you, Robin, because you are there in Beirut, which has obviously been through so many decades of war, and we’ve just seen this terrible explosion obviously. It’s not war but it’s just rocked the whole sort of situation there again, and you covered the war there. Tell me about the key ingredients and this notion that while at war, so many people actually did imagine peace.

ROBIN WRIGHT, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Well, going back 30 years after the end of the war, it was fascinating to look at what people had emerged from the conflict and tried imaginatively to engage society, whether it was in a new form of politics, a new form of bringing the 18 different religious sects in Lebanon together in talking about the costs of war. The tragedy in all of the war zones, I think, we’ve covered is that there’s not enough people who are engaging in that imagination, that it takes much more bravery to engage in the process of enduring peace than it does to pick up an arm and shoot somebody. And you have to give credit to whether it’s former fighters, a young techie that I met, I met a former hijacker, he holds the world record on hijackings, six, who talk about what the conflict meant to them and they resent, what they went through and wanted to live differently.