To all our supporters - many thanks indeed for all your contributions that helped us to launch To Trust Spark on the 5th May 2016 at Friends House, London.
The launch was a lovely, intimate event with around 23 people from Friends House staff, PYPL and interested groups attending. Our author, Anne Bennett, together with Alan Pleydell, Diana Francis and Judith Large provided some absorbing accounts of their involvement in the post Yugoslav region over the years. Below are some comments from our book reviewers.
The launch was a lovely, intimate event with around 23 people from Friends House staff, PYPL and interested groups attending. Our author, Anne Bennett, together with Alan Pleydell, Diana Francis and Judith Large provided some absorbing accounts of their involvement in the post Yugoslav region over the years. Below are some comments from our book reviewers.
Dr Paul StubbsSociologist. Senior Research Fellow, The Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia
As a peace activist, researcher and consultant, I worked with the Quakers on specific interventions on peacebuilding in the post-Yugoslav space and have long considered their work in this region as exceptional, especially when compared to other international organisations. In a typically humble way, To Trust a Spark provides a considered, reflexive and honest account of the ways UK Quakers supported nascent peace groups, individuals and movements over an eighteen year period. It shows clearly the importance of taking time, actively listening to and trusting local voices, and building open and inclusive relationships. The seeds which the Quakers helped to sow have borne so many fruits and ensured that visions of a better future are not only still present throughout the region but are gaining ground. The Quakers stood by those who sought peace in the midst of violence and war, those who sought justice in the face of oppression, and those who struggled to keep alive a vision of a better world. This book is both a chronicle of important work done and, almost despite itself, a guide to lessons which can and should be learnt when contemplating future conflict and post-conflict peace-building interventions. |
Dr Brian Phillips Co-Editor – Journal of Human Rights Practice (Oxford University Press)
To Trust a Spark is precisely the kind of book that the fields of peacebuilding and human rights practice so urgently require. While academic studies in these fields abound, this volume beautifully captures a sort of genuinely experiential wisdom – born of innovative practice and grounded in lived realities - that too often goes unrecorded and unshared. This is the story of recognizably Quaker approaches to post-conflict social reconstruction and dealing with the past becoming profoundly enriched and extended by the initiatives and insights of the imaginative, committed local practitioners who worked closely with Quaker Peace and Social Witness in the post-Yugoslav region during the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s. It is therefore an essential chapter in the unfolding history of Quaker international work – but it is much more than that as well. This is also an indispensable alternative history of a region of Europe where the bold and creative interventions of local peacebuilders and human rights practitioners deserve to be seen as a crucial a part of the narrative of these years – as central to understanding life in that time and place as any more ‘mainstream’ account of social and political developments in the region following the wars of the 1990s. |