The wider peacebuilding field has long suffered under the weight of an intriguing paradox: Violence has never been more studied, understood in terms of its dynamics and patterns, and officially identified as a policy challenge than it has in past the twenty years. And violence continues to unfold with extraordinary resilience in too many communities around the world. In this book Joe Bock makes a significant step into unpacking and suggesting creative ways to respond to this dilemma. I say that as a practitioner- scholar with thirty years of experience in community conflict and as a critic of the difficulties that this promising area of exploration — all too often misnamed as conflict prevention — has failed to deliver. From the standpoint of the practice of strategic peacebuilding several key contributions are worth highlighting from this book.

The concept of toleration plays a central role in pluralistic societies. It designates a stance which permits conflicts over beliefs and practices to persist while at the same time defusing them, because it is based on reasons for coexistence in conflict - that is, in continuing dissension. A critical examination of the concept makes clear, however, that its content and evaluation are profoundly contested matters and thus that the concept itself stands in conflict. For some, toleration was and is an expression of mutual respect in spite of far-reaching differences, for others, a condescending, potentially repressive attitude and practice. Rainer Forst analyses these conflicts by reconstructing the philosophical and political discourse of toleration since antiquity. He demonstrates the diversity of the justifications and practices of toleration from the Stoics and early Christians to the present day and develops a systematic theory which he tests in discussions of contemporary conflicts over toleration.