This book investigates world peace: what it is, whether it might be achieved, and how.

• Preface


• 1: The Elusive Quest


• 2: Dreams of Peace


• 3: Hard-Wired for War?


• 4: Why We Fail


• 5: The State: Warmaker and Peacemaker


• 6: The Costs of War


• 7: Leashing the Passions of War


• 8: Towards World Peace

Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, at The University of Queensland, Australia. He is also Non-Resident Senior Adviser at the International Peace Institute in New York and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Since 2012 he has served as a consultant for the United Nations Office for Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. For some of his work, he has been awarded a United Nations Association award for 'outstanding service' to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. In 2014-2015 and 2017-2018 he was a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. He was the winner of the Ethics Section of the International Studies Association Prize 2013 for his book Massacres and Morality: Mass Atrocities in an Age of Civilian Immunity.