Wars dehumanize. This book humanizes.
Speaking Their Peace gives a voice to people who have not been heard before, people silenced by the trauma of conflict, gagged by fear and conformity, or muted by the world's indifference.
These are "ordinary" people -- mechanics and priests, lawyers and farmers, journalists and teachers, youngsters and retirees. But they have extraordinary stories to tell of life during wartime and their efforts to build a better, more peaceful life for themselves, their families and their societies. They make clear the terms such a "rule of law," "justice," and "security" are not just intellectual notions but are of massive, real, and personal significance.
Their voices are unforgettable: powerfully, intimately human, heart-wrenching, and heartwarming in equal measure, singing a song of horror or of hope.
With a foreword by the Dalai Lama, Speaking Their Peace is packed with eighty compelling interviews with people from eleven conflict zones across the world (Afghanistan, Burma/Myanmar, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, Nicaragua, Peru, South Sudan, and Yemen). Photos capture the diversity and personalities of interviewees, while short profiles of each conflict provide back ground and context.
The United States Institute of Peace's Colette Rausch has put together a book that will change the way readers think about how people cope with war and the transition from war to peace.
Colette Rausch is committed to participating in efforts to support peaceful and just societies.
Her adoptive father (a musician who learned to play performing for silent movie audiences as he traveled across the country with his father) and mother divorced when Colette was eight years old. Her life until then was stable and secure. That changed after the divorce when her mother remarried a few more times and Colette, her brother and mother experienced domestic violence. At times, they were required to flee the home and live in other people's homes or when they could afford it, in motel rooms. Colette started working at a McDonald's at fourteen and was the restaurant's manager by sixteen.
She began taking college courses as a senior in high school and moved herself into a college dorm. She worked her way through college, including a stint running the night shift in a funeral home. She dealt blackjack at a Reno casino after she earned a degree in journalism from the University of Nevada-Reno.
At first, she thought of becoming a war correspondent. But her love for justice won out, and she earned a J.D. in law from Santa Clara University. Around this time, she sought out her birth parents and was very fortunate to find them: her mother was living in the United States, and her father in Germany. They remained in close touch and enjoyed frequent visits throughout the ensuing years. Sadly, her father in Germany passed away in 2019.
After practicing law for a large firm, she joined the State of Nevada's Attorney General's Office, where she first was the lawyer for the Consumer Affairs Division and later director of the telemarketing and consumer fraud unit. Her successes there led her to join the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), where she worked in both the white-collar crime and the violent crimes unit as a federal prosecutor in Las Vegas.
She prosecuted the state's first case under the federal Violence Against Women Act, and the first case involving the federal anti-church burning law. Later, she become a federal public defender for death row inmates.
In the 1990s, as some Easter European countries struggled to make the transition to democracy. Colette's career took a new direction. She was appointed by the DoJ as its legal advisor, first in Hungary and later in Bosnia. In Hungary, she worked on the development of a crime task force. In Bosnia, she worked with local justice officials on law reform. She then returned to Washington, DC, as the DoJ program manager for Central and East Europe, establishing criminal justice development and training projects in Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, and Macedonia.
From there, Colette took a position with the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE), working closely with the United Nations on strengthening rule of law and adherence to human rights standards, training judges and prosecutors, defense counsels, and revising laws and establishing systems for monitoring human rights.
Colette then served over 18 years with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). USIP is an independent, nonpartisan organization funded by Congress that works to prevent and resolve international conflict. She held multiple leadership roles and led the development of new approaches, research, learning and tools to be used to facilitate peacebuilding and promote justice, security and rule of law. While at USIP, she founded the peacebuilding and neuroscience initiative that focused on the nexus of neuroscience and peacebuilding and explored what drives individuals and societies to resort to violence and what encourages people to turn from violence to peacebuilding. The initiative also looked at the role of trauma and its affect on peacebuilding efforts. Colette has worked in numerous countries embroiled in or emerging from conflict, including, Afghanistan, Burma/Myanmar, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, Nicaragua, Peru, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Yemen.
Experiencing firsthand the toll that chronic stress and trauma takes on individuals and communities, Colette established Transform Trauma Solutions in 2020 to address the critical need to help alleviate stress and trauma, as well as build resiliency, in order to create the environment where peace is possible.
Each member of the Speaking Their Peace team was crucial to the success of the project as a whole. Each brought his or her own unique skill set to our joint endeavor, allowing us to explore more widely and more deeply the transition from conflict to peace. What we shared in common were the qualities that made Speaking Their Peace possible: abundant curiosity, respect for our interviewees, a fascination with the stories they related, and a readiness to follow wherever an interview might lead.