A peace to be won*

 Hans – Lukas Kieser

A book title like The Missed Peace, as I had entitled my book eleven years ago, inevitably raises the question about a peace to be won.

In this talk, dear audience, I would like to say a few words on the sources, topics and the human rights perspective of The Missed Peace, and first on how I came to write it.

While studying history in Basel in the 1980s, I was confronted with unrest in Turkey at the time because I met refugees of my own age who had fled the military junta of 1980, not a few of whom had been tortured. More generally, I met a number of migrant families who had fled situations devoid of prospects for the future in eastern Anatolia and elsewhere.