The twenty-first century has unsettled many of the assumptions that shaped post-Cold War global politics. The war in Ukraine, the Gaza war, Hamas’s surprise attack of 7 October 2023, and the widening confrontation between Iran, Israel, and the United States have intensified geopolitical conflict and fractured intergroup relations. In this context, Julia Chaitin and Elad Avlagon offer a timely contribution to peace psychology, conflict studies, and Holocaust and genocide studies. Striving for Peace through Personal Narratives of Genocide and War synthesizes psychosocial theory, archival narrative research, oral history, and applied peacebuilding practice into an accessible and intellectually substantive whole.
Crucially, both authors are Israeli Jewish-born scholars who write explicitly as Jewish Israelis whose personal and family histories connect them to both the Holocaust and the Israeli–Arab/Palestinian conflicts. This positionality, openly declared in the preface (pp. xi–xviii), gives the book an unusual perspective for a scholarly inquiry: it is simultaneously a work of rigorous scholarship and a deeply personal intervention, shaped by the authors’ own proximity to the violence and divisions they seek to understand.
The book is organized into three parts. Part I establishes the theoretical framework, covering the psychosocial literature on personal narratives, collective identity, perceptions of the “enemy,” intergenerational trauma, and conceptualizations of positive peace and reconciliation. Chapter 2, which interrogates social identity theory alongside the intersectional dimensions of group identity, is particularly strong, tracing how processes of stereotyping, dehumanization, and “us versus them” thinking become encoded in the personal narratives that communities transmit across generations. Chapter 4’s treatment of positive peace, moving beyond the mere absence of violence toward sustainable reconciliation, situates the book squarely within the traditions of Galtung and contemporary peace psychology.
The theoretical heart of the book is Chapter 5 (pp. 80–86), which presents the authors’ original four-mode conceptual model linking different types of personal narratives to either peacebuilding or peace obstruction. The model distinguishes between narratives of: (1) distancing; (2) victimhood; (3) ambivalence and paradoxes; and (4) embracing the other while remaining in one’s own pain. While this is a potentially novel theoretical framework for a book of this kind, readers from a Political Science perspective may wonder why the theoretical chapter appears only in Chapter 5. As a result, expert readers are unable to engage with the full conceptual framework from the outset. This is not merely a matter of stylistic preference but a structural issue, as the authors’ original theoretical contribution emerges only relatively late in the volume.
The authors could have condensed some of the discussions on personal narratives, collective identity, perceptions of the “enemy,” intergenerational trauma, and conceptualizations of positive peace and reconciliation into a shorter, more integrated chapter. Doing so would have created additional space to explore the empirical applicability of their model in greater depth. As it stands, the breadth of Part I exceeds that of the empirical sections, limiting the opportunity to fully develop and demonstrate the explanatory potential of the authors’ own theoretical contribution.
Part II applies this framework to three narrative contexts: the Holocaust (Chapter 6), the Jewish–Arab and Israeli–Palestinian conflict (Chapter 7), and internal Israeli Jewish divisions (Chapter 8). The inclusion of intra-group conflict in Chapter 8 is a particularly notable methodological choice. In this context, however, one may also wonder why the authors, who clearly engage with both sides of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, do not extend their analysis to another major cleavage within Palestinian society itself. The political and territorial division between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank since 2007 constitutes one of the most acute and enduring internal Palestinian conflicts of the contemporary era, yet it remains outside the scope of the book. Engagement with this intra-Palestinian divide could have provided a valuable comparative dimension and an additional opportunity to apply and test the four-mode framework beyond the Israeli and Jewish contexts that dominate the analysis.
The inclusion of Chapter 8 lends the book an unusual urgency, complicating the binary framing that often governs conflict research and acknowledging that peace work must contend with divisions within, not only between, communities. Throughout Part II, the authors draw on extensive quotations from personal narratives, survivors, descendants, activists, and ordinary civilians, allowing the human texture of lived experience to animate the theoretical analysis. This combination of narrative richness and analytical rigor is one of the book’s defining strengths. However, some of these testimonies (e.g., pp. 99, 102, 106, 110, 118, and 121) are presented largely as raw excerpts, with little or no accompanying analysis, leaving readers to infer their significance, interpretation, and context on their own. More careful organization and analytical integration of these quotations would have strengthened the theoretical framing and enhanced the explanatory power of the authors’ argument.
Part III, comprising Chapters 9 and 10, shifts toward research implications and practical peacebuilding recommendations. Here, the book is at its most applied, offering concrete suggestions for practitioners, educators, and policymakers interested in leveraging narrative exchange as a tool for reconciliation (pp. 157–175). The authors draw on existing dialogue programs, peace education initiatives, and cross-community encounter models to ground their recommendations.
Several qualities distinguish this work from others in its field. First, it is accessible and concise: written in a clear, narrative style, it is highly approachable for practitioners and postgraduate students who may lack a deep background in either peace psychology or Middle East conflict studies. Second, its scope: by treating the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in sustained dialogue with each other, the authors resist the tendency to compartmentalize these histories while also being careful not to flatten their distinct moral and historical features. Third, its methodological ambition: the interview materials, while not always subjected to sustained analytical treatment, provide rich empirical sources and offer readers a vivid sense of the narratives to which the authors repeatedly refer throughout the book.
The book’s focus, while deep, is geographically narrow; one wonders how the four-mode typology might be tested or complicated in contexts such as Rwanda, Bosnia, or Colombia, where narrative-based reconciliation efforts have also been extensively documented. The model’s universalist ambitions would be strengthened by cross-contextual application, and this represents a clear agenda for future scholarship.
The most pressing challenge facing this book, however, is one with which the authors choose not to engage in either the empirical or theoretical dimensions of the volume: the events of 7 October 2023 and their devastating aftermath. The Hamas surprise attack on southern Israel, which killed 1,200 people and resulted in the taking of some 250 hostages, and the subsequent Israeli military campaign in Gaza have fundamentally transformed the landscape in which this book must be read.
The question of genocide in Gaza, raised and debated in countless articles, podcasts, and op-eds by scholars, journalists, and practitioners alike, is largely absent from a book published in 2025. The preface itself registers something of the gathering storm (pp. xxii–xxiii), yet it does not engage systematically with what 7 October and its aftermath mean for the book’s central claims. The debates that emerged following October 2023 have become inseparable from contemporary discussions of memory, victimhood, reconciliation, and the moral boundaries of violence in the Israeli–Palestinian context. As a result, readers are left to consider for themselves how the authors’ conceptual framework might apply to these developments and whether the four modes of narrative engagement remain equally persuasive under the pressures of war and mass trauma.
In this context, the book’s four narrative modes take on new and sometimes painfully ironic dimensions. Narratives of victimhood, one of the modes the authors identify as potentially obstructing peace, have proliferated on all sides since October 7, often in forms that render the suffering of the other categorically invisible. Narratives of distancing have hardened into dehumanization. The fourth mode, embracing the other while remaining in one’s pain, has become not merely a theoretical aspiration but an almost radical act, one that peace activists in both Israeli and Palestinian civil society have pursued at enormous personal cost and with diminishing political space.
These are, finally, less critiques than invitations to the broader scholarly conversation this book opens. Striving for Peace through Personal Narratives of Genocide and War is a serious, humane, and methodologically ambitious work. It makes an important contribution to peace psychology by demonstrating how people tell their stories of atrocity matters not only for individual healing, but also for the collective political futures of societies still living in the shadow of genocide and war. Political Science and International Relations scholars may also find the book accessible, but they are likely to be less convinced by the limited and unsystematic application of the theoretical model throughout the empirical chapters. Nevertheless, the book merits close attention from scholars of genocide and memory, as well as from practitioners and researchers in psychology, conflict studies, Holocaust studies, Middle East studies, and peace education alike.
