If you want peace, build peace

Relations between states are based primarily on dialogue, on the ability to mediate between mutual positions, even and especially when they seem irreconcilable and the clash of arms drowns out everything. Connecting entire nations therefore requires a complex art, an art that these days seems forgotten in favor of unilateral declarations, if not the most offensive tactics to humiliate the adversary. In such a context, far-reaching solutions capable of satisfying everyone's needs are almost never found. The aim is simply to strengthen one's own positions, and it is difficult to defuse international crises, which otherwise become increasingly complicated and dangerous. The situation becomes even more complicated when tensions erupt into armed conflict and the sound of weapons, at the outset, becomes the voice of reason, of common sense, the voice of that art, today too often forgotten, called diplomacy.

Precisely because we live in an age in which armed conflicts appear to be the hallmark and negotiations, agreements and treaties are too often reduced to chimeras, a book like Making Peace (il Mulino, 2026, pp. 332) edited by Blythe Alice Raviola, professor of Modern History and History of Modern Europe at the University of Milan , becomes important.

Through the analysis of the main treaties signed between the Peace of Lodi (1454) and the Congress of Vienna (1815), the volume reconstructs the history of European diplomacy by observing peace as a process of negotiation, mediation, and redefinition of political balances . Each of the 19 chapters, each written by a different expert, contextualizes the agreements, examines their protagonists, contents, documentary forms, and consequences, restoring the role played by diplomats, sovereigns, and institutions in the construction of Europe in the modern era.

Above all, the book attempts to answer some fundamental questions when trying to end a war: "What does it mean to make peace? What conditions make the end of a conflict possible? And how have negotiations contributed to shaping the political, legal, and cultural balance of modern Europe?" These are complex questions, to which several of the book's contributors attempt to provide detailed answers, in the belief that not enough space has yet been given, particularly in scholarly literature, to that culminating moment of negotiations: the final signing of agreements. This labor-intensive moment is often dismissed in a few lines.

As Blythe Alice Raviola writes in her introduction to the book: "And yet, those moments were acted upon by thoughtful minds, they involved places designated to host working groups for months, they had immediate repercussions on ceremonial and publishing, they set in motion mechanisms of dynamic interaction. The signing of a peace treaty—then as now—should not therefore be read as a static epilogue to a concluded war phase, as a hoped-for and longed-for goal, but rather as the starting point for new balances, concrete effects, and results that are not always equally satisfactory for the contracting parties and the populations involved, and yet aimed at ending hostilities." Because every war, for those who live and endure it, establishes a before and an after. It undoubtedly represents the most shocking collective experience that an individual or a group of individuals can face. The signing of a peace treaty shares the same value: it marks a turning point after which new rules and new balances are established not only between the contracting parties, but also on the domestic front of the states involved in the agreements. This is why peace cannot be improvised. It must be built, something that seems to escape too many of us today, especially those who govern us. To paraphrase the ancient Roman saying "si vis pacem, para bellum" (if you want peace, prepare for war), today it becomes necessary to say "si vis pacem, paae pacem": if you want peace, build peace.

This is one of the key messages of the volume edited by Blythe Alice Raviola, a manual designed for students that offers tools for understanding the historical roots of diplomacy and international law , but also a civil book that, in harmony with the principles of the academic network Runi Pace (Network of Italian Universities for Peace), stimulates reflection on how it was and is possible to find alternatives to weapons.