Insight with Peter Beaumont: The Secret Life of War

Chaired by Wendell Steavenson

 

The Observer’s foreign affairs editor Peter Beaumont will discuss his new book The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict. Drawing on his extensive experience, Beaumont examines the changing nature of war, focussing the human cost to the combatants and civilians in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq and Israel.

 

“I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write a book about the nature of those kinds of modern conflicts I had encountered during my career – ambiguous, intractable, long-lasting and very largely unresolved affairs which amounted to chronic afflictions of violence,” he writes. “When I began I was clear that what I wished to do was to give back a voice – or rather voices – to those affected by war, free from the organising justifications of those who order conflict.”