Imminent violence and war make news headlines, while longstanding peace and good inter-state relations hardly seem newsworthy. By contrast, Charles Kupchan's new book, How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace, focuses on the origins of peace rather than war. While war is certainly big news, he posits that the bigger news is that the US-Canada border has been consistently peaceful for more than a century, or that only 68 years after France and Germany fought two world wars, people can now drive across the border as though it does not exist. His new book seeks to identify the dynamics that lead countries to achieve lasting peace.

In the process of nation-building, states attempt to make the state and the demographic nation overlap. In this process, national minorities become a problem and European nation states have a checkered past in terms of dealing with them, with variable policies reflecting ethnic antipathy at one moment and cooperation at another. Conventional wisdom holds that ethnic antipathy is the result of cultural distance or "age-old ethnic hatreds." However, according to Harris Mylonas, these theories neither predict outcomes nor account for variation in minority policy over time. His research focuses on the relationship between minority treatment and interstate relations, in an effort to gain a broader understanding the complexity of state-building and minority policies in Europe.

Aristotle Tziampiris, Assistant Professor, Department of International and European Studies, University of Piraeus (Greece)