Patrick Barron

The short poems in Bosk grow out of close encounters with trees, shrubs, and understory plants observed throughout a sprawling Boston arboretum built on glacial drumlins, with valleys and meadows threading between them. These poems emerged from slow, aimless wandering-moments when a shape, texture, or pattern tugged at the senses and asked to be noticed. From those encounters came a series of questions: How does careful attention to nonhuman beings both distort and sharpen our perception? How might deep observation rekindle our connection to place, easing us out of apathy? And can brief poems spark a kind of phenomenological inquiry-playful, probing, and alive to the porous membrane between the self and the wider world?

The overlapping crises of COVID-19, climate change, and rising levels of conflict are exacerbating global inequalities. This book offers a definition and framework for social sustainability, as well as examples and concrete guidance on how development can foster progress towards it.

The interconnected texts in Spooring have their origin in a slow journey down the Apennine Mountains in central and southern Italy over the course of a number of months. The genre is mixed. Poems trade places with short prose passages and transcriptions of road signs. Footnotes interrupt throughout, tempting fragments and byways. There are also a number of photographs and maps. The project is inspired in part by Robert Smithson's idea that "language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head," and also the corollary--that the physical world can find itself in language. Any text risks fossilizing ideas, and perhaps all the more so texts that take as their inspiration the physical world, since the overpowering immediacy of certain places tends to trick us into believing that language generated in response or dialogue will remain somehow authentic to those places. And the heady state of the cross-country walker is vulnerable to corruption, to believing that an empathetic dialectic with the physical world is translatable. To connect ideas to matter, thoughts to place, through language engaged with language. Not a fixed relief map, but a moveable index of small traces, tracks, words, and images, messages half-dismantled, enough to begin a paragraph or stanza, but not necessarily to finish.

Why are some places successful in moving from war to consolidated peace while others continue to be troubled by violence? And why does postconflict violence take different forms and have different intensities? By developing a new theory of postconflict violence Patrick Barron's When Violence Works makes a significant contribution to our understanding. Barron picks out three postconflict regions in Indonesia in which to analyze what happens once the "official" fighting ends: North Maluku has seen peace consolidated; Maluku still witnesses large episodes of violence; and Aceh experiences continuing occurrences of violence but on a smaller scale than in Maluku. He argues that violence after war has ended (revenge killings, sexual violence, gang battles, and violent crime, in addition to overtly political conflict) is not the result of failed elite bargains or weak states, but occurs because the actors involved see it as beneficial and lowcost. His findings pertain directly to Indonesia, but the theory will have relevance far beyond as those studying countries such as Colombia, the Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria seek a framework in which to assess what happens after war ends. Barron's theory also provides practical guidance for policymakers and development practitioners. Ultimately, When Violence Works pushes forward our understanding of why postconflict violence occurs and takes the forms it does.

This pathbreaking book analyzes a highly successful participatory development program in Indonesia, exploring its distinctive origins and design principles and its impacts on local conflict dynamics and social institutions.