So much awaited conference proceedings from the “Local Roots of Global Peace” conference held in Eurasia International University on June 24-25, 2016,  are finally published.

The papers included in this volume were delivered by their authors at the conference. The topics cover various areas of global security studies, ranging from human trafficking to refugee crisis from the Syrian war to third-party systems in ongoing and “frozen” conflicts around the world.

In essence, the globalized world has become both more and less peaceful. On the one hand, there is a strong trend of cooperation between states, international organizations and civil society groups on various global problems that defy purely state-centric responses. On the other hand, pushback from states on the grounds of state sovereignty and geo-politics has also been significant. Whether in post-war Central America or Western Balkans, political solutions to armed conflicts developed a tendency to mutate to terrorism, corruption and organized crime such as trafficking in humans, drugs and weapons.

The purpose of this conference was to make sense of these seemingly disparate and contradictory trends.