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Go to united.com/australia to book your adventure. This podcast brought to you by Ring. With Ring cameras, you can check on your pets to catch them in the act, or just keep them company. Or I'll be home soon. Make sure they're okay while you're away. With Ring, learn more at Ring.com/pets. Welcome to the new Books Network. Hello, and welcome to our interview today with Miranda Melcher. I'm Dr. Margot Tudor. I am a host on the new Books Network. Today, we're going to be talking about the Miranda's new book, Securing Peace in Angola and Mozambique, the importance of specificity in peace treaties, which was recently published by Bloomspray this year. Miranda earned her PhD in Defence Studies from King's College London, where she researched how to negotiate and implement peace treaties. Prior to her PhD, she earned an MA in Intelligence and International Relations from the Department of War Studies at King's College and a BA in Political Studies from Yale University. And she was also a 2022-23 fellow at the Civil War's Paths Research Centre at the University of Sheffield. But importantly, and I'm sure as many of you will know at home, she is nowadays a prolific host on the new Books Network herself. And so, putting her in the hot seat today, we will be discussing more about her book, her research, and how her work came to result with this specific topic. Miranda, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me, Margot. What a strange, strange experience to be on this side of the podcast. But I'm absolutely thrilled to be on the new Books Network to talk about my book for once. Exactly, and it feels like it's a very fair turnaround after a very long time of dedicating yourself to being the interviewer for the new Books Network. So today, we're just going to start with an opening question for those of us who want to learn more about this fascinating topic. And so, could you tell us a little bit about how you were inspired to write this monograph and what led to your arrival at the topic of peace negotiations, especially in this region? Sure, so that seems like a reasonable place to start. Why have I done this? Why have I written this book? It starts from kind of some relatively straightforward, I don't even want to say realizations, confusions, I suppose. Back when I was doing my undergraduate degree at Yale, I knew I was really interested in studying war. It seemed kind of like the obvious big problem besetting the world that didn't have a solution that also could probably be investigated without having to be good at things like maths or biology or chemistry. So many issues in healthcare that need attention, and I didn't think I was particularly suited to those. But if we're thinking on that sort of scale, war was the obvious other one. We've put people in space. We have eradicated diseases, or at least some of them. And yet, a lot of times wars, especially civil wars, have looked today in many ways similar to how they have for centuries. Why? Why is this still something that impacts so many people so negatively? Why? What is going on here? And motivated pretty much just by that. I started taking any class module I could get my hands on, modern politics, anything to do with war, conflict, et cetera, current, historical, really anything I could get my hands on. And I quickly became kind of more confused, I suppose, mainly about sort of two facts. First, so much of the literature I was beginning to discover and the classes I was beginning to experience focused on wars between countries. So whether these were older wars, whether this was World War II, whether this was since World War II, and that obviously seemed important. That was building off a lot of what I had learned before university. But every so often, we kept talking about civil wars. And yet, I haven't heard as much about them. And yet, there were a lot of them, like, really quite a lot. And the fact that the sort of number of wars impacting people and the sort of airtime they got on syllabuses weren't quite matching up with sort of the first point of confusion. The second point of confusion, as I started poking more at the civil wars, to find out that on the one hand, we have this incredibly rich body of literature that discusses how any war is so idiosyncratic, right? The causes of a particular war, how it plays out, how it ends, is so specific to the politics, the culture, the economy of the particular place. And yet, on the other hand, we also have these sort of set policy prescriptions of what to do in situation X, how to solve problem Y, that in a number of cases were kind of being applied as if one size fits all was a thing. And again, this seems like a bit of a disconnect. So this is kind of where I kept poking. I didn't come into this thinking, "Ah, I'm gonna go look at peace negotiations," right? It was motivated by these confusions and these curiosities. And moving forward, moving through into this, the policy that I kind of latched onto, and I think we can talk about kind of more later why, was the thing called DDR. So it's an acronym that stands for disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. And it's the idea of kind of what to do with combatants once the war is over, right? You disarm them, you demobilize them. So this means, for example, taking away uniforms, sending people back to wherever they come from, and then reintegration. So some sort of job that is not related to fight. And this was something that, as I was learning more about, it kind of kept coming up and up and over and over and over again, especially kind of in more modern civil wars, thinking, you know, sort of late 1980s onwards. And yet, it didn't seem to work that well. And it also seemed to have some strange logic in it. Why would someone give up their weapon? Why would someone go back to a place that they maybe haven't been for five or ten years? Why would someone choose to completely start over with a totally different career? You know, why would someone agree to that? I don't know if I would agree to that. And so that was kind of where I started investigating. Well, who even comes up with these things? Oh, it turns out they're in peace treaties. Okay, well, how do peace treaties get negotiated? Hmm. Maybe this has something to tell us about why we have photo ops of signing these nice documents, and yet don't necessarily see results on the ground. Or there are actually a lot more of these points of confusion that are cropping up at this highest of political levels that maybe we treat a little bit too much like a black box and assume we cannot get into the weeds of and understand. I guess I just kind of kept poking at it and determined, well, can I get into that black box? Can we see what's actually happening here? Can we determine how these decisions are made? What impact it has to negotiate in a conference room in a hotel thousands of kilometers away from a conflict and what gets written down on a document and then implemented? How are all of these things connected? And that's really what motivated this research. In terms of the Southern Africa focus, so the book does focus on the civil wars in Mozambique and Angola. This was determined through the use of a very large color-coded spreadsheet to look at every single civil war since the end of World War II and all of the different groups involved and figure out what happened to them afterwards. And at a very superficial level, what happened to them afterwards, trying to find places where alternatives to DDR were being used, because so much of the literature was focused on this one option. My hunch was, what if there's another one? Or has someone tried another one? Surely this isn't it, I guess it's what it boiled down to. So searching through all of the conflicts to find alternatives, we decided on Mozambique and Angola as being a useful comparison for various reasons. We can probably get into a bit more on why shortly. And kind of just went from there, but those were the big questions that motivated it. And the goal of using intensive comparative case studies to answer the questions was not to say, we're going to break open every single black box of negotiations that ever exists. Maybe someone could do that in a book, but I certainly can't. You show that it's possible to go into those black boxes, to show that there's utility in going into those black boxes, and also showing that there are things that can be learnt from different civil wars that can apply to current ones, can apply to other ones. And because it turns out poking into the black boxes, a lot of the things that happen in these negotiations that are written into these treaties are a lot less idiosyncratic than we might think. I mean, it's so impressive every time how important spreadsheets are to academics, and especially historians in trying to help us make those incredibly difficult decisions about case study selection. And as you said, we'll talk about that later on, but it is always revelatory to me. How many of us rely on a lovely, good old friend of a colour-coded spreadsheet. And I mean, you touched then on your answer, just thinking a little bit about why civil wars are so fundamentally important to understanding so many other categories in our understanding of not just modern history, but international relations, peace and conflict studies. It's a real insight that allows us to think about several other different concepts, different structures, different assumptions that have been there for a very long time. Whilst ostensibly peace negotiations might seem a very, very specialist topic, actually the implications of your research are so broad, you know, there are so many applications for thinking about peace civil wars and their resolution in this packed into this book. And so your introduction really begins by giving us a powerful insight into why you are specifically interested in civil wars and this unique, specific form of political violence and warfare. And you show us incredibly, you know, strongly how important there has been in civil wars have been to the evolution of modern history in this post-war era in the 20th century. And yet they seem to have kind of failed to attract any meaningful analysis within traditional or even academic circles. And as you've said, those that have have focused so much more on that DDR aspect of it. But clearly civil wars present such a complex sense, conditions for conflict resolution, more so than the traditional kind of international state wars than perhaps most people are more familiar with. And so rather than fighting a war for territorial control or imperial extractions, belligerents in civil wars seem to prioritize and promise a political future, a claim to national ownership that's obviously very persuasive. Civil wars as a topic then, as you know, I think you demonstrate incredibly well and your introduction prompts us to consider all of these questions about the fundamental relationship to statehood, how nations and how communities attach meaning to political conflicts, but also how these negotiations therefore have to have this huge responsibility to speak to these issues that are so important and fundamental to a community. And so in both of your case studies, you've made this case about them being chosen based on the spreadsheet, but what about these kinds of cases of Mozambique and Angola? Do you think reveal or speak to something specifically enduring or protracted about these divergent sovereign imaginaries within post colonial states, specifically in Southern Africa, that potentially has led to this post-Second World War rise in civil wars? And relatedly, do you think civil wars are therefore endemic to post colonial nationhood more broadly? So there's obviously a bunch of things there that I'm going to unpack and hopefully kind of hit all of those points. So a little bit about the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique for those who are less familiar. These are really not particularly studied civil wars. Both countries were Portuguese colonies in Africa, which again puts them in the minority of how we might think of the history of African colonialization. They were not the only Portuguese colonies, but they were pretty big ones. They were ones that Portugal was pretty invested in for a substantial chunk of time. Until Portugal wasn't. So the brief history that's useful to be aware of here is following World War II. Obviously, there was a lot of rethinking about what nationhood was, what sovereignty was, what empire was. And across the various European empires, we see ways of decolonization happening in that post-war period, but we don't see that with the Portuguese colonies. And especially as we look at Africa, this is where if anyone's got one of those great colored maps of kind of when different African countries become independent, this is a really useful one to look at because as so many countries in Africa are becoming independent in the late 50s and the 60s, Portuguese colonies in Africa are not. And in fact, Portugal is doubling down on colonialism in these countries in terms of investment, of moving people from Portugal to these colonies, in terms of infrastructure, in terms of extractive resource manufacturing, lots of things like that. And in both Angola and Mozambique, anti-colonial movements rise up against this. In Angola, it's a few different ones. In Mozambique, it's mainly one. And they do a variety of different things. There's all sorts of interesting linkages to anti-colonial movements in other places. But for the sake of not going into every detail here, the important thing to understand is Portugal is facing challenges within both of those countries fighting for independence. And it gets to a point where putting down this repression for Portugal is far too costly in terms of manpower, far too costly in terms of literal cost. And so there's a coup in Portugal. And one of the results of the coup is, yeah, okay, never mind, all of our colonies could become freed, like, you know, now. So it's not the result of negotiations. It's not the result really of treaties. In Angola's case, there technically is a treaty. But it's just kind of cold that and I wouldn't really compare it to any of the others. It's incredibly brief and not particularly helpful. And Portugal kind of goes, okay, it's 1975, we're pulling out now, you know, you're on your own. Now, in Mozambique's case, in the immediate period, this is not a huge political problem, right? The one anti-colonial group kind of automatically becomes the government. But the problem in Mozambique is that Portugal has developed the colony for very specifically extractive purposes, and all the Portuguese settlers leave almost immediately on independence. So the economy is in a state, the political system is incredibly fragile. And of course, there's all sorts of things going on around Mozambique at the time, thinking of, for example, South Africa and Rhodesia. Angola, on the other hand, falls immediately into chaos because there isn't one anti-colonial group. There are three, mostly. And the problem is that this thing that I've called a treaty doesn't really account for the fact that there are more than one group who wants full political control over Angola. Civil War breaks out pretty much immediately. In Mozambique, it does take a few years to kind of ramp up to the level of Civil War. But by the time you get to 1980, both countries are really in the midst of massive civil war that have started from a lot of the same political reasons, a lot of the same economic reasons, a lot of the same social reasons, are happening in the pretty much exact same global context of the Cold War. So we've got North Korea, the Soviet Union, Cuba, the United States, China for a hot second. And we've got all of them involved in both of the conflicts. South Africa, again, I can't believe I missed that. And these kind of continue all throughout the '80s, and they're big wars, right? The Angolan Civil War, for example, has 10,000 Cuban troops deployed on Angolan soil for like a good few years. The second largest tank battle in all of African history takes place in the Angolan Civil War, and the largest one was one of the big ones in North Africa during World War II. So we're talking like big artillery here. We're talking mass devastation. And it's only really towards the end of the '80s that negotiations start to be on the table. And I think we can talk perhaps a little bit more about kind of why negotiations start. But the point is they start around the same time with roughly the same actors with the same sort of blueprint of what the peace could look like. These negotiations run from about '89 to '92, '93, depending on which the wars you're looking at, and they're looking at each other. They're seeing even some of the same people involved in one set of negotiations and the other. They both signed treaties in the early '90s, Angolan fails pretty quickly within about 18 months. Mozambique doesn't. Mozambique's treaty holds. Whether we want to call it a success or not is another question, but it holds and proceeds as detailed in the treaty. And there isn't another Civil War. Angolan, the first treaty, fails. Another one is negotiated in '94 after multiple years of incredibly nasty fighting. Doesn't work. And then a final treaty is signed in 2003 after again even more intense fighting between '94 and 2003. So these wars start for a lot of very similar reasons. They take place in very similar regional and international contexts. Obviously they're working with the same sorts of technologies and things like that given the time period. They move to negotiations and peace discussions at the same time with the same actors with the same blueprint. And yet the trajectory is very different. Mozambique has one treaty that works. Angola has three and has ended up in a different political situation afterwards as well. So this was what was so compelling as a comparison of the two. But a number of the things that I've talked about as well are just things that are specific to Angola and Mozambique. The context of the Cold War, I mean for one thing, we only call it cold because from the US and the USSR's point of view, they weren't directly fighting each other. A lot of the rest of the world wouldn't really consider particularly cold, like Angola and Mozambique. In terms of regional involvement, again, that's not something that just happens in these wars. In terms of superpowers trying to have a say in terms of when is there going to be war and when is there going to be peace. Again, that's not something that just happens with these conflicts. And the idea that disputes that come up during periods of colonialism are just magically resolved, the data independence has declared, again, is not at all specific to these two conflicts. So in a lot of ways, they're very good comparisons with each other for these details. But also quite representative of a lot of what we saw during this period of the 20th century. And I think there's still a lot of ways in which civil war, since then, or civil wars that haven't ended, can trace a lot of similarities with these conflicts. So understanding how these ended, the different ways that they ended, is actually, I think, quite useful. Even if technically we're like, oh, but we're not in a, you know, states are no longer decolonial. It's been a while since they got independence. Truly, that's not the dynamic we're talking about. Oh, the Cold War has been over for decades. That's not a legacy hanging over us. It's like, well, no, actually, both of those things are probably there in a lot more places than we might think. And so looking at these cases, hopefully can help us understand that better. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax, and think about work. You really, really wanted all to work out while you're away. Monday.com gives you and the team that piece of mind. When all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync, things just flow wherever you are. Tap the banner to go to Monday.com. Yeah, absolutely. I think that was something that really jumped out of me as I was reading the book. It was just, you know, I write so much about 50s and 60s and learning about this period and going, wow, I mean, decolonization really was not a one and done process in any kind of country context. So really, really fascinating how you've given us an insight there and how those civil wars in different contexts didn't have that independence, freedom, full stop conclusion and actually these conflicts that are at the core of your project and thinking about their resolution are products or manifestation of those ongoing processes of decolonization that we often forget. We often forget to think about these processes as part of that longer narrative. So I do think that's another reason why this book is so useful for scholars like us who are thinking about the 20th century. I mean, and even earlier, processes of decolonization as all connected. It's all part of similar conversations about statehood sovereignty and the future of it after colonization, you know, how that can work. And I mean, we'll talk, it would be great now just to kind of dig a little bit more into the black box. I suppose, as you referred to it, those negotiation processes that you really did crack open for us. And we can go into the specifics and, you know, I kind of, I think that's one of the great strengths of the books is, is its specificity in those granular aspects. It's so important when you're doing comparative research, but I wanted to ask you fundamentally before was what is it about peace treaties that is so popular as a tool or a method of resolution for civil wars in this period. I mean, what do they offer that other methods haven't offered or kind of potentially promised in that particular way? And why have they remained so popular despite, as you've just mentioned, they're being repeatedly undoing processes or resurgence of violence. So this is a great question. The problem is the answer kind of comes down to, well, what else is there? Okay, in a lot of cases, a peace process or peace treaties. I mean, what is the alternative, right? The alternative really comes down to about two other options. One alternative is one, just for arguments sake, let's say that we're talking about a conflict that only has two sides, right? That'll just make things easier. One option is that one side just gives us up, just decides that whatever political goal they've been aiming for, you know, control over the entire country. That they've been willing to literally fight and die for suddenly no longer matters to them. And so you don't need to treat me because one side essentially just gives up and then the fighting's over and you don't need to treat me because that's that, right? The other option is one side, again, assuming we've only got two, beats the other, just militarily wins, right? And we have a lot of kind of societal tropes. I do think filtering some of our literature understandings kind of around the way in which this might be preferable, around the ways in which this might be kind of more likely than we think. I think we do essentially still have a hangover of like how much the Nazis were actually defeated on the battlefield, right? That we somehow think that that is more often a viable option than actual battlefield tactics would suggest. Those are kind of the only alternatives to a peace treaty, like one side just gives up or one side gets beaten. Realistically, how likely is it for one side to give up? I mean, I could pause here for someone to come up with an answer, but I think we'd be waiting for a really long time. So then you go to peace treaty or military victory. Military victory is really hard, right? We can think just even if we stay away from civil wars for a moment and look at wars between countries in the last, say, 100 years, it's really hard. It's not enough to have, for example, massive technical superiority. We can look at the US's most recent wars of the last few decades and realize, well, no, that's not enough to guarantee victory. There's a lot of factors that are needed, and realistically, it doesn't happen that often. So much more often, you are in a situation where your real choice is between continuing to fight knowing you probably can't win a military victory. You can keep fighting, but it's probably not going to get you that Hitler killing himself in a bunker full surrender outcome. Or you can try to negotiate and achieve at least some of your goals without having to keep expending the human lives and the cost to trying to achieve it. Realistically, those are your two options if you are fighting a conflict. Now, there are going to be actors, there are going to be conflicts who think that option one of "keep fighting" is going to be enough. Is going to get you to a point where maybe I'm not going to fully beat them, but it'll be enough that I can achieve most of my political goals or enough of my political goals, and they keep going. And I think there's a number of conflicts that we see today that are still in that phase. But some conflicts do get to a point where it's what we call in the literature herding stalemate, right? The idea that actually we can keep fighting, but it's not really getting us anywhere, so you know what? Maybe it's time to see if we can achieve our goals some other way. And peace negotiations are really the only other way. Now, my book goes into kind of how to make that work, why that doesn't work. It's one thing to say, "Okay, fine, we're willing to sit down at the table and see what the other side has to offer." There is a long way between that and signing a treaty, and there's a long way between signing a treaty, and things actually happening on the ground such that everyday people have peace and security to go about their lives. So simply being willing to negotiate is one very, very small step on the process, and that's exactly how I treat it in the book. Let's, in many ways, the book kind of starts with a bit of background, but starts from that moment of being grudgingly willing to go to the table, and then traces out in the detail you mentioned. How does that actually work? What does that even mean? Where is the table? Who's at the table? What happens at the table? And how that progresses over time to get to a moment of signing. Okay, great, you've had the photo op, but now what? And to get to the days and the weeks and the months and these years of implementation, to understand over time how this process works. And that's what I think is so key about the analysis is it's not about the one snapshot moment of deciding to negotiate or signing a treaty or the withdrawal of a UN peacekeeping mission. It's about the process over time. No, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And I do think both case studies really do give us such a wonderful insight into how this is such a broad process where every single negotiation, every single tension is so fundamental to its own contingent result within that context. And I think you do a very good job of bringing in that detail whilst also reminding us of that broader implication that actually, even being at the table is in many senses, a better solution than the continuation of violence, the continuation of ongoing insecurity in that region. So, that idea that you're at the table to avoid a peric victory is very, it makes sense. It kind of, you know, it provides us a useful solution, but I think you also then are like, well, that's not the end of the story. You know, the sitting at the table is, is step one of a very, very drawn our process. And I suppose that leads on really nicely to my next question, which is, and obviously I know we have a limited amount of time here, but I was wondering if you could briefly take us through the peace treaty process for maybe one day. Yes, for maybe one of your case studies just to kind of give our listeners an idea of the range of conditions that are included in this very, very drawn out process in order to negotiate an agreement to end a civil war. Yeah, no, let's do an overview. We're not going to get into all the detail, but it's in the book. So let's see if we take from the starting point, kind of being willing to come to the table. That is not a moment where both sides are in the same room and say, yeah, okay, I'll sit down with you. What that actually looks like, for example, in actually both of these cases, the initial one is it's the US and the USSR, each on one side of the consulate to have been funding, and in some cases, applying military personnel to their sort of proxy side, saying, you know what, the Cold War is ending. We've just resolved this conflict over in Namibia, which, by the way, was a lot simpler than either of these civil wars, which is going to come into play in a moment. We've just had the success over here in Namibia. It's 1989. We're starting to think about how we as the US and the USSR might want to get together a bit more might want to work a little bit better. Maybe we want to calm down some of these fires that we've been stoking. Angolimos and beaker kind of good places to start with that because they're real conflicts that need to be resolved and ideally taken off our plates. But they're also not kind of the highest profile. And so if things are a little bit sticky to have us get along, you know, at least this won't happen in the midst of the public eye. So you know what, how we've been giving you all this money, it'd be really great if you could start to negotiate now. Thank you very much. And in both conflicts, this is essentially sufficient to get the actual parties fighting to agree to at least start negotiations. Now, in neither case is anyone on the ground actually particularly happy about this. It is very much a case in my argument as being around superpower pressure. But fine. Okay, we're going to have some negotiations. Now, let's say we take the Angolins in this case. So then the question is where do you have them? You can't really have them in the country where the conflict is actually happening. Because you don't want the leaders to all be in one place where they can be able to threat. It's also a question, how do you get places that are safe, you know, is there neutral territory, et cetera, et cetera. So, okay, so you have to go somewhere else. Great. Where else? Well, you don't want to go to the US or the USSR because they're not particularly neutral. So who is willing to offer up some sort of space for some amount of time that they'll probably pay for that is going to be acceptable to both parties in the conflict and to the superpower prop superpowers behind them. But who is also kind of neutral enough to be getting on with? All right, that's, you know, a Venn diagram with not too many options. And I'm goal is case they went with Portugal. Yes, Portugal had been their former colonial overlords. Yes, that was an interesting thing that had to get kind of smoothed over at this point. But Portugal offers up essentially a hotel in a small town and says, Hey, why don't you come here and we'll pay for the hotel and you can bring your people here and negotiate. So then you have the political problem of, well, who's going to negotiate? Right. How many leaders do you actually have on each side of a civil war after over a decade of fighting? Who has the right political authority to make decisions? Who has the right political knowledge to make decisions? Who can be spared from actively fighting the war? Because the war doesn't stop while the negotiations are going on. Right. And when people are in these negotiations, in this case, it was about six weeks at a time. So you're shut up in a hotel in the middle of nowhere for about six weeks, and then you can go home. And then if negotiations are agreed that they can continue, you would go back for another six weeks or so. Not always the same people, but again, there's not that many people so you don't have that many options. So now you're in a hotel in essentially like a suburb in Portugal. One side of the Angolan conflict spoke very good Portuguese. The other side, some of them spoke good Portuguese. So now you've got the issue of like who can actually walk out to the cafe and get a coffee, right? You're shut up in the same hotel. So that's awkward. It's also odd. You've been fighting the war for over 10 years, and you're now really, really far away from the conflict. It's 1990. It's not like you've got WhatsApp and you can check in with everyone instantly. And essentially you wake up in the morning. There's breakfast altogether in one room with the people you've been fighting against for 15 years, breakfast. Okay. And then there's rooms, like, you know, hotel, business rooms. And this room over here is for elections, and that room is for refugees, and this room is for security, and that room is, you know, etc. And you go in, and there's a list of items that you're meant to talk about and work through and see if you can come up with a plan for. And then all the rooms kind of report back to their senior leaders and say, well, here's where we got to and you have lunch and you go back into the rooms and you do this for three weeks. Six weeks. Four weeks. Depends. And that takes a fast negotiation as probably what? Two years? I mean, it's strange, right? And that's without some of the additional complications. So in many ways, the Angolan process that I've just described is like, when it's all smooth, the Mozambique one, on the other hand, was really not like that. So first of all, finding a neutral place was even trickier, in some senses. They eventually agreed on the Vatican, mostly because of the NGO that had been working in Mozambique that was from the Vatican. So then the question is, how do you get to the Vatican? Well, if you were the legally recognized government, even if you're in the midst of a civil war and the US is not on your side, you're still the legally recognized government. You can issue, for example, passports. You have access to lawyers. In this case, if you're back by the Soviet Union, you have very nice organized uniforms you could wear. So how do you get to Rome? Well, you have your government issue passport and you get on a plane and you fly to Rome. Problem solved. What if you're the rebels, though? You don't have nice shining uniforms. You've been fighting in the bush for 15 years with supplies being illegally flown over the border from South Africa or Rhodesia as needed. There's some senior leaders who don't even read. What are you going to do? Ask your enemy, the government, for a passport? That doesn't work. So how do you get a passport? How do you get a plane to Rome? You turn up in Rome. It's one of the shiniest, most decorated cities in the entire world. And you don't have a nice suit. You can't pay for your hotel room. Do you really want to walk into a conference room at the Vatican of all shiny places and stand across from the people you've been fighting against for 15 years and try and argue with them, not with tactics or weapons, which you've been successfully doing for 15 years, but with legalese? That's not going to exactly make anyone want to negotiate. So in fact, what happened in this particular case is the rebels turned up to Rome after all of this. The Americans bought them suits and then the Mozambican sat in a different room where the rebels sat in a different room from the government and a very young state department aide who was very happy to talk to me, thankfully, literally would ferry drafts back and forth along the corridor because they didn't want to be in the same room to negotiate. These are just two-piece processes. In many ways, they give you kind of, I think, two ends of the spectrum of complexity or ease of lack of tension. But in both cases, there's a lot more going on here. It's not a question of, okay, we agree to negotiate. We fly to Geneva and sign a bit of paper. There's really practical logistical dignity that's necessary to even make negotiations a possibility. Yeah, it's these intimacies of negotiations that really jump out there. I mean, in addition to obviously the material disparity between the different parties and thinking about those bureaucratic personal aspects that are obstacles to even sitting at the table like we were saying that one, maybe that's not even step one. Maybe, you know, there's all these other planning and preparation processes that are integral to their being an equal or supposed dignity between all the parties then. We'll talk about that later. I mean, I think it's a very important aspect of your argument is the retention of dignity between the different parties and that being so fundamental. And I do think that draws us really nicely onto this question of neutrality because obviously we were just discussing or you were just just telling us about how do you even find a host supposedly neutral country and a suitably neutral country or a space that can host this type of very unique negotiation. And within those neutral spaces you have neutral figures or supposedly neutral figures that would observe and participate in a kind of media tree role like you were mentioning with that staff member there. And how these this negotiation process between these belligerent parties was often a role played by a UN special representative who would chair these talks. And so I was wondering if you could give us an insight into how important or even unimportant you believe these kinds of international actors as both personalities but also as political agents figured into these peace negotiations. Yeah, so I think there are some elements here that are really key. A lot of it is around these ideas are kind of location and hosting and how do people even get to those locations is a big part of that you know the Mozambican rebels who did get the passports and planes that involved for example Kenyan Tanzania as well. This wasn't something that could be solved sort of within the conflict itself. And it also involved a lot of flexibility for example that young US State Department age walking through the corridors. He didn't think that was going to be his job as part of these negotiations that wasn't the plan. But it quickly became apparent that that's what was needed. And so there were some key aspects in which flexibility was important. But I want to kind of add an arena I suppose of negotiation to this because try to figure out what goes in the treaty is not the only portion of this whole process that requires neutrality and mediation. The whole other section where that also comes up is actually after the treaty is signed. You'd think that it's all written down and so that's kind of you know it's all written now you just have to do it. But actually there's loads of things built into any peace treaty these included that have sort of committee set up for how to manage this when it happens or how to manage this if it happens or how to manage things that we can't think of right now that could come up. And these committees after the treaty we signed in the first few years of implementation were also really key sites of mediation and negotiation. And yes, they were usually chaired by UN special representatives who were usually the heads of whatever UN peacekeeping force happened to be deployed in the country at the time. Mozambique had one peacekeeping force Angola had either three or five depending on how you count. But these figures were really key because essentially they headed up these committees. Now what they were able to do how much their political role and their personal role came into play. I argue in the book is a lot to do with what sort of powers they were able to have as an institutional figures. So these committees that they were chairs off were not created the same. The ones in Angola for example of the UN rep was the chair of the committee but didn't actually have any voting power and a lot of cases didn't have any kind of decision making power in some key areas. Whereas the committee set up on Mozambique the UN representative did have essentially the deciding vote. And that had nothing to do with the people inhabiting those roles but I think had a really big impact on kind of what the people in the roles could or could not do. Then you add on the layer of who are those people right in Angola we start with a British woman. And to be honest I went into the archive a little nervous about looking into this was they're going to be things I found about how part of why her mission had not succeeded had broken down in fact quite catastrophically was like reading the committee meeting minutes reading the memos back and forth that talked about her gender is a problem talked about her inability to lead and all of the wonderfully gendered language that unfortunately we still have some of today. But in the 90s I was not super optimistic about what I might find looking into those records. But that wasn't there. That wasn't the discussion. The discussion was a lot more around. We already have so much outside interference and influence on this conflict and all these negotiations in the first place. Those the UN really have a role here. The UN even people who wanted the UN there were very skeptical as to whether the UN mission as planned and deployed could actually do what they were supposed to do suspicions that turned out to be incredibly accurate. So, the fact that she was British the fact that she was a woman actually didn't seem to have very much bearing on it at all, which I found really interesting, especially because her replacement a North African man French speaker. Okay well that's not going to make any difference either the mission he headed also didn't work in fact it failed in some ways faster and the same institutional lack of power so okay I'm expecting also not to find anything in the record here. And yet here there was discussion that because he was a fellow African, albeit from a completely different country completely different part of the continent. Maybe he gets this, maybe we can have more negotiation with them. I was expecting French to be a language barrier pretty much no one involved in this conflict really spoke French whereas a decent number of them did speak English. Didn't come up as a potential problem even though yes he did write all of his memos and papers and everything in French there's a whole French section of the archive when he turns up. But it wasn't really his gender it wasn't even the language it was the fact that he was technically from the same continent that came up that I thought was so interesting. Moving over to Mozambique I argue a lot in the book that the UN representative here really did make a difference his deputy as well. But in this case again I don't I didn't find any evidence that it was to do with his nationality he was Italian or his gender he was male or the fact he was not civilian or the fact you know if he was Italian that's where the negotiations were like no particular link between those. Instead I had to do with the fact that he wasn't a UN person. He had come into this role as working in UNDP the UN development program in Italy on like not that interesting big deal projects. He essentially got seconded to run this thing in Mozambique for a few years and then left the UN and I'm not entirely sure exactly what happened him afterwards. And the fact that he wasn't trying to play politics he didn't even seem to notice the politics between field command and New York for example. I actually think really made a difference because his goal was okay you've told me this is a tree I have to put into practice. I'm going to put into practice and if that means I need to be flexible about this because of what's actually happened on the ground. Then fine I don't really care if that doesn't look like a shiny photo up I don't care if that's not exactly what New York is expecting you've told me to implement this and that's what I'm going to do. And so the pragmatism and flexibility and I think lack you know distance from UN politics made a difference there. And so I found this really interesting because I did go in looking to see what difference these people in their positions would have made. And I did find things that made a difference but they were absolutely not the things I thought they would be when I went looking. I love that. It's always the way with the archives I mean I'm so fascinating hearing about how those perceptions of power or those perceptions of organizational proximity or what kind of representation a person brings and how that might potentially affect their contribution or their influence upon a negotiation and that not even necessarily being practical that being so much so about how people anticipate an influence or anticipate how their careers, their backgrounds, their race, their gender might potentially play a part in shaping their interests in that moment. And it's just it's incredibly important for revealing I think more about the person doing the perceiving than it is about that person themselves. So it's incredibly fascinating and also really great to see more research being done on women being participatory in these spaces. So for those of us who are interested in trying to draw attention to the gendered practices within international peace, international security, really, really fascinating kind of example to draw upon. And I mean within the UN as a system itself but particularly it's kind of more interventionist arm so whether that's through peacekeeping whether that's through UNDP. The UN has historically struggled to engage with non-state actors and to understand civil wars beyond its kind of nation state paradigm its anxieties of secessionism especially during decolonization. And so you've got this respect for dignity and between the different parties and the negotiations and this effort to be neutral between the various different belligerents. But how do you think does your book tell us a little bit more about that diplomatic relationship between the UN the state and how insurgent or rebellion groups. I mean we touched on it a little bit more about that material aspects but were all parties treated the same throughout these processes and how might there have been potentially more deference to that state party that the UN really couldn't push against. So in a lot of ways I think the deference was by accident but I don't think that makes it any better or I don't think that lessens the impact of it I suppose. So deference in terms of negotiations are things that we've sort of already talked about right the assumption that once we decide where the negotiations will happen both parties are going to be able to make their way there. So if one side is able to issue passports and the other isn't then flying somewhere is not going to be equal to start with. And this isn't something that was really thought through this isn't something that was considered when negotiations were proposed it was a very sort of scrambling ad hoc sort of thing. And I do think that that was in some ways deference or some ways sort of oversight and it kind of goes back to what we're saying right at the beginning the idea that the emphasis in the focus is on wars between countries not wars within a country because that's a really kind of key difference here that just hadn't really been thought about. Similarly the material aspects in terms of kind of preparation to negotiate that kind of thing. But this also came up in the treaty terms themselves. So this was actually a really key part of where that flexibility of pragmatism in Mozambique. I argue was sort of most on display was a large part of the treaty terms focused on this idea that the kind of first step for combatants across the conflict not just on the government side and needed to move to what we're called assembly areas. We might today call them like demobilization camps or things but they were called assembly areas. And the idea was that this would be a place where all combatants would go there were a whole number of these across the country. And these would be places where they would stay as the first stage of a ceasefire essentially so get people off the front lines put them in known places where you keep an eye on them. And then from there the combatants were given the choice of joining a new integrated military so combatants from both sides joining the same military or giving up your weapons and going home. So this is in some ways DDR but offered to both sides rather than just one and was the option of an integrated military as an alternative. So the idea was that all the combatants would have X number of days to get to whichever assembly area they'd be assigned to. Once they're there they've lived there for this is where we had an expectations management problem they were often told it would be something like six weeks it was often a lot more in the realm of things like eight months which is a pretty big difference. And these assembly areas would be overseen by UN peacekeeping troops and provisioned by the United Nations peacekeeping mission so housing, food, etc. If any disarmament was to take place this would be overseen by the UN that kind of thing. And in the plans created for these assembly areas of which the UN archives has fabulous detail everything is accounted for theoretically. And this is where the kind of accidental deference I think comes in or the oversight. The assumption was made that combatants would be coming to the assembly areas with certain amounts of stuff. Right so the assumption was essentially we are looking at infantry soldiers and they will turn up as infantry soldiers with the kind of Western standardized military of like that means a uniform that means a hat that means boots that means a backpack the backpack is going to have you know XYZ item in it. You know an individual mess kit first aid kit that sort of thing. And in both conflicts this was true for the government side. In both cases funded and provisioned for decades by the Soviets. They had uniforms they had been trained in drill and they had backpacks and they had you know all the things that the Soviets were getting out all over the world during the Cold War. But in neither case was this true for the rebels. Especially in Mozambique this was a really big problem. And the way this manifested wasn't just an issue of dignity. In fact it was an issue of dignity with really serious political stakes. Because what happened is both sides turned up to the assembly areas as directed the government and the rebels they turned up to the respective assembly areas at the rate that they were supposed to. The agreements were made of kind of you know each side is going to send this many people in this month and this many people in the next month great. But the camps were prepared for people who didn't have a full uniform and boots. Who had not had access to medical care for 10 years and had a whole host of medical needs that the caps were prepared for. They weren't prepared for soldiers who didn't have toothbrushes and soap with them when they arrived. And so the living conditions for those combatants pretty obviously dropped off. As compared to what they've been promised and compared to what they knew the their opponents the government combatants were experiencing in their assembly areas. And tomorrow much quite rationally they let their fellows who hadn't come to the camp yet know and go. Actually this isn't great you maybe don't want to turn up for this. And that is an incredibly risky prospect because this is one of the very first stages of implementing the treaty is not just declaring a ceasefire but actually having people move around. Such that one can be held. And if you've got a whole bunch thousands of combatants who are not turning up to their camps on time. First of all that means that the UN for example doesn't know where they are. It also means that the government doesn't know where they are and the government goes oh no what if they're coming after us. Well we have to make sure that our people don't go into the camps because we have to prepare against it and blah blah blah blah. And obviously they're doing it on purpose and so they're reneging on the treaty and the whole thing is going to come crashing down. Right? Because of toothbrushes. This is really key. This to me is such an example of kind of not fully thinking through these things of kind of making assumptions about what does the word soldier mean. What does the word combatant mean. What does the word political actor mean. Now the pragmatism and flexibility here was very helpful because that allowed the UN mission to solve the problem of toothbrushes and soap. And the book obviously goes into a lot more detail about how this happens. And this issue was resolved and the timeline got back on track. People continued to move through the process. But that example to me sticks out so much as why these seemingly abstract things of like the word dignity. Right? The word deference. They sound really abstract. But there's a really direct connection between these sorts of assumptions. And people's experience on the ground in ways that have a pretty direct trajectory between peace or violence. Absolutely. And I think it's sometimes really difficult to do that translation from that abstract idea to those practical consequences. But I think in one area that is incredibly stark for this, I mean the conversation, the disconnect between what is being negotiated in a room versus the kind of implications for that beyond just symbolically like what's happening. But actually also materially and in people's lives is one of the most fascinating kind of themes of the threads through both of the case studies throughout the book is your attention to time or more specifically delays. This idea that throughout the process and then even later as you've just detailed these kinds of the process of implementation and those kinds of post treaty processes also having these significant logistical and political ramifications. And so I was interested from your perspective about thinking about how potentially time could be more adequately included as an integral process as part of treaty negotiations. Yeah, so this is a big point that I make throughout the books. I'm really glad you picked up on it. The short version of this is essentially none of the treaties at any point predicted time accurately and predicted how long it would take this many people to get from point eight point B on road B and predicted kind of any of the things. And the problem is they wrote those predictions down and made it very difficult in the case of Angola to make any sort of adjustments when like real life and real logistics and real physics interbeat. I argue that this is one of the biggest reasons that Mozambique's treaty did not fall into the same traps as Angola because they gave themselves a way to adjust these unrealistic expectations. So that's kind of one thing is build in methods of flexibility and adjustment. Another thing is think about who's doing the estimated. So this is something I kind of ended up going back to my interviewees and asking further about when after talking them and getting into that black box of what was happening in the conference rooms, you know, going through the archives of implementation and going, hang on a second, this keeps coming up. These timelines keep being wrong. Okay. Well, who came up with that. And turns out, they were made almost every time by political speakers, which makes sense in some cases, because in both cases, the kind of big date on the timeline that they were working towards and after was elections. But the problem is that politicians aren't logistical experts. And they're also not the people necessarily on the ground doing the fighting and therefore managing the people doing the fighting. And so, in addition to building in mechanisms for allowing flexibility, the other thing is think about who's in that room. And the military maybe should be in that room more than you'd think. One, they're logistical experts. Right. But two, also the on the ground knowledge is really important here. And two things came up that were really interesting to me during the research into this. The first is that in the Angolan negotiations, when they were split into the different conference rooms, the room that was for military issues actually had to be stopped partway through the negotiations, not because the generals were at each other's throats and couldn't stand to be in the same room with each other. In fact, when they were told, okay, your job today is to work out how we can have a sustainable ceasefire, et cetera, et cetera. The problem was that they were too good at working together and figuring out a practical way to solve the logistical problem. And the political leaders on both sides didn't like that much cooperation, liked having the security issues to give political leverage. And so they're actually not particularly included in negotiations going forward. The other thing I found interesting is the US government, a key actor in these negotiations, and in many others, kind of can't do this. The US State Department, those negotiations, by definition, they're not the military. And the US Defense Department does military things and sometimes helps with implementing trees, but by definition, doesn't do diplomacy. USAID, in the UK, it's the US version kind of of diffed. To my knowledge, it's not particularly allowed to be involved in security issues. So the US, one of the biggest actors involved in these sorts of things, quite literally this particular issue that is so important, falls through the institutional cracks. It's not state, it's not defense, it's not USAID, well, who is is it? Okay, it turns out it isn't really anyone's. So that's a big issue here. It does come up, as you said, time and time and time again throughout these processes, and I don't think it's something that's been particularly solved in others since. And so I think that that's probably something worth looking at, who's in the sort of room, how much planning can be done for things that want to inevitably come up, and who sorts of expertise is or isn't there. All of these, just such fundamental questions, and I mean, it's just so, that question of who's at the table that we always return to, I think, so much in international peace and security issues. The question of silence and being excluded, but more fundamentally, the logistics of even pushing through and finding out who's duty it is to go to the table once the party has agreed to it. Well, who's going to represent us there? And especially when it's a topic that doesn't have a clear department or a clear assigned member of staff who's in charge of peace negotiations, absolutely. And I mean, I'm just, I'm incredibly grateful to you for kind of giving us such a really fascinating insight into all of these different aspects of the book. And potentially a question that is going to be the most useful, interesting, and for me, digging into, I suppose, the box of the book itself is giving us a little bit of a behind the scenes of how you were able to transform your initially kind of PhD research into a book of manuscript, especially one that has such a non-traditional structure with a comparative case study project, but not really at the same time, like it's a tone, it's its own beast in its own way, not trying to bring it down at all. I think it's fascinating and on a model that should definitely be used to try and build future kind of approaches to comparative research, but also, you know, how you're able to bring in a topic that is ostensibly something that is so familiar with. Those of us who potentially are engaging in the news or watching information about it or in peripheral approximate neighbouring topics, but actually, so rarely with these case studies themselves, so how do you kind of want to give us an insight or teaser of behind the scenes of that production process? Yeah, no, thank you for asking that. So a few kind of things that were important to me. As you can probably tell, being a host on a podcast, I like talking to people. I also really like reading books. I loved going into the archives. It was quite fun to interview people. I love finding things out. I don't love writing. Really don't love writing, right? There's a reason I interview people about their books rather than like write reviews of them. And so I knew coming into the PhD that I wanted to come out of it with a book, and I also knew I really didn't want to write it twice. And this is something I saw from the people who were ahead of me that quite often the sort of quote normal way of doing it is write your dissertation, examiners pass you, you get a PhD, you get postdoc somewhere and you spend your postdoc year revising the whole thing into a book. And I was like, okay, well, I don't want to write it twice. I don't want to have to revise it. I don't enjoy writing enough to do that. And I wonder, you know, is there a way I can design the project so that I can avoid that? And so really deeply selfish motivation to start off with. And so I started kind of going through people's dissertations, obviously to like, for research, right, to find out what they had written about on this topic and obviously published books. It was kind of, as I was finding out things about Angola and Mozambique and civil wars, I was also sort of making a list of like, okay, well, what's the difference between dissertation and a book? And I started kind of making a little checklist of things. I'm like, all right, so the tone is different. PhDs often are much more kind of nervous sounding. Okay, cool, it's far enough. We're all terrified of examiners. Sometimes there's like big substantive chunks that are different. You know, you've added a case study or dropped it or things like that. Okay, cool. And often the sort of introduction chapter is different. It doesn't really, you know, it's really targeted at your examiner. So there isn't necessarily a lot of like background. Every single thing has to be footnoted to within an inch of its life. So you can't really go big picture. Okay, fine. Do I have to do it that way, right? That was kind of my challenge to myself of like, you know, how far can I write this as a real book from the beginning and still get it passed by the examiners. And so this then went into the idea of kind of, well, how do you do a taste study comparison? And to be honest, I looked at the traditional way of doing it. It's kind of, you know, here's going to be my intro methods lit review. Then I'll have a chapter on Angola. Then I'll have a chapter on Mozambique. Then I'll have a chapter comparing them. And then maybe I'll have some recommendations. And honestly, I didn't think I could do it. I was like, there's too much to talk about for Angola. There's too much to talk about for Mozambique. And there's too many things about them that are in conversation with each other and literally like the timelines overlap. And this happens in Mozambique because of what's just happened in Angola. Like, I genuinely don't know how I could write that without either chapter being like 50,000 words and half repeating the other one. Which I don't want to write and no one wants to read. So that negates the first goal of not having to revise the thing again. Okay, well, what's the alternative? And so I just kind of went back and went, okay, well, how do I write? What if I just wrote it as a book? I buy in Waterstones. Now, I don't think I've achieved that. It's a very nerdy book. I am not that great of a writer. So I don't think that this is going to become a bestseller in Waterstones tomorrow. But that was kind of the overarching goal. So instead, the book goes chronologically through the processes, which means that we talk about Angola and Mozambique in 1989 together. And then we move into the '90s and we talk about them back and forth as they go because that's actually what happened. And that was the only way I could make sense of it. And it's written with the kind of, you know, fake it till you make it attitude of, I'm going to write this as if the examiners have already approved it. And then we'll see, right? And so there isn't kind of some of the tone that we often see in a dissertation. And then the final piece, I couldn't figure out. So the final piece was the introduction. How do you write a book introduction that examiners will be happy with? And eventually I realized after much discussion with my supervisor that that probably wasn't going to happen. So I gave up on that and I wrote a separate introduction for the dissertation version. I wrote a dissertation, chapter one and a book chapter one, and then just essentially swapped them out. But I was so adamant that from chapter two onwards, I wasn't going to have to redo it. And I was so nervous when I sent the manuscript off to Bloomsbury for the external reviews and feedback because, of course, they don't know that. To them, it's all fair game. And I got the review feedback and I was terrified of six pages long. And I was like, oh my God, okay. And of those six pages, there was one comment that wasn't about chapter one. And the one comment literally was kill the first sentence of chapter two and then you're fine. I was like, okay. And I had really good feedback on exactly how to fix chapter one, how to turn it from a dissertation chapter that was just for examiners into something more people can actually read, which is exactly what I wanted them to tell me. And it was incredibly helpful and I'm so grateful to them. But that was really important to me because I didn't want to have to rewrite the entire thing. And so I kind of just decided, you know what, I'm going to give it a go and hope the examiners are okay with it. And you know what, they never mentioned it. It's crazy how much we build it up in our heads, right, like that process of waiting for review, whether that's peer review, whether that's examiners in a kind of PhD context. I mean, reading the book, having read the book as an academic monograph, like trying to try to really connect to the reader rather than just being a piece to examine to kind of show off and improve your knowledge. It is incredibly engaging, like you really do feel a different tone than you do, and that I definitely had in my PhD thesis. Well, so this is the other trick that I'll mention that I think is how that was possible and I would highly recommend this to anyone with a big writing project. Before I gave any of the drafts to my supervisor, I gave them to what I called my PhD proofreading posse. And this is a collection of between 12 and 20 people, depending on where I was on the PhD, of friends, fellow PhD people, et cetera, who weren't specialists in my area. Maybe if they were PhD students were in the same department, but I mean, war studies is really big, so you can work on completely different topics. Friends from undergrad, friends from my masters, like not necessarily academics, not people who knew anything about Angola and Mozambique. And I would commit ahead of time and say, okay, in six weeks, I'm going to have this draft ready, who has time six weeks from now. So great, that creates a deadline. Anyone doing a PhD knows that deadlines are really important. And I would split up the chapter and each person would get assigned about a thousand words, which is really not actually that much. And I would give them instructions, you know, tell me where I've jumped from A to F and missed out the explanation in the middle. Tell me where it feels like it needs an example. Tell me where it feels like it needs more evidence or citation. Also, please do tell me like where I've missed a comma or where I've missed type something, but help me make sure it makes sense. And I was incredibly lucky that so many people were willing to help. And the feedback I got was, well, if you give me six weeks noticed, I only have to read a thousand words and I've got like two weeks to do it. Yeah, actually, I can make that work, right? I wasn't asking one person to read the whole thing. And so every single chapter went through that process. And so not only did I then get my supervisor's feedback, who is an actual expert, but I got a whole bunch of people who just know what a book should read like and are, you know, general interested people in this sort of topic without being like super specialized in it. And they were my sense checkers and it's always more than my supervisor to make sure, like, does this even make sense. So I'm glad it worked. Yeah, absolutely. And I do think that's just advice to live by, to be honest. And I don't know where any of us would be without our, I mean, that sounds like an incredible group of humans who kind of belong together. Absolutely. And I remember reading that in your acknowledgments and just thinking, wow, this sounds like such a generous community. This, this is such an inspiring way to do research. And I do think you can read the smile on your face as you go through their names in the economy. You can really like sense that there's such this, this feeling of gratitude, this feeling that the book is, is so much a testament to 100% your knowledge and research. But also this being able to do an undertaking right in a space that has allowed you to get that kind of reciprocity and to feel that kind of engagement from your readers. And to be honest, I think it's just forebranding for you that there will be a reader, like the reader being rather than just an aspiration for many of us, but actually, yeah, forebranding that experience that readership experience from the very beginning. And I think it's something many of us in academia often forget about and you focus so much on all the specialist ideal reader, rather than that sense reader, which is fundamentally what most of us are for each other. Yeah. And it really helps clarify ideas, right? You know, things that I didn't think were that interesting. If I'm getting feedback going, Oh, wait, tell me more about that. Like, Oh, okay, right, or something that I think is like very obvious. People going, wait a second, hang on. I don't understand what point you're trying to make here. There's so much that I think not only do we get caught up with specialist readers, but we also get caught up kind of in our own knowledge of it. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That I think was a really key part of it. So honestly, to anyone still listening, that would be the single biggest piece of advice is like build yourself a community of sense checkers. And they really don't have to be academics to be incredibly useful. No, I just seconded Amelia. Yeah, just so true. And, and these are people, you know, you can have with you for the whole of your career. Yeah, it's, you know, and that support and that network is, it can often be kind of such a negative way of thinking about doing a work is having to find kind of it, your colleagues who networking and it becomes this kind of horrible way of framing it when actually it's, it's pure friendship. It's pure feminist praxis to have that group of people who each of you can rely on one another to be honest, to be generous, to kind of dedicate time to supporting one another in this very, very difficult industry. So no, absolutely. I think that's very, very, very useful advice for us to kind of bring this interview to a close. And I really do encourage any of you listening to pick up a copy, a beautiful copy because the cover is stunning of securing peace in Angola and Mozambique. And I just wanted to thank you again, Miranda, because I really, really enjoyed listening to you talk more about your book today. Thank you so much. Well, thank you for having me and making being on this side of the interview really quite fun. That's right. [MUSIC] (gentle music)
