The first impression upon reading General Roméo Dallaire’s new book The Peace: A Warrior’s Journey is a muttered “Oh, come on.” Then you remember. Thirty years ago in April, Dallaire was commanding an understaffed UN peacekeeping mission in the middle of a full-blown genocide in Rwanda, as mobs of Hutus attacked and murdered Tutsis during a 100-day civil war. Despite pleas to his New York bosses for help, more than 800,000 people were slaughtered, often with machetes, while the world sat on its hands. 

The second thought is maybe there’s something to be said for the naive optimism espoused in the book, which sets out the lodestars that lead him to believe “The Peace” – a place where humans can be truly secure and flourish – is achievable.

“The catalyst for this [book],” he says in a phone interview, “is that as I am sitting here, weeks away from the 30th anniversary of the genocide, I am watching Ukraine … and I am watching Gaza, and saying, ‘What the hell have we learned from all this?’”

The problem is humans never really achieve lasting peace, only “a series of truces,” which is what Rwanda had before the genocide. We might stop a war in this country or that, but the frictions that kicked it off still exist. To realize “The Peace, ” we need to get beyond a simple absence of conflict.

To drive home this point, Dallaire, 77, and longtime co-author Jessica Dee Humphrey adopted a novel structure for the book. Reaching back to the Renaissance, they took their lead from Italian poet Dante Aligheri’s The Divine Comedy, specifically its division into three parts: Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory) and Paradiso (heaven). Quotes from Dante kick off each chapter. “I couldn’t bring this damn thing together,” Dallaire says. “I’d been working at it for over 10 years since my last book.” Thanks to Dante, he was able to draw together his thoughts, and make it happen.

He says the book’s structure mirrors his life. Hell was Rwanda. He learned a few lessons from it, but “I was too wounded and battle-scarred to see beyond the emotional and intellectual purgatory I remained mired in.” He suffered from PTSD, an experience he wrote about in his 2016 book, Waiting for First Light , and several others, including Shake Hands with the Devil (2007) and They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children (2010).

On the surface, these were busy, productive years. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant-General and, on retirement from the army, was appointed to the Senate. He was, he writes, “racing around the world, juggling pro bono efforts on behalf of child soldiers, injured veterans and victims of mass atrocities, living out of suitcases and eating fast food in airports, always alone, always on high alert.…” The product of more than three decades in the military, he was “trying desperately to solve the world’s problems with the tools, the language and the ethos of combat,” but the strain was becoming too much. “I was working my way to an early grave.” 

Then, he writes, “I fell in love, and through this solace and safe harbour, I gained a new lease and a new perspective on life.” Secure and happy in his 2020 marriage to his second wife, Marie (Dallaire and his first wife, Elizabeth, divorced in 2019), he could at last start to imagine a future, guided by the ideals he calls his lodestars: security, justice, prevention and, the most intriguing of all, sans frontières. He feels that today’s youth are truly the Génération sans frontières – without borders – in the sense that they don’t just think locally. But sans frontières can also mean without limits.  “[T]his generation,” he writes, “is equipped like no other to break the mould, to shift the social imperative….” When that happens, he believes we might realize not just social or world peace, but “The Peace. “

Dallaire thinks what he has gained may guide us all, collectively. He adds, “I’m at the stage now where I’m just finalizing the layout. These things, they take decades to put together.”

For all his focus on the future, he remains busy in the here and now. Over the phone, he rattles off a list of commitments (and these aren’t all of them), like the Dallaire Institute for Children Peace and Security at Dalhousie University. It covers Africa from an office in Rwanda’s capital of Kigali, and just opened an office in Uruguay to cover Latin America and the Caribbean. Dallaire also has a small foundation that runs a five-year program to develop leadership potential in high-school students from less fortunate backgrounds. He is also a senior fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies and at Concordia University. 

“Oh, and I’ve also found time to finally have my miniature train set up,” he adds. “When I want to disappear from the world and dream, I go into this room that’s been set aside.”  

Dallaire admits he is on a spiritual quest. “Aiming for The Peace will emancipate us, turning us away from simple survival toward a potential that we haven’t even considered and that we can’t yet imagine.”  

He knows that naysayers who think it is human nature to be selfish and barbaric may think his optimism is naive. “However, I am confident we can break the limitations that we create by staying locked in our egocentric, exclusionary vices.” Daillare’s conviction and vision are so hard-earned and so deeply felt, we ignore his entreaty at our peril.