Suicide through a Peacebuilding Lens

“Suicide through a peacebuilding not only fills a significant gap in our wider understanding of conflict transformation around the challenges of suicide, Katerina offers us a significant step forward in how building peace requires a praxis of friendship. A book well worth the read that echo into many spheres of our peacebuilding development.”
—Professor John Paul Lederach, Professor Emeritus, University of Notre Dame, USA.

“In this accomplished scholarship, Katerina Standish has written a must-read primer for anyone seeking to understand suicide (from any field) and the unique opportunity to peacebuild suicide via relationship.
—Professor Sean Byrne, Foundational Director and Director of the PACS Graduate Program at the Arthur V. Mauro Centre for Peace and Justice Studies, University of Manitoba, Canada.

“Suicide through a Peacebuilding Lens is a ground-breaking study. Meticulously researched, this book throws new light on the nature & prevalence of suicide. It is a ‘must’ read for peace-building practitioners and a pioneering work of scholarship.”
—Professor Padraig O’Malley, the John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA.


This book, as the first exploration of suicide in Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS), illustrates the scarcity of suicide research in the discipline and argues that the leading cause of violent death worldwide is a multifaceted phenomenon that needs to be fully comprehended as a significant and often preventable form of world-wide violence. The author supplies a theoretical framework for assessing suicide as medical or instrumental, posits interdisciplinary complementarity and offers future lines of inquiry that challenge established notions of prevention. The book presents a PACS meta-theory termed ‘encounter theory’ and supplies a suicidal peacebuilding platform via relationship. This book questions why more PACS scholars aren’t turning their attention to suicide when more people die by suicide than ethnic, religious or ‘terroristic’ violence combined.


Katerina Standish is Deputy Director and Senior Lecturer at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago, in New Zealand.