English · Chapter 45
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
War and Peace is a Language Development unit of the Grade 11 Compulsory English textbook. Its theme is the resort to organised violence and the slow work by which violence is ended and kept from returning. The unit trains comprehension on a reading text about conflict or peacemaking, builds the vocabulary of war and settlement, teaches the grammar of contrast and concession, and puts both to work in argumentative and persuasive tasks. The textbook handles the theme with restraint, and so should an answer. The examination rewards accurate vocabulary, an account of the costs of war, an explanation of what peacemaking requires, and a position held with reasons rather than slogans.
Confirm the exact title and author of this unit's reading text against your own copy of the textbook, because these notes develop the substance the unit's reading treats rather than a particular title.
War is organised violence between states, or between armed groups within a state. It is fought over territory, power, resources, belief or old injury, and those who wage it always call it necessary and brief. It is rarely brief.
The cost of war is never confined to the battlefield. Soldiers are killed and maimed, and in modern conflicts civilian casualties are commonly the greater number. Bridges, clinics and schools are destroyed in weeks and rebuilt over decades. Families leave their homes, becoming refugees if they cross a border and displaced persons if they do not. Harvests are missed, so hunger and disease follow, often killing more people than the weapons did. Children lose years of schooling, and money spent on weapons is not spent on classrooms. Grief, fear and the mistrust between neighbours last longest of all.
Peace is more than the silence after the guns, and it is usual to distinguish two senses of the word. In the first, peace means only that the fighting has stopped, a real achievement and a fragile one. In the second, the reasons for fighting have been addressed, so that people have work, land, representation and the protection of law. A ceasefire that leaves every grievance untouched buys time and little else, which is why so many settlements fail within a few years.
Ending a war is slow work with a recognisable shape, although no two end alike. The fighting is halted by a truce or a ceasefire, often arranged by a mediator whom both sides accept. Negotiation follows, and a treaty or an agreement then records what each side has undertaken to do. Then come the harder tasks: combatants disarm and return to civilian life, displaced families go home, and serious wrongs go before a transitional justice process that establishes the truth, compensates the harmed and decides on accountability. Nepal came through an armed conflict of its own, ended by a peace agreement and followed by a transitional justice process, and it has long contributed personnel to United Nations peacekeeping missions. The United Nations was itself founded after the Second World War to prevent war, and international humanitarian law limits how a war may be fought.
Reconciliation is the slowest part, because it asks people who have lost to live beside those they hold responsible. It is not the same as forgetting: it needs the truth first, then a shared account of what happened, and then the ordinary contact of markets and workplaces that makes neighbours of strangers again. Peace is therefore not a condition a country arrives at but a work it keeps doing.