Fighting Words: The Origins Of Religious Violence.

AVALOS, Hector [Madeleine Albright].

$375.00

Item Number: 148447

New York: Prometheus Books, 2005.

First edition of Avalos’s critical examination of religion and violence. Octavo, original publisher’s cloth. Signed and dated by the author on the front free endpaper. From the library of  Madeleine K. Albright. Madeleine K. Albright was the first woman to serve as the U.S. Secretary of State. She acted under President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001, leading the United States through foreign policy in the Middle East with the endorsement of military action in Iraq. At the 1998 NATO summit, Albright coined the “3 Ds” of NATO, “which is no diminution of NATO, no discrimination and no duplication – because I think that we don’t need any of those three “Ds” to happen.” After her tenure as Secretary of State, she served as chair of the consulting Albright Stonebridge Group and was the Michael and Virginia Mortara Endowed Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. For Albright’s contributions to foreign policy and relations that defined a century, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Bookplate to the front pastedown from, “The Private Collection of Secretary Madeleine K. Albright.” Jacket cover design by Nicole M. Sommer. Images by kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection.

Hector Avalos’s Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence is a critical examination of the role religion plays in fostering and perpetuating violence. Avalos argues that religious violence is rooted in the competition for scarce resources that are often deemed sacred or divinely mandated. These resources—whether they are land, scriptures, or ideological truths—are rendered inaccessible to outsiders, creating conflict and justifying violence.