“It’s really a horror to live in a war”, Antoine Makdis told me in Aleppo. And over the next ten days we were witnesses to that horror. “The war has aged me not just psychologically but in my way of thinking. It aged me in my body. I have pain when I walk. I have pain when I’m sleeping. I’m not wiser but I’m older.”

Featuring stories of human rights violations and struggles in a world of human- and earth-destroying globalised capitalism, the RTÉ What in the World? television series has filmed in over fifty countries across Africa, Asia and The Americas. This is the second book published by The Liffey Press based on the award-winning series.

With a focus on war and its consequences, this book tells profoundly moving stories of how conflict has convulsed the lives of people caught up its insidious grip, plunged people into the depths of despair and crushed the hopes and dreams of whole generations. None of this is accidental. Wars don’t just happen. They are the inevitable result of the military industrial complex, the colonial legacy, the economic dividends of war.

War, Suffering and the Struggle for Human Rights describes the suffering of ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mexico, Russia, South Sudan, Syria, Uruguay, Western Sahara, Palestine/Israel, Brazil, South Korea, Somalia and Timor Leste. Above all, the reader will be left with an understanding of how wars live on in the lives and bodies of the injured and the traumatized long after they are deemed officially over.