Midwifing Peace

"Midwifing Peace" by LeeAnn McKenna is a memoir and practical account of peacebuilding work across some of the world's most volatile conflict zones, including Sudan, Uganda, the Philippines, and Palestine. McKenna, a Canadian conflict transformation trainer, uses the extended metaphor of midwifery throughout: she sees herself not as an expert delivering peace from the outside, but as someone who creates conditions for communities to birth their own futures. Her role is facilitation, not prescription. The book moves across multiple countries and decades, weaving together vivid scenes from training workshops with historical and political context. In Sudan, she works with SONAD—a Sudanese nonviolence organization—bringing together Muslim and Christian peacemakers across deep religious and tribal divides, using role plays, fishbowls, and experiential exercises to open conversations that formal diplomacy could never reach. She witnesses both the promise of grassroots peace work and its fragility in the face of ongoing military violence and political collapse. In Uganda, she partners with Irene Dawa and CEPD to deliver menstrual health education to schoolgirls near the DRC border—recognizing that keeping girls in school is itself an act of peacebuilding. In the Philippines, she works alongside the Baclagon sisters and Baptist development networks in Mindanao, navigating the layered tensions of Indigenous displacement, Moro insurgency, mining extraction, and US military presence, using games and economic literacy tools to help communities understand and resist structural violence. A recurring thread is gender: McKenna insists that women are indispensable to durable peace, and she documents this not through argument alone but through showing what happens in rooms when women speak, when men listen, and when both are pushed outside their comfort zones together. The writing is intimate and honest—McKenna doesn't hide her uncertainty, fear, or exhaustion. She records moments of unexpected grace: eggs carried carefully across Khartoum as symbols of fragile hope, a currency kiosk worker named Elsa who offers comfort in a Vancouver airport at the worst moment. Ultimately, the book is a testament to slow, patient, unglamorous work—and to the belief that transformation begins not in treaties but in conversations.