According to the author, Peaceful Persuasion: The Geopolitics of Nonviolent Rhetoric intends to “tip the scales of scholarship, which have weighed so heavily on violence, back in the direction of peace and nonviolence ” and to consider the link between rhetoric and nonviolence.

Macedonia was spared the inter-ethnic violence that raged elsewhere in the Balkans following the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s but it came close to civil war a decade after independence.