To Stop a Warlord: My Story of Justice, Grace, and the Fight for Peace

Attorney and human rights advocate Davis powerfully tells of her efforts to free Central Africa from the grip of violent rebel leader Joseph Kony and liberate his army of child soldiers. As CEO of a foundation established “to prevent oppression, genocide, and human rights abuses,” Sedgwick realized that funding relief programs for survivors of Kony’s massacres was “just putting Band-Aids on bullet holes.” In 2010, she traveled to Central Africa and Uganda, where Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army—kidnapped children who had been turned into soldiers—had killed thousands. Taking “a step beyond traditional philanthropy,” she hired “a private, professional military trainer to train the Ugandan army in counter-LRA tactics,” a decision backed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Warren Buffett’s philanthropist son Howard. When military efforts failed, Davis decided on a strategy of “taking the LRA down from the inside out” through a defection campaign aimed at Kony’s top commanders and young soldiers; this ultimately undermined his control. Indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in 2005, Kony remains at large, yet the author concludes “peace is bigger than one man. It is the 90 percent reduction in LRA violence.” This is a fast-paced and intense geopolitical narrative. [em](Apr.) [/em]