The War of the Pacific (1879–1883) looms large in the history of Peru and Chile. Upending the prevailing historiographical focus on the history of conflict, Beyond Patriotic Phobias explores points of connection shared between Peruvians and Chileans despite war. Through careful archival work, historian Joshua Savala highlights the overlooked cooperative relationships of workers across borders, including maritime port workers, doctors, and the police. These groups, in both countries, were intimately tied together through different forms of labor: they worked the ships and ports, studied and treated disease transmission in the face of a cholera outbreak, and conducted surveillance over port and maritime activities because of perceived threats like transnational crime and labor organizing. By following the movement of people, diseases, and ideas, Savala reconstructs the circulation that created a South American Pacific world. The resulting story is one in which communities, classes, and states formed transnationally through varied, if uneven, forms of cooperation.

This book argues that it can be beneficial for the United States to talk with "evil" - that is, terrorists and other bad actors - if it uses a strategy that engages a mediator who shares the United States' principles yet is pragmatic. The project shows how the United States can make better foreign policy decisions and demonstrate its integrity for promoting democracy and human rights if it employs a mediator who facilitates disputes between international actors by moving them along a continuum of principles, as political parties act for a country's citizens. This is the first book to integrate theories of rule of law development with conflict resolution methods, and it examines ongoing disputes in the Middle East, North Korea, South America, and Africa (including Uganda, Sudan, Kenya, and Liberia). It uses a narrative approach, drawing on the author's experiences with The Carter Center and judicial and legal advocacy training to give the reader a sophisticated understanding of the current situation in these countries and of how a strategy of principled pragmatism will give better direction to U.S. foreign policy abroad.

The year 1879 marked the beginning of one of the longest, bloodiest conflicts of nineteenth-century Latin America. The War of the Pacific pitted Peru and Bolivia against Chile in a struggle initiated over a festering border dispute. The conflict saw Chile's and Peru's armored warships vying for control of sea lanes and included one of the first examples of the use of naval torpedoes.