January 26, 2025 • 43 mins
In this episode, we talk with John Paul Lederach – professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, focused on international peacebuilding. Lederach spent much of his career helping build peace in conflict areas around the world, and has written extensively on his experiences.
Together, we explore the importance of building relationships across divides and differences to achieve meaningful foundations for building lasting peace. We also discuss how we might apply these lessons here in the U.S. before polarization becomes sustained violence.
Of particular relevance to our current situation in the U.S. is Lederach’s Pocket Guide for Facing Down a Civil War: Surprising ideas from everyday people who shifted the cycles of violence.
To learn more about John Paul Lederach and peruse his writings, go to JohnPaulLederach.com.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
We've got to stand together on common ground.
(00:08):
We've got to be together before we all fall down.
Welcome to This is Civity. I'm Gina Baleria.
Civity is a culture of deliberately engaging in relationships of respect and empathy with others who are different.
Moving people from us versus them to we all belong.
To learn more, go to civity.org.
(00:30):
In this episode, we talk with John Paul Lederach, professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, focused on international peace building.
Lederach spent much of his career helping build peace in conflict areas around the world.
He's written extensively on his experiences.
Together, we explore the importance of building relationships across divides and differences to achieve meaningful foundations for building lasting peace.
(00:54):
We also discuss how we might apply these lessons here in the U.S. before polarization becomes sustained violence.
Talk about the work you do in your own words, like the work you've done throughout your life.
How do you describe the work you do?
So I mostly describe my work as peace building and engagement with conflict transformation.
A lot of my lifetime career has been in settings where there's been long-term protracted and often violent conflict.
(01:22):
Sometimes they take the form of civil wars, but they're not always full-blown civil wars, but there's often a good bit of violence.
So examples are places like Columbia to Northern Ireland, parts of West Africa, and Nepal.
I worked in Nepal for a long time coming out of the civil war.
That's been kind of the context of my work.
(01:44):
A lot of the engagement has been accompanying more local communities than the pure form of national peace accord mediation,
though I have done that kind of work in support of negotiations and for a period of time worked as the director of a peace accord matrix,
which is a comparative research initiative that has contributed to a lot of these places with reference to how we understand
(02:12):
what's happening in contexts of really deep and violent conflict as they move into agreements and how those agreements are implemented.
Of course, I'm a teacher and an author, so there are a lot of elements that come with that.
With regard to the peace building work, you seem to have hit on these ideas that I think Sivati has drawn a lot from your work.
(02:34):
I think you're a big inspiration to Sivati as far as how we formed what we do.
But you've hit on these ideas that have really captured a lot of people's attention or imagination,
the ideas of being in a relationship, of going down to that community level and really dealing with people
and helping them see each other's humanity and building that critical yeast that can grow from this very sort of basic level,
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whereas so much of the understanding of negotiations, peace building, et cetera, are, oh, let's get the generals to the table
or let's get the political powers to the table.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you started to develop that and apply it and how it's grown over the course of your career.
The contexts that I work with are often settings that have very long lasting forms of open violence.
(03:20):
They last decades, if not half centuries, generations, quite often consider generational.
And when you work long term in those settings with people that you care about, you come to realize pretty quickly that it's a long journey.
And it requires a real commitment to accompaniment and to be alongside where people are at.
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So those are the communities that I've learned from.
And what I've learned consistently is that enduring change has to do with enduring relationships and the quality of those relationships.
To move toward really shifting long term patterns, it's going to require being in relationship with people you feel not only uncomfortable with, but that are often perceived as your enemies.
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I think the core of the learning has been that these communities that are most affected are also the ones that are the greatest artists and geniuses of that kind of change.
And that they do highly unexpected and unusual things by ways that they engage other people and the environment around them.
We often perceive these contexts as being very challenged and by virtue of that needing some form of outside input and help in order for things to happen.
(04:38):
But in reality, what I've found pretty consistently is that it often begins with a small number of people who have the ability to develop relationships across their divides in ways that respond creatively to issues that are very relevant to their context.
And it seemed kind of commonsensical.
(05:01):
Women in Wajir who focused on making the market safe, or the Campesinos in one part of Colombia who just basically said, we're going to go figure out how to negotiate ways in which people will no longer bring weapons into our villages.
They systematically began to work on those kinds of things that were very concrete, but that required them to open up and be open to very different sets of people and relationships and to do it over time.
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And I referred to that as critical yeast and rather than critical mass because critical mass often is a metaphor of large quantities of people.
It's about the catalyst and the quality of interaction that reproduces has a generative ongoing capacity that is really at the core of a lot of this work.
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Critical yeast was a way to kind of shock the mental mindset, but yeast is a very small ingredient within the mass of the flour and other things that are present in bread baking, but it's the only ingredient that is well mixed has a capacity to help everything else grow.
And that's what people were after. How do you make things grow and stick and become nourishing, if you will, in spite of all of the patterns and impact that are coming and that push against it.
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And so that's what a lot of the community were taught me in many very concrete ways is that this is not only possible, but it's brilliant that change to be enduring needs and has to be in relationship with the ways we create governance and sort of this top down thing.
My whole push from the 80s and into the 90s was we have to be cognizant that the basis from which it lasts is that communities are actually engaged involved and provide the relationships of what makes a lot of this, I think, enduring.
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And that's that was what I was after you described a couple examples, which I really appreciate. And one of them was women making sure market was safe. And the other was making sure guns don't come into the community, which are all very active things like let's do this, you know, like let's do this together.
This is something even if we disagree, this is something we can all agree on that these things are good and let's work and do and see each other helping each other.
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One of the books that captured this is a book titled The Moral Imagination, the Art and Soul of Building Peace. And there are a number of examples that are in there, but there were four qualities that I found came together pretty significantly and I often refer to these as social energies or as different forms of imagination.
The first obviously was this notion that you arrive at a place where you that people just said enough, enough, more or less. I mean, there was a lot of this because these are often long lasting that you come to a point that you no longer want to bequeath this kind of conflict to yet another generation.
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And there is this real appeal to taking a step, but that step is often that you come to understand that the well-being of your grandchildren are connected to the well-being of those who are different than you are perceived as your enemies, that you can't untie each other as if it will be independent.
And that kind of imagination was just that you saw a web of relationship that included your enemies. Now that is not always easy to arrive at, but was something I found pretty prevalent that there was that ingredient that was relationally based that understood that the patterns had to do with the quality of relationships.
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And the second was that people had a level of curiosity. Curiosity is actually an action. It's an act. It's a way of choosing to be in the world where you say, listen, all this stuff that's presenting to me has got to have something underneath it that I don't fully understand.
There's a level of humility that connects to my lived experience is one element of this, but there are other people with other lived experiences and something else is going on that's deeper. And that action of curiosity or the imagination of something that sits below what is offered as the crisis of the day that gets so much focus on to the content.
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How we argue over, you know, a policy or an approach or a piece of land or whatever the particular cases that curiosity drives to a deeper level.
The way the Campesinos in Columbia put it, I've always loved it because they made it as a principle of their actions, which was that we commit ourselves to understand those who do not understand us.
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Very simple principle, very hard to live by. But it requires a lot of action. You have to actually go in with a curiosity to understand how people have arrived at where they're at and how they view the community you live in.
I mean, one of the things that's very, a big part of this is that the enemy is not half a world away. The enemy is actually right where we live. It's in our face in a lot of ways. And that's, I think, as a component to the third one, which comes, I think, to you.
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Question more specifically.
Was that imagination itself suggests that we in the human community are capable of the creative act, but the creative act was not a far fetched miracle.
It was often about taking note of things that were immediately accessible where you live, but coming at them differently.
(10:35):
And that, I think, is the action that probably was most prevalent. So if you went, say, to Mindanao in the conflict in the Philippines, where in particular Catholic, Christian and Muslim communities contiguously lived in certain areas where there was this longstanding and deep armed conflict around issues that had been prevalent for years.
(10:59):
And often what people would immobilize when they began to shift was things like, okay, this road is no longer safe to travel for our kids to get to school, which is, you know, very concrete kind of thing.
Or we need food for humanitarian relief in some form or fashion.
These elements have a characteristic to them that I often encourage people to take a closer look at, which is don't start by imagining the perfect policy on something that is not very accessible to you.
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Ask the question, what is it where we live that we are concerned about and that if we want to do something about it, we're going to have to be in relationship with a wider set of people than just us.
The particular community I'm a part of or the particular group that as the way I see it.
The creativity that came, what I refer to in the book as the element that is about the creative act that we can bring into existence, things that do not yet exist, are often tied very much to concrete ways of looking where you live around how that affords possibility to bring unusual sets of people together.
(12:16):
Because they will be required if something is to change and over time, among other things, I began to refer to that as the improbable engagement, the improbable dialogue, the improbable relationship.
That change does not happen just because we get an extra person or two to believe like we do. Change happens because people work in unusual ways across difference to affect change on things they care about where they live.
(12:47):
And it is about local, but it also is about proximate that you're close to so you can see and feel the things and you can attend to that in a way that sometimes the national politics and the ways that it's polarized doesn't permit you to do so.
But you have to have this notion that change requires us to think about who will need to be engaged if it's actually to last over time for our community. And that's part of, I think, what that third element was.
(13:18):
The fourth one is the hardest in a lot of ways. I called it the imagination of risk.
And imagination of risk was that this meant that I had to step out of my zone of comfort. I didn't get one step beyond what I was comfortable with, especially when things are really polarized and we're kind of pulled back to where we find our safety.
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And what I found pretty consistently was that people often ask the question, how did that happen? You have an image of the worst case scenario of the person you don't want to talk to.
And I think that's the extreme form of that. And extremism is often what drives the view of the other. But a lot of the people in communities that I worked with, they may have made an enormous change happen over time.
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But if you ask them how it happened, it didn't happen miraculously in one big leap. It's not like jumping from one mountaintop to the next mountaintop.
And what they had was the imagination of what risk I can take today that's one step in the direction that I think I need to go. And then you learn from it.
So it's imagination of risk of one step at a time. And maybe not reaching all the way across to the worst possible set of people or person that you haven't constructed in your mind that's impossible to deal with.
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It may be a huge leap to imagine getting in touch with the commander X that runs a militia somewhere. It may not be nearly that complicated if you're reaching out to another person down the street whose kids also attend your school or that are going to other places, but who you know have different views or come from different backgrounds.
So one of the problems we have is that we often look at these things retrospectively. So we look back and say, how did these people end a war? Well, it was multiple decades. It wasn't that they just landed away over here.
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There were steps that began to come into place little by little. They didn't have an absolute brilliant clear horizon in mind.
They just had a notion that something this week needed to happen around the things that are not working well. And that there's a way of engaging risk as responsibility to reach out.
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And that's what I think is one of the core actions that often went with it.
That was one of the things that I highlighted from your pocketbook, humanizing the other within your own group confronting dehumanization.
And you described this a little bit, but I do want to ask the question outright is that there is in that context of lengthy strife or pain or war, there's a lot of hurt, pain, negative emotion surrounding sitting down with someone who thinks differently or considered the enemy or the adversary.
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And of course, we have the famous example of Nelson Mandela. But how do you help cultivate allowing people to do that or helping them have the ability to do that?
Obviously, one of the challenges that comes with this is that there's a lot of trauma involved in both the loss and the separation that comes with deep conflict.
And especially if there's violence involved, it's not just the loss of relationship. It's the loss of actually people that you care about.
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So a lot of grieving in the rapid ways that crisis unfold over and over again means that a lot of people have very little time to actually do kind of a deeper grieving that may come with a situation that has less of that open violence.
I think what we found is that there are two or three elements that come with it that have been significant.
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One is that the trauma is not best understood in the traditional ways of understanding sort of post-traumatic syndrome that is tied to a single event.
In many of these settings, it's happened intergenerationally. So it has a much deeper pattern to it. People are born into the levels of things that are there.
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Even people from very different sides of a conflict experience pretty consistently. So there's this odd kind of ironic element that in a place like Northern Ireland or other locations, that there have been many instances where people could come to understand that what one community has lived, the other community has also lived.
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So there's an element of commonality. And I think there is a significant shift that can come with understanding how the patterns have a certain systemic quality to them as opposed to doing the thing which we tend to do more often than not, which is that our deep polarization drives us to various forms of escapism.
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The most common being that we blame somebody or that we defend the properness of our view and our understanding in order to have this bigger picture, which is what do we understand about the patterns that are typically taking place and how do they repeat?
You're listening to This is Civity. I'm Gina Baleria. We're talking with international peace building expert John Paul Lederach.
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When you've experienced deep harm, there is a need to find a way to both understand it but also to bounce back to purpose.
So a lot of where trauma has this deep impact in repeated patterns is that it leaves people feeling so numb that they no longer feel like a person anymore, that they no longer feel fully like a human being.
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So how does one heal in that process of bouncing back to our sense of personhood, our sense of humanity, and our sense of purpose?
But that gets tied into a second element, which is that there has to be ways in which you also have the platform from which to resist the harms that keep coming.
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And so when you resist, you're pushing back against something that is creating harm.
Now that often leads us into movements and activism and other things that may come with that.
But the third one, which is probably more proximate to the communities I've worked with than to the formal field of individuated counseling and psychology,
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which we tend to individuate more here in the Western world, is what I would refer to as accompaniment.
And accompaniment is that you have a sense of feeling that there are others alongside you.
One way to describe that is that you, people experience a collective healing, which is understood as feeling like somebody has my back.
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Now we've got three backs, how to bounce back, how to push back, and how to have our backs.
And I think those three things are part of what creates the wider capacity for people not only to find pathways of healing,
but pathways of healing that continue to carry our woundedness, but not as a deep vulnerability that becomes paralyzing,
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but rather woundedness as a recognition that we are about the process of rehumanizing that which has been dehumanized.
Rehumanization, which is never found in any dictionary, by the way.
Oh, it should be. Why not? That's crazy.
How do we make our way back toward humanity when it has been destroyed?
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And I think this is what is at that core of those three things, is that part of the bounce back, part of the push back,
and part of the have our back permits us to also have a bigger picture that we are dealing with a wider system where people have been harmed,
and it's not exclusively and only me and my community. There is a bridging element to that that is a bit different than just purely dialogue.
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It's about a common recognition of finding our way toward something that really begins to create the changes that are needed
and that have combined in those repair and restoration, which are very much a part of that rehumanization element
that is so often and far too much invisibilized in what we're doing.
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But when it works, what it does is it provides, I think, a much greater sense of the potential for social healing and for aliveness.
People begin to feel more alive in who they are and in the potential of the relationships, even when those are under extreme stress and difficult.
Yeah, it's going to be interesting. I'm thinking as you talk about Syria, where Assad regime has fallen and you hear a lot of hope,
(22:06):
but also a lot of like, well, I don't know, what are these new people going to do? Is it going to be just as bad?
And I think that that idea of feeling safe and coming to the table with each other, hopefully we'll see that happen there.
Paul Mastrand and I were having a conversation prior to this, and she mentioned and I also was thinking a lot of the work you've done is sort of post-conflict,
post-violence or to sort of mitigate or end or tamp down violence.
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But in the U.S., obviously there's a lot of concern here among some about what may happen with us and where we're headed and whether or not violence could be in our future.
And I'm wondering how you might approach this pre-violence idea, because Civity also very much believes in the rehumanization
and the idea of rehumanizing the people that were starting to vilify or starting to other or othering to get us to the sort of polarized space,
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you know, in this sort of mostly pre-violent context. I know we had the insurrection on January 6th, but in this primarily pre-violent context,
how you might approach us and our challenges.
A lot of the context that I've worked with have had repeated cycles of violence, which means that you're constantly in a place that is simultaneously before, during and after.
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One of the great paradoxes is that the period of time just prior to larger scale violence emerging is very similar to the period of time when you're trying to end it.
In what ways? How is it similar?
There is a great deal of unpredictability about whether a pattern will track toward repeating a new wave of violence or whether it will actually endure and begin to come down.
So you take a place like Columbia Post Accord or Northern Ireland Post Good Friday.
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There actually, you know, are many instances where historically we fail more often than we succeed in our, quote, peace agreements.
That's just the nature of it. So when you're at a place where you're beginning a process of saying we're going to try to end this,
it's not only clear that what you're ending also has the capacity to build something new that stops the cycle.
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And the pre-period is precisely the volatility that is unpredictable.
So we had just as example, we had a great deal of unpredictability in our recent election.
Had it gone a slightly different direction, we may actually right now in this conversation have a much higher level of volatility.
That was certainly the case after the last election.
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Many of the elements that still remain in that. We have a very toxic level of polarization.
It's often driven by the deep ways that people imagine others as being not just enemies, but enemies of our survival.
The language that we hear consistently is that if one group wins or another wins, that we will be at the end.
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That everything will irreparably be shifted forever and that there's a sense that our survival is at stake as a democracy, as a people, et cetera.
I find it always kind of frustrating and challenging globally as well as here at home how many politicians use the word people to describe mandates.
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I think that's something that people have spoken, but the actual nature of that speaking is such small, narrow margins of either one or the other winning.
And that pattern seems like we're going to be in it for quite some time to come.
There are quite a number of things.
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I think, Guy, the book that you referenced that I wrote recently, obviously, was using the metaphor of pocket with the notion that you need to watch your pockets, watch where you live about how these patterns are emergent.
And that we do have around the geography of the United States, a lot of places where there has been increased levels of preparation and justification of potential violence.
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think it still remains the case that that's more on the margins, but often the tyranny
of the few can be very powerful because you begin to put into motion things that then
people have to react to and that often is the case with violence. The expectation is
that it's justified because we have no other option, but once it's used, it will catalyze
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others either joining us or reacting to us. My view is that this will not miraculously
be taken care of from the top down. It requires concerted effort from the places where people
live across these United States to engage more carefully in the resilience that will
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be necessary for holding to the fabric of our basic social contract. Most fundamental
element of our social contract is that it's possible to do politics without violence,
that it's possible to engage whether it's local school boards or mayor's offices or
things that are very prevalent to where we live, that we can do these things in ways
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that exemplify holding our differences, but without following patterns of violence. That's
really incumbent upon us all. If I understand some of what you're asking, that's precisely
what common others are referring to when they talk about the kind of work that is required
to engage across deep divisions is that it's not waiting for the perfect set of politics
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and the perfect politicians. It is that we have to lead from where we live. It's really
at the core of this. Sometimes there's a lot of pushback on that. We would love to have
exemplar Mandela-like leaders at a national level, if you will, but they're not always
easy to find in settings of really toxic polarization. They don't rise. What rises more in leadership,
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you guys on the wave of staying close to a particular view and vilifying or demonizing
those on the other side. I think that is precisely the kind of thing that has to shift, but it's
more likely to shift by my view from the bottom up. You can push back on it where you see
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it. The single greatest thing that can offer a shift in that regard is not calling out
the other side for when they don't do it well, but knowing when it is that your particular
community, the group that you're proximate to, the group that you feel most affinity
with, when you feel and see the signs of dehumanization, to speak in the ways that you have the courage
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to do so to those people or to those moments and say, that feeling, I understand it, and
it comes from a deep sense of both fear and at times anger, but it is not well served
by demonizing people who are different. By doing so, we often set up such extraordinary
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tests of who's with who that we lose sight that we're no longer capable to even build
a coalition of people that are of common concern, even if we have deep policy difference, of
common concern about the quality of our social contract, of who we are going to choose to
be with each other in this democracy. I think that's what we have to keep nudging on, is
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that when we see it come forward, especially when it's from people that we care about and
are from our more proximate community, that we're able to speak to those more directly
because that's where the power sits in shifting.
What we talk about at Sibydi a lot is, of course, we want to bring everyone to the table,
but if you're privileged in any context, that you have a responsibility also to, like you
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say, speak up and call out dehumanization and make the spaces safer so that we can start
having these conversations. Absolutely. Absolutely.
What is it that made you decide that you were going to dedicate yourself to this type of
work? Why do you do what you do? Probably a lot of roots that underpin any given
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species. But certainly for me growing up, I grew up in small rural and Mennonite communities.
I had exemplar parents in a lot of ways. I attribute so much of this to my mom and dad
and even all the way up to my grandparents. My parents were both involved in varieties
of ways in a period of the civil rights movement in the US. I was a younger person at that
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time period. But when I came into adolescence, I came into the end of the Vietnam War. As
coming through high school and into early college, we were still under that lottery
system. They would pull birth dates for the men in particular. Depending on who got pulled
when, you may have been drafted. Our particular tradition within the Anabaptist Mennonite
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realm is one of a deep commitment to human dignity that took the expression of pacifism
and conscience subjection to war. We had available to us alternatives to military service. In
my particular case, if you volunteered ahead of either taking a deferment for college or
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doing other things, if you volunteered, you could go on to an international setting of
service with a commitment for a longer period of time as opposed to waiting to see what
number came up. We were back in those days where you still were going to present yourself
at a draft board and that kind of thing. After my second year of college, that's what I
did. I volunteered in what was one of the remaining international assignments and ended
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up working for close to three years at a student home in Brussels, Belgium, that was bringing
French speaking, mostly African students to study in Europe. The Belgium colonies were
at the times I year now Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, which as you know became and still remain
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flashpoints of deep conflict and violence. People from French speaking West Africa into
the Middle East and some from Latin America. I lived in a house full of sort of younger
generation 25 to 35 year old men from those countries around our globe that were dealing
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with deep questions of how change is going to happen in their home setting. My early
school was actually living with people. Home countries were in the middle of either oppression
or revolution. So suddenly all your discussions that we would have in my little rural community
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about pacifism now were deeper and with relationships that I cared a lot about. I say that because
that was the context in which when I decided to come back to school, I asked the question
who has degrees in peace studies and working with conflict, et cetera, and ended up getting
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an undergraduate degree in history and peace studies from one of our very few Mennonite
universities that had a degree at that point, a major. And I've never left the field. That's
kind of the roots of where it started. I think my parents, my upbringing, these decisions
as a younger person and then choosing to actually begin to look at this as an area that I feel
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that I have vocational luck. So what's vocational luck? It means when your deepest sense of vocation
connects to the ability to actually work in the thing that you care about. I refer to
as a practitioner scholar. I've spent more time engaged in doing this than I have in
formally trying to teach about it or research about it. I'm much more of a person who both
(34:18):
writes and teaches from the practical experience that I've been afforded. And that's where
it came from in its origin.
Oh, that's so beautiful. What does it mean to you to be able to have vocational luck?
What does that mean to you?
What it's meant is that the things that I care most about, I could actually provide
for myself and family and a wider community. Sometimes those things align and sometimes
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they don't, but in my case it certainly did. The peace studies field and the conflict studies
fields, they trace back certainly prior to my time, but I was at a period where it was
beginning to grow.
When you're doing this work and whether it's post-conflict or whether we're talking about
what's going on in the United States and how we're sort of navigating our way through,
(35:04):
there is this element now of pretty significant disinformation, misinformation campaigns.
And I'm wondering, has that cropped up in your work that you've done thus far and how
does misinformation and disinformation play a role in the work you do?
It has always been a part of it, but it never had the capacity to move so quickly or exponentially.
(35:26):
The onset of the social media phenomena of the last decade or more has prevented this
to happen, one, at a much faster pace and two, at a much more extended level.
But it's not like the pattern wasn't there. If I go back to even my first experiences
with locations of open violence and warfare was in Central America, Nicaragua, Salvador,
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and especially where in extraordinary ways, people depended on informal information to
know how to navigate safety.
And even the smallest little rumor could send a whole refugee camp into chaos or rumor about
something happening that somebody did beyond that person's ability to explain it.
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They could very quickly be caught in a situation where it became irreparable and impossible
to come back to a fundamental understanding of what it was or how it worked or to triangulate
that information in a useful way.
So I think the patterns have always been there that conflict is consistently a question of
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sense-making.
And sense-making depends upon three always cycling elements.
One perception, what our eyes, our ears, and our whole body is watching and attentive to.
And in settings of conflict, we become way more attentive.
We have hypersensitivity to everything that comes.
(36:58):
What we perceive and what we don't perceive is often a big picture of that because we
watch for the things that we feel are most significant.
That's brought into our capacity to interpret.
And interpretation or the actual act of sense-making is often done in some form of community.
So when it gets deeply polarized, those communities narrow to only those who have particular ways
(37:23):
of seeing it and interpreting it.
And the third is based on an interpretation, we act.
We act on the basis of the meaning that things have for us.
How we act or how we choose to act then becomes the source of the new perception.
And that cycle, I think, has been consistently one of the challenges in working with conflict.
What's exacerbated now is that there seems to be so few ways that we can create common
(37:50):
and collective triangling, sense-making.
And it's much more diversified, the sources that people have, but it's much more bubbled
and much more narrow and much more powerful.
Obviously, I think this last election here in the US demonstrated the degree to which
traditional ways of understanding information flows are actually shifting even as we speak.
(38:14):
What we're doing now, the podcast world, the world of alternative information, where people
go to get their information, how that's held.
So if you go back to my three core points, we used to say, I'll believe it when I see
it.
It's the opposite now.
We see what we look for.
(38:34):
We see what we believe.
And that attentiveness takes us into only particular areas where we gather that and
it becomes very suspicious of anything that sits on the outside.
But it's instant and it's constant.
And it's always available.
And that's part of what has, I think, shifted is how fast and how far it can move.
(38:59):
Where we make sense of this is rarely in the kind of curiosity that requires being with
a diverse set of lived experiences and views of what this might mean and is narrowed so
much and so quickly to only a few ways that is acceptable and many ways that are not.
(39:20):
And that kind of bubbled separation is a big part of, I think, the information world right
now.
And the third is that we know pretty consistently that people act on this.
So action can come quite quickly at times.
And once the action emerges, it's very difficult, as we say, to put that back in the bottle
(39:42):
that it came out or the tube of toothpaste that it came flowing out of.
It becomes then the new element that people begin the cycle over again.
So there is a massive challenge that we've not been well prepared for.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to add to this.
And a lot of colleagues that are trying to find the ways to ask good questions about
(40:03):
where it contributes positively and where it doesn't.
But I think it's coming at us at a pace that we may not fully understand how much and how
far this will go just because of the extraordinary ways that it replicates and is already in
motion.
And I think it leaves many of us feeling like we're significantly at a place where we no
(40:26):
longer control a lot of what happens around us.
And that sense of control then often looks for who will take this and make it controllable,
which I think is one of the elements that kind of lends itself toward more autocratic
ways of managing, which I think can be pretty scary.
So it comes back to our basic points.
(40:48):
Finding improbable sets of people that you converse and engage with is a way of offering
a platform of greater understanding of a bigger picture.
And I think to the degree that we can, this is precisely why those elements I feel is
so key to understand there's a bigger picture beyond ourselves, to be curious, to test with
(41:14):
action together with people who are unusual and to take small risks where we have greater
access.
These are all pushbacks, the drivers that are coming at us from the world of misinformation
and disinformation.
Yeah.
And it just makes the work you do and the work Civity does, I think, all that more important.
How do you see the intersections between the work you do and the work Civity does?
(41:35):
I would say that there are two or three very concrete places of intersection.
One is a belief that where you live and who you talk with is important, this whole notion
that you can work across communities.
I think we share a lot in the area of curiosity, engagement, and dialogue and finding common
action, but to do so in ways that take us one step beyond our comfort zone.
(41:59):
And I think probably the biggest one is not only the belief that this is possible, but
that there is a lot of evidence that shows that it can make a difference, not only where
you live, but for a wider country and situation.
And those to me are a lot of the intersection points.
I've really enjoyed talking with you, sir.
Thank you so much.
(42:20):
Appreciate you.
You gave me a chance to talk with you.
It's been great.
Thank you to my guest, John Paul Lederach, peacebuilding expert and professor emeritus
at the University of Notre Dame.
To check out John Paul Lederach's writings, go to johnpaullederach.com.
Civity is a culture of deliberately engaging in relationships of respect and empathy with
(42:44):
others who are different, moving people from us versus them to we all belong.
To learn more, go to civity.org.
Civity's theme song is Common Ground, performed by Tommy Castro and the Painkillers, written
by Tommy Castro and Kevin Bow, and used courtesy of Alligator Records and Dangerous Entertainment.
(43:04):
Thank you for listening to This is Civity.
Left, right, black or white, we all dream about the same things tonight.
Let's wake up people, it's time to build a brand new day.
We're gonna stand together on common ground.
We've got to stand together on common ground.
(00:08):
We've got to be together before we all fall down.
Welcome to This is Civity. I'm Gina Baleria.
Civity is a culture of deliberately engaging in relationships of respect and empathy with others who are different.
Moving people from us versus them to we all belong.
To learn more, go to civity.org.
(00:30):
In this episode, we talk with John Paul Lederach, professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, focused on international peace building.
Lederach spent much of his career helping build peace in conflict areas around the world.
He's written extensively on his experiences.
Together, we explore the importance of building relationships across divides and differences to achieve meaningful foundations for building lasting peace.
(00:54):
We also discuss how we might apply these lessons here in the U.S. before polarization becomes sustained violence.
Talk about the work you do in your own words, like the work you've done throughout your life.
How do you describe the work you do?
So I mostly describe my work as peace building and engagement with conflict transformation.
A lot of my lifetime career has been in settings where there's been long-term protracted and often violent conflict.
(01:22):
Sometimes they take the form of civil wars, but they're not always full-blown civil wars, but there's often a good bit of violence.
So examples are places like Columbia to Northern Ireland, parts of West Africa, and Nepal.
I worked in Nepal for a long time coming out of the civil war.
That's been kind of the context of my work.
(01:44):
A lot of the engagement has been accompanying more local communities than the pure form of national peace accord mediation,
though I have done that kind of work in support of negotiations and for a period of time worked as the director of a peace accord matrix,
which is a comparative research initiative that has contributed to a lot of these places with reference to how we understand
(02:12):
what's happening in contexts of really deep and violent conflict as they move into agreements and how those agreements are implemented.
Of course, I'm a teacher and an author, so there are a lot of elements that come with that.
With regard to the peace building work, you seem to have hit on these ideas that I think Sivati has drawn a lot from your work.
(02:34):
I think you're a big inspiration to Sivati as far as how we formed what we do.
But you've hit on these ideas that have really captured a lot of people's attention or imagination,
the ideas of being in a relationship, of going down to that community level and really dealing with people
and helping them see each other's humanity and building that critical yeast that can grow from this very sort of basic level,
(02:56):
whereas so much of the understanding of negotiations, peace building, et cetera, are, oh, let's get the generals to the table
or let's get the political powers to the table.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you started to develop that and apply it and how it's grown over the course of your career.
The contexts that I work with are often settings that have very long lasting forms of open violence.
(03:20):
They last decades, if not half centuries, generations, quite often consider generational.
And when you work long term in those settings with people that you care about, you come to realize pretty quickly that it's a long journey.
And it requires a real commitment to accompaniment and to be alongside where people are at.
(03:42):
So those are the communities that I've learned from.
And what I've learned consistently is that enduring change has to do with enduring relationships and the quality of those relationships.
To move toward really shifting long term patterns, it's going to require being in relationship with people you feel not only uncomfortable with, but that are often perceived as your enemies.
(04:07):
I think the core of the learning has been that these communities that are most affected are also the ones that are the greatest artists and geniuses of that kind of change.
And that they do highly unexpected and unusual things by ways that they engage other people and the environment around them.
We often perceive these contexts as being very challenged and by virtue of that needing some form of outside input and help in order for things to happen.
(04:38):
But in reality, what I've found pretty consistently is that it often begins with a small number of people who have the ability to develop relationships across their divides in ways that respond creatively to issues that are very relevant to their context.
And it seemed kind of commonsensical.
(05:01):
Women in Wajir who focused on making the market safe, or the Campesinos in one part of Colombia who just basically said, we're going to go figure out how to negotiate ways in which people will no longer bring weapons into our villages.
They systematically began to work on those kinds of things that were very concrete, but that required them to open up and be open to very different sets of people and relationships and to do it over time.
(05:30):
And I referred to that as critical yeast and rather than critical mass because critical mass often is a metaphor of large quantities of people.
It's about the catalyst and the quality of interaction that reproduces has a generative ongoing capacity that is really at the core of a lot of this work.
(05:51):
Critical yeast was a way to kind of shock the mental mindset, but yeast is a very small ingredient within the mass of the flour and other things that are present in bread baking, but it's the only ingredient that is well mixed has a capacity to help everything else grow.
And that's what people were after. How do you make things grow and stick and become nourishing, if you will, in spite of all of the patterns and impact that are coming and that push against it.
(06:21):
And so that's what a lot of the community were taught me in many very concrete ways is that this is not only possible, but it's brilliant that change to be enduring needs and has to be in relationship with the ways we create governance and sort of this top down thing.
My whole push from the 80s and into the 90s was we have to be cognizant that the basis from which it lasts is that communities are actually engaged involved and provide the relationships of what makes a lot of this, I think, enduring.
(06:58):
And that's that was what I was after you described a couple examples, which I really appreciate. And one of them was women making sure market was safe. And the other was making sure guns don't come into the community, which are all very active things like let's do this, you know, like let's do this together.
This is something even if we disagree, this is something we can all agree on that these things are good and let's work and do and see each other helping each other.
(07:22):
One of the books that captured this is a book titled The Moral Imagination, the Art and Soul of Building Peace. And there are a number of examples that are in there, but there were four qualities that I found came together pretty significantly and I often refer to these as social energies or as different forms of imagination.
The first obviously was this notion that you arrive at a place where you that people just said enough, enough, more or less. I mean, there was a lot of this because these are often long lasting that you come to a point that you no longer want to bequeath this kind of conflict to yet another generation.
(07:58):
And there is this real appeal to taking a step, but that step is often that you come to understand that the well-being of your grandchildren are connected to the well-being of those who are different than you are perceived as your enemies, that you can't untie each other as if it will be independent.
And that kind of imagination was just that you saw a web of relationship that included your enemies. Now that is not always easy to arrive at, but was something I found pretty prevalent that there was that ingredient that was relationally based that understood that the patterns had to do with the quality of relationships.
(08:39):
And the second was that people had a level of curiosity. Curiosity is actually an action. It's an act. It's a way of choosing to be in the world where you say, listen, all this stuff that's presenting to me has got to have something underneath it that I don't fully understand.
There's a level of humility that connects to my lived experience is one element of this, but there are other people with other lived experiences and something else is going on that's deeper. And that action of curiosity or the imagination of something that sits below what is offered as the crisis of the day that gets so much focus on to the content.
(09:19):
How we argue over, you know, a policy or an approach or a piece of land or whatever the particular cases that curiosity drives to a deeper level.
The way the Campesinos in Columbia put it, I've always loved it because they made it as a principle of their actions, which was that we commit ourselves to understand those who do not understand us.
(09:42):
Very simple principle, very hard to live by. But it requires a lot of action. You have to actually go in with a curiosity to understand how people have arrived at where they're at and how they view the community you live in.
I mean, one of the things that's very, a big part of this is that the enemy is not half a world away. The enemy is actually right where we live. It's in our face in a lot of ways. And that's, I think, as a component to the third one, which comes, I think, to you.
(10:11):
Question more specifically.
Was that imagination itself suggests that we in the human community are capable of the creative act, but the creative act was not a far fetched miracle.
It was often about taking note of things that were immediately accessible where you live, but coming at them differently.
(10:35):
And that, I think, is the action that probably was most prevalent. So if you went, say, to Mindanao in the conflict in the Philippines, where in particular Catholic, Christian and Muslim communities contiguously lived in certain areas where there was this longstanding and deep armed conflict around issues that had been prevalent for years.
(10:59):
And often what people would immobilize when they began to shift was things like, okay, this road is no longer safe to travel for our kids to get to school, which is, you know, very concrete kind of thing.
Or we need food for humanitarian relief in some form or fashion.
These elements have a characteristic to them that I often encourage people to take a closer look at, which is don't start by imagining the perfect policy on something that is not very accessible to you.
(11:34):
Ask the question, what is it where we live that we are concerned about and that if we want to do something about it, we're going to have to be in relationship with a wider set of people than just us.
The particular community I'm a part of or the particular group that as the way I see it.
The creativity that came, what I refer to in the book as the element that is about the creative act that we can bring into existence, things that do not yet exist, are often tied very much to concrete ways of looking where you live around how that affords possibility to bring unusual sets of people together.
(12:16):
Because they will be required if something is to change and over time, among other things, I began to refer to that as the improbable engagement, the improbable dialogue, the improbable relationship.
That change does not happen just because we get an extra person or two to believe like we do. Change happens because people work in unusual ways across difference to affect change on things they care about where they live.
(12:47):
And it is about local, but it also is about proximate that you're close to so you can see and feel the things and you can attend to that in a way that sometimes the national politics and the ways that it's polarized doesn't permit you to do so.
But you have to have this notion that change requires us to think about who will need to be engaged if it's actually to last over time for our community. And that's part of, I think, what that third element was.
(13:18):
The fourth one is the hardest in a lot of ways. I called it the imagination of risk.
And imagination of risk was that this meant that I had to step out of my zone of comfort. I didn't get one step beyond what I was comfortable with, especially when things are really polarized and we're kind of pulled back to where we find our safety.
(13:40):
And what I found pretty consistently was that people often ask the question, how did that happen? You have an image of the worst case scenario of the person you don't want to talk to.
And I think that's the extreme form of that. And extremism is often what drives the view of the other. But a lot of the people in communities that I worked with, they may have made an enormous change happen over time.
(14:03):
But if you ask them how it happened, it didn't happen miraculously in one big leap. It's not like jumping from one mountaintop to the next mountaintop.
And what they had was the imagination of what risk I can take today that's one step in the direction that I think I need to go. And then you learn from it.
So it's imagination of risk of one step at a time. And maybe not reaching all the way across to the worst possible set of people or person that you haven't constructed in your mind that's impossible to deal with.
(14:34):
It may be a huge leap to imagine getting in touch with the commander X that runs a militia somewhere. It may not be nearly that complicated if you're reaching out to another person down the street whose kids also attend your school or that are going to other places, but who you know have different views or come from different backgrounds.
So one of the problems we have is that we often look at these things retrospectively. So we look back and say, how did these people end a war? Well, it was multiple decades. It wasn't that they just landed away over here.
(15:07):
There were steps that began to come into place little by little. They didn't have an absolute brilliant clear horizon in mind.
They just had a notion that something this week needed to happen around the things that are not working well. And that there's a way of engaging risk as responsibility to reach out.
(15:30):
And that's what I think is one of the core actions that often went with it.
That was one of the things that I highlighted from your pocketbook, humanizing the other within your own group confronting dehumanization.
And you described this a little bit, but I do want to ask the question outright is that there is in that context of lengthy strife or pain or war, there's a lot of hurt, pain, negative emotion surrounding sitting down with someone who thinks differently or considered the enemy or the adversary.
(15:58):
And of course, we have the famous example of Nelson Mandela. But how do you help cultivate allowing people to do that or helping them have the ability to do that?
Obviously, one of the challenges that comes with this is that there's a lot of trauma involved in both the loss and the separation that comes with deep conflict.
And especially if there's violence involved, it's not just the loss of relationship. It's the loss of actually people that you care about.
(16:23):
So a lot of grieving in the rapid ways that crisis unfold over and over again means that a lot of people have very little time to actually do kind of a deeper grieving that may come with a situation that has less of that open violence.
I think what we found is that there are two or three elements that come with it that have been significant.
(16:44):
One is that the trauma is not best understood in the traditional ways of understanding sort of post-traumatic syndrome that is tied to a single event.
In many of these settings, it's happened intergenerationally. So it has a much deeper pattern to it. People are born into the levels of things that are there.
(17:09):
Even people from very different sides of a conflict experience pretty consistently. So there's this odd kind of ironic element that in a place like Northern Ireland or other locations, that there have been many instances where people could come to understand that what one community has lived, the other community has also lived.
(17:33):
So there's an element of commonality. And I think there is a significant shift that can come with understanding how the patterns have a certain systemic quality to them as opposed to doing the thing which we tend to do more often than not, which is that our deep polarization drives us to various forms of escapism.
(17:56):
The most common being that we blame somebody or that we defend the properness of our view and our understanding in order to have this bigger picture, which is what do we understand about the patterns that are typically taking place and how do they repeat?
You're listening to This is Civity. I'm Gina Baleria. We're talking with international peace building expert John Paul Lederach.
(18:20):
When you've experienced deep harm, there is a need to find a way to both understand it but also to bounce back to purpose.
So a lot of where trauma has this deep impact in repeated patterns is that it leaves people feeling so numb that they no longer feel like a person anymore, that they no longer feel fully like a human being.
(18:43):
So how does one heal in that process of bouncing back to our sense of personhood, our sense of humanity, and our sense of purpose?
But that gets tied into a second element, which is that there has to be ways in which you also have the platform from which to resist the harms that keep coming.
(19:08):
And so when you resist, you're pushing back against something that is creating harm.
Now that often leads us into movements and activism and other things that may come with that.
But the third one, which is probably more proximate to the communities I've worked with than to the formal field of individuated counseling and psychology,
(19:31):
which we tend to individuate more here in the Western world, is what I would refer to as accompaniment.
And accompaniment is that you have a sense of feeling that there are others alongside you.
One way to describe that is that you, people experience a collective healing, which is understood as feeling like somebody has my back.
(19:59):
Now we've got three backs, how to bounce back, how to push back, and how to have our backs.
And I think those three things are part of what creates the wider capacity for people not only to find pathways of healing,
but pathways of healing that continue to carry our woundedness, but not as a deep vulnerability that becomes paralyzing,
(20:29):
but rather woundedness as a recognition that we are about the process of rehumanizing that which has been dehumanized.
Rehumanization, which is never found in any dictionary, by the way.
Oh, it should be. Why not? That's crazy.
How do we make our way back toward humanity when it has been destroyed?
(20:53):
And I think this is what is at that core of those three things, is that part of the bounce back, part of the push back,
and part of the have our back permits us to also have a bigger picture that we are dealing with a wider system where people have been harmed,
and it's not exclusively and only me and my community. There is a bridging element to that that is a bit different than just purely dialogue.
(21:17):
It's about a common recognition of finding our way toward something that really begins to create the changes that are needed
and that have combined in those repair and restoration, which are very much a part of that rehumanization element
that is so often and far too much invisibilized in what we're doing.
(21:41):
But when it works, what it does is it provides, I think, a much greater sense of the potential for social healing and for aliveness.
People begin to feel more alive in who they are and in the potential of the relationships, even when those are under extreme stress and difficult.
Yeah, it's going to be interesting. I'm thinking as you talk about Syria, where Assad regime has fallen and you hear a lot of hope,
(22:06):
but also a lot of like, well, I don't know, what are these new people going to do? Is it going to be just as bad?
And I think that that idea of feeling safe and coming to the table with each other, hopefully we'll see that happen there.
Paul Mastrand and I were having a conversation prior to this, and she mentioned and I also was thinking a lot of the work you've done is sort of post-conflict,
post-violence or to sort of mitigate or end or tamp down violence.
(22:31):
But in the U.S., obviously there's a lot of concern here among some about what may happen with us and where we're headed and whether or not violence could be in our future.
And I'm wondering how you might approach this pre-violence idea, because Civity also very much believes in the rehumanization
and the idea of rehumanizing the people that were starting to vilify or starting to other or othering to get us to the sort of polarized space,
(22:58):
you know, in this sort of mostly pre-violent context. I know we had the insurrection on January 6th, but in this primarily pre-violent context,
how you might approach us and our challenges.
A lot of the context that I've worked with have had repeated cycles of violence, which means that you're constantly in a place that is simultaneously before, during and after.
(23:22):
One of the great paradoxes is that the period of time just prior to larger scale violence emerging is very similar to the period of time when you're trying to end it.
In what ways? How is it similar?
There is a great deal of unpredictability about whether a pattern will track toward repeating a new wave of violence or whether it will actually endure and begin to come down.
So you take a place like Columbia Post Accord or Northern Ireland Post Good Friday.
(23:47):
There actually, you know, are many instances where historically we fail more often than we succeed in our, quote, peace agreements.
That's just the nature of it. So when you're at a place where you're beginning a process of saying we're going to try to end this,
it's not only clear that what you're ending also has the capacity to build something new that stops the cycle.
(24:12):
And the pre-period is precisely the volatility that is unpredictable.
So we had just as example, we had a great deal of unpredictability in our recent election.
Had it gone a slightly different direction, we may actually right now in this conversation have a much higher level of volatility.
That was certainly the case after the last election.
(24:34):
Many of the elements that still remain in that. We have a very toxic level of polarization.
It's often driven by the deep ways that people imagine others as being not just enemies, but enemies of our survival.
The language that we hear consistently is that if one group wins or another wins, that we will be at the end.
(24:56):
That everything will irreparably be shifted forever and that there's a sense that our survival is at stake as a democracy, as a people, et cetera.
I find it always kind of frustrating and challenging globally as well as here at home how many politicians use the word people to describe mandates.
(25:17):
I think that's something that people have spoken, but the actual nature of that speaking is such small, narrow margins of either one or the other winning.
And that pattern seems like we're going to be in it for quite some time to come.
There are quite a number of things.
(25:38):
I think, Guy, the book that you referenced that I wrote recently, obviously, was using the metaphor of pocket with the notion that you need to watch your pockets, watch where you live about how these patterns are emergent.
And that we do have around the geography of the United States, a lot of places where there has been increased levels of preparation and justification of potential violence.
(26:03):
think it still remains the case that that's more on the margins, but often the tyranny
of the few can be very powerful because you begin to put into motion things that then
people have to react to and that often is the case with violence. The expectation is
that it's justified because we have no other option, but once it's used, it will catalyze
(26:29):
others either joining us or reacting to us. My view is that this will not miraculously
be taken care of from the top down. It requires concerted effort from the places where people
live across these United States to engage more carefully in the resilience that will
(26:49):
be necessary for holding to the fabric of our basic social contract. Most fundamental
element of our social contract is that it's possible to do politics without violence,
that it's possible to engage whether it's local school boards or mayor's offices or
things that are very prevalent to where we live, that we can do these things in ways
(27:16):
that exemplify holding our differences, but without following patterns of violence. That's
really incumbent upon us all. If I understand some of what you're asking, that's precisely
what common others are referring to when they talk about the kind of work that is required
to engage across deep divisions is that it's not waiting for the perfect set of politics
(27:43):
and the perfect politicians. It is that we have to lead from where we live. It's really
at the core of this. Sometimes there's a lot of pushback on that. We would love to have
exemplar Mandela-like leaders at a national level, if you will, but they're not always
easy to find in settings of really toxic polarization. They don't rise. What rises more in leadership,
(28:08):
you guys on the wave of staying close to a particular view and vilifying or demonizing
those on the other side. I think that is precisely the kind of thing that has to shift, but it's
more likely to shift by my view from the bottom up. You can push back on it where you see
(28:30):
it. The single greatest thing that can offer a shift in that regard is not calling out
the other side for when they don't do it well, but knowing when it is that your particular
community, the group that you're proximate to, the group that you feel most affinity
with, when you feel and see the signs of dehumanization, to speak in the ways that you have the courage
(28:54):
to do so to those people or to those moments and say, that feeling, I understand it, and
it comes from a deep sense of both fear and at times anger, but it is not well served
by demonizing people who are different. By doing so, we often set up such extraordinary
(29:19):
tests of who's with who that we lose sight that we're no longer capable to even build
a coalition of people that are of common concern, even if we have deep policy difference, of
common concern about the quality of our social contract, of who we are going to choose to
be with each other in this democracy. I think that's what we have to keep nudging on, is
(29:43):
that when we see it come forward, especially when it's from people that we care about and
are from our more proximate community, that we're able to speak to those more directly
because that's where the power sits in shifting.
What we talk about at Sibydi a lot is, of course, we want to bring everyone to the table,
but if you're privileged in any context, that you have a responsibility also to, like you
(30:07):
say, speak up and call out dehumanization and make the spaces safer so that we can start
having these conversations. Absolutely. Absolutely.
What is it that made you decide that you were going to dedicate yourself to this type of
work? Why do you do what you do? Probably a lot of roots that underpin any given
(30:27):
species. But certainly for me growing up, I grew up in small rural and Mennonite communities.
I had exemplar parents in a lot of ways. I attribute so much of this to my mom and dad
and even all the way up to my grandparents. My parents were both involved in varieties
of ways in a period of the civil rights movement in the US. I was a younger person at that
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time period. But when I came into adolescence, I came into the end of the Vietnam War. As
coming through high school and into early college, we were still under that lottery
system. They would pull birth dates for the men in particular. Depending on who got pulled
when, you may have been drafted. Our particular tradition within the Anabaptist Mennonite
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realm is one of a deep commitment to human dignity that took the expression of pacifism
and conscience subjection to war. We had available to us alternatives to military service. In
my particular case, if you volunteered ahead of either taking a deferment for college or
(31:36):
doing other things, if you volunteered, you could go on to an international setting of
service with a commitment for a longer period of time as opposed to waiting to see what
number came up. We were back in those days where you still were going to present yourself
at a draft board and that kind of thing. After my second year of college, that's what I
did. I volunteered in what was one of the remaining international assignments and ended
(32:02):
up working for close to three years at a student home in Brussels, Belgium, that was bringing
French speaking, mostly African students to study in Europe. The Belgium colonies were
at the times I year now Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, which as you know became and still remain
(32:25):
flashpoints of deep conflict and violence. People from French speaking West Africa into
the Middle East and some from Latin America. I lived in a house full of sort of younger
generation 25 to 35 year old men from those countries around our globe that were dealing
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with deep questions of how change is going to happen in their home setting. My early
school was actually living with people. Home countries were in the middle of either oppression
or revolution. So suddenly all your discussions that we would have in my little rural community
(33:08):
about pacifism now were deeper and with relationships that I cared a lot about. I say that because
that was the context in which when I decided to come back to school, I asked the question
who has degrees in peace studies and working with conflict, et cetera, and ended up getting
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an undergraduate degree in history and peace studies from one of our very few Mennonite
universities that had a degree at that point, a major. And I've never left the field. That's
kind of the roots of where it started. I think my parents, my upbringing, these decisions
as a younger person and then choosing to actually begin to look at this as an area that I feel
(33:53):
that I have vocational luck. So what's vocational luck? It means when your deepest sense of vocation
connects to the ability to actually work in the thing that you care about. I refer to
as a practitioner scholar. I've spent more time engaged in doing this than I have in
formally trying to teach about it or research about it. I'm much more of a person who both
(34:18):
writes and teaches from the practical experience that I've been afforded. And that's where
it came from in its origin.
Oh, that's so beautiful. What does it mean to you to be able to have vocational luck?
What does that mean to you?
What it's meant is that the things that I care most about, I could actually provide
for myself and family and a wider community. Sometimes those things align and sometimes
(34:43):
they don't, but in my case it certainly did. The peace studies field and the conflict studies
fields, they trace back certainly prior to my time, but I was at a period where it was
beginning to grow.
When you're doing this work and whether it's post-conflict or whether we're talking about
what's going on in the United States and how we're sort of navigating our way through,
(35:04):
there is this element now of pretty significant disinformation, misinformation campaigns.
And I'm wondering, has that cropped up in your work that you've done thus far and how
does misinformation and disinformation play a role in the work you do?
It has always been a part of it, but it never had the capacity to move so quickly or exponentially.
(35:26):
The onset of the social media phenomena of the last decade or more has prevented this
to happen, one, at a much faster pace and two, at a much more extended level.
But it's not like the pattern wasn't there. If I go back to even my first experiences
with locations of open violence and warfare was in Central America, Nicaragua, Salvador,
(35:50):
and especially where in extraordinary ways, people depended on informal information to
know how to navigate safety.
And even the smallest little rumor could send a whole refugee camp into chaos or rumor about
something happening that somebody did beyond that person's ability to explain it.
(36:13):
They could very quickly be caught in a situation where it became irreparable and impossible
to come back to a fundamental understanding of what it was or how it worked or to triangulate
that information in a useful way.
So I think the patterns have always been there that conflict is consistently a question of
(36:35):
sense-making.
And sense-making depends upon three always cycling elements.
One perception, what our eyes, our ears, and our whole body is watching and attentive to.
And in settings of conflict, we become way more attentive.
We have hypersensitivity to everything that comes.
(36:58):
What we perceive and what we don't perceive is often a big picture of that because we
watch for the things that we feel are most significant.
That's brought into our capacity to interpret.
And interpretation or the actual act of sense-making is often done in some form of community.
So when it gets deeply polarized, those communities narrow to only those who have particular ways
(37:23):
of seeing it and interpreting it.
And the third is based on an interpretation, we act.
We act on the basis of the meaning that things have for us.
How we act or how we choose to act then becomes the source of the new perception.
And that cycle, I think, has been consistently one of the challenges in working with conflict.
What's exacerbated now is that there seems to be so few ways that we can create common
(37:50):
and collective triangling, sense-making.
And it's much more diversified, the sources that people have, but it's much more bubbled
and much more narrow and much more powerful.
Obviously, I think this last election here in the US demonstrated the degree to which
traditional ways of understanding information flows are actually shifting even as we speak.
(38:14):
What we're doing now, the podcast world, the world of alternative information, where people
go to get their information, how that's held.
So if you go back to my three core points, we used to say, I'll believe it when I see
it.
It's the opposite now.
We see what we look for.
(38:34):
We see what we believe.
And that attentiveness takes us into only particular areas where we gather that and
it becomes very suspicious of anything that sits on the outside.
But it's instant and it's constant.
And it's always available.
And that's part of what has, I think, shifted is how fast and how far it can move.
(38:59):
Where we make sense of this is rarely in the kind of curiosity that requires being with
a diverse set of lived experiences and views of what this might mean and is narrowed so
much and so quickly to only a few ways that is acceptable and many ways that are not.
(39:20):
And that kind of bubbled separation is a big part of, I think, the information world right
now.
And the third is that we know pretty consistently that people act on this.
So action can come quite quickly at times.
And once the action emerges, it's very difficult, as we say, to put that back in the bottle
(39:42):
that it came out or the tube of toothpaste that it came flowing out of.
It becomes then the new element that people begin the cycle over again.
So there is a massive challenge that we've not been well prepared for.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to add to this.
And a lot of colleagues that are trying to find the ways to ask good questions about
(40:03):
where it contributes positively and where it doesn't.
But I think it's coming at us at a pace that we may not fully understand how much and how
far this will go just because of the extraordinary ways that it replicates and is already in
motion.
And I think it leaves many of us feeling like we're significantly at a place where we no
(40:26):
longer control a lot of what happens around us.
And that sense of control then often looks for who will take this and make it controllable,
which I think is one of the elements that kind of lends itself toward more autocratic
ways of managing, which I think can be pretty scary.
So it comes back to our basic points.
(40:48):
Finding improbable sets of people that you converse and engage with is a way of offering
a platform of greater understanding of a bigger picture.
And I think to the degree that we can, this is precisely why those elements I feel is
so key to understand there's a bigger picture beyond ourselves, to be curious, to test with
(41:14):
action together with people who are unusual and to take small risks where we have greater
access.
These are all pushbacks, the drivers that are coming at us from the world of misinformation
and disinformation.
Yeah.
And it just makes the work you do and the work Civity does, I think, all that more important.
How do you see the intersections between the work you do and the work Civity does?
(41:35):
I would say that there are two or three very concrete places of intersection.
One is a belief that where you live and who you talk with is important, this whole notion
that you can work across communities.
I think we share a lot in the area of curiosity, engagement, and dialogue and finding common
action, but to do so in ways that take us one step beyond our comfort zone.
(41:59):
And I think probably the biggest one is not only the belief that this is possible, but
that there is a lot of evidence that shows that it can make a difference, not only where
you live, but for a wider country and situation.
And those to me are a lot of the intersection points.
I've really enjoyed talking with you, sir.
Thank you so much.
(42:20):
Appreciate you.
You gave me a chance to talk with you.
It's been great.
Thank you to my guest, John Paul Lederach, peacebuilding expert and professor emeritus
at the University of Notre Dame.
To check out John Paul Lederach's writings, go to johnpaullederach.com.
Civity is a culture of deliberately engaging in relationships of respect and empathy with
(42:44):
others who are different, moving people from us versus them to we all belong.
To learn more, go to civity.org.
Civity's theme song is Common Ground, performed by Tommy Castro and the Painkillers, written
by Tommy Castro and Kevin Bow, and used courtesy of Alligator Records and Dangerous Entertainment.
(43:04):
Thank you for listening to This is Civity.
Left, right, black or white, we all dream about the same things tonight.
Let's wake up people, it's time to build a brand new day.
We're gonna stand together on common ground.
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