November 26, 2025 • 52 mins
Tonight on The Brian Crombie Hour, Brian is joined by Meredith Preston McGhie, one of the world’s leading practitioners in conflict resolution and the Secretary General of the Global Centre for Pluralism. For nearly 30 years, Meredith has worked at the front lines of peacebuilding across Africa and Asia — from the Naga in Northeast India, to ethnic dialogues in Nigeria and Kenya, to UN efforts in Kosovo, Iraq, South Sudan, Somalia and Sudan. Few people understand conflict, diversity, and democratic resilience the way she does.
Meredith brings realism, experience, and a rare optimism grounded in decades of hard-won lessons from conflict zones. She believes and demonstrates that pluralism isn’t idealistic. It’s necessary. And that in times of division, ordinary people have extraordinary power to create peace.
Meredith brings realism, experience, and a rare optimism grounded in decades of hard-won lessons from conflict zones. She believes and demonstrates that pluralism isn’t idealistic. It’s necessary. And that in times of division, ordinary people have extraordinary power to create peace.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The views expressed in the following program are those of
the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of
Saga nine sixty am or its management.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Scidinnian. Everyone, and welcome to the Brian Crombie Radio Hour.
So we've got an interesting conversation today about sort of pluralism,
foreign affairs, international relations, what's going on with all of
the changes that are occurring in our world today. I
think this is going to be a topic that we
really want to discuss. Our guest is Meredith Preston McGee.
She's devoted nearly thirty years to addressing conflict and instability
(00:40):
in Africa and Asia in some of the most troubled
situations around the world. She is with the Global Center
for Pluralism. She's the Secretary General and she's going to
speak to us today about what pluralism is all about.
What's happening international relations. We'll talk about Asia, We'll talk
about Africa. This is going to be a fascinating conversation today.
(01:00):
Welcome to thinking about more than just Tronto and Canada,
thinking about the world. Meredith, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Thank you so much for having me, Brian.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
My pleasure. So tell me what is pluralism and how
does pluralism function as a strategic advantage for Canada, for
countries and for communities. Explain please?
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Thanks, well, I will start with explaining pluralism and how
we see it. I think it's a word that a
lot of people may have heard, but they can't necessarily
put their finger on what it really means. And what
we do know in our society and in societies around
the world is that differences abound everywhere. All of our
societies are diverse. That's simply a fact. We're going to
(01:41):
be different ethnically, linguistically, geographically, in terms of our background, generation, gender, everything.
What pluralism asks us to do is to take actions,
to make choices to respond to that difference and diversity
as something as that is positive, that is a potential
strength in our societies, a threat, not something that we
(02:01):
need to suppress, not something that we need to weaponize
as forces of division. So pluralism is really asking us
to take that as our superpower. So that's really the
core of what we're asking people and societies to do.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
As are superpower.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Really, I believe so, and I think that as we
are in a time of real anxiety of real division
and polarization, and probably structurally in spaces where we may
feel more isolated from one another, with fewer opportunities to
connect with one another, even in a country like Canada,
(02:40):
when we're at a time where there are more conflicts
at play in the world than there have been for
almost one hundred years, that the ability to overcome difference,
the ability to see diversity as something positive rather than
something to be weaponized, is the way that we will
come to both resolve the conflicts that we're seeing around
(03:00):
the world, but also to better manage our democracies. I
think at a time of a rise of authoritarianism, some
would say not just a crisis of multilateralism around the world,
but a crisis of democracies, we need to figure out
how to engage positively with one another, particularly when we
(03:21):
see things differently.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Meredith, is your belief and attitude overly idealistic and out
of touch with the current realities of today? Given you
know what you see in the United States, and what
you've seen to a certain extent in Canada, what you've
seen in Western Europe where there's an anti immigrant backlash,
there's you know, ice people on the streets rounding up
(03:48):
people and deporting them forcibly, where Canadian politicians and the
public appear to not be in favor of the immigration
levels that we've had in the past years, is what
you're talking about just old fashioned and too idealistic.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Well, I actually think it's the way of the future.
Rather than being something that is old fashioned, I think
that it is practical. I'm also really conscious and we
see around the world it is incredibly hard. And one
of the reasons we talk about it, and one of
the reasons that we develop tools and techniques is that
we're conscious that it's not easy to talk with people
that we don't agree with. It's not easy to engage
(04:26):
with people whose backgrounds and perspectives are different from ours.
And we need to have structures, We need to have systems.
We need to kind of have the muscles in our
society so that we can sit down with somebody with
whom we disagree and figure out, first of all, where
we have some common ground, because often there is common
ground that we're not seeing. And we have to push
(04:46):
back against the polarization, division and frankly weaponization. And I
think the examples that you give from ice agents and
the rise of nativistic nationalism and fear are really good examples.
But I think that we need techniques to push back
against that. I don't think that that division and that
(05:06):
polarization serves any of us. Do we need to think so, Brian,
if I can say that, I think scarcity is where
a lot of people are at. People feel like there
isn't enough to go around, and so they need to
protect what they have. And I recognize that fear, but
I also think that if we look throughout history, actually
in those moments of scarcity, collaboration is what gets you through.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
I was at a really interesting presentation by Fred Zachari
last week, the CNN commentator who is a Canadian American citizen.
He from India, Muslim commentator, and he was almost suggesting
that what we had done is we were too lenient.
We accepted too many immigrants into particularly the United States,
(05:50):
particularly asylum seekers. And he said there's an amount of
change that populations are are able to absorb, and that
we we tried to get them to change too much,
and that that was the problem. And it was almost
as if you know, it's back to this sort of
melting pot versus mosaic attitude. It was almost as if
(06:11):
this gentleman, who I was surprised and wasn't expecting to
have this attitude from, was arguing in favor of the
US assimilation and melting pot rather than the Canadian mosaic attitude.
And that you know, a reasonable amount of immigration can
be absorbed from a society, but too much leads to backlash.
So what do you think about that?
Speaker 3 (06:31):
So I don't necessarily think it's the numbers. I think
it's the way that it operates. And when you look
actually at migration in other parts of the world now
remind us often that Canada we haven't seen the same
levels of migration that you see in a lot of
other in a lot of other countries. But what we
have seen here in Canada that has worked really well
is when communities come together to welcome immigrants into their spaces.
(06:54):
That often, when you bring what I would call sort
of host communities together with new newcomer Canadians or newcomers
in other societies and you make it a collective project,
you see a lot more success. So I think there's
a lot of issues around the process, which isn't the
numbers game necessarily, it's how we're engaging with people in
(07:16):
our in our societies, in our spaces.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
You've done a lot of work in Africa and Asia.
Tell me a little bit about what you found there
in regards to pluralism, because you know, India, as one example,
is very dominant in one religion and one ethnic background.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
And at the same time was founded as a pluralist democracy.
But I would say is on a different trajectory. Now.
You know, what's interesting about pluralism as an idea as
well is that it's constantly evolving and changing. So what
we think about in terms of pluralism in Canada today
isn't what pluralism was fifty years ago in Canada. And similarly,
(07:54):
in India, we're seeing a rise of a dominant Hindu
majoritarianism as a narrative. But when you spend time moving
around India, you hear a kind of ply of different languages,
You see different religions, you see different cultural expressions. You
even see different cultural expression within Hinduism, let alone within
the other communities religions, ethnicities, faiths, and languages across that country.
(08:21):
I think one of the questions that we often ask with,
particularly with democracies, is this idea of majoritarianism can be
dangerous because it can say, okay, so if you are
not part of the dominant mainstream, you don't get to
be a full citizen. If you don't speak this language,
you don't get to be a full citizen. If you
don't express this faith, you don't get to be a
(08:42):
full citizen. And while that can feel comfortable in the moment,
particularly when you're in the dominant majority, it doesn't serve
your societies in the long term. What I've seen across
Africa in particular, is that when you marginalize and marginalize
and marginalize a group, when you tell them over in
a run over again, you don't really get to be Kenyan.
(09:03):
You don't really get to be Sudanese. You fement spaces
where you will see over time the narrowing of people's
sense of options and opportunities. And what we see in
places like Sudan, for example, South Sudan, parts of Kenya,
is you see that leading to violence, You see that
leading to people feeling like they have no other agency
(09:24):
other than expressions of violence.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Isn't isn't that like the trend that we see we
see civil wars in so many different places around the
world where ethnic groups, religious groups. Maybe they're just people
that are trying to control the economic rewards of being
in a control of society. But it seems like this
idea that we could all get along is pass and
(09:49):
then the poluralistic, democratic mosaic societies that you know, Canada
wanted to be are pass a. What do you think
about that.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
I think that sounds like you're giving up, and I
think that we absolutely can't. I think that it's hard,
and I think that right now when we see civil
wars around around the world, I think that that is
certainly disheartening concerning cause for pessimism. But at the same time,
for example, when I spend time with Sudanese and one
(10:21):
of our Global Pluralism Award laureates who's going to be
with us in a couple of weeks is a Sudanese
youth network that are working across lines in Sudan, and
I look at a space like that that is one
of the most deeply polarized, one of the most violent
situations on the planet right now, and they are managing
to bring together young people from both sides, from places
(10:41):
that are under the control of both the military and
the militias, people who are divided in so many ways,
and they are able to come together and figure out
ways of starting to talk about peace. And I think
when those things can be happening around the world, I
genuinely believe that we can all do more of that.
So while there is a trend, I don't think it's
an inevitability. And I think the real danger right now
(11:04):
is for all of us to think that we don't
have agency to make it better. I'm not saying it's easy,
and it isn't in a way about all of us
just getting along. It's about us recognizing that our differences
don't have to inevitably be division and violence. Our differences
can be something else.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Maybe if you could, because I'm not sure if everyone
listening is familiar where Sudan even is, let alone what
the issues are, could you just take a step back
for a second and tell us a little bit about
Sudan Because my understanding is that you know, there was
a democratic movement being born in Sudan, the military came
(11:45):
back in and took over control, and that it's two
different parts of the military that are actually fighting now.
It's not necessarily a religious or ethnic division that's created
this incredible civil war, with an incredible amount of poverty
and starvation and death. It's just people fighting over the
economic rewards. What's your assessment? Tell us where the heck
is Sudan by the way.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
So Sudan is in is in the Horn of Africa.
And so if you imagine a map of Africa sort
of a giant upside down triangle, and you go over
to your to sort of your right top corner, you
have Sudan there on the Red Sea. So it's strategically important.
It sort of faces the Gulf in the Middle East,
but it also faces the rest of Sub Saharan Africa.
It's really it has been in the pastorald bread basket.
(12:28):
It is a strategically important place, not just for the continent,
but for the wider for the wider region. Obviously Egypt
borders it to the north and then and then up
into the Mediterranean. What you've described Brian is a very
good precis of what's happening right now. I would say
a couple of things. The wars. This is one of
many wars that Sudan has faced over years of military
(12:51):
rule and civil war that led of course to the
separation of South Sudan, the previous wars in Darfia and others.
So this is something that is been built upon many
layers of conflict, and a lot of those conflicts have
been because Sudan has not managed its diversity well. So
there are ethnic dimensions to the conflict, there are geographic
(13:13):
elements to the conflict, and there are different identity pieces
to it. The reasons of the immediate current conflicts certainly
are a breakdown between the Sudan arm Forces and one
of the main militia groups that they sort of were
allied with as part of the military takeover of Sudan
after the Democratic revolution and the attempt at a democratic
(13:35):
transition after twenty and nineteen. But what you're seeing now
is a war over the spoils of the country, certainly
by these two militaries. But what you also see inevitably
in any of these sorts of conflicts is that people
have to live in these spaces. People have to find
ways of surviving under the authority of the Sudan ar
(13:58):
forces in one space or the rapid support forces in
the other, and do anything that they can to survive.
And so it creates new layers of division, new layers
of trauma, and new layers of polarization that we have
to work again to fight back to bring Sudan back
together again. I think the idea of a Sudan separating
(14:21):
again is really taking everyone down the wrong path. You know,
President Tabombecki, who is very involved in a lot of
the mediation processes in Sudan previously, and of course the
former President of South Africa has spoken really eloquently on
the danger of imagining that you can carve out smaller
spaces ethnically or otherwise as countries and sort of say, well,
(14:45):
you can have your bit and we can have our bit,
and if we just stay out of one another's way,
things will get easier and things will get better. And
what we know about the world is people move and
people intermingle, and all of our histories are multi layered
and related to one another in so many different ways
that you can't disentangle. You can't disentangle it in Sudan,
(15:05):
you can't disentangle that in Canada, you can't disentangle that
anywhere in the world. So we do have to find
ways that we can live together. Quite frankly, without killing
each other.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
We, you know, obviously have a war in Ukraine, the
Russian invasion of Ukraine. We've got a war that you know,
maybe Trump thought he solved but doesn't appear to be
actually over in the Middle East between Israel and Gaza.
Are we just not paying enough attention to what's going
in Sudan? You know, what I've heard is that if
the United States and Saudi Arabia actually wanted to, they
(15:37):
could end the war in Sudan. What's your assessment of
how we solve this problem.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Absolutely, we're not spending enough time on it. I think
the United States has a huge role to play. I
think the Saudis have a huge role to play, as
does Egypt, as does the United Arab Emirates, and those
four countries in fact make up something called the Quad,
and they have been in converse with one another. But
this is a war that is being fueled by the outside,
(16:04):
not fueled by the United States per se, but fueled
by others in the region. This is not just a
Sudanese war, and people do need to take it more seriously.
But I would say that while the military and the
rapid support forces, as the militia are most in the news.
If you're going to come up with a solution for Sudan,
you have to center the civilians who speak for the
(16:25):
actual people of Sudan. The military forces and the rapid
support forces do not represent the people of Sudan, and
so any kind of solution has to really be driven
by speaking to independent civilians who are driving for peace.
And the Sudanese Use Networks who I mentioned before, is
one such example. There are platforms of independent civilians who've
(16:48):
been working towards a process like this. But I would
also say Brian that in addition to the big powers
that we mentioned, Canada can play a role in this.
Canada has been a promoter of peace around the world
in the past, and we can play a bigger role
than we have been recently.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
But last question on Sudan, Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I thought there was democracy. I thought that they elected
a democratic government in the recent past and it was
completely taken over by the military. So what went wrong?
Why didn't democracy take hold? And why didn't people support democracy?
Speaker 3 (17:25):
People support democracy? The roots of the military industrial complex
in Sudan are incredibly deep, and so while the revolution
in twenty nineteen toppled President Omar al Bashir and led
to this beginning of this democratic transition. The military systems
(17:46):
and the Islamist structures that are behind them continued to
control economy, continued to control security, and you've seen this
in other places. In Myanmar, is I think a comparable
example where you have democratic structures that start to emerge,
but when a lot of the state systems of power
are still controlled by the military, democracy is really it's new,
(18:10):
it's fragile, and it's this veneer that hasn't been able
to take over the entire power structures. The transition was
nowhere near or finished. And it's one of the reasons
that we saw the military coup. They didn't want the
democratic transition to unseat the military power. It's part of
the reason why the period between twenty nineteen and the
war reemerging in twenty twenty three was so short.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
It's a shame. It's a real shame. And you know,
there are some people that I think believe it'd be
interesting and I'll maybe ask you later on that controlling
the economic spoils of society ends up being one of
the major objectives of people, and they use racism and
religion and nationalism and even you know, misogyny. Sexism is
that way of just you know, having some other way
(18:54):
of controlling all the all the resources of society. You know, absolutely,
I don't know why why we just can't get along better.
We're gonna take a break for some messages and come
back in just two minutes with our guest Meredith Preston McGee,
talking about pluralism, democracy, international affairs and how we get
along better, how we create peace. Stay with us, everyone
(19:16):
back into minute.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
No Radio, No Problem stream is live on SAGA nine
sixty am dot C.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Welcome back everyone to the Brian Crimee Radio our really
interesting conversation tonight with Meredith Meredith Preston McGee. She is
the Global Center for Pluralism Secretary General. She was appointed
to that in October twenty nineteen. In this position, it's
a peace builder job where she provides strategic leadership for
the Center and represents the organization externally as an ambassador
(20:00):
of pluralism to develop strong relationships with diplomatic communities, governments,
and other institutions. Before the Center, Meredith worked as the
African Regional Director with the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, overseeing
some complex mediation and dialogue efforts in Africa. She also
worked in the Kenya National Dialogue and reconciliation process, and
(20:21):
she's contributed annually to the Oslo Forum. Wow, and and
you know, Meredith, you've worked with the Naga in northeast India,
with indigenous communities in Miramar supporting you, and efforts in Kosovo,
Northern Iraq, South Sudan, Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, and Kenya. What
(20:42):
a What a career, what a life, What an experience.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
I've been incredibly fortunate to spend time in all of
those places. That's taught me a huge amount.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
What does it taught you?
Speaker 3 (20:57):
You know, Brian, I was thinking the other day actually
that one of my early arliest jobs was with the
Naga in the northeast of India. It's a community I'm
sure most of your listeners have never heard of. It's
in a tiny mountainous bit of India that sits on
the other side of Bangladesh. It's in one of the
provinces in Nagalata and Manipur. And I was working with
(21:18):
indigenous leaders, human rights leaders, and I was also working
with the Armed Resistance helping them negotiate with the Government
of India, and one of my mentors talked a lot
about the need for the Naga to fight the government
of India because they were fighting for the soul of
their culture. Their culture was pluralist and democratic and consensus
(21:42):
building and open, and they were fighting for protection of
their own culture against the onslaught of the Government of India.
But in creating a secretive armed resistance movement in order
to fight the Government of India, that they'd lost their
cultural soul, that the things that they were fighting for
(22:06):
they ended up losing by having to fight the kind
of violent, secretive, secretive, militarized resistance that they needed to
fight in the war against the Government of India. And
that is always stayed with me when I think about
how we seek to resolve conflict, but also how we
seek to protect our own democracies, whether it was when
(22:29):
I was living in Kenya or here back in Canada,
that we really have to sit back and think about
our first principles of what we are as a society
and what fighting for our democracy or fighting for our
culture actually does to the culture that we're maybe trying
to protect. And when I think of all of that.
It's one of the reasons why pluralism has always been
(22:51):
such an attractive concept to me, because I think it
asks us to go back to the first principles of
our society of what do we want? What do we
want for our children? And I think when you ask
people around the world what they want, it's amazing how
remarkably similar the answers are. People want to be able
to sustain themselves with dignity, They want jobs and livelihoods,
(23:14):
but they also want to feel like they belong. They
want to feel like they belong in their communities, they
want to feel like they're seen for who they are,
they want to be in relationship with other people, and
they want to be able to shape how that society
is moving forward. And that's really at the heart of
what pluralism tries to help us to do in times
of peace, but also in recovery from conflict, to get
(23:37):
back to some of those basic principles that I think
really are universal.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
I want to challenge you if I could, because when
you think about democracy, democracy is also you know, majority worlds.
If you get fifty point one percent, or in a
lot of cases even if you you know, you just
get forty percent because of a split vote. You get
to control the agenda, you get control what's going on.
And a lot of democratic parties seem to be catering
(24:05):
to their base rather than actually being pluralistic and wanting
to represent the whole population. So is democracy and pluralism
the same thing or are they different things? And it
seems like, you know, you're very and I think inspirational
but potentially idealistic attitude toward pluralism may not be where
(24:27):
democracy is today.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Well, it's interesting because democracy and pluralism certainly aren't the
same thing. And we also see that a lot of
pluralistic tendencies of wanting to actually engage with your diversity
positively doesn't have to be a democratic trait. You see
this happening in non democratic societies as well as in
democratic societies. But what we do see is that when
you are a diverse democracy, if you don't have an
(24:51):
underpinning of pluralism, your system doesn't actually work. It's what
leads to that kind of fragmentation. So majoritarianism, as you describe,
when it becomes a winner takes all system, is when
things start to break down. And of course most systems
have various checks and balances for that. You'll have rights
of minorities. You'll have maybe state legislatures to balance to
(25:16):
balance in national legislature. You'll have checks and balances within
a system. When you have a minority government, maybe you
have to collaborate with other parties in order to in
order to get your agenda forward. You have a free
media to hold politicians and other leaders to account. All
of these things together are designed in many systems in
(25:37):
order to ensure that I can't just say I got
one more vote than you, I can do anything I
want for the next five years. We create a scaffolding
of our governance systems that also sort of says, broadly speaking,
though this is what we believe, right, It's a constitution,
it's our charter, it's constitutional processes around the world. And
(25:58):
so I think what pluralism helps us to do is
to kind of again get back to some of those
first principles, to talk to one another. And again, I
take your point about idealism, but I think that what
pluralism is asking of us is not to build a
perfect society, but also to recognize that if we fall
into traps of weaponization, of being allowed to be divided
(26:21):
over issues that don't actually have to divide us. We
are being pawns in a game where maybe it is
people who are looking for economic advantage or political advantage
of what have you. And I think people can be
better than that. I think sometimes we don't always have
the tools, we don't always have the techniques to do it.
And one of the things that we do is we
spend a lot of time building some of those tools
(26:43):
and techniques. We celebrate our Global Pluralism Award laureates as
people who are doing this in some of the most
difficult parts of the world and showing us that it
can actually be done.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
I read an interesting interview that you did called lessons
in Peace Building, and I want to ask you about
one of the comments you made because I found it. Actually,
I'd love to ask you about several of the comments
you made, but one of the comments you made was
listen for this said the unsaid and the unsayable. What
do you mean by that?
Speaker 3 (27:14):
Well, first of all, I have to and I realized
in that interview she didn't she didn't footnote him. But
that was from the Massy lectures here in Canada year
before last, and now that you've asked me about it,
I'm forgetting the name of the lecturer. But it's really
stayed with me as a concept because what you see,
and what I have seen in peacemaking around the world,
is that you get into a room and there's an agenda.
(27:35):
There's a formal agenda. We're going to talk about the constitution,
or we're going to talk about issue ex er issue why.
But then there's always the reading between the lines. There's
always the things that people are wanting to bring into
the room but they can't quite bring into the room yet,
or they're trying to get there through another guys, and
so that's really the unsaid. But then there are the
(27:58):
deeper questions really sit at the heart of perhaps in
a conflict situation, why I am deeply traumatized, what it
really means for me to feel excluded, what it might
mean that other identities that I hold are not being recognized,
and when I think, for example, when I was in
the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation process where I was
(28:21):
working with this excellency Kofia, we were talking a lot
about about a range of a range of issues at
the table and One of the issues that came up
was was education and the need to support a revision
of the history curriculum in Kenya, and there was just
an explosion in the room of the leaders that was
not in keeping with the issue of your history textbook.
(28:45):
A lot of us within a history textbook, but what
was being proposed in the Unseid that was really about
the unsayable was the layers of conflict, the layers of
violent life and grabbing that had taken place for decades
in Kenya that had led to the power structures that
existed in that very room that we were sitting in.
(29:08):
It was talking about massacres that had taken place in
the north that did not feature in any way in
the history curriculum, that would further marginalize different groups in
the society with all of these layers of things, and
it was coming out in a history curriculum. And so
when you're in a room so often there are many
different layers of conversation. And what I've seen as a
(29:30):
peacemaker is that when you can build layers of trust,
people will start just with the said, Okay, so this
is what we're going to talk about, and then you
can get a little bit further down into some of
the tougher issues, some of the issues that really maybe
divide you. You can start to ask some questions about
those sorts of things, and if you can spend enough
time and get to enough trust, you can get into
(29:51):
the really, really really deep spaces that are potentially more traumatic,
that bring up a lot of really really deep emotion.
But if you can create spaces where people feel like
they can raise those things without everything breaking, they can
have a breakthrough in terms of how they can actually
deal with and address those cycles of trauma. Because so
(30:12):
many of the conflicts that we're looking at around the
world are a layer upon layer upon layer of unresolved trauma,
of things that have never.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Been said, unresolved trauma, things have never been said. That's
an interesting, interesting topic. Let me ask you about that
from a Canadian perspective as well as an international perspective.
You know, just and true to our former Prime minister
was criticized that he spent you know, years talking about
sort of truth and reconciliation about all the things that
we have done in the past that are bad. And
clearly we did some things in the past as a
(30:41):
society that you know, whether the residential schools or or
some of the ways that we treated our indigenous communities
and things like that that were bad. And yet a
lot of people reacted negatively to that and thought, you know,
changing Dundask Square and taking down a statue of Johnny
MacDonald and you know, saying that, you know, evaluating people
in the past by the attitudes of today are wrong.
(31:05):
So what's the right strategy do you need to go through,
you know, talking about and discussing all that unresolved trauma,
those problems of the past, or no, you should just
sort of move on and get along better.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
I think one of the first things to recognize is
that is that for the people who've experienced the trauma,
people do need to talk, and there are spaces and
should be spaces for that. I think every society has
a different approach to it. You know, often the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is held up as a model.
They Couchacha courts and process in Rwanda, some of the
(31:45):
reconciliation processes in Liberia. There's a lot of different really
interesting processes where people have come together as communities to
collectively hold and recognize the trauma that's existed so that
we don't just sweep it under the carpet, because I
think that sweeping it under the carpet doesn't resolve it,
it doesn't make it go away. But at the same time,
(32:07):
self flagellation over and over again doesn't take us forward.
What that does is might make a few people feel
good in the moment of like, oh, well, you know,
we apologize and we feel just terrible, But what is
that doing as we move forward? And here at the
Global Center actually, so we're in the Farmer War Museum
in Ottawa, and you know, this is a big colonial building.
(32:28):
It was the Dominion Archives originally, and so we commissioned
an indigenous history of the building and the land with
archipel Consulting, who are a really wonderful indigenous consulting firm.
And when we launched the report, there was a wonderful
young woman from kiddaganzb First Nation who came to open
with us. And one of the ways that she talked
about it, which I've always really loved, is she said,
(32:49):
you know, our trauma of the past was like a
bridge that was broken, and it was these shattered pieces.
But that what reconciliation asks us to do is take
those shattered pieces and rebuild a broken bridge forward. And
I really love that imagery because the whole point is
not to just go and sort of live in the
(33:10):
pain of the past. It's to say, we are here,
where we are now, what can we acknowledge and what
can we build? Because guilt, as other you know, First
Nations colleagues of mine have reminded me many times, guilt
is a paralyzing emotion. Shame is a paralyzing emotion. It
doesn't enable us to say I have some agency in
(33:33):
doing something better in the future that engages all of us,
that celebrates Indigenous culture, that doesn't erase the pain and
the trauma of the past, but celebrates that and celebrates
that alongside other things in Canadian history that we can
all be proud of. And so, I mean, I know
there's always controversy around things like that, you know, the
(33:54):
taking down of the statues and so forth, but I
think contextualization of these spaces is a really interesting approach.
Just behind us, there's a new point for your listeners
if they're ever up and on walks. We do some
beautiful spots Kiweki Point, which is just behind the National
gallery here has been reopened, and there was some controversy
(34:14):
around some statues there, and what they've done is they've
separated at the statues they worked with Kidagan zb First Nation.
They have a series of plaques that contextualize the space
and they ask you to reflect on the history and
on the future. And I think that coming together like
that in more constructive ways will take everybody forward, rather
(34:35):
than creating divisions or ignoring trauma that does need some
space in order to be a result.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
I like your image of repairing a broken vase or
a broken bridge and moving forward rather than what did you.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Call self self flagellation.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Is that what you think we did over the course
of the last five seven years.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
No, not entirely. I think there was some of that,
but I think that there was. I think it's been
a mixed record, and I also think when I look
at the truth and reconcilation calls to action. I think
one of the other things that's really striking to me
about that is that there's a lot of really practical
things in there that we can and should do around
ensuring that services are available for people, that some of
(35:26):
the structural marginalization that has gone on for so long
is repaired so that I mean clean drinking water is
the most obvious example, but obviously there's a huge number
of those, whether it is issues around children and care,
whether it's around health services and so forth. There's a
lot of really practical things that can be done. And
(35:48):
one of the things I find, back to one of
your questions about the pragmatism of pluralism, is that often
what holds people back from doing some of these practical
things is divisions of bringing people around the table that
need to be around a table that maybe don't agree
with one another, but they all know they all see
the same problem. They're seeing it from different vantage points,
(36:09):
to bring people around the table to come up with
some kind of collaborative solution. And I think that there's
a lot more that we can learn from peace building
around the world to have constructive conversations where you bring
different stakeholders together in order to address some of the
core issues.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
In the TRC Calls to Action person we're going to
take a break for some messages and come back in
just two minutes with our guest Meredith Preston McGhee talking
about pluralism, democracy, the world, International affairs and is her
attitude idealistic or is it what we actually need to
achieve the better world? Stay with zeveryone back in two mony.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
Stream us live at SAGA nine six am dot CA.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
Welcome back everyone to the Brian Crime Radio Wire. I've
got Mered Meredith Preston McGee with us tonight talking about pluralism. Meredith,
You've had like a really interesting career. You worked for
the United Nations for six years in Sudan and Kastovo
in Iraq and Sudan and Somalia, and then you work
for something called the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue in Africa
(37:26):
and then for their and for twelve years you did that.
Were you based in Africa the whole time? And then
you worked for the Global Center for Pluralism. So tell
us how'd you get to where you are, where'd you
live around the world and what the heck is the
Global Center for Pluralism.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
Let me start with through your first set of questions.
I was in Eastern the Horn of Africa for a
little over twenty years. I've been living in Asia before that,
and I first got involved in this work with a
very Canadian story, which is that I was part of
a youth international internship program funded by the Government of
Canada that sent me over to Asia where I got
to first work with Annaga. So I did have an
(38:06):
amazing opportunity to live and work around the world, and
then came back to Canada in twenty nineteen for this job.
But I'd been away for about twenty five years, and
so it really got shaped by the leadership of peacemakers
and community leaders in Sudan, so Sudan, Kenya, Somalia and
Nigeria and so many of these of these spaces. But
(38:27):
one of the reasons I came back was that the
Global Center for Pluralism for me, represents a sort of
the next layer of what it really means to build peace.
So we as a center were set up jointly actually
by the Government of Canada along with his late Highness
the Aga Khan. So for your listeners will will may
know his Highness y Aga Khan is the spiritual leader
(38:51):
of the It'smaili community around the world. We have, of
course a very large and activist Maley population in Canada.
His Highness really believed strongly that the ability to engage
constructively with difference was the secret sauce to success for societies,
but he equally recognized how incredibly difficult it is and
(39:13):
has been throughout history, and believed that there should be
a global center that was dedicated to trying to understand
when it works, how it works, and when it breaks down,
what that looks like and how we can repair it.
He also felt that despite all of our challenges and
the unfinished project of pluralism in Canada, that Canada was
(39:33):
one of the societies in the world that represented a
really deep commitment to a lot of those ideas, and
that was the reason that he was really keen to
situate the Center here in Canada.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
I understand that one of the things that your center
does is that your award a award that celebrates ordinary
people like teachers, artists and community organizers that work on
furthering pluralism. Why do you think, rather than people like
the Agaca, it's worthwhile focusing on the ordinary people that
(40:04):
have an impact on pluralism and there.
Speaker 3 (40:07):
It's wonderful because they are extraordinary ordinary people. And one
of the reasons that we set up the award was
firstly to support leaders like this around the world, but
secondly to inspire action and to demonstrate that this is
the work of all of us in society, and that
you don't need to be a head of state or
(40:28):
a spiritual leader to be leading for pluralism and to
make a transformative impact in your society. You can be.
You can be a young, displaced Sudanese person who says,
I'm actually going to change the way our society is
going to come together around peace. I remember a few
(40:49):
years ago one of our previous award laureates, and it's
an example I always love to give because it gives
a great example of the ordinary as well. She's a
hairdresser from the Dominican Republic and she was campaigning on
the acceptance of natural Afro hair because what they were
seeing in the Dominican Republic is if you went with
a natural afro to get your national ID photo taken,
(41:10):
they wouldn't take the photo. They tell you to go
back and have your hair done properly and come back.
And it was excluding women from getting their national ideas.
And this was an issue with her in our salons.
She was saying, come on, we can do something about this,
and so she did, and she campaigned. They changed the
laws and she campaigned around this issue from a hair salon,
and it's a reminder to us that we can all
(41:32):
make this kind of change in our own societies. We
can make that change whether or not we're running legal
aid clinics in Southern Africa, or we're teachers in the Balkans,
or we're peace activists in Israel and Palestine. We can
make this kind of change.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
You in this interview about peace, spoke about about how
you need to belong to. You need to feel that
you belong to be part of a pluralistic society. I
think a lot of people today think that to belong
you've got to belong to a national group, religious group,
(42:11):
you know. I think that people felt that they belonged
to this effort that Charlie Kirk was speaking to, but
his was a very narrow group. So do you belong
to a narrow group or can you belong to a
pluralistic group?
Speaker 3 (42:27):
Well, I think that when we think about positive belonging,
I wouldn't necessarily say it has to be narrow or abroad.
I think we all feel that we belong in different spaces, right,
So all of us have many different identities. Brian and
all of those in sometimes intention with us in our
everyday life. I feel, for example, because I lived outside
(42:47):
the country for twenty five years, I feel I belong
as much to communities in East Africa as I do
here in Canada. Each of us have our different sort
of idiosyncrasies in that space. What I think it makes
a real difference around this question of belonging in terms
of it being narrow or broad, is an idea that
I can belong in relationship with others in the society
(43:10):
instead of at the expense of others. So my belonging
doesn't sit in a hierarchy against yours, but in fact
my belonging and your belonging have to strengthen one another
in the society. So when we ask people when we
do research and belonging around the world, around belonging, we
ask about three questions. So you'd ask how much do
(43:31):
you feel part of And it can be how much
do I feel that I am a girl from Prince George,
where I was originally born, or how much do I
feel Canadian? It can be all of those things, But
the second set of questions would be how much do
I feel that you and others see me as Canadian?
Do you recognize me as part of this wider society,
(43:51):
so are we in relationship with each other? And then
the third piece is this question of how much do
I feel like I have any say in the direction
my see society is going. And it's this last piece
that I think we're actually at risk of right now,
is that people might feel, yeah, I'm part of my
little banned my community, or I'm part of my country,
(44:11):
but people are feeling like it's spinning out of control
and they don't have any kind of agency over the
direction their society is going, whether at the community level,
the provincial level, of.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
The national level.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
And I think what we look at when we try
to inspire actions through the Global Pluralism Awards, when we
try to give support with tools and resources for pluralism,
is to give people tools to have that kind of agency.
How can you engage positively in a conversation that's going
on in your community, whether or not it's about bike
lanes or a new development, or whether it's at your
(44:44):
children's school about an issue that's going on in the school.
How can you feel like you have agency over how
things are going and that you can use that productively
to bring other people together.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
I think it takes a lot of optimism. For sure,
you and your article talked about hope is a discipline.
I've never heard hope as a discipline. You know, Obama
talked about the audacity of hope. But how can hope
be a discipline?
Speaker 3 (45:12):
Well, I think that very much comes from spending a
lot of time in situations of really, really really serious
conflict and violence and seeing the horrific things that people
have done to each other and are capable of doing
to one another. That within that, you have to say
that if I don't have some degree of hope, if
(45:33):
I don't believe that people can do this better, what
is the alternative? When I look, for example, at a
Land for All, who are one of our Global Pluralism
Award winners this year, who are in Israeli Palestinian Peace Movement,
its Israelis and Palestinians who come together around a political
vision for two states and one homeland, saying there is
(45:56):
a way that we can build on a call on
human rights for all of us, on justice where we
can live together, where we can all belong. And a
lot of people have said to me, well, that's just
I mean, that's so optimistic given everything that has happened,
not just in the last couple of years, but over
(46:17):
decades in that region, how can they even think that?
And what I've said to them over and over again
is what is the alternaty? Is the alternative that we
just sit back and say it is just going to
be destruction and domination and hatred for the next seventy years.
We can't allow ourselves to get into those spaces. And
so hope does have to be a discipline in order
(46:39):
to say we can chart a political vision. And maybe
it starts with one conversation and then another conversation and another.
And what I have seen in peace processes is I
have seen it start with one conversation. We ran a
series of peace processes in the Middle Belt of Nigeria,
(46:59):
which is an area of deep seated, long standing violets.
Not genocide against the Christians, as President Trump has noted recently,
but something that is much more deep and complex between
sedentary populations and pastoralist populations, Muslim and Christian ethnicity. So
many different things come together, and nobody was able to
(47:22):
get leverage on starting a process. And I went there
with one of our senior advisors many many years ago
in the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, and we had a
series of just one on one conversations with radicalized young people,
with the security services, with the traditional leaders, with women,
and we just sat and we talked, and out of
that we were able to weave the beginning of a process.
(47:43):
And it happens one by one by one by one,
and it isn't going to change overnight. But I really
believe that of all of us would go out and
have that one conversation, you really never know where it
can lead.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Well, this is a very hopeful, optimistic and positive conversation.
I appreciate, you know. I really wonder how Ukrainians and
Russians are ever going to live together or live even
as neighbors with a wall between them in the future.
I wonder how people from Gaza and Israelis will ever
live together. But then I'm astounded that the that the
(48:18):
Catholics and the Protestants in Northern Ireland seem to have
figured it out. And I'm not close enough to that
to know why and how, but it seems to have
worked in a place that seemed, you know, impossible to
have reconciliation over over a long period of time. You
finished this article with a really interesting quote which I
don't understand. I wonder if you could explain it to me,
(48:38):
because I think it talks and speaks to this issue.
You say, and you're quoting Rumy. You say, out beyond
ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field.
I'll meet you there. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 3 (48:53):
So, Brian, I'm also laughing because I say, sometimes we
like to joke that when we want to be accessible
about these issues, let's start by quoting a thirteenth century
Sufi poet, and so unconscious that it does feel a
bit esoteric. But the idea and the reason I love
that quote is that often we get stuck in our
heads about this thing is right and this thing is wrong,
and we can't get out of that to say, but actually,
(49:17):
if we step forward into a space of trying to
understand everything that's going on from all angles, then we
can maybe begin to unpack the problem. And so often
what I talk to people in peacemaking spaces and in
pluralist spaces is I say, look for the people who
(49:37):
are in the field, because there's a lot of people
in our society that you will disagree with deeply, but
they are interested in trying to have a deeper understanding
of the issue. They're interested in trying to understand why
you think what you think, and then to interrogate a
little bit why they think what they think, and through
that you can come up with really interesting and different
(49:59):
conversation that will start to open the kinds of spaces
that I mentioned even in my Nigeria example, that you
begin to sort of unpack these pieces. And so we
have to, I think, get out of these binaries of
I believe this and you believe that, and there's simply
a gulf in between us. But step into this field
(50:19):
where we can start to understand one another, and through
that you'll see the seeds of pluralism. You'll see the
seeds of rather than me being afraid of your difference
of opinion than mine, that we're coming to a space
where we can explore that together.
Speaker 2 (50:35):
Meredith, thank you so much for Jonas, I really appreciate it.
If people want to follow up on your organization, is
there a website that they should go to to check
you and your organization and some of your articles.
Speaker 3 (50:44):
About absolutely so pluralism. Dot ca is our website and
you can also find us Global Center for Pluralism on Instagram,
on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on x across all of the
social media.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
I got to tell you this has been a fascinating
conversation and I need to have you back because I
did check out your website. You've got an article about
females going on a sex strike to further peace, and
then another article on what is evil, and then another
one on a peace building a peace building blueprint based
on twenty years of experience. So I think you've probably
(51:20):
got a lot of really great secrets to let us
know about, and some scary ones like a female sex strike,
but I won't talk about that. Thank you so much
for joining us. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (51:28):
Thanks Brian, it was a pleasure.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
That's our show for tonight. Thank you everyone for joining us.
I'm on every Monday through Friday at six o'clock on
nine to sixty am. You can stream me online a
triple W Saga ninety sixty Am dot CA. You can
get all my podcasts videocasts on Briancrombie dot com, on YouTube,
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Podcasts and on Speakeasy, Thank you, checking out good Night Everybody.
Speaker 1 (51:56):
Stream us live at SAGA nine six am dot C
The views expressed in the following program are those of
the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of
Saga nine sixty am or its management.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Scidinnian. Everyone, and welcome to the Brian Crombie Radio Hour.
So we've got an interesting conversation today about sort of pluralism,
foreign affairs, international relations, what's going on with all of
the changes that are occurring in our world today. I
think this is going to be a topic that we
really want to discuss. Our guest is Meredith Preston McGee.
She's devoted nearly thirty years to addressing conflict and instability
(00:40):
in Africa and Asia in some of the most troubled
situations around the world. She is with the Global Center
for Pluralism. She's the Secretary General and she's going to
speak to us today about what pluralism is all about.
What's happening international relations. We'll talk about Asia, We'll talk
about Africa. This is going to be a fascinating conversation today.
(01:00):
Welcome to thinking about more than just Tronto and Canada,
thinking about the world. Meredith, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Thank you so much for having me, Brian.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
My pleasure. So tell me what is pluralism and how
does pluralism function as a strategic advantage for Canada, for
countries and for communities. Explain please?
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Thanks, well, I will start with explaining pluralism and how
we see it. I think it's a word that a
lot of people may have heard, but they can't necessarily
put their finger on what it really means. And what
we do know in our society and in societies around
the world is that differences abound everywhere. All of our
societies are diverse. That's simply a fact. We're going to
(01:41):
be different ethnically, linguistically, geographically, in terms of our background, generation, gender, everything.
What pluralism asks us to do is to take actions,
to make choices to respond to that difference and diversity
as something as that is positive, that is a potential
strength in our societies, a threat, not something that we
(02:01):
need to suppress, not something that we need to weaponize
as forces of division. So pluralism is really asking us
to take that as our superpower. So that's really the
core of what we're asking people and societies to do.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
As are superpower.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Really, I believe so, and I think that as we
are in a time of real anxiety of real division
and polarization, and probably structurally in spaces where we may
feel more isolated from one another, with fewer opportunities to
connect with one another, even in a country like Canada,
(02:40):
when we're at a time where there are more conflicts
at play in the world than there have been for
almost one hundred years, that the ability to overcome difference,
the ability to see diversity as something positive rather than
something to be weaponized, is the way that we will
come to both resolve the conflicts that we're seeing around
(03:00):
the world, but also to better manage our democracies. I
think at a time of a rise of authoritarianism, some
would say not just a crisis of multilateralism around the world,
but a crisis of democracies, we need to figure out
how to engage positively with one another, particularly when we
(03:21):
see things differently.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Meredith, is your belief and attitude overly idealistic and out
of touch with the current realities of today? Given you
know what you see in the United States, and what
you've seen to a certain extent in Canada, what you've
seen in Western Europe where there's an anti immigrant backlash,
there's you know, ice people on the streets rounding up
(03:48):
people and deporting them forcibly, where Canadian politicians and the
public appear to not be in favor of the immigration
levels that we've had in the past years, is what
you're talking about just old fashioned and too idealistic.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Well, I actually think it's the way of the future.
Rather than being something that is old fashioned, I think
that it is practical. I'm also really conscious and we
see around the world it is incredibly hard. And one
of the reasons we talk about it, and one of
the reasons that we develop tools and techniques is that
we're conscious that it's not easy to talk with people
that we don't agree with. It's not easy to engage
(04:26):
with people whose backgrounds and perspectives are different from ours.
And we need to have structures, We need to have systems.
We need to kind of have the muscles in our
society so that we can sit down with somebody with
whom we disagree and figure out, first of all, where
we have some common ground, because often there is common
ground that we're not seeing. And we have to push
(04:46):
back against the polarization, division and frankly weaponization. And I
think the examples that you give from ice agents and
the rise of nativistic nationalism and fear are really good examples.
But I think that we need techniques to push back
against that. I don't think that that division and that
(05:06):
polarization serves any of us. Do we need to think so, Brian,
if I can say that, I think scarcity is where
a lot of people are at. People feel like there
isn't enough to go around, and so they need to
protect what they have. And I recognize that fear, but
I also think that if we look throughout history, actually
in those moments of scarcity, collaboration is what gets you through.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
I was at a really interesting presentation by Fred Zachari
last week, the CNN commentator who is a Canadian American citizen.
He from India, Muslim commentator, and he was almost suggesting
that what we had done is we were too lenient.
We accepted too many immigrants into particularly the United States,
(05:50):
particularly asylum seekers. And he said there's an amount of
change that populations are are able to absorb, and that
we we tried to get them to change too much,
and that that was the problem. And it was almost
as if you know, it's back to this sort of
melting pot versus mosaic attitude. It was almost as if
(06:11):
this gentleman, who I was surprised and wasn't expecting to
have this attitude from, was arguing in favor of the
US assimilation and melting pot rather than the Canadian mosaic attitude.
And that you know, a reasonable amount of immigration can
be absorbed from a society, but too much leads to backlash.
So what do you think about that?
Speaker 3 (06:31):
So I don't necessarily think it's the numbers. I think
it's the way that it operates. And when you look
actually at migration in other parts of the world now
remind us often that Canada we haven't seen the same
levels of migration that you see in a lot of
other in a lot of other countries. But what we
have seen here in Canada that has worked really well
is when communities come together to welcome immigrants into their spaces.
(06:54):
That often, when you bring what I would call sort
of host communities together with new newcomer Canadians or newcomers
in other societies and you make it a collective project,
you see a lot more success. So I think there's
a lot of issues around the process, which isn't the
numbers game necessarily, it's how we're engaging with people in
(07:16):
our in our societies, in our spaces.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
You've done a lot of work in Africa and Asia.
Tell me a little bit about what you found there
in regards to pluralism, because you know, India, as one example,
is very dominant in one religion and one ethnic background.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
And at the same time was founded as a pluralist democracy.
But I would say is on a different trajectory. Now.
You know, what's interesting about pluralism as an idea as
well is that it's constantly evolving and changing. So what
we think about in terms of pluralism in Canada today
isn't what pluralism was fifty years ago in Canada. And similarly,
(07:54):
in India, we're seeing a rise of a dominant Hindu
majoritarianism as a narrative. But when you spend time moving
around India, you hear a kind of ply of different languages,
You see different religions, you see different cultural expressions. You
even see different cultural expression within Hinduism, let alone within
the other communities religions, ethnicities, faiths, and languages across that country.
(08:21):
I think one of the questions that we often ask with,
particularly with democracies, is this idea of majoritarianism can be
dangerous because it can say, okay, so if you are
not part of the dominant mainstream, you don't get to
be a full citizen. If you don't speak this language,
you don't get to be a full citizen. If you
don't express this faith, you don't get to be a
(08:42):
full citizen. And while that can feel comfortable in the moment,
particularly when you're in the dominant majority, it doesn't serve
your societies in the long term. What I've seen across
Africa in particular, is that when you marginalize and marginalize
and marginalize a group, when you tell them over in
a run over again, you don't really get to be Kenyan.
(09:03):
You don't really get to be Sudanese. You fement spaces
where you will see over time the narrowing of people's
sense of options and opportunities. And what we see in
places like Sudan, for example, South Sudan, parts of Kenya,
is you see that leading to violence, You see that
leading to people feeling like they have no other agency
(09:24):
other than expressions of violence.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Isn't isn't that like the trend that we see we
see civil wars in so many different places around the
world where ethnic groups, religious groups. Maybe they're just people
that are trying to control the economic rewards of being
in a control of society. But it seems like this
idea that we could all get along is pass and
(09:49):
then the poluralistic, democratic mosaic societies that you know, Canada
wanted to be are pass a. What do you think
about that.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
I think that sounds like you're giving up, and I
think that we absolutely can't. I think that it's hard,
and I think that right now when we see civil
wars around around the world, I think that that is
certainly disheartening concerning cause for pessimism. But at the same time,
for example, when I spend time with Sudanese and one
(10:21):
of our Global Pluralism Award laureates who's going to be
with us in a couple of weeks is a Sudanese
youth network that are working across lines in Sudan, and
I look at a space like that that is one
of the most deeply polarized, one of the most violent
situations on the planet right now, and they are managing
to bring together young people from both sides, from places
(10:41):
that are under the control of both the military and
the militias, people who are divided in so many ways,
and they are able to come together and figure out
ways of starting to talk about peace. And I think
when those things can be happening around the world, I
genuinely believe that we can all do more of that.
So while there is a trend, I don't think it's
an inevitability. And I think the real danger right now
(11:04):
is for all of us to think that we don't
have agency to make it better. I'm not saying it's easy,
and it isn't in a way about all of us
just getting along. It's about us recognizing that our differences
don't have to inevitably be division and violence. Our differences
can be something else.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Maybe if you could, because I'm not sure if everyone
listening is familiar where Sudan even is, let alone what
the issues are, could you just take a step back
for a second and tell us a little bit about
Sudan Because my understanding is that you know, there was
a democratic movement being born in Sudan, the military came
(11:45):
back in and took over control, and that it's two
different parts of the military that are actually fighting now.
It's not necessarily a religious or ethnic division that's created
this incredible civil war, with an incredible amount of poverty
and starvation and death. It's just people fighting over the
economic rewards. What's your assessment? Tell us where the heck
is Sudan by the way.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
So Sudan is in is in the Horn of Africa.
And so if you imagine a map of Africa sort
of a giant upside down triangle, and you go over
to your to sort of your right top corner, you
have Sudan there on the Red Sea. So it's strategically important.
It sort of faces the Gulf in the Middle East,
but it also faces the rest of Sub Saharan Africa.
It's really it has been in the pastorald bread basket.
(12:28):
It is a strategically important place, not just for the continent,
but for the wider for the wider region. Obviously Egypt
borders it to the north and then and then up
into the Mediterranean. What you've described Brian is a very
good precis of what's happening right now. I would say
a couple of things. The wars. This is one of
many wars that Sudan has faced over years of military
(12:51):
rule and civil war that led of course to the
separation of South Sudan, the previous wars in Darfia and others.
So this is something that is been built upon many
layers of conflict, and a lot of those conflicts have
been because Sudan has not managed its diversity well. So
there are ethnic dimensions to the conflict, there are geographic
(13:13):
elements to the conflict, and there are different identity pieces
to it. The reasons of the immediate current conflicts certainly
are a breakdown between the Sudan arm Forces and one
of the main militia groups that they sort of were
allied with as part of the military takeover of Sudan
after the Democratic revolution and the attempt at a democratic
(13:35):
transition after twenty and nineteen. But what you're seeing now
is a war over the spoils of the country, certainly
by these two militaries. But what you also see inevitably
in any of these sorts of conflicts is that people
have to live in these spaces. People have to find
ways of surviving under the authority of the Sudan ar
(13:58):
forces in one space or the rapid support forces in
the other, and do anything that they can to survive.
And so it creates new layers of division, new layers
of trauma, and new layers of polarization that we have
to work again to fight back to bring Sudan back
together again. I think the idea of a Sudan separating
(14:21):
again is really taking everyone down the wrong path. You know,
President Tabombecki, who is very involved in a lot of
the mediation processes in Sudan previously, and of course the
former President of South Africa has spoken really eloquently on
the danger of imagining that you can carve out smaller
spaces ethnically or otherwise as countries and sort of say, well,
(14:45):
you can have your bit and we can have our bit,
and if we just stay out of one another's way,
things will get easier and things will get better. And
what we know about the world is people move and
people intermingle, and all of our histories are multi layered
and related to one another in so many different ways
that you can't disentangle. You can't disentangle it in Sudan,
(15:05):
you can't disentangle that in Canada, you can't disentangle that
anywhere in the world. So we do have to find
ways that we can live together. Quite frankly, without killing
each other.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
We, you know, obviously have a war in Ukraine, the
Russian invasion of Ukraine. We've got a war that you know,
maybe Trump thought he solved but doesn't appear to be
actually over in the Middle East between Israel and Gaza.
Are we just not paying enough attention to what's going
in Sudan? You know, what I've heard is that if
the United States and Saudi Arabia actually wanted to, they
(15:37):
could end the war in Sudan. What's your assessment of
how we solve this problem.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Absolutely, we're not spending enough time on it. I think
the United States has a huge role to play. I
think the Saudis have a huge role to play, as
does Egypt, as does the United Arab Emirates, and those
four countries in fact make up something called the Quad,
and they have been in converse with one another. But
this is a war that is being fueled by the outside,
(16:04):
not fueled by the United States per se, but fueled
by others in the region. This is not just a
Sudanese war, and people do need to take it more seriously.
But I would say that while the military and the
rapid support forces, as the militia are most in the news.
If you're going to come up with a solution for Sudan,
you have to center the civilians who speak for the
(16:25):
actual people of Sudan. The military forces and the rapid
support forces do not represent the people of Sudan, and
so any kind of solution has to really be driven
by speaking to independent civilians who are driving for peace.
And the Sudanese Use Networks who I mentioned before, is
one such example. There are platforms of independent civilians who've
(16:48):
been working towards a process like this. But I would
also say Brian that in addition to the big powers
that we mentioned, Canada can play a role in this.
Canada has been a promoter of peace around the world
in the past, and we can play a bigger role
than we have been recently.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
But last question on Sudan, Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I thought there was democracy. I thought that they elected
a democratic government in the recent past and it was
completely taken over by the military. So what went wrong?
Why didn't democracy take hold? And why didn't people support democracy?
Speaker 3 (17:25):
People support democracy? The roots of the military industrial complex
in Sudan are incredibly deep, and so while the revolution
in twenty nineteen toppled President Omar al Bashir and led
to this beginning of this democratic transition. The military systems
(17:46):
and the Islamist structures that are behind them continued to
control economy, continued to control security, and you've seen this
in other places. In Myanmar, is I think a comparable
example where you have democratic structures that start to emerge,
but when a lot of the state systems of power
are still controlled by the military, democracy is really it's new,
(18:10):
it's fragile, and it's this veneer that hasn't been able
to take over the entire power structures. The transition was
nowhere near or finished. And it's one of the reasons
that we saw the military coup. They didn't want the
democratic transition to unseat the military power. It's part of
the reason why the period between twenty nineteen and the
war reemerging in twenty twenty three was so short.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
It's a shame. It's a real shame. And you know,
there are some people that I think believe it'd be
interesting and I'll maybe ask you later on that controlling
the economic spoils of society ends up being one of
the major objectives of people, and they use racism and
religion and nationalism and even you know, misogyny. Sexism is
that way of just you know, having some other way
(18:54):
of controlling all the all the resources of society. You know, absolutely,
I don't know why why we just can't get along better.
We're gonna take a break for some messages and come
back in just two minutes with our guest Meredith Preston McGee,
talking about pluralism, democracy, international affairs and how we get
along better, how we create peace. Stay with us, everyone
(19:16):
back into minute.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
No Radio, No Problem stream is live on SAGA nine
sixty am dot C.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Welcome back everyone to the Brian Crimee Radio our really
interesting conversation tonight with Meredith Meredith Preston McGee. She is
the Global Center for Pluralism Secretary General. She was appointed
to that in October twenty nineteen. In this position, it's
a peace builder job where she provides strategic leadership for
the Center and represents the organization externally as an ambassador
(20:00):
of pluralism to develop strong relationships with diplomatic communities, governments,
and other institutions. Before the Center, Meredith worked as the
African Regional Director with the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, overseeing
some complex mediation and dialogue efforts in Africa. She also
worked in the Kenya National Dialogue and reconciliation process, and
(20:21):
she's contributed annually to the Oslo Forum. Wow, and and
you know, Meredith, you've worked with the Naga in northeast India,
with indigenous communities in Miramar supporting you, and efforts in Kosovo,
Northern Iraq, South Sudan, Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, and Kenya. What
(20:42):
a What a career, what a life, What an experience.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
I've been incredibly fortunate to spend time in all of
those places. That's taught me a huge amount.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
What does it taught you?
Speaker 3 (20:57):
You know, Brian, I was thinking the other day actually
that one of my early arliest jobs was with the
Naga in the northeast of India. It's a community I'm
sure most of your listeners have never heard of. It's
in a tiny mountainous bit of India that sits on
the other side of Bangladesh. It's in one of the
provinces in Nagalata and Manipur. And I was working with
(21:18):
indigenous leaders, human rights leaders, and I was also working
with the Armed Resistance helping them negotiate with the Government
of India, and one of my mentors talked a lot
about the need for the Naga to fight the government
of India because they were fighting for the soul of
their culture. Their culture was pluralist and democratic and consensus
(21:42):
building and open, and they were fighting for protection of
their own culture against the onslaught of the Government of India.
But in creating a secretive armed resistance movement in order
to fight the Government of India, that they'd lost their
cultural soul, that the things that they were fighting for
(22:06):
they ended up losing by having to fight the kind
of violent, secretive, secretive, militarized resistance that they needed to
fight in the war against the Government of India. And
that is always stayed with me when I think about
how we seek to resolve conflict, but also how we
seek to protect our own democracies, whether it was when
(22:29):
I was living in Kenya or here back in Canada,
that we really have to sit back and think about
our first principles of what we are as a society
and what fighting for our democracy or fighting for our
culture actually does to the culture that we're maybe trying
to protect. And when I think of all of that.
It's one of the reasons why pluralism has always been
(22:51):
such an attractive concept to me, because I think it
asks us to go back to the first principles of
our society of what do we want? What do we
want for our children? And I think when you ask
people around the world what they want, it's amazing how
remarkably similar the answers are. People want to be able
to sustain themselves with dignity, They want jobs and livelihoods,
(23:14):
but they also want to feel like they belong. They
want to feel like they belong in their communities, they
want to feel like they're seen for who they are,
they want to be in relationship with other people, and
they want to be able to shape how that society
is moving forward. And that's really at the heart of
what pluralism tries to help us to do in times
of peace, but also in recovery from conflict, to get
(23:37):
back to some of those basic principles that I think
really are universal.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
I want to challenge you if I could, because when
you think about democracy, democracy is also you know, majority worlds.
If you get fifty point one percent, or in a
lot of cases even if you you know, you just
get forty percent because of a split vote. You get
to control the agenda, you get control what's going on.
And a lot of democratic parties seem to be catering
(24:05):
to their base rather than actually being pluralistic and wanting
to represent the whole population. So is democracy and pluralism
the same thing or are they different things? And it
seems like, you know, you're very and I think inspirational
but potentially idealistic attitude toward pluralism may not be where
(24:27):
democracy is today.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Well, it's interesting because democracy and pluralism certainly aren't the
same thing. And we also see that a lot of
pluralistic tendencies of wanting to actually engage with your diversity
positively doesn't have to be a democratic trait. You see
this happening in non democratic societies as well as in
democratic societies. But what we do see is that when
you are a diverse democracy, if you don't have an
(24:51):
underpinning of pluralism, your system doesn't actually work. It's what
leads to that kind of fragmentation. So majoritarianism, as you describe,
when it becomes a winner takes all system, is when
things start to break down. And of course most systems
have various checks and balances for that. You'll have rights
of minorities. You'll have maybe state legislatures to balance to
(25:16):
balance in national legislature. You'll have checks and balances within
a system. When you have a minority government, maybe you
have to collaborate with other parties in order to in
order to get your agenda forward. You have a free
media to hold politicians and other leaders to account. All
of these things together are designed in many systems in
(25:37):
order to ensure that I can't just say I got
one more vote than you, I can do anything I
want for the next five years. We create a scaffolding
of our governance systems that also sort of says, broadly speaking,
though this is what we believe, right, It's a constitution,
it's our charter, it's constitutional processes around the world. And
(25:58):
so I think what pluralism helps us to do is
to kind of again get back to some of those
first principles, to talk to one another. And again, I
take your point about idealism, but I think that what
pluralism is asking of us is not to build a
perfect society, but also to recognize that if we fall
into traps of weaponization, of being allowed to be divided
(26:21):
over issues that don't actually have to divide us. We
are being pawns in a game where maybe it is
people who are looking for economic advantage or political advantage
of what have you. And I think people can be
better than that. I think sometimes we don't always have
the tools, we don't always have the techniques to do it.
And one of the things that we do is we
spend a lot of time building some of those tools
(26:43):
and techniques. We celebrate our Global Pluralism Award laureates as
people who are doing this in some of the most
difficult parts of the world and showing us that it
can actually be done.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
I read an interesting interview that you did called lessons
in Peace Building, and I want to ask you about
one of the comments you made because I found it. Actually,
I'd love to ask you about several of the comments
you made, but one of the comments you made was
listen for this said the unsaid and the unsayable. What
do you mean by that?
Speaker 3 (27:14):
Well, first of all, I have to and I realized
in that interview she didn't she didn't footnote him. But
that was from the Massy lectures here in Canada year
before last, and now that you've asked me about it,
I'm forgetting the name of the lecturer. But it's really
stayed with me as a concept because what you see,
and what I have seen in peacemaking around the world,
is that you get into a room and there's an agenda.
(27:35):
There's a formal agenda. We're going to talk about the constitution,
or we're going to talk about issue ex er issue why.
But then there's always the reading between the lines. There's
always the things that people are wanting to bring into
the room but they can't quite bring into the room yet,
or they're trying to get there through another guys, and
so that's really the unsaid. But then there are the
(27:58):
deeper questions really sit at the heart of perhaps in
a conflict situation, why I am deeply traumatized, what it
really means for me to feel excluded, what it might
mean that other identities that I hold are not being recognized,
and when I think, for example, when I was in
the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation process where I was
(28:21):
working with this excellency Kofia, we were talking a lot
about about a range of a range of issues at
the table and One of the issues that came up
was was education and the need to support a revision
of the history curriculum in Kenya, and there was just
an explosion in the room of the leaders that was
not in keeping with the issue of your history textbook.
(28:45):
A lot of us within a history textbook, but what
was being proposed in the Unseid that was really about
the unsayable was the layers of conflict, the layers of
violent life and grabbing that had taken place for decades
in Kenya that had led to the power structures that
existed in that very room that we were sitting in.
(29:08):
It was talking about massacres that had taken place in
the north that did not feature in any way in
the history curriculum, that would further marginalize different groups in
the society with all of these layers of things, and
it was coming out in a history curriculum. And so
when you're in a room so often there are many
different layers of conversation. And what I've seen as a
(29:30):
peacemaker is that when you can build layers of trust,
people will start just with the said, Okay, so this
is what we're going to talk about, and then you
can get a little bit further down into some of
the tougher issues, some of the issues that really maybe
divide you. You can start to ask some questions about
those sorts of things, and if you can spend enough
time and get to enough trust, you can get into
(29:51):
the really, really really deep spaces that are potentially more traumatic,
that bring up a lot of really really deep emotion.
But if you can create spaces where people feel like
they can raise those things without everything breaking, they can
have a breakthrough in terms of how they can actually
deal with and address those cycles of trauma. Because so
(30:12):
many of the conflicts that we're looking at around the
world are a layer upon layer upon layer of unresolved trauma,
of things that have never.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Been said, unresolved trauma, things have never been said. That's
an interesting, interesting topic. Let me ask you about that
from a Canadian perspective as well as an international perspective.
You know, just and true to our former Prime minister
was criticized that he spent you know, years talking about
sort of truth and reconciliation about all the things that
we have done in the past that are bad. And
clearly we did some things in the past as a
(30:41):
society that you know, whether the residential schools or or
some of the ways that we treated our indigenous communities
and things like that that were bad. And yet a
lot of people reacted negatively to that and thought, you know,
changing Dundask Square and taking down a statue of Johnny
MacDonald and you know, saying that, you know, evaluating people
in the past by the attitudes of today are wrong.
(31:05):
So what's the right strategy do you need to go through,
you know, talking about and discussing all that unresolved trauma,
those problems of the past, or no, you should just
sort of move on and get along better.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
I think one of the first things to recognize is
that is that for the people who've experienced the trauma,
people do need to talk, and there are spaces and
should be spaces for that. I think every society has
a different approach to it. You know, often the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is held up as a model.
They Couchacha courts and process in Rwanda, some of the
(31:45):
reconciliation processes in Liberia. There's a lot of different really
interesting processes where people have come together as communities to
collectively hold and recognize the trauma that's existed so that
we don't just sweep it under the carpet, because I
think that sweeping it under the carpet doesn't resolve it,
it doesn't make it go away. But at the same time,
(32:07):
self flagellation over and over again doesn't take us forward.
What that does is might make a few people feel
good in the moment of like, oh, well, you know,
we apologize and we feel just terrible, But what is
that doing as we move forward? And here at the
Global Center actually, so we're in the Farmer War Museum
in Ottawa, and you know, this is a big colonial building.
(32:28):
It was the Dominion Archives originally, and so we commissioned
an indigenous history of the building and the land with
archipel Consulting, who are a really wonderful indigenous consulting firm.
And when we launched the report, there was a wonderful
young woman from kiddaganzb First Nation who came to open
with us. And one of the ways that she talked
about it, which I've always really loved, is she said,
(32:49):
you know, our trauma of the past was like a
bridge that was broken, and it was these shattered pieces.
But that what reconciliation asks us to do is take
those shattered pieces and rebuild a broken bridge forward. And
I really love that imagery because the whole point is
not to just go and sort of live in the
(33:10):
pain of the past. It's to say, we are here,
where we are now, what can we acknowledge and what
can we build? Because guilt, as other you know, First
Nations colleagues of mine have reminded me many times, guilt
is a paralyzing emotion. Shame is a paralyzing emotion. It
doesn't enable us to say I have some agency in
(33:33):
doing something better in the future that engages all of us,
that celebrates Indigenous culture, that doesn't erase the pain and
the trauma of the past, but celebrates that and celebrates
that alongside other things in Canadian history that we can
all be proud of. And so, I mean, I know
there's always controversy around things like that, you know, the
(33:54):
taking down of the statues and so forth, but I
think contextualization of these spaces is a really interesting approach.
Just behind us, there's a new point for your listeners
if they're ever up and on walks. We do some
beautiful spots Kiweki Point, which is just behind the National
gallery here has been reopened, and there was some controversy
(34:14):
around some statues there, and what they've done is they've
separated at the statues they worked with Kidagan zb First Nation.
They have a series of plaques that contextualize the space
and they ask you to reflect on the history and
on the future. And I think that coming together like
that in more constructive ways will take everybody forward, rather
(34:35):
than creating divisions or ignoring trauma that does need some
space in order to be a result.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
I like your image of repairing a broken vase or
a broken bridge and moving forward rather than what did you.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Call self self flagellation.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Is that what you think we did over the course
of the last five seven years.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
No, not entirely. I think there was some of that,
but I think that there was. I think it's been
a mixed record, and I also think when I look
at the truth and reconcilation calls to action. I think
one of the other things that's really striking to me
about that is that there's a lot of really practical
things in there that we can and should do around
ensuring that services are available for people, that some of
(35:26):
the structural marginalization that has gone on for so long
is repaired so that I mean clean drinking water is
the most obvious example, but obviously there's a huge number
of those, whether it is issues around children and care,
whether it's around health services and so forth. There's a
lot of really practical things that can be done. And
(35:48):
one of the things I find, back to one of
your questions about the pragmatism of pluralism, is that often
what holds people back from doing some of these practical
things is divisions of bringing people around the table that
need to be around a table that maybe don't agree
with one another, but they all know they all see
the same problem. They're seeing it from different vantage points,
(36:09):
to bring people around the table to come up with
some kind of collaborative solution. And I think that there's
a lot more that we can learn from peace building
around the world to have constructive conversations where you bring
different stakeholders together in order to address some of the
core issues.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
In the TRC Calls to Action person we're going to
take a break for some messages and come back in
just two minutes with our guest Meredith Preston McGhee talking
about pluralism, democracy, the world, International affairs and is her
attitude idealistic or is it what we actually need to
achieve the better world? Stay with zeveryone back in two mony.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
Stream us live at SAGA nine six am dot CA.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
Welcome back everyone to the Brian Crime Radio Wire. I've
got Mered Meredith Preston McGee with us tonight talking about pluralism. Meredith,
You've had like a really interesting career. You worked for
the United Nations for six years in Sudan and Kastovo
in Iraq and Sudan and Somalia, and then you work
for something called the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue in Africa
(37:26):
and then for their and for twelve years you did that.
Were you based in Africa the whole time? And then
you worked for the Global Center for Pluralism. So tell
us how'd you get to where you are, where'd you
live around the world and what the heck is the
Global Center for Pluralism.
Speaker 3 (37:43):
Let me start with through your first set of questions.
I was in Eastern the Horn of Africa for a
little over twenty years. I've been living in Asia before that,
and I first got involved in this work with a
very Canadian story, which is that I was part of
a youth international internship program funded by the Government of
Canada that sent me over to Asia where I got
to first work with Annaga. So I did have an
(38:06):
amazing opportunity to live and work around the world, and
then came back to Canada in twenty nineteen for this job.
But I'd been away for about twenty five years, and
so it really got shaped by the leadership of peacemakers
and community leaders in Sudan, so Sudan, Kenya, Somalia and
Nigeria and so many of these of these spaces. But
(38:27):
one of the reasons I came back was that the
Global Center for Pluralism for me, represents a sort of
the next layer of what it really means to build peace.
So we as a center were set up jointly actually
by the Government of Canada along with his late Highness
the Aga Khan. So for your listeners will will may
know his Highness y Aga Khan is the spiritual leader
(38:51):
of the It'smaili community around the world. We have, of
course a very large and activist Maley population in Canada.
His Highness really believed strongly that the ability to engage
constructively with difference was the secret sauce to success for societies,
but he equally recognized how incredibly difficult it is and
(39:13):
has been throughout history, and believed that there should be
a global center that was dedicated to trying to understand
when it works, how it works, and when it breaks down,
what that looks like and how we can repair it.
He also felt that despite all of our challenges and
the unfinished project of pluralism in Canada, that Canada was
(39:33):
one of the societies in the world that represented a
really deep commitment to a lot of those ideas, and
that was the reason that he was really keen to
situate the Center here in Canada.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
I understand that one of the things that your center
does is that your award a award that celebrates ordinary
people like teachers, artists and community organizers that work on
furthering pluralism. Why do you think, rather than people like
the Agaca, it's worthwhile focusing on the ordinary people that
(40:04):
have an impact on pluralism and there.
Speaker 3 (40:07):
It's wonderful because they are extraordinary ordinary people. And one
of the reasons that we set up the award was
firstly to support leaders like this around the world, but
secondly to inspire action and to demonstrate that this is
the work of all of us in society, and that
you don't need to be a head of state or
(40:28):
a spiritual leader to be leading for pluralism and to
make a transformative impact in your society. You can be.
You can be a young, displaced Sudanese person who says,
I'm actually going to change the way our society is
going to come together around peace. I remember a few
(40:49):
years ago one of our previous award laureates, and it's
an example I always love to give because it gives
a great example of the ordinary as well. She's a
hairdresser from the Dominican Republic and she was campaigning on
the acceptance of natural Afro hair because what they were
seeing in the Dominican Republic is if you went with
a natural afro to get your national ID photo taken,
(41:10):
they wouldn't take the photo. They tell you to go
back and have your hair done properly and come back.
And it was excluding women from getting their national ideas.
And this was an issue with her in our salons.
She was saying, come on, we can do something about this,
and so she did, and she campaigned. They changed the
laws and she campaigned around this issue from a hair salon,
and it's a reminder to us that we can all
(41:32):
make this kind of change in our own societies. We
can make that change whether or not we're running legal
aid clinics in Southern Africa, or we're teachers in the Balkans,
or we're peace activists in Israel and Palestine. We can
make this kind of change.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
You in this interview about peace, spoke about about how
you need to belong to. You need to feel that
you belong to be part of a pluralistic society. I
think a lot of people today think that to belong
you've got to belong to a national group, religious group,
(42:11):
you know. I think that people felt that they belonged
to this effort that Charlie Kirk was speaking to, but
his was a very narrow group. So do you belong
to a narrow group or can you belong to a
pluralistic group?
Speaker 3 (42:27):
Well, I think that when we think about positive belonging,
I wouldn't necessarily say it has to be narrow or abroad.
I think we all feel that we belong in different spaces, right,
So all of us have many different identities. Brian and
all of those in sometimes intention with us in our
everyday life. I feel, for example, because I lived outside
(42:47):
the country for twenty five years, I feel I belong
as much to communities in East Africa as I do
here in Canada. Each of us have our different sort
of idiosyncrasies in that space. What I think it makes
a real difference around this question of belonging in terms
of it being narrow or broad, is an idea that
I can belong in relationship with others in the society
(43:10):
instead of at the expense of others. So my belonging
doesn't sit in a hierarchy against yours, but in fact
my belonging and your belonging have to strengthen one another
in the society. So when we ask people when we
do research and belonging around the world, around belonging, we
ask about three questions. So you'd ask how much do
(43:31):
you feel part of And it can be how much
do I feel that I am a girl from Prince George,
where I was originally born, or how much do I
feel Canadian? It can be all of those things, But
the second set of questions would be how much do
I feel that you and others see me as Canadian?
Do you recognize me as part of this wider society,
(43:51):
so are we in relationship with each other? And then
the third piece is this question of how much do
I feel like I have any say in the direction
my see society is going. And it's this last piece
that I think we're actually at risk of right now,
is that people might feel, yeah, I'm part of my
little banned my community, or I'm part of my country,
(44:11):
but people are feeling like it's spinning out of control
and they don't have any kind of agency over the
direction their society is going, whether at the community level,
the provincial level, of.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
The national level.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
And I think what we look at when we try
to inspire actions through the Global Pluralism Awards, when we
try to give support with tools and resources for pluralism,
is to give people tools to have that kind of agency.
How can you engage positively in a conversation that's going
on in your community, whether or not it's about bike
lanes or a new development, or whether it's at your
(44:44):
children's school about an issue that's going on in the school.
How can you feel like you have agency over how
things are going and that you can use that productively
to bring other people together.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
I think it takes a lot of optimism. For sure,
you and your article talked about hope is a discipline.
I've never heard hope as a discipline. You know, Obama
talked about the audacity of hope. But how can hope
be a discipline?
Speaker 3 (45:12):
Well, I think that very much comes from spending a
lot of time in situations of really, really really serious
conflict and violence and seeing the horrific things that people
have done to each other and are capable of doing
to one another. That within that, you have to say
that if I don't have some degree of hope, if
(45:33):
I don't believe that people can do this better, what
is the alternative? When I look, for example, at a
Land for All, who are one of our Global Pluralism
Award winners this year, who are in Israeli Palestinian Peace Movement,
its Israelis and Palestinians who come together around a political
vision for two states and one homeland, saying there is
(45:56):
a way that we can build on a call on
human rights for all of us, on justice where we
can live together, where we can all belong. And a
lot of people have said to me, well, that's just
I mean, that's so optimistic given everything that has happened,
not just in the last couple of years, but over
(46:17):
decades in that region, how can they even think that?
And what I've said to them over and over again
is what is the alternaty? Is the alternative that we
just sit back and say it is just going to
be destruction and domination and hatred for the next seventy years.
We can't allow ourselves to get into those spaces. And
so hope does have to be a discipline in order
(46:39):
to say we can chart a political vision. And maybe
it starts with one conversation and then another conversation and another.
And what I have seen in peace processes is I
have seen it start with one conversation. We ran a
series of peace processes in the Middle Belt of Nigeria,
(46:59):
which is an area of deep seated, long standing violets.
Not genocide against the Christians, as President Trump has noted recently,
but something that is much more deep and complex between
sedentary populations and pastoralist populations, Muslim and Christian ethnicity. So
many different things come together, and nobody was able to
(47:22):
get leverage on starting a process. And I went there
with one of our senior advisors many many years ago
in the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, and we had a
series of just one on one conversations with radicalized young people,
with the security services, with the traditional leaders, with women,
and we just sat and we talked, and out of
that we were able to weave the beginning of a process.
(47:43):
And it happens one by one by one by one,
and it isn't going to change overnight. But I really
believe that of all of us would go out and
have that one conversation, you really never know where it
can lead.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Well, this is a very hopeful, optimistic and positive conversation.
I appreciate, you know. I really wonder how Ukrainians and
Russians are ever going to live together or live even
as neighbors with a wall between them in the future.
I wonder how people from Gaza and Israelis will ever
live together. But then I'm astounded that the that the
(48:18):
Catholics and the Protestants in Northern Ireland seem to have
figured it out. And I'm not close enough to that
to know why and how, but it seems to have
worked in a place that seemed, you know, impossible to
have reconciliation over over a long period of time. You
finished this article with a really interesting quote which I
don't understand. I wonder if you could explain it to me,
(48:38):
because I think it talks and speaks to this issue.
You say, and you're quoting Rumy. You say, out beyond
ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field.
I'll meet you there. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 3 (48:53):
So, Brian, I'm also laughing because I say, sometimes we
like to joke that when we want to be accessible
about these issues, let's start by quoting a thirteenth century
Sufi poet, and so unconscious that it does feel a
bit esoteric. But the idea and the reason I love
that quote is that often we get stuck in our
heads about this thing is right and this thing is wrong,
and we can't get out of that to say, but actually,
(49:17):
if we step forward into a space of trying to
understand everything that's going on from all angles, then we
can maybe begin to unpack the problem. And so often
what I talk to people in peacemaking spaces and in
pluralist spaces is I say, look for the people who
(49:37):
are in the field, because there's a lot of people
in our society that you will disagree with deeply, but
they are interested in trying to have a deeper understanding
of the issue. They're interested in trying to understand why
you think what you think, and then to interrogate a
little bit why they think what they think, and through
that you can come up with really interesting and different
(49:59):
conversation that will start to open the kinds of spaces
that I mentioned even in my Nigeria example, that you
begin to sort of unpack these pieces. And so we
have to, I think, get out of these binaries of
I believe this and you believe that, and there's simply
a gulf in between us. But step into this field
(50:19):
where we can start to understand one another, and through
that you'll see the seeds of pluralism. You'll see the
seeds of rather than me being afraid of your difference
of opinion than mine, that we're coming to a space
where we can explore that together.
Speaker 2 (50:35):
Meredith, thank you so much for Jonas, I really appreciate it.
If people want to follow up on your organization, is
there a website that they should go to to check
you and your organization and some of your articles.
Speaker 3 (50:44):
About absolutely so pluralism. Dot ca is our website and
you can also find us Global Center for Pluralism on Instagram,
on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on x across all of the
social media.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
I got to tell you this has been a fascinating
conversation and I need to have you back because I
did check out your website. You've got an article about
females going on a sex strike to further peace, and
then another article on what is evil, and then another
one on a peace building a peace building blueprint based
on twenty years of experience. So I think you've probably
(51:20):
got a lot of really great secrets to let us
know about, and some scary ones like a female sex strike,
but I won't talk about that. Thank you so much
for joining us. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (51:28):
Thanks Brian, it was a pleasure.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
That's our show for tonight. Thank you everyone for joining us.
I'm on every Monday through Friday at six o'clock on
nine to sixty am. You can stream me online a
triple W Saga ninety sixty Am dot CA. You can
get all my podcasts videocasts on Briancrombie dot com, on YouTube,
on Facebook and Instagram, and on Audible podcasts, on Apple
Podcasts and on Speakeasy, Thank you, checking out good Night Everybody.
Speaker 1 (51:56):
Stream us live at SAGA nine six am dot C
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