The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul
of Building Peace
by John Paul Lederach
Association of Conflict Resolution 2004 Annual Conference Keynote
Presentation
Sacramento, September 30, 2004
Introduction
It is an honor to speak with you this morning. I am humbled by the invitation.
The title of this conference rings particularly appropriate for our times:
“Valuing Peace in the 21st Century: Expanding the Art and Practice
of Conflict Resolution.” If we are honest we must admit it clearly
sets our feet onto the pathways of a complex journey through a most difficult
terrain. These are not easy times we live in. They do not value peace,
nor do they value the practice of conflict resolution. In this field we
live a certain irony. We perhaps have never enjoyed a wider recognition
for what we do and at the same time we have never experienced such a wide
gap between our fundamental propositions and values, and the driving and
far too often polarizing forces of national and global politics.
Clearly one of our challenges is how to make clear, accessible and relevant
the growing body of knowledge and practice of conflict transformation
and peacebuilding in the wider public and in particular political spheres.
But that challenge is informed and pushed by a deeper quest: To find our
way to the imaginative source that gives impulse to who we are and what
we are about in this field. I am not sure who proposed the phrase “expanding
the art and practice” but it lends itself to what has been preoccupying
my professional journey for some years now. In these next few minutes
I wish to speak about this phrase, about the essence, the “heart’s
core”, the rhythms and pulse of what is required to build genuine
constructive change, what it takes to heal deep divisions, what is vital
and necessary to value peace in a polarized world. I want to explore the
art and soul of this movement gathered here today.
There are no easy pathways that lead to the art and soul of anything,
much less mediation, conflict resolution, or the building of peace. And
even greater is the complexity of that pathway when you live in places
like those where I have been working for nearly three decades, Colombia,
Somalia, West Africa or the Philippines, places wrought with suffering,
afflicted by war, hopelessly lost in what appear to be endless spirals
of violence. Or are they?
People in those settings face a daunting question on nearly a daily basis:
How do we transcend this spiral of violence while still living day-to-day
in all that produces it? And lest we think that is a question relevant
only to far off places, we should remind ourselves that this is the core
question facing our nation and our globe in the Post-September 11 world
in which we live.
In the weeks following September 11, 2001 I started writing a book, a
book based on stories of people I had worked with who displayed an uncanny
capacity to transcend violence while living in it. The book carries the
title of this keynote. It starts with the question, what is essence of
peacebuilding? Or put with a twist, what, if it were missing, would make
peacebuilding collapse, would make it impossible?
One lesson I have learned over the years is that you rarely reach the
essence of anything by going straight at it. As my African and Nicaraguan
colleagues taught me long ago, when all else fails, tell a story. So stories
it is, in the search for the art and soul of this craft we hold in our
hands.
Wajir: How A Few Women Stopped A War
The women of Wajir did not set out to stop a war.2 They just wanted to
make sure they could get food for their families. The initial idea was
simple enough: make sure that the market is safe for anyone to buy and
sell.
Located in Northeast Kenya Wajir District is made up mostly of Somali
clans. With the collapse of the Somali government in 1989, Wajir soon
found itself caught up in interclan fighting, with a flow of weapons and
refugees that made life increasingly difficult. Dekha Ibrahim recalls
one night in mid 1993 that shooting erupted once again near her house.
She ran for her first-born child and hid for several hours under the bed
while bullets crisscrossed her room. While under the bed she had distinct
memory of huddling with her mother as young child under the same conditions.
By morning she had decided this had to stop.
Other women shared similar stories and so they gathered less than a dozen
of them at first. We just wanted to put our heads together, they said,
to see what we knew and we could do. We decided the place to start was
the market. They agreed on a basic idea. The market should be safe for
any woman of any clan background to come, to sell and to buy. Women were
looking out for their children. Access and safety to the market was an
immediate right that had to be assured. Since women mostly ran the market,
they spread the word. They established monitors who would watch everyday
what was happening at the market. They would report any infractions. Whenever
issues emerged a small committee of women would move quickly to resolve
them. Their initiative resulted in the creation of the Wajir Women's Association
for Peace.
They soon discovered that the broader fighting still affected their lives.
Sitting again they decided to pursue direct conversations with the elders
of all the clans. Getting the men on board was not an easy thing to do
in this highly patriarchal society. “Who are women to advise and
push us?” was the response they feared they might get. So they sat
and thought through their understanding of the elder system, the actual
key elders, and the make-up of the Somali clans in Wajir. Using their
personal connections they worked with concerned men and succeeded in bringing
together a meeting of the elders. They aligned themselves carefully to
not push or take over the meetings. Instead they found one of the elderly
men, quite respected, but who came from the smallest and therefore the
least threatening of the local clans. In the meeting he became their spokesperson,
talking directly to the other elders and appealing to their responsibility.
“Why, really,” he asked, “are we fighting? Who benefits
from this? Our families are being destroyed.” His words provoked
long discussions. The elders, even some of those who had been promoting
revenge killings, agreed to face the issues and stop the fighting. They
formed the Council of Elders for Peace.
Engaging the fighters in the bush and dealing with clan clashes soon led
the women to recognize they had contact government officials from both
the district and eventually the national representatives in Parliament.
Accompanied by some elders, they transparently described their initiative
and process. They agreed to keep the officials informed and in fact invited
to various meetings, but they asked that in return the officials not disrupt
the process that was in motion. They sought received the blessing from
the government.
Soon the question became how to engage the youth, particularly the young
men who were hidden and fighting in the bush. They formed a new initiative
Youth for Peace and soon discovered that if the youth were to leave their
guns and the bush, they would need something to occupy their time and
provide income. The business community was then approached. Initiatives
for rebuilding and local jobs were offered. Together, the women from the
market, the elders commissions, the youth for peace, the businessmen and
local religious leaders formed the Wajir Peace and Development Committee.
Ceasefires came into place. Local Commissions were created to verify and
help the process of disarming the clan-based factions in coordination
with local authorities and the District Police. Emergency response teams
were formed who would travel on a moment’s notice to deal with renewed
fighting, rustling, or thievery.
Ten years later Wajir District still faces serious problems though the
Wajir Peace and Development Committee still actively works for peace and
has continued to expand. Fighting has not stopped in Somalia and spills
into Wajir. The elders meet on a regular basis. There is greater cooperation
between the local villages, clans, and the district officials. And the
women who stopped a war still monitor a now much safer market.
When I recently spoke with Dekha she said that since September 11, 2001
there is an increased presence of US personnel based in Wajir focused
on anti-terrorism in Somalia. “Our challenge now is to engage the
US government and convince them of better ways to approach this,”
she said. “Insh’Allah we will be successful.”
“Insh’Allah indeed,” I whispered to myself. God knows
we have not been to successful at that in our own land.”
A Story from Colombia: We Have Decided To Think For Ourselves
Josué, Manuel, Hector, Rosita, Excelino, Miguel Angel, Sylvia
and Alejandro shared several things that forever bound them together.3
They lived along the Carare River in an area called La India, in the jungles
of Magdalena Medio in the country of Colombia. They were campesinos, peasants.
They considered themselves ordinary folk. And they faced an extraordinary
challenge: how to survive the wicked violence of numerous armed groups
that traversed their lands and demanded their allegiance.
In the late 1960s the leftist-oriented guerrilla movment FARC “entered”
the territories of these campesinos. Military response from the national
government followed and escalated. Unable to impact or eliminate the influence
of the guerrilla movements in the region, landowners privately financed
often in conjunction with the military, the “Paras” the self-defense
armed groups of vigilantes. Battles took place not just for the land and
for the informal war taxes where the campesinos had made their home, but
for their very allegiance. As one armed group put it: “no one is
obligated to follow our code; you always have the right to leave the territory.”
The law of silence prevailed. “It is prohibited to talk about the
death of any friend or family member, about those who killed them or the
reasons why they were killed. If you open your mouth, the rest of your
family will be killed.” Such were the realities faced by Josué,
Hector, Manuel, Sylvia and the campesinos of the region.
In 1987 fighting and larger scale massacres began to take over. In response
to the guerrilla, a notoriously violent Captain of the Colombian army
convened more than 2000 peasants from La India and offered them forgiveness
in the form of an amnesty if they would accept his weapons and join the
ranks of local militia to fight against the guerrilla. In the eyes of
the Captain many of these peasants were guilty of supporting the guerrilla.
So the offer of forgiveness was considered an ultimatum about choosing
sides in the conflict. He concluded with what he called the four choices
before the campesinos: “You can arm yourselves and join us, you
can join the guerrilla, you can leave your homes, or you can die.”
The crowd was stunned. In the midst of the pending silence a middle-aged
campesino, Josué, spoke from the crowd and from his heart. His
spontaneous speech was so memorable that up until today you will find
peasants in La India who can recite his response to the Captain word for
word even though they were not there.
Capitan, you speak of forgiveness, but what do you have to forgive us?
You are the ones who have violated. We have killed no one. You want to
give us millions in weapons paid for by the state, yet you will not facilitate
even the minimum credit for our farming needs. There are millions for
war but nothing for peace. And what has all this served? What has it fixed?
Nothing. In fact Colombia is in the worse violence ever. We have arrived
at the conclusion that weapons have not solved a thing and that there
is not one reason to arm ourselves. Look at all these people you brought
here. We all know each other. And who are you? We know that some years
ago you yourself were with guerrilla and now you are the head of the paramilitaries.
You brought people in to our houses to accuse us, you lied, and you switched
sides. And now you, a side switcher, you want us to follow your violent
example. Capitan, with all due respect, we do not plan to join your side,
their side or any side. And we are not leaving this place. We are going
to find our own solution (Garcia, 1996; 189).
Later that week a group of twenty campesino leaders decided to play the
ultimate card: they would pursue civilian resistance without weapons.
As one of them put it, we decided that day to speak for ourselves. In
the weeks and months that followed they organized one of the most unique
and spontaneous processes of transformation Colombia has seen in fifty
years.
They formed the Association of Peasant Workers of Carare (ATCC). Their
first act was to break the code of silence. The quota for entry was a
simple commitment: Your life not your money expressed in the phrase “We
shall die before we kill.” Listen to a few of their guiding principles:
1) Faced with individualization: solidarity.
2) Faced with the Law of Silence and Secrecy: Do everything publicly.
Speak loud and never hide anything.
3) Faced with fear: Sincerity and disposition to dialogue. They set a
single goal: We shall understand those who do not understand us.
4) Faced with Violence: Talk and negotiate with everyone. We do not have
enemies.
And these were not just ideas. Within weeks local villages posted handmade
signs with the title “What the people from here say” in which
a declaration that no weapons would be allowed in their villages. They
spontaneously declared their lands a territory of peace.
Delegations were sent to meet with the armed groups. Never conducted
alone and always public, each meeting with each different armed group
required careful preparation and choice of who would speak. But the message
remained the same. Respect for the territory of peace and the campesinos.
They approached each meeting seeking the connection with the person not
the institution. The key, as several people reported it, was that they
had to find a way to meet the human being, the real person. Informal and
in some instances formal agreements and arrangements were reached. The
Association held to its promise of never giving in to weapons and never
giving up on dialogue. In the public debriefing of any meeting everyone
was welcome, friend and foe alike. The doors were never shut. Transparency
was carried to its fullest extent.
During the next years violence was greatly reduced, though Magdalena Medio
remained and is yet today a hotbed of armed conflict. Nonetheless, the
local campaign for respect and dignity came with its price. Josué
and several other leaders were assassinated by unknown and yet undetermined
sicarios (hired guns). Survivors believe it was due to local politicians
not the hands of the armed groups. Their legacy lives on. Today in Colombia
many speak of the potential of local groups to develop a capacity for
civilian resistance as the key to building a permanent peace. As Alejandro
Garcia, the history professor who extensively interviewed many of the
early and subsequent participants in the Association, aptly wrote: “Born
in the nucleus of violence, the ATCC introduced into the logic of war
a sense of uncertainty, it broke the conventional cycle of spiraling violence
and developed through lived demonstration the basic idea that solutions
without violence were possible” (Garcia, 1996; 313).
Tajikistan: Talking Poetry With the Warlord
Notes from my journal, February, 2002
We are seated in a seminar room in Dushanbe with twenty-four Professors
from eight universities across Tajikistan. I had just finished what I
thought was quite an excellent presentation on the process of mediation
when over tea Abdul, the only Professor in our group who knows some of
the inner details of how the Tajiks negotiated while war raged and how
they brought the Islamic movements into negotiation rather than isolating
or trying to defeat them, draws me to a corner with a translator to tell
me a story.
“I was tasked by the government to approach and convince one of
warlords, a key Mullah-Commander located in the mountains to enter negotiations,”
Abdul begins. “This was difficult if not impossible, because this
Commander was considered a notorious criminal, and worse, he had killed
one of my close friends.” Abdul stops while the translation conveys
the personal side of his challenge.
“When I first got to his camp the Commander said I had arrived late
and it was time for prayers. So we went together and prayed. When we had
finished, he said to me, ‘How can a communist pray?’
‘I am not a communist, my father was,” I responded.
Then he asked what I taught in the University. We soon discovered we were
both interested in Philosophy and Sufism. We started talking Sufi poetry.
Our meeting went from twenty minutes to two and half hours. In this part
of the world you have to circle into Truth through stories.”
In the hallway Abdul’s gold capped teeth sparkle with a smile as
he relays his message: “You see in Sufism there is an idea that
discussion has no end.”
His point well conveyed, the Professor picks up the story again.
“I kept going to visit him. We mostly talked poetry and philosophy.
Little by little I asked him about ending the war. I wanted to persuade
him to take the chance on putting down his weapons. After months of visits
we finally had enough trust to speak truths and it all boiled down to
one concern.”
“The Commander said to me, ‘If I put down my weapons and go
to Dushanbé with you, can you guarantee my safety and life?’”
The Tajik storyteller pauses with the full sense of the moment. "My
difficulty was that I could not guarantee his safety."
He waits for the translator to finish making sure I have understood the
weight of his peacemaking dilemma and then concludes.
"So I told my philosopher warlord friend the truth, ‘I cannot
guarantee your safety.’"
In the hallway Professor Abdul swings his arm under mine and comes to
stand fully by my side to emphasize the answer he then gave the Commander.
"But I can guarantee this. I will go with you, side by side. And
if you die I will die.’
The hallway is totally quiet.
“That day the Commander agreed to meet the Government. Some weeks
later we came down together from the mountains. When he first met with
the Commission he told them, ‘I have not come because of your Government.
I have come for honor and respect of this Professor.’
“You see, my young American friend,” Abdul taps my arm lightly,
“this is Tajik mediation."
The Essence of Peacebuilding
What is the essence of these three stories? What happened here? As we
might ask at the end of a tale, what is the moral of the story? With time,
each of us could add our insight. That is the genius of story. It invites
you to participate and there is always room for more.
As I reflected and continued to interact with the people whose lives built
these stories, my journey took me toward four elements without which I
have come to believe, peacebuilding is impossible. Combined the four comprise
what I call the moral imagination, what I define as the wellspring that
is rooted in the challenges of the real world yet is capable of giving
birth to that which does not yet exist. Here are my four elements of this
kind of imagination.
The first is the capacity to imagine the web of relationships. Time and
again where the shackles of violence are broken we find a singular taproot
that gives life to the moral imagination: the capacity of individuals
and communities to imagine themselves in a web of relationship even with
their enemies.
This kind of imagination envisions and gives birth to relational mutuality.
Such a birthing is akin to the aesthetic and artistic process. Art is
what the human hand touches, shapes and creates, and in turn what touches
our deeper sense of being, our experience. The artistic process has this
dialectic nature: It rises from human experience, then shapes, gives expression
and meaning to that experience. Peacebuilding has this same artistic quality.
It must experience, envision and give birth to the web of relationships.
The perpetration of violence, more than anything else, requires a deep,
though implicit belief that desired change can be achieved independent
of the web of relationships. Breaking violence requires that people embrace
a more fundamental truth: who we have been, are and will be emerges and
shapes itself in a context of relational interdependency.
Such vision requires humility and self-recognition. People don’t
just take notice of the web. They situate and recognize themselves as
part of the pattern. Violence is rarely superseded without acts that have
a confessional quality at their base. Spontaneous or intentionally planned,
these acts emerge from a voice that says in the simplest of terms: “I
am part of this pattern. My choices and behaviors affect it.” While
justification of violent response has many tributaries, the moral imagination
that rises beyond violence has but two: taking personal responsibility
and acknowledging relational mutuality.
I once wrote a single line poem about this reality and my struggle with
the mediator’s dilemma. Titled the Parasite it reads:
The Parasite
I have
Traveled
Most of the
Globe
On the
The backs
Of people
Whose
Lives
Are
Held
Together
By the
Wars
They fight.
November 1999
Stated bluntly, if there is no capacity to imagine the canvas of mutual
relationship and situate oneself as part of that historic and ever evolving
web, peacebuilding collapses.
At second level we find what I would call the discipline to sustain curiosity,
a kind of imagination that lives in the untamed and mostly unexplored
geographies of human interaction that lie beyond forced dualisms and polarization.
Curiosity suggests attentiveness and continuous inquiry about things and
their meaning, but it is more.
The Latin root curiosus formed on the term cura literally meaning “to
take care of” and having to do with both “cure” and
“care” as in spiritual and physical healing. From this we
get terms like caregiver and curator. In its negative form, curiosity
pushes toward exaggerated inquisitiveness best seen perhaps in the snooping
detectives or overly interested neighbors who poke around too much in
the affairs of others. In its most constructive expression curiosity builds
a quality of careful inquiry that reaches beyond accepted meaning. It
wishes to go deep and in fact is excited by those things that are not
immediately understood. We could say from this perspective that sustained
curiosity in peacebuilding is about a deep caring for people and the meaning
of their experience. Curiosity is about passion: A passion for people,
for Truth, for meaning, for healing, for constructive change. If such
a curiosity is at the essence of valuing peace and building the art of
conflict resolution, then we must find ways to continuously incite the
imagination that fuels our passion and our caring.
Third, peacebuilding requires an eternal belief in the creative act, the
building and coaxing of imagination itself. Creativity moves beyond what
exists toward something new and unexpected while rising from and speaking
to the everyday. This is the role of the artist and why it is that imagination
and art are at the edge of society. I believe that the primary role of
the moral imagination is to provide space for the creative act to emerge.
Providing space requires a predisposition, a kind of attitude and perspective
that opens up, even invokes the spirit and belief that creativity is humanly
possible.
Bruno Bettleheim once commented that violence is the response of a person
who can imagine no other alternative. This is the great myth of violence.
It purports that the lands it inhabits are barren and without life. Artists
shatter this myth, for they live in barrenness as if new life, birth,
is always possible. They give rise to the unexpected. Creativity and imagination,
the artist giving birth to something new as a way of looking at our craft,
require that we think about how we know the world, how we are in the world,
and most importantly, what in the world is possible.
The final discipline at the essence of this imagination can be described
in simple terms but requires heart and soul that defy prescription. It
is the willingness to take a risk. Risk is to step into the unknown without
any guarantee of success or even safety. Risk by its very nature is mysterious.
It is mystery lived, for it ventures into lands that are not controlled
or charted. People living in settings of deep-rooted conflict are faced
with an extraordinary irony. Violence is known--peace is the mystery.
By its very nature therefore, peacebuilding requires a journey guided
by the imagination of risk.
Relationship, curiosity, creativity and risk: These I believe are the
art and soul of our craft as informed by those who miraculously break
the shackles of violence. If we took them seriously would they not ask
us to rethink the core of what sustains our work, how we prepare for it,
and how we prepare others? Think for a moment of the intriguing questions
this imagination poses and what it may require if we seriously pursued
our craft as an artistic process as much as one of technical expertise.
What if mediation were more like birthing a poem, composing a song, or
creating a choreography of movement, rather than primarily a process of
communication management? How would this change the metaphor of what we
do? Of how we prepare people? Of what we might suggest they attend to
as part of their work?
Would we perhaps see and feel intuition as equally important alongside
cognitive analysis? Would we perhaps envision process design as the developing
of a relational canvass, seeking the poetics of social change? Would we
venture the risk to introduce music, dance, papermaking into the very
process of training and preparation? Would we perhaps give equal space
in our conferences and educational endeavors to explore the vocation,
the deepest voice of who we are and what we are called to be, to the time
and space we give to skill development in process management? We would
perhaps listen and learn in new ways from the indigenous and culturally
diverse creativity of response to age-old problems, much like we might
watch for insight and truth from an extraordinary painting, without an
immediate proclivity to reduce them to techniques bartered in our marketplaces?
I do not have conclusive answers to those questions. The imagination of
which I speak and hope to incite invites a journey not a solution. The
moral imagination, the art and soul of building peace does however beckon
us constantly toward three things that make this journey possible. And
as I look back it is these things that drew me into the work in the first
place: Passion, care and dreams.
We must I believe find ways to constantly stay in touch with and rejunvenate
our passion for the work we do. When was the last time you genuinely sat
and talked with colleagues about why we do this crazy work? We cannot
face the challenges of this Century, from local to global levels, unless
we tap into, unleash and follow our deepest passions. Twenty-five years
ago you could barely count on one hand any place in the world to pursue
studies and a profession in conflict resolution or peacebuilding. If you
responded to your inquisitive uncle about what you wanted to do with your
life and said “I want to study and work for peace.” The look
on his face told you to say something quick like, “but I think I
will probably become a lawyer or a doctor.” I would guess for a
lot of us in this room, I know it is true for me, when I first pursued
this work it was in large part because I was touched and felt the passion
of people who dared to care, who aligned their lives in pursuit of a dream
to build things that did not yet exist, and who encouraged me to fearlessly
follow my passions. These are the marks of authenticity that will carry
us through this Century, that will create the platforms from which our
voice will be heard: That we have passion for what we do, that we care
deeply about our craft, and that we dream boldly and well beyond what
is presented to us as the range of alternatives.
Conclusion
I want to conclude with a small anecdote and reflection. These past months
we have been moving house. I have set up a new office and writing space.
For years now whenever I set up a writing space I pick a couple of books
and place them so I can see the cover or the author’s face, people
that have influenced me, words that keep me alive. In this new space I
chose two books to put in a prominent place watching over me. One is titled
Africa Adorned. It reminds me from whence humanity came and that in spite
of enormous suffering and injustice, grace is an interminable well exemplified
more in Africa than anyplace I have ever been. The other is a pictorial
essay of the life of Martin Luther King Jr. I like Martin’s face
watching over me as I write.
Several weeks ago Bernie Mayer and Bill Potapchuk stopped by for a little
tour of the house. When we arrived at the office, Bill intuitively pulled
Martin’s book off the shelf and paged toward the back. We gathered
for a short moment to look at a photo of the balcony where Martin Luther
King Jr was assassinated. There seated on the balcony was a much younger
Jim Laue. Jim was one of those people on whose coattails of passion I
rode into this field. He encouraged and help push the undergraduate program
in peace studies where I finally found a place to study my passion. He
tirelessly worked in the civil rights movement. He was a Methodist who
encouraged us Mennonites to actually be Mennonites and do something useful
with our tradition. He offered me access and mentorship in the early days
of my work.
Later that night I sat again with the book and looked at the picture.
On that balcony of the Lorraine hotel there is a small commemorative plaque
that carries a verse from the book of Genesis drawn from the story of
when Joseph’s brothers plotted to get rid of him. It reads: “Here
comes the dreamer. Come now, let us kill him…and we shall see what
will become of his dreams.”
What will become of our dreams? Do we have the passion, care and dreams
to face the absolute daunting challenges of this Century? I say, “bring
‘em on.” Why dream small? We need big challenges to assure
the authenticity of hope. This is our Century. It is our Century to shape
and mold. Bring on the challenges. To the divide between the Islamic and
Western world, this is the Century of great promise, awakening and reconciliation
that will the bury myth of clash of civilizations. I say bring it on.
To the Palestinians and Israelis, this is your Century. The spiral of
destruction has but tilled the soils. The seeds are planted. The rising
will come. To the peoples of Burma, Nagaland, Manipur, Tibet and Nepal,
this is your Century. Let it rise. From Magdalena Medio to Choco, nuestra
querida Colombia, this is the Century the fifty-year war will end. To
the first peoples of this land we now share, Lakota to Mohawk, Cherokee
to Navaho, this is the Century when we will see each other again for the
first time with the eyes of the Ancestors. The Century of the circle is
here. To the peoples of Africa, the land of grace and creation, that gifted
to us the tenacious joy of life, this is your Century. Dreamkeepers do
not give up on us. The rising is come.
Gather out of star-dust,
Earth dust
Cloud dust
Storm dust
And splinters of hail.
One handful of dream dust
Not for sale.
(Langston Hughes)
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