Category Archives: Uncategorized

Talking Stick Breaks Impasse

Big News – A Moment of Dialogue in Washington!

Divided Democrats and Republicans found a way to talk this week, and actually listened to each other, using a talking stick!

The Washington Post on January 28, 2017 reports that Senator Susan Collins of Maine, one of the few remaining moderate Republicans, convened a bipartisan meeting in her office to explore ways to reopen the government during the recent shutdown. Having succeeded at that, they’re now discussing a way forward on immigration issues. They used a Masai talking stick to structure their conversation.

So What’s a Talking Stick?

A talking stick – this one borrowed from the renowned cattleherders of Kenya – is an object passed around as people talk, to provide a simple structure of respectful communication. There’s one ground rule: You can’t speak unless you’re holding the talking stick.

How to Use a Talking Stick

The simplest of all tools for facilitating dialogue, the talking stick requires no great expertise or training. No special equipment required. Any simple object will do – a feather, a stone, a pencil, a paperweight.

Usually a talking stick is used with people sitting in a circle, and it’s simply passed around the circle, from one person to the next. I’ve also had success with it in larger settings where people are not in a circle. In this case it can be simply passed back through the group to those wanting to speak, or the facilitator can move around the room and reclaim it after each speaker.

Two things to be careful about in facilitating with a talking stick:
1) Make sure the ground rule is clearly understood and supported by all.
2) Model and require respect for the stick. Model giving full attention to the person holding it and do not interrupt. Be alert to any violations of the ground rule. When this happens, promptly repeat the ground rule and remind the group that keeping it is essential. If you ignore violations without saying anything, they will multiply and the structure will be lost.

Cleanly facilitated, a talking stick quickly brings a tangible sense of order and deep listening into the room. People hold forth and then a few seconds of spacious, uncontested quietness reigns as the object is passed to the next person. As facilitator, you can invite such spaces by holding the object thoughtfully in your own hands for a few seconds of silence at well-chosen moments, such as just before you pass it to the first speaker.

Limits of the Talking Stick

As a tool for structuring dialogue, the talking stick can be almost magical. But recognize its limits. It’s a dialogue tool and unwieldy in moments of negotiation or decisionmaking. Think through the purpose of the session. If eventually you must go beyond dialogue – as usually you must at some point – think through options and how to transition when the time arrives.

You can easily find detailed guidance with a web search. Or get my book Cool Tools for Hot Topics: Group Tools to Facilitate Meetings When Things are Hot, with more than twenty practical tools for facilitating dialogue in difficult settings, including the talking stick. At $4.95 on Amazon it won’t break your piggy bank!

Attacker Spreads Hate, Finds Mercy

The NY Times carries a gripping account about vandalism by young whites against a mosque in Texas. One youth writes a heartfelt letter of apology and Muslim leaders are so moved that they request the judge to be lenient.

The prosecutor thinks this is a bad idea and forbids the youth from even visiting the mosque. Nevertheless, well, just read the story – you won’t regret it.

In a time when alienation is widespread, the response of NY Times readers to this story is one of visceral gratitude. Many comment it is the best they have read in a long time.

This is a story about restorative justice that Americans really need to hear. If we are to find our way back from the abyss of polarization, we have to stop planting seeds of alienation. This requires changes to a justice system that systematically blocks people from relationally-based responses to crime. .

The concept of justice widely known and applied in our society is court-centered punitive justice, which holds no interest in healing of relationships or individuals. The court calls all the shots. The individuals involved have only small roles in the process, and no say in what happens.

Victims often have the tiniest role and the least say in this process. They are expected to provide evidence of wrong-doing and then disappear for the court to mete out punish against an offender.

Restorative justice, in contrast, recognizes that offenses involve human beings and relationships and therefore responses ought to do so as well. It creates space for the instinct for healing that often still survives after offense and, when it emerges, allows it to shape sentencing.

Throughout the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and many other places, facilitators trained in restorative justice assist parties and justice system officials to work out a response to offense acceptable to the parties.

Restorative justice is not the right approach to all offenses. But it has grown rapidly since the early 1980s (first used by traditional and native communities; pioneered in courts in Ontario by Mennonite community workers in the 1970s; I did first US cases in Elkhart, Indiana in 1977; first US program there in the 80s) because it honors one of the strongest and best human instincts.

After offense we are hurt and angry. But we are also wired with deep knowledge that we ourselves are offenders at times and that offenders deserve support and help to grow.

If families, churches, mosques, schools, and courts would nurture this deep instinct, the polarization that threatens our world today would rapidly fade.

Stories like this help reclaim the best of who we are. There is hope! Share it!

What Not to Say After Violence

An Important Choice: What to Do and Say After Violence?

Whenever violence takes place as a result of public conflict, well-intentioned leaders face a challenging question. How should they respond? What should they say that might reduce possibility of further bloodshed?

A Painful Lesson from Yugoslav Wars

They can learn from the tragic experience of the Yugoslav Wars in the Balkans in the 1990s where some 130,000 were killed in a decade of horrific genocidal conflict.

Most of the combatants were religious, loyal to the eastern or western branch of Christianity or to Islam. All three traditions are home to resources for peace. Each has scriptures that affirm kindness and peaceful conduct. Each has individuals deeply committed to peaceful coexistence with others.

Yet religion played a central role in the violence in the Balkans. And religious leaders often contributed to the violence rather than help end it.

General Condemnations of Violence May Make Things Worse

One way religious leaders stoked the war was through public comments on the conflict that superficially seemed to support peace but actually stirred followers up and ultimately supported an upward spiral of violence.

In his insightful book, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), Scott Appleby, a noted scholar of religion and conflict details the problem:

“Although few religious leaders endorsed or engaged in ethnoreligious violence, many more played into the hands of extremists by elevating national identity and the defense of communal rights above all other values.”

Even more damaging, writes Appleby, “was the failure of most religious leaders, on all sides, to denounce consistently and unequivocally the violence and human rights abuses committed by their own people. Instead, they issued general condemnations of human rights violations by all sides and even formulated categorical denials of well-documented atrocities – while providing detailed reports about the suffering of their own people. (p75)”

How to Formulate Constructive Response

Although Appleby writes about religious leaders, his observations speak to all leaders sincerely committed to helping communities and nations end upwardly spiralling violence.

Shaped in part by Appleby’s study, my counsel to leaders with good intentions over the last twenty years in a variety of situations of violent conflict in Africa, Asia, and the US has been:

1) You must speak out against violence when it occurs. Silence will be interpreted as permission to continue.

2) If people from your group or aligned with you have been violent or are seriously tempted to violence, it is imperative that you acknowledge this and publicly address it. Failure to do this will be understood as license to continue violence.

3) General calls to all for peace and good conduct have positive value only to the extent that you display deep commitment to constructive behavior by those “on your side”. If you don’t specifically challenge your own allies to high standards of conduct, they will inevitably sink to low ones.

4) Unless you are scrupulously doing the above, public criticism of the excesses of the other side only fans the escalation of violence.

5) The ability to do the above constructively will be much higher if you establish personal friendships with some leaders in communities in conflict with your own. Try out on them the responses you anticipate making publicly about the conflict. You will probably be surprised by gaps in your understanding of what is happening. The quality and constructiveness of your responses will rise.

How to Turn Insult to Dialogue

Public Insult Endangers Even If You’re Not the Target

Insult has become a daily aspect of life. It’s hard to read the newspaper or view screens without encountering it. This is bad, not just for us, but for our future and our children’s future.

Public insult damages more than its target. It erodes community by implanting destructive messages in all who witness it, eg:

Human interaction is a battlefield;
Being vicious, heartless, and cruel is acceptable in order to win;
Feelings of others and values of trust, good relationships, tolerance, and dialogue simply don’t matter.

When insult is allowed to have the last word, when it succeeds in silencing or humiliating people, those messages are planted like seeds. Eventually the seeds become norms and people begin acting on them on a broad scale. Then violence is just a stone’s throw away.

Respond to Insult without Being Insulting

Among the many things we can do to prevent this is learning, modeling, and teaching the art of responding constructively to insult, without using insult ourselves.

Don’t fight fire with fire. Fight fire with water.

Steve Jobs’ Skillful Response to Public Insult

In a 3 minute video clip in 1997, Steve Jobs offers one of the best examples of defusing insult I’ve seen. He had just returned from a humiliating absence at Apple where he had been forced out ten years earlier. In a conference someone tells Jobs it’s clear he often doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The speaker continues with a hostile question and adds a zinger at the end: “And when you’re finished with that, perhaps you can tell us what you personally have been doing for the last seven years.”

In an insightful analysis of Job’s response, Justin Bariso nails why it was effective:

He pauses, for a full 10 seconds, contemplating his response. A pause not only gives time to control anger and prepare a thoughtful response, it sends a deeper message: Let’s listen and think; let’s engage the issues, not just jump into combat.
He acknowledges elements of truth in the challenger’s point.
He then reframes the discussion to the big picture, where there is more common ground. The user had challenged Job’s work on a particular software. Rather than respond directly and defensively, Jobs reframes the discussion to the issues and strategies that led to the development of that software.
He displays vulnerability, admitting that he has made mistakes.

That’s high skill in communication on display there. You probably can’t match Job’s grasp of the issues in his field. But you can learn from and practice the poise he models in the face of insult.

Mastering the thoughtful pause is a great place to start. What’s to lose? At the very least you gain time to formulate an answer you won’t regret later.

Studies have shown (eg: Daniel O’Keefe, Communication Yearbook 22, 1999, pp. 209-249) that speakers who, in a balanced way, present both sides of an issue before asserting their own views are more persuasive than speakers who present only one side. Pausing gives space to review the other side, in addition to the emotional timeout it obviously gives. Jobs recognized an element of truth in his challenger’s question and came up with a response that turned the challenge into a conversation.

In the language of conflict styles, this is opting for a Cooperating response (committed both to self and the relationship) in a setting where a Directing response (committed to self but not to the relationship) would have been easy but polarizing.

I’ve learned from my own efforts at this: 1) The best replies often occur to me about twenty minutes too late to be of value! 2) Like any skill, the ability to reply to insult without adding to it grows with practice. A conflict style inventory like the Thomas Kilmann or my Style Matters is a great place to get started. Compare them here.

Trump and Conflict Styles

We can Learn a Lot from Trump about Conflict Styles

The weekend brought a textbook example of under-use of conflict avoidance and its costs.

It started on Friday when Rep. John Lewis picked a quarrel with Trump. “I don’t see this President-elect as a legitimate president,” he announced in a press statement. Saturday Trump fired back with tweets.

In the context of the long holiday weekend honoring Martin Luther King’s birthday, the exchange echoed thunderously in the media.

Result? Lewis’ book sales skyrocketed. By Sunday leading newspapers were carrying reports that his books were in the top 20 list of booksales and Amazon had sold out all copies of his best known work.

For his part, Trump took a hail of criticism, including critical tweets by some fellow Republicans, for dissing one of America’s most respected civil rights leaders.

Let’s be clear – Lewis started it. Never mind that Trump himself spearheaded a preposterous “birther” challenge to Barack Obama’s legitimacy for eight years, against all evidence. What matters here is that this time someone else threw the first punch.

But conflict management is about more than who started things. What matters is how to respond in a way most likely to bring a good outcome.

I cannot imagine a prudent advisor saying, “Donald Trump, you need to go after that revered civil rights leader. You’ll gain a lot by firing right back with a big put-down.” On a weekend when everyone remembers white domination of blacks, it’s a good idea to smack down a guy honored for leading demonstrations alongside MLK? With lines a 7th grader could write?

Trump chose the conflict response that I call Directing in my conflict style inventory (aka Competing in the TKI, for those who use that instrument). Directing pays no attention to relationships, feelings, or cooperation. You focus solely on taking charge. You win.

Don’t Diss Directing as a Response to Conflict

Don’t diss that style. I agree it sounds vicious, and it can be. But every human being needs it in certain forms from time to time. A parent who doesn’t grab his three year-old dashing towards the street and take charge of the situation is a bad parent. No matter how the child feels about it.

How about the captain of a sinking ship, a surgeon in charge of a dicey operation, a youth leader on a field trip with teenagers? Sometimes goals and responsibilities are more important than relationships and feelings.

So, respect Trump for a generous dose of Directing in his conflict style repertoire. But is Directing the only style he’s capable of? That’s a question fundamental to all leadership.

Mark Twain wrote, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail.” Conflict management is about flexibility, using the right style for the situation. When we’re skilled in only one or two styles, we set ourselves up for failure.

Although Lewis started the fight, in the circumstances, conflict avoidance would seem to have served Trump, his party, and the nation far better.

When is Avoiding the Right Response to Conflict?

Avoidance is the perfect response:

when there’s no goal or purpose beyond ego satisfaction that you can accomplish by pushing your cause, or
when the the costs of a battle outweigh the costs of silence or withdrawal.

On both counts, this was a slam-dunk for avoiding. Why not starve the alligators with presidential inattention? Just let the annoying words of the outspoken Representative fade into the news cycle.

People with a high Directing conflict style and low Avoiding response look and are intimidating. But they are also easy to maneuver and tie in knots. All it takes is low-grade insult to trigger them into reactions that waste time, energy, and good will over trivialities. They can’t stop themselves from reacting.

In the world of politics and diplomacy, over-reaction can be hugely damaging. Years ago I talked with an activist close to a group waging political insurrection in a country in Asia. “We consider carefully,” he said, “which police stations to attack. We hope they retaliate. Our goal is to hit those stations most likely to strike back wildly in ways that really anger the public. That’s one of the best ways to win support for our cause.”

I have no idea if provoking a self-damaging outburst from Trump was the intention of Lewis. But it appears that the outcome of the exchange was indeed an expansion of the already record-breaking gap dividing Trump from many voters.

One thing we can count on: Recognition of the thin skin of the incoming president is not lost on adversaries of America. Trump is already being targeted in the international arena in ways calculated to work against all Americans. On the long run, the slender repertoire of conflict styles he has so far demonstrated will benefit neither the politician nor the nation.

You Can’t Delete Religious Extremism

This diagram contains important clues about an alternative to the widely held notion that religious extremism can be forcefully countered. It’s from Ian White, a key strategist behind the scene in stabilizing the Northern Ireland peace process.

Diagram by Ian White – more readable here – shows alternative to “countering” religion

Religion is deeply embedded in human experience. The goal in responding to religious extremism must be to work with and constructively engage the powerful energies of religion rather than to remove or thwart them, what White calls “countering”.

The latter rarely work out as expected. To the extent that strategies to counter extremism are violent, they share and strengthen the underlying assertion of extremism, that force is acceptable and effective in building a desirable future. Even when not violent, if such strategies fail to engage religious leaders, they are devoid of understanding of the world from which extremism emerges; and thus bereft of potency and sustainability.

Transformation: A Sustainable Response to Extremism

The only option for responding to religious extremism without making things ultimately worse is a strategy of transformation.

Such a strategy works respectfully and knowledgeably in regard to the role religion holds in human functioning and it engages religious people where they are. It actively seeks out and finds common cause with those values, symbols, traditions, individuals and institutions that support non-violent responses to human diversity; responses that exist in virtually all religious milieu, even if not always apparent from a distance.

Because the only realistic goal is transformation, not transmission or domination, such an approach must be a dialogue, not a monologue.

With no exceptions, all who travel and engage the world participate in and benefit from systems that are violent and oppressive. There is no such thing as fully peace-creating people engaging others in need of enlightenment. The best we can hope for is to step forward as still-struggling, partially blind people, committed nevertheless to working actively with others to improve ourselves, our communities, and our world.

And that’s enough. From such a stance we have sufficient credibility that we will find and engage those with a similar stance in other communities. Together with them, we can find transformative responses, things that will change both them and us in constructive, sustainable ways.

Ask Ian White, who quietly called into life and coordinated such an approach in Northern Ireland.

Author Ron Kraybill has worked in peace processes in the US, Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, South Africa, the Philippines, Myanmar, and other locations and blogs at www.KraybillTable.com.

Do this for Less Holiday Conflict

If you’ve already spent time with relatives this holiday season perhaps you’ve discovered things are not all fa-la-la at family gatherings. Getting together is great, but it can also bring conflict. All that cozy togetherness gives space for old issues to appear in new forms.

In a year when politics has polarized, more rancor than usual is likely to get served along with the turkey. Here’s what you can do about it.

Start with a resolution to be nimble at conflict avoidance. You can’t stop others from being pissants, but you can decline to be baited. Avoidance is a great conflict style for situations where you don’t have any real goal other than staying out of difficulty.

You probably already know which people and circumstances can handle candor and which cannot. Prepare lines for conflict harmonizing and avoiding that you can easily pull out when needed. To that annoying relative who can’t resist a verbal poke about politics or some other dicey topic, come back with responses that re-direct or de-escalate.

– “You know, I promised myself I’d stay on safe topics this year. Tell me about your new job….”

– “That’s a topic a little more lively than I’m up for right now. Want to hear what I did for the Thanksgiving holidays?”

– “I know you weren’t thrilled about my choice to XXXX, and probably neither of us is going to change our mind about that. But tell me, what’s going on in your life these days?”

You don’t have to be witty or cute to succeed with a conflict avoiding response. You just need to be firm in redirecting the topic. You’re more likely to pull it off if you’ve given forethought to the actual wording of your redirect.

Perhaps the most important preparation you can do is update your personal boundaries before the holiday gatherings begin. Boundary maintenance is about recognizing that you and I are different people, each responsible for our own self, each respectful of the other’s independence. When we each have good personal boundaries, there is no emotional drive to change the other. You are you; I am me; we let each other be.

If I have healthy boundary maintenance:

– It’s fine for you to prefer a different politician – that’s your choice.

– Whatever choices you’ve made about your life are fine. They’re your choices, not mine.

– Your opinions about my choices and views, whether in politics, lifestyle, dress, career, etc., are simply that, opinions. I make my own choices and accept that you make your own. Just because someone doesn’t like my choice doesn’t mean I have to defend it.

If I have poor boundary maintenance

– It’s hard for me to allow others to hold views different from my own.

– I am easily upset by choices you’ve made for your own life. I have a need to convince you that your choices are wrong if they don’t fit my beliefs.

– Your opinions about me and choices matter hugely to me. If you don’t like my choices and voices, I am upset and anxious.

Small children have no emotional boundaries and as a result are easily stirred to intense emotional responses by criticism or differing opinions. Boundaries develop and grow stronger in adolescent and adulthood, but maintaining and expanding healthy boundaries is a lifetime challenge.

A large number of people in mid-life and beyond have never developed strong boundaries. Family gatherings seem to bring out the worst in bad boundary management. When that happens people interact on the basis of old boundaries of long ago, as though they’d never grown and matured since the original years of being family together.

Updating your personal boundaries is the best protection against such dynamics. Staying connected to family members in a relaxed way over time helps that to happen. Being in touch as we grow and change across life helps us to learn new patterns of interacting that reflect our unfolding life as adults.

You can do a simple reflection exercise in a few minutes that helps prepare you for relaxed interaction with family members. The exercise guides you in reflecting on how you have changed and grown since childhood and teenage years.

Draw the diagrams below on a sheet of paper.

Then fill in some names. Start with your life at age of twelve and fill in the names of people in your family and network of friends who had a big affect on your daily sense of the quality of life. Then in the second diagram fill in names for today.

I’m not talking about distant people. Names in these lists should only be those people where there’s a personal connection and who have enough of a role in your life that a bad day or a bad month for them made (or makes) your life significantly harder.

When you are done, compare the two. Notice and appreciate fully the extent to which those two lists differ. For most people the lists are very different.

Take the exercise a step farther by listing personal strengths, talents, abilities, or accomplishments that have emerged in your life since the time you left your nuclear family. When you feel secure and grounded in these, you are less vulnerable to being suckered back into the vulnerabilities that every child lives with by virtue of being a child.

When we get together for holidays, we return to relationships of long ago. But of course we’ve lived and grown since. We now have resources of knowledge and personal foundations from other relationships and roles that did not exist in the old days. If we keep our inner sense of boundaries updated, we draw strength and stability from our recent life experience. We are less vulnerable to difficult dynamics from long ago.

But if we’ve failed to update our sense of boundaries, we react emotionally from the limits of our ancient self. We’re like twelve year olds (or whatever age that we suffered the greatest difficulties with the people we are interacting with) in adult bodies.

You can prepare for re-connecting to complex relationships by refreshing your awareness of who you are today. When your brother/parent/aunt/grandparent makes a move that pokes your emotional buttons, remind yourself of your current reality. Odds are high that the person has little to no capacity any longer to have any impact on your daily life, so long as you keep your focus on your current network of family and friends.

Spare yourself the energy required to react. Just let it be like water off the back of a duck. Shrug, grin, smile. Change the topic. Find someone else to talk to. Resist the temptation to try to change that person or fight back – if you do, you are already participating in the old patterns.

Draw strength from knowledge of who you are today and where you get the energy and joy that make your life meaningful.

Don’t Resolve Conflict, Utilize It

If you like the conflict styles framework and want compatible tools to build the capacity of your organization or team, check out the trove of short videos by Dr. John Scherer.

Don’t Resolve or Manage Conflict, Utilize It

For example, in a 6 minute video clip on “Conflict Utilization“, Scherer explains why you shouldn’t be too quick to “resolve” or “manage” conflict. Odds are you will end the conflict prematurely and thus lose an opportunity to talk deeply, think carefully and make necessary changes.

In the last two minutes Scherer lists 4 concepts and tools valuable for helping groups and team use conflict well: The Pinch Theory, Three Worlds, The Four Languages, and Polarity Thinking. He dedicates a short video to each of those concepts on the same site.

I especially recommend the video on polarity management. That’s a powerful tool that I’ve found dramatically effective in certain conflicts. It should be in the toolkit of all who resource organizations and their leaders.

John Scherer is an esteemed elder in the field of organizational management and change who brings wonderful clarity and humanity to everything he does. He has posted 100+ free short videos over the last two years on organizational management and change management, many with valuable tools for making conflict a positive experience.

Scherer reads widely and faithfully credits the many practitioners and authors from whom he draws his rich insights. I have no stake in promoting John’s work – I simply think he’s a very wise man, who gives generously to others. He deserves wide exposure; you deserve the benefit of his wisdom.

Fringe Groups at Edge of Talks

Columbia’s peace process includes a problem that recurs in many national peace processes: What to do with groups whose tactics or ideology makes them unacceptable? My life experience has taught me to move towards, not away from such groups.

In Columbia, an agreement was announced on September 26, 2016, between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), ending 52 years of fighting. Left out of this agreement is the National Liberation Army (ELN), a more radical and smaller insurgency whose practices have included kidnapping civilians. The ELN has refused to renounce this practice as a precondition to talks.

I have no knowledge of the details of the Columbian peace process, but I recognize this as an old problem. In South Africa, the Philippines, Israel/Palestine, and other large peace processes I’ve been close to, there is almost always at least one group like this.

Kristin Herbolzheimer of Conciliation Resources writes insightfully about how to respond in a recent post that I recommend. There are no simple answers to such situations and Herbolzheimer clearly recognizes that. But he explores reasons why ELN has been reluctant to enter fully into talks and offers useful ideas in response.

Personal experience in several big peace processes taught me that some of the most important insights essential to sustaining peace on the long-term can be had by studying the “fringe” groups. I recall here the Pan-Africanist groups at the fringes of the South African talks whose epithets were often blood-curling. Pondering their slogan “One settler, one bullet”, it felt pretty weird to be going off for a 3 day workshop with regional leaders of the Pan Africanist Congress in a township of Port Elizabeth in 1990.

In Israel/Palestine, I encountered Hamas; in the Mindanao peace process in the Philippines, communist insurgencies and other groups; in India, the Naxalites.

“Problem children” are understood by many family counselors as often a voice of serious issues in the larger family system. I’ve come to view fringe groups in peace processes in a similar way. They are often, in part, an expression of deep issues that are not getting the attention they deserve in the peace process.

Sometimes these are vast, long-term issues like corruption, internal injustices, land, and identity; sometimes they are about badly handled process strategies that overlook or exclude certain groups. Often they are a wicked combination of the above.

Rather than ignore such groups, I think it wise to make a serious effort to understand their critique. That does not mean accepting their tactics. It simply means trying to understand the larger goals they are trying to accomplish and what dynamics are present that have caused them to adopt the tactics they deploy.

In his short piece, Herbolzheimer tries to do that with the ELN, and he offers several suggestions for the Columbian process. These include giving careful attention to public participation in the peace process, in particular to identifying and removing obstacles to involving existing structures, presumably local and regional, in public participation.

Herbolzheimer wisely warns against a common dynamic in peace processes, the tendency to create a boilerplate for secondary talks based on success at the national level. What few people understand about peace processes is that, as talks proceed, many secondary negotiations typically follow at regional and local levels. A host of related decisions have to be made once the larger framework is in place. Herbolzheimer warns against too rigid a framework for these secondary talks in Columbia.

Often the issues driving extremist groups have roots in dynamics that have particular meaning and pain for ordinary people at grassroots levels. National negotiators weary of war are often out of touch with such dynamics. Or, they may know them well but be eager to complete the large national peace framework, opting to set aside certain concerns and leave them unresolved rather than hold up a national agreement.

When this happens, major problems still lie in wait for resolution later. It is important not to set in stone – from the level of a central national peace process – the framework for secondary processes that must follow. Those processes must address issues that are often staggeringly complex. They can’t succeed in a straitjacket. Guiding general principles from the central level are needed, not binding rules.

Herbolzheimer also suggests adding a strategic time dimension to planning of next steps. In other words, separate out the issues requiring discussion into short, medium and long-term, and plan accordingly for each. I see this as a logical extension of the previous point: Each issue has its own time requirements for resolution. Recognizing and planning around this reality eases the tyranny of trying to squeeze all issues into one undifferentiated time frame.

I lived for 6 years in South Africa knowing that if I ever had the bad fortune of crossing paths with the wrong person from certain fringe groups in the wrong time and place, I could die. It wouldn’t be personal; I would be symbolic to them of a larger evil, or seen as a necessary if regrettable sacrifice to their important cause.

That personal experience makes it easy for me to understand the deep repulsion some people feel at the mere suggestion of a sympathetic examination of such groups.

But personal history taught me something else as well. Study of the fringes – and in some cases personal relationships with individuals I was able to form with them – has often been transformative for me. With few exceptions, such engagement deepened my understanding of the conflict, often in startling ways.

I think most peace processes would achieve more and prove more sustainable on the long-term by cultivating deep awareness of and engagement with the fringe elements that invariably lurk at their edges.

Nothing About Us Without Us

Injustice is a big problem. But it’s always a symptom of a deeper cause.

Wherever people aren’t getting their fair share, you’ll find patterns of decisions being made without genuine participation of people affected by them.

You can’t build lasting peace and you won’t get justice if people feel excluded from decisions they care about. That works sometimes for a little while but in the end things fall apart.

If you want to fight for justice, go for root causes. Fight for good process, starting with the groups where you hold power or influence. If you don’t make good process a priority there, your base will eventually collapse and everything you’ve done will be lost.

Kraybill Table