If the obstacles to peacebuilding and reconciliation are so severe, what hope is there? Where is it possible to find the resources to overcome the inertia, the wickedness, the rackets and power games, the deep-set structures of evil – the principalities and powers as St Paul calls them in chapter 6 of his epistle to the Ephesians – that come together to overwhelm the weak, the unthinking and the negligent?
As in looking at the obstacles, this chapter does not pretend to be the volumes-long work that would be necessary to explore all the resources for peacebuilding. I will try to look at some examples and pick up some attitudes that provide a grounding. Parts II and III of this book will develop that thinking and apply it.
The Moral Imagination
In the early 2000s I was invited to facilitate a gathering in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, where government and opposition military and politicians would discuss reconciliation. The long civil war in Burundi that had started around the time of the Rwandan Genocide, more than ten years earlier, had died down to some extent as a result of ceasefires. Travel was still complicated, and flare-ups were frequent.
The meeting was held in a hotel. Around thirty attended for three days of discussion, all in French. There was a very suspicious atmosphere as long-term enemies met. On the third day a senior government military officer pointed across the room and said, ‘That man’s militia killed 30,000 people. How can I be reconciled?’
We were near Lake Tanganyika and I pointed out of the window to the beautiful sight of the lake and hills.
‘If you go out in a boat and fall into the water, what do you do?’
‘Swim!’ came the answer.
‘And if you can’t swim?’
‘Then you drown.’
‘And if you do not find a way to reconcile then you will all die.’
The last chapter set out just a few of the issues of reconciliation. It is easy to conclude that peacebuilding is impossible. At its heart is the need for a leap of moral imagination1 towards a possibility previously unimaginable, a structure for peaceful and reconciled disagreement that is radically different from the experience of destructive conflict. This is the point where an outsider may help. Peacebuilding in many conflicts at any level may seem so impossible that the only response is to continue fighting.
John Lederach comments:
The moral imagination proposes that turning points and a journey towards a new horizon are possible, though based on perplexing paradoxes. The turning points must find a way to transcend the cycles of destructive violence while living with and being relevant to the context that produces those cycles. A horizon, though visible, is permanently just out of touch, suggesting an epic journey, the pursuit of which in peacebuilding, is the forging of new ways to approach human affairs with an enemy.2
That is what is meant by moral imagination: it leads to a change of heart. In all sorts of conflict, the aim becomes more and more towards winning, even when winning is an empty dream. Whether it is a family arguing over an inheritance, or a group seeking political power in a country, once the conflict – within its own context – becomes destructive then only change of heart and a new imagination gives the strength to move forward. The very act of planning victory is itself one sort of imagination that energizes and motivates those involved even where the consequences of victory, let alone defeat, would be terrible.
In March 2021, the UK government published a review of the outlook for security, defence and development in the 2020s.3 It is a powerful and comprehensive document, probably the widest ranging of its kind in very many decades, possibly ever. Yet in many places it suffers from a lack of moral imagination, especially in dealing with world-changing threats like nuclear war. It includes an approach to nuclear warfare strategy, but never asks the question about consequences. If there was a nuclear war and the UK deployed and used its weapons, what happens next? It comes in the category of ‘too difficult, ignore’.
Such a failure of the necessary imagination of the moral consequences of proposed actions are typical of conflicts that pursue a single, straight road, well paved with good intentions. Its underlying assumption is that ‘we can control events’, ‘we will win’, or ‘it won’t happen’. Yet all the history of wars reveals that they are times of chaos and error, where often the side that makes the fewer mistakes wins.
The same is true of domestic or community quarrels. Where the whole resources of imagination are taken up with seeking to win and with mulling over the horrible nature of the enemy, no space, no bandwidth, is left for the moral imagination. The long, straight and well-paved road is never looked at afresh with the question, ‘Can I or we imagine an alternative, a fork in the road that takes us on the hard and stony path of peace?’
Lederach quotes his researcher as writing: ‘In our context of thirty plus years of the Troubles [in Northern Ireland], violence, fear and division are known. Peace is the mystery! … Peace is Mystery. It is walking into the unknown.’4
The first and indispensable resource for overcoming a sense that conflict is inexorable, unavoidable, conquering all the best intentions, is the moral imagination. The moral imagination is the responsibility of leadership. It is perhaps the example of leadership that most clearly sets great leaders apart.
In the twentieth century there are many examples of such moral imagination. In Chapter 1, I have already referred to the leadership of those who sought to bring western Europe together after 1945, to provide a pathway for peaceful competition and to end the centuries of terrible wars that had killed so many, especially since 1870. There are many more examples. After the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70, President Gowon of Nigeria declared, ‘no victors, no vanquished’, and thereby started a process of reconciliation that has endured to some extent for half a century. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Germany was reunited, and other countries in the former communist-ruled centre and east of Europe adjusted in largely peaceful revolutions. In what was then Czechoslovakia, President Václav Havel, a former political prisoner, led the country into peaceful adjustment (the Velvet Revolution of 1989) and then into the ‘velvet divorce’ when in 1993 Slovakia separated and received independence. In February 1990, following his twenty-seven years of imprisonment, soon-to-be-president Nelson Mandela navigated the transition to Black majority rule in South Africa, along with President de Klerk.
There are many quibbles and many serious objections that can be raised with every example. None of them demonstrates a process of moral imagination that is eternal or that became part of the DNA of a country or a movement. Time goes by, the vision of the founders fades. Others replace them, the pain of conflict is forgotten as the generation that lived it grows old and dies. Moral imagination, like forgiveness, is a fragile plant that needs constant attention. Moral imagination never will be in human DNA: our desires for power, our capacity to find enemies, our pride and foolish self-reliance, all prevent such a deep change in human nature.
But when it flowers, miracles happen. That fragile plant will, for a few years or even a couple of generations, shelter nations from war and turn human hearts to love for those with less resources than them. Its flowering can be renewed with the right leaders and the right inspiration.
Inspiration matters at several levels. It is far more than emotional. It affects perception and influences imagination. It can change the attitude to outgroups by members of an opposed ingroup. It works across the whole human being,5 including in the neurochemistry that has a powerful influence on emotions, on decision-making capacity, on ethical attitudes. Inspiration changes perceptions of challenges or, to put it another way, it can nourish or restrict the moral imagination. Studies have shown that perceptions of a challenge, such as climbing a very steep hill, will be improved if someone has a positive and confident companion – the hill, in the case of the climber, then being physically perceived as less steep. Perceptions of threat are appropriate when facing someone violent or for a fighter in battle, but they pose dangers to peace negotiations. Inspiration may nurture a different attitude.
The first and most important resource in peacebuilding is the moral imagination described above: nobody will retain that imagination without being nurtured and inspired by leadership and by functional and mutually supportive communities. Reconciliation is seldom, if ever, the choice of a lone individual and even if they make that choice, they still need the resilience and persistence that comes from community.
A Holistic Focus
The second key resource is a holistic approach to building peace. Peacebuilding is very often seen as those things that capture the headlines. Prime ministers and presidents come and go in convoys of armoured vehicles and howling sirens. They are surrounded by people in dark glasses with curly wires coming out of their ears who talk to their shirt cuffs and are always looking for threats. Exhausted spokespeople talk of honest discussions, slow progress, hope of a breakthrough or the achievement of settlement. Signings are held in large halls with people passing documents from one to the other and pens being exchanged. Polling figures are consulted to see what the impact has been on re-election chances.
Then the caravan moves on. Three or five or seven years later, the struggle re-emerges, perhaps a little different but always the same basic virus of violence. Nobel Prizes are not returned, the politicians may have moved on, but the people, the sufferers, the women raped, the men ignored, were never touched. They had a few courses on job finding, but their hearts and intentions were not treated as having the same intrinsic value and independence as those of the leaders, and their moral imagination was neither inspired nor nurtured. The struggle begins again and this time it is worse.
In the sixteenth century, during the French religious wars, a leader on one side commented that ‘in the first war we fought like men, in the second like animals and in the third like demons’. Conflict does not improve with age, nor does it decay and become less dangerous. It rots. The rot is poisonous to the body, mind and spirit of the individual and of the society.
Yet there is as much problem with the hidden work that happens. Grassroots groups may work intensely and intelligently. Local efforts may bring local peace. Yet regional conflicts overwhelm as does the pressure of others with a dog in the fight or who are just observers with bias and interests. The leaders call their followers to arms and out of peer pressure and desire for honour the middle-rank leaders and the people at the most local level respond.
Peacebuilding in every situation must be top down, middle out and bottom up, all at once, all linked and all inclusive.
The illustration of the need for a holistic approach is a failure that taught me a lesson. In the early 2000s, the group with whom I worked at Coventry Cathedral was invited to support work on peacebuilding in an area of an African country. It was a border area where historic expansion of Christianity and Islam met. It was also a border between farmers and pastoralists as well as two ethnic groups. Several thousand people had died during clashes. The area was remote, and police and army groups could not reach threatened towns and villages in time. I remember walking through burned-out settlements one Ash Wednesday, the dust and ash rising into the air from the ruins and the humps of shallow graves in the ground. Hostility, deep hatred, were all around.
The process was long but for a while it was effective. Influential people in different villages were given satellite phones so that they could communicate. They were trained a little and had a very few numbers programmed in. Some training on conflict management was given to local police units. If a person with a phone heard that there was trouble brewing, they could phone the equivalent elder in the nearest village from where the trouble might come, or might be going, and warn them. They would also call the police, rather than walking for hours to a place where they could call.
The results were dramatic for a while. There was a good deal of peace and collaboration. Then, at a higher level, the whole region erupted into new violence and in a short period all the progress was swept away. We had supported the real reconcilers who were local, and the next level up, the middle. But the top remained untouched. The result was failure to establish sustainable non-violence for long enough to change the moral imagination towards peace.
Partnership
Everyone wants the glory. Everyone wants, being human, to be recognized for what they have done. NGOs, whether local or international, rely on attention to maintain access to funding streams. Having led an NGO within Coventry Cathedral, I remember well the pressure. It is not corruption or greed, merely the normal reality that any institution seeks to preserve its own life, and, in most institutions, ‘life’ is represented by money to carry out work. Without money, staff cannot be kept and new projects cannot be completed. In one sense this is right. A good organization, with visionary ideas, comes into being and grows. Sooner or later, however, its initial vision and sharpness of aims and values are blurred as people come to work for it who were not there at the beginning. As it gets larger, more time is spent on finance and function and less on the front line.
Equally, no institution is capable of doing all that is needed. Those with skills at mediation may well not be so good at running refugee or IDP6 settlements. There may be very severe problems of security that require working with peacekeeping or peacemaking organizations. Epidemics will need medical support. Displaced and disturbed children will need education and stability. Many of all ages and types will require trauma counselling. There will be the need of resettlement, of rebuilding an economy with microfinance and other support. The list is endless.
Perhaps the most difficult and most valuable part of putting together an effort in reconciliation is assembling a team and having the humility or ethos among its members to be willing to share the way forward.
In the UK a town was divided by prospects of a new motorway running close by. The route would divide it from other, smaller villages in the community, and there would be more noise and a disturbance to the view. Many of the older and more conservative households were against it. They had settled in the area towards the end of their working lives, mostly professional and white-collar elite, and they resented the change to the character of the area. For exactly the same reasons, a minority of the older people, those who had grown up there and to quote someone I knew, ‘their grandparents are in the churchyard’, were in favour because their children could not afford the increasingly expensive housing and would have to move away. For some others, who came from families in the area for up to seven generations, this felt like the end of the world. The community needed better facilities and affordable housing, not a road.
The priest of the parish rather naively invited people to an open meeting at the church to discuss a way forward. Ahead of the date both sides, who had representatives on the town council, agreed who would speak and a line to take. The meeting quickly turned not into a debate but into an exchange of explosive-filled speeches that did not attempt to address the fears of the other but were aimed at rallying hard-line support for their own view.
The parish priest put aside her fantasies of being loved by everyone because she had put the community back together, and with considerable courage picked herself up and got advice.
To cut the story of a couple of years very short, she found partners and, with a group, mapped the conflict. They saw who had what interests, who led them and who encouraged them. They listened carefully and built relationships with different groups, not least with church services tailored for every different group. They worked with small groups, trained people in listening skills and in having difficult conversations. They understood some very physical needs, such as for improved surgeries, a bigger school and better and cheaper shopping. By the end they had enabled the majority, but not all, of the community to accept that the motorway could go ahead, and negotiated with developers that the new jobs it would bring as transport links improved would open the way to new housing that was appropriate for the area and affordable for those who would work there. There would be more shopping, a sports centre and a new secondary school.
They did not live happily ever after, and the priest was not loved by everyone, until the next one came, when, of course, the previous one was seen as a golden age, but the community grew in diversity and functioned as a place of welcome and hope. And that is good enough.
Think about what was needed for that outcome. Mediation and reconciliation were only part of the problem. There needed to be social understanding, training, developers, lawyers, educationalists, doctors and loads of volunteers. Scale it up to a violent conflict over a region and the complexity grows enormously. Scale it globally and face an issue like climate change and it is orders of magnitude more complex still.
It is obvious that at almost no level can things be done alone. Even a single household may well need mediation, counselling, financial advice, support for a bullied child at school and help to get a leaking roof repaired. The key issue for anyone involved in mediation and reconciliation work is to know what they can do and to ensure that the right team is assembled. We will look at how this is done more carefully in Part II.
A Commitment to Truth and Transparency
At UK schools, textbooks in history usually describe the Battle of Trafalgar as the key naval engagement of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in which the Royal Navy defeated a stronger Franco-Spanish force after a dramatic chase across the Atlantic and back. It is set out as the moment that stopped Napoleon’s ‘Army of England’ mounting an invasion. The next passage will usually say that the army at Boulogne then broke camp and marched across Europe to defeat the Dual Monarchy at Ulm and Austerlitz and in 1806 the Prussians at Jena. Nelson’s death is always painted in heroic colours. The Royal Navy celebrates Trafalgar Day (21 October) with dinners and a toast to ‘the immortal memory’.
A French history textbook for schools described Trafalgar as a naval engagement off the Spanish coast in which the British admiral was killed. End of story.
Both statements are true, but neither is the whole truth. The understanding of history is seldom precise. There is always a myth that somehow ‘truth’ in a dispute exists somewhere. The reality is that the nature of conflict at all levels of our lives makes us perceive reality differently. There is a letter in our family from someone who was part of the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854 at the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War. It was written to his mother immediately after the battle. He tells of the charge, of friends who were killed or wounded, and of his horse having been hit by a shell splinter. Surely this would be accurate? It certainly is, but it is only one aspect of the battle and contradicts other accounts in some important ways. There is a true account of the battle, but no single person could tell it and no history will get every detail right.
We all have the experience of listening to friends whose marriage or relationship has broken down. It is painful and sad. It is also confusing. Sometimes there is a sort of resigned defeatism, ‘it just was not working’, which cannot be explained. Sometimes there are flat contradictions. The outsider cannot tell which is true and often even those involved don’t know or convince themselves of truth that has no relation to what happened. Finding the truth is a difficult process, and the bigger the conflict the more complicated the truth. It takes time and often a process of enquiry.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) approach was most famously applied in South Africa after the fall of the Apartheid regime. Chaired by the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, it achieved a remarkable success in enabling the hardest of stories to be told by victims and perpetrators. Not only did this result in a far clearer understanding of truth, but in some remarkable cases it opened the way to reconciliation between individuals and symbolized the beginnings of reconciliation for the nation.
TRCs have been tried in many places. The key to their working is a deep commitment to transparency by individuals and organizations. They must have official support and a willingness by all significant figures to be open and not simply to use a TRC as a forum for putting their own case. Truth is only found by transparency that listens as well as speaks. It requires the humility of being able to accept that wrong has been done. Above all, TRCs require leadership that is trusted in the way that both President Mandela and Archbishop Tutu were.
Truth and transparency are painful and costly. A commitment to both is essential but needs help through skilled and trusted figures in a TRC or through good facilitators in other methods. What matters is developing habits of facing conflict in a way that always leaves space for changing of minds. ‘My truth, right or wrong’ does not lead to progress.
The sign of a commitment to truth and transparency is the seeking of a joint understanding at best, or at least an understanding of the position of the other. To be able to tell the other’s story and to give an account of their view, even when disagreement is profound, is a major step on the journey of reconciliation.
Embrace Complexity
I love simplifying things. To look at a complex problem and be able to extract the key elements in a way that is simple feels like a great achievement. I hold strongly to the adage ‘KISS’, ‘keep it simple, stupid!’ Complicated problems end up with untidy solutions.
In some areas of work, it is a good rule. The organization of companies or other institutions is better kept as simple as possible. I once worked in a company that relied on matrix management. The theory was fine: that junior employees like me had more than one manager so that all those above knew what was going on. The result was at best disorder and at worst an opportunity to play off one boss against the other. Paper proliferated as people like me tried to tell all those who we thought might be one of our line managers everything they needed to know about everything we were doing.
However, there is no simplifying the human heart. We seldom understand all our own motivations. The wonderful film Bridge of Spies with Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance (2015) is about the Cold War in the 1950s. Mark Rylance plays a Russian spy in the USA who is caught and sentenced to death. His lawyer is played by Tom Hanks. Hanks says to Rylance on several occasions, ‘You don’t seem worried’, and the Rylance character replies, ‘Would it help?’ Most of us are not quite like that. People annoy us and even when we do not show it, we are unsettled by conversations with them. Often, we cannot quite explain it.
Put our own internal complexity into a group and multiply it by the number of people. Add in the soup of not-quite-understood history and the impact of historic myths and legends. Add a garnish of fear and anxiety for the future, of apprehension for one’s family and stability and the ambitions of many leaders. Combine with the influence of those who gain from conflict at all levels. Don’t forget the impact of pride and unwillingness to agree one is wrong and the strength of greed for gain and the fruit of victory. Even then one is not anywhere close to the complexity of many conflicts.
Imagine you end up in hospital after you have had a bad fall. You are wheeled into the emergency department. A doctor takes a very quick look and says, ‘You have a bruised head; take some paracetamol and lie down until you feel better’ but ignores your broken leg. You would not be impressed. You would certainly not get better.
Simplifying the genuinely complex leads not only to misdiagnosis of the problem but also to the wrong treatment and thus no recovery.
A clear example of this is the use of religion or immigration or another single issue as a political hook, on which politicians often hang much more complicated problems. Religion and immigration are easily identifiable differences between people. News and media will often present a conflict as ‘religious’, or ‘tribal’, or a similar term. The reality will be a very complicated mixture of history, economics, ethnicity and numerous other causes. For a political leader seeking office, simplification enables more followers to be found. For a reporter in a war zone, who usually understands how intricate the problem is, the pressure of condensing a report into less than two minutes makes complexity impossible to communicate. For someone facilitating the process or for the parties there are no excuses: complexity has to be faced. You cannot heal what you have not identified.
In 2002, I had the privilege of being the note taker at a meeting in Jerusalem chaired by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey (now Lord Carey). It was a gathering of religious and political leaders who had signed the Alexandria Declaration on religious peace in the Holy Land. There were about twenty-five people present in a brilliantly chaired and fiercely argued meeting. The discussion covered the situation of the intifada (the uprising) that was currently happening, the issue of bombings, Jewish and Christian and Islamic theology, as well as a multitude of historic events as far back as the destruction of Herod’s Temple in 70 ce. I was sitting next to the British Consul General in Jerusalem, who at one point muttered, ‘I hope you understand all this, because I don’t.’
No simplification could do justice to the complexity of a dispute that in some readings goes back to the time of Moses. Lord Carey’s remarkable ability to hold the subtleties delicately enabled a good outcome to the day. He recognized and embraced the complexity.
Summary
• In some ways the keys to progress come down to character.
• Humility enables partnerships to work, complexity to be embraced and the unknowable and undiscernible aspects of truth to be left on the table where they can be examined over time. Pride seeks self-glory, wants partners only as subordinates, simplifies to show sharp insight and is impatient.
• Openness to others stimulates the moral imagination. A gentle manner and a confidence when needed, another way of saying courage, combine to make it possible for the moral imagination to be spread and taken on board by those in a dispute.
• And I would say faith enables us to call out to the God of peace for blessing on the journey of reconciliation and the miracle of roadblocks circumvented and barriers overcome.
Points to Ponder
• Do you believe reconciliation is possible? Looking back at Part I, are the obstacles too great? List some disputes you have known, locally, in families or on a wider scale. What proportion have been fought out and which ones have shown some fruit of reconciliation? What made the difference?
• What is most discouraging and most encouraging about this Part? Why?
• In your own faith tradition or non-faith tradition, what are the stories that call you to reconciliation?
Biblical Reflection
John 13.1-20
A famous passage. Spend time talking about the reaction of those involved. What would a foot-washing church look like at every level? Try washing each other’s feet, if everyone is happy with that. Then share how you feel. Then pray.