Ashok Panikkar, Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess Discuss: Whither Peacebuilding? Is There Life After USAID and USIP?
Newsletter 357 - May 31, 2025
Note: All our newsletters are also available on the BI Newsletter Archive.
Ashok Panikkar, Founder of the Village Idiot Studio, invited Guy and Heidi to join him in this live video discussion on the future of peacebuilding, which took place on April 21. 2025. We were joined by Rukmini Iyer, Director of Exult! Solutions, who facilitated the conversation. The video and the full transcript of the discussion can be found here.
We started our conversation by talking about what peacebuilding is and what threats it is designed to address. Heidi noted that when she started working in the field in the 1990s in the U.S., we thought of "peacebuilding" as something that was done abroad, helping people in other (mostly war-torn) societies recover from war after a peace agreement was signed. It was not something that was seen as needed or done in the U.S.
Over the last decade or so, this has changed. More and more peacebuilders began to realize that the problems they were addressing in other places were occurring here in the U.S. as well. While, fortunately, the U.S. has not fallen into an all-of-society shooting civil war, its divisions are almost as deep as if it has. And if one counts cyber attacks and lawfare (the use of law to attack the other side) as "hybrid warfare," the U.S. is clearly in that realm. Physical political violence is also sporadically occurring, as evidenced by the summer attempts to assassinate President Trump, the recent firebombing of the Governor's Mansion in Pennsylvania and the assassination of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C.
Ashok pointed out that peacebuilding is based on "building relationships — among stakeholders, among people in villages and towns and men and women in the majority and the minority and the leadership." This is possible to do, he observed, in free and open societies. But he said, "I don't think you can do that in Saudi Arabia or Burundi or Colombia because they are not and have not been free and open societies" ... Peacebuilding is an intrinsic and ongoing process in creating and maintaining liberal democracies." So, surprisingly to many (and perhaps to their dismay), Ashok argued that peacebuilding is something that needs to be done at home, in Western liberal societies. But it is not something that can or should be exported to non-liberal societies, as was commonly done in the past (and is still being done now, although gravely crippled by the elimination of USIP and USAID in the U.S.)
We then turned to the question of what "peace" is. Is it just the absence of war, or is it more than that? We agreed it is more than that, although Ashok said his definition has narrowed over the years. He used to buy into the phrase "you can't have peace unless you have justice," to which he also added equality and opportunity. He has come to believe justice and equality are "extremely dangerous ideas," because they are impossible to achieve. But still, he said, peace is "more than the absence of violence. It is more than basic security and safety. It is also a set of conditions that allow people to engage with each other with a modicum of dignity."
Guy defined peace more narrowly still. He defined it as the situation in which people assume that the way conflicts are resolved is through negotiation and collaboration, not force. He quoted a Carl Sandberg poem that we mentioned in Newsletter 322, where one man says "I want your land." And the other replies, "You can't have it." The first asks "Where'd you get it?" The answer: "from my father." "Where'd he get it? "From his father." "Where'd he get it?" "He fought for it." "Well, I'll fight you for it." This is what Guy and Heidi call "I'll fight you for it rules." Peace, Guy said, is when people widely assume that I'll-fight-you-for-it rules are off the table, and disputes must be resolved in nonviolent ways.
And, finally Heidi talked about John Paul Lederach's conception that peace is one of four concepts (together with justice, truth, and mercy), which together make up "reconciliation." So reconciliation does require the combination of peace and justice, but it also requires truth and mercy as well. The way these are put together varies from case to case. But it is never easy, because the demands of each, to some extent, contradict the demands of the others. So reconciliation requires a careful balancing, a give and take, among those four concepts, with none being realized in their entirety.
Guy also talked about Kenneth Boulding's concept of stable peace, which is the situation where two countries would not even imagine going to war with each other. Back in the 1970s when Boulding wrote the book Stable Peace, the region of the world that enjoyed stable peace was slowly expanding.
The countries of Scandinavia used to be at war with one another all the time, and then they decided, "No, that's a stupid idea. We're not going to do that anymore." He talked about how the Rush Bagot Agreement of 1817 ought to be a national holiday. That's when we demilitarized the border with Canada and decided we weren't going to go to war with them. He talks about the emergence of this vast liberal, democratic, capitalistic region of the world after World War II from the Cold War through North America and around the Pacific.
After the end of the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union, it looked as if the region of stable peace was spreading further. And with the Arab Spring, it seemed like stable peace was going to emerge all over the planet.
But in the last 25 years, we've seen that trend reversed. Now regions of stable peace are shrinking almost everywhere, even within countries that used to be considered stable, peaceful, successful democracies. Now they are at war with one another.
Donald Trump is now even threatening to annex Greenland and Canada — completely preposterous and unthinkable ideas just a few months ago!
Even as the reach of stable peace has been diminishing, some positive things regarding peacebuilding have been happening. Guy talked about the level of cooperation that developed between the military and the peacebuilding communities in the U.S., starting during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Peacebuilders began to understand that they shared some (not all, certainly) common goals with the military, and could work together on what peacebuilders called "peacebuilding," and the military called "stabilization."
But again, Ashok brought in the non-US point of view:
It was fascinating for me to hear you mention the fact that they realize they are on the same side, and they are trying to do the same thing. ... This brings us to the primary challenge that we are here to discuss, which is what I sometimes refer to as "the age of idealism, the age of love, peace, compassion, empathy,." that was literally created in the US and the Western world, starting from the '60s and '70s, I think the world has given us a huge reality check about that.
Anywhere else outside the West, the idea that peacebuilding, as a function of civil society, and the military having much in common and should be working together, would be laughed out of existence. It was possible in the US, because of the extraordinary wealth, the security that came from the wealth, the economy, military security, and the development of a very strong civil society.
All of these allowed for that kind of idealistic and even intelligent thinking to take place. And now I think what the 2020s are teaching us is that this is not really sustainable in a world where everybody doesn't accept the same set of rules. It was easier for Americans to dream of a world without war, even more than Western Europeans, because we don't have a history of being brutally attacked (other than an isolated Pearl Harbor or 9/11). Most other parts of the world are not that secure ... and they don't share the American vision and the ideals of peacebuilding. For me, this is something we need to grapple with as a field. ...
For most nations, war has enormous benefits. War gives meaning to nations. So I think peacebuilding needs to account for the fact that the glorious, idealistic theories and practices that came out of the '60s and '70s in the United States and Western Europe are no longer applicable, at least, for the immediate future.
Rukmini asked Guy and Heidi if they agreed that there were assumptions that Western practitioners failed to question as much as they should. Guy said "yes," but he didn't view it the same way Ashok did. Rather, Guy pointed out that many peacebuilders treat conflict and war as if they are complicated systems, not as though they are complex systems, which is what they truly are. He compared war and peacebuilding to medicine. In the 1950s, we created a vaccine for polio, and polio was essentially gone overnight. Then we tried to create a vaccine for cancer. While we have abandoned that effort, we are still trying to cure cancer 50 years later. The problem is that cancer is far more complex a problem than polio. It is not just one disease; it is a whole host of diseases, with multiple causes, each of which manifests in different people in different ways.
Societal-level intractable conflicts are similarly complex. You can't just sit the disputants down at a table with a mediator and work them out, the way you might be able to when you are negotiating to buy a car, or work out the division of property in a divorce. That's like polio. Societal-level intractable conflicts are more like cancer.
Guy observed that we need at least four tiers of peacebuilding processes.
On the one hand, we have been very good at figuring out how to resolve conflicts within the highly homogeneous community that its detractors describe as the "woke progressive left." The progressive left has a whole set of rules about how to interact with one another. And within that community, conflict resolution and peacebuilding work pretty well.
(Not so much, anymore, Heidi thought to herself, but didn't say out loud.) Guy went on:
The problem is that even within Western liberal democratic societies, there are a lot of people who don't agree with those rules. And they're the source of the populist rebellions that are tearing apart democracies all over. So we need strategies for working within progressive communities, and now we need a new set of strategies for working on the conflict between these progressive communities and the larger populace. Fortunately, that's a place where there's lots of good opportunities.
The next area that we really need to deal with is how do we interact with countries that are aggressive authoritarians that are using the same old might-makes-right, I'll-fight-you-for-it model. This is China and Russia, and there are lots of others in the world. Here we fall back on the ideas such as real politik. Authoritarians will make deals, so you try to craft those. And you develop and work within "spheres of influence." A lot of this is disagreeable. But if you do it carefully, and are a little lucky, you can avoid large-scale war. A lot of people wind up living in pretty horrible conditions as a result, but you don't have large-scale war with nuclear, chemical and other weapons of mass destruction. So you need a set of rules on how you deal with authoritarian regimes.
And then there's another class of problems where you have entities that are absolutely committed to the total destruction of another group of people. I put Hamas in this category. It is so committed to the destruction of Israel and the Jews that it will absorb staggering losses and place its civilians directly in harm's way in an effort to achieve its goal. It's an almost nihilistic philosophy. You have this with mass shooters in the United States— people who are so alienated from modern society and so hostile to it, that they just want to destroy it. We need another set of rules for dealing with those folks. So we need to start thinking big about the multi-faceted conflict problem.
Many of our readers would probably put Israel in this category too, and we understand this view (we think), given Israel's devastating attacks on Gaza, and to a lesser extent on the West Bank. However, we disagree. Israel, we believe, is willing to live in peace with the Palestinians provided that the Palestinians are willing to do the same for Israel and Jews. The problem is that Hamas, at least, and many other Palestinians, have made it very clear, time and again, that they are not willing, under any circumstances, to do this. Also undermining Hamas' legitimacy, in our view, is its tactic of using unspeakable atrocities to provoke a fierce Israeli military response and then cultivating global sympathy by sacrificing its citizens through the use of a civilian shield strategy that makes it impossible for Israel to avoid substantial numbers of civilian casualties. Further compounding the tragedy is the fact that Hamas routinely steals the humanitarian aid that Israel and other entities are trying to provide to Palestinian citizens, adding to their misery, and creating the false impression that Israel is deliberately starving the population.
Guy ended by saying:
When I give a dismal lecture like this, I always try to end it with an upbeat point, which is that the thing about social problems is that all problems create opportunities for people who can figure out how to solve them. We've just been handed a gigantic stack of problems. And there is an opportunity for a new and very exciting beginning as we figure out how to grapple with all this.
Rukmini asked Heidi what that meant for what the peacebuilder of the future should be learning and/or doing. Heidi explained our notion of Massively Parallel Peacebuilding. Given that intractable conflicts are extraordinarily complex, one person or one organization cannot possibly learn enough or do enough to handle these conflicts in their entirety. We have identified over fifty different roles that need to be filled, if societal-level intractable conflicts are to be successfully managed and transformed. Peacebuilders of today or tomorrow should look at those roles, figure out which one(s) they are best suited to play, and then set out to learn what they need to learn to to carry out that role effectively, all the while understanding that they will be one small piece of a very large peacebuilding puzzle.
Ashok laid out a challenge to this image, however. He asked who is going to pay all these people to undertake all these roles and tasks.
Who pays for peace? It's not the people who are affected by war —for instance, it is not those affected by civil war in Sudan. It's not the Ukrainians who are being attacked by Russia. It is rich, well-meaning countries and their taxpayers who pay to establish peace elsewhere. So there is no consumer, or at least, the end user is not paying for it. This means that the peacebuilder is forever trying to sell the idea of peace and peacebuilding to those who have excess money, who will pay for the privilege of creating peace elsewhere.
This makes it, as a profession, extremely fragile and tenuous. Dentists and plumbers don't have to struggle to make their case. Society needs them. Even the poor person needs a dentist and a plumber. But peacebuilders aren't in the same position.
Ashok went on to explain the qualities that a current-day peacebuilder needs. First, he said,
they need to understand the nature of reality, the world. "They need to understand is the sheer astonishing complexity of the world, what Guy referred to when he talked of the conditions and the extraordinary complexity of cancer as opposed to polio. That is a very difficult thing to grapple with. ... So first, a would-be-peacebuilder needs knowledge. Not knowledge about the field. Knowledge about the world. We have too many humanitarians, too many do-gooders who have extraordinary specific technical knowledge about their area of study or the intervention that they wish to bring to the world. But without understanding how the world works.
The second thing peacebuilders need is humility. If you have clarity, if you can appreciate the extraordinary complexity of the world, then you are most likely to have extraordinary humility. It can't be otherwise. Then you can never be self-righteous.
While Heidi and Guy agreed that peacebuilders need humility and should not be self-righteous, we think they have needed skills in the same way plumbers do. War and even nonviolent intractable conflicts are extraordinarily destructive, and few people come out of them achieving their goals. Most often, they fight very costly battles, and either lose, or get an outcome that doesn't even cover the costs of their efforts.
To the extent that peacebuilders can help people conduct their conflicts more effectively, they would be offering a service that would be highly desired, particularly in Western liberal democracies that have a culture of compromise and collaboration. If they (peacebuilders) develop a reputation for doing this, even poor people, organizations, and perhaps countries, might be willing to pay for such assistance—because it would cost less than continuing the fight.
But peacebuilders must have the humility to respect the interests, needs, values, and goals of their clients, and not try to impose their own interests, needs, values, and goals (as has happened at times in the past). And they must develop a reputation for success, not a reputation of failure, which is what they largely have now. It is going to be a challenging time for peacebuilders, and it may well be that their skills are more needed right now at home in the United States and Western Europe than they are in other countries. But their knowledge and skills are still very much needed. We just need to figure out how to make ourselves useful and trusted.
We talked about a number of other related things, and had a question and answer period which we include in the video and transcript of the entire session.
Please Contribute Your Ideas To This Discussion!
In order to prevent bots, spammers, and other malicious content, we are asking contributors to send their contributions to us directly. If your idea is short, with simple formatting, you can put it directly in the contact box. However, the contact form does not allow attachments. So if you are contributing a longer article, with formatting beyond simple paragraphs, just send us a note using the contact box, and we'll respond via an email to which you can reply with your attachment. This is a bit of a hassle, we know, but it has kept our site (and our inbox) clean. And if you are wondering, we do publish essays that disagree with or are critical of us. We want a robust exchange of views.
About the MBI Newsletters
BI sends out newsletter 2-3 times a week. Two of these are substantive articles. Once a week or so we compile a list of the most interesting reading we have found related to our topics of interest: intractable conflict, hyper-polarization, and democracy, and we share them in a "Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links” newsletter. These links include articles sent by readers, information about our colleagues’ activities, and news and opinion pieces that we have found to be of particular interest. Each Newsletter will be posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
NOTE! If you signed up for this Newsletter and don't see it in your inbox, it might be going to one of your other emails folder (such as promotions, social, or spam). Check there or search for beyondintractability@substack.com and if you still can't find it, first go to our Substack help page, and if that doesn't help, please contact us.
If you like what you read here, please ....