A Reasonable Peace: Can Critical Thinking Save the Field of Peacebuilding?
Newsletter #309 - January 5, 2024
EVENT NOTICE: Urban/Rural Action and Ideos Institute, together with many partners, are holding the "National Days of Dialogue" starting today, January 5, and running through January 20. This initiative provides both virtual and in-person platforms for Americans to engage in conversations exploring different perspectives and building relationships across diverse backgrounds. If this is something you've been thinking about doing, now is an easy way to dip your feet in the water.
A REASONABLE PEACE: On Monday November 4, 2024, Guy and Heidi Burgess talked with Ashok Panikkar about how the peacebuilding field fits in today's world, and whether it needs to fundamentally change to become effective in the context of the many illiberal actors who are sowing discord and violence across much of the world. Ashok, long a fan of and teacher of critical thinking proposed the title: "A Reasonable Peace: Can Critical Thinking Save the Field of Peacebuilding?" Merrick Hoben facilitated our conversation.
After doing fairly lengthy personal introductions Merrick asked Heidi and Guy to talk about what peacebuilding and conflict resolution, when they were first developed, were originally intended to do, and whether that intent now needs to be changed (as Ashok has suggested) to respond to current times.
Heidi responded that the fields of peacebuilding and conflict resolution have two separate histories. The conflict resolution field, as it currently exists, largely came out of U.S. labor-management struggles of the early 1900s. The Wagner Act (also called the Labor Management Relations Act) was passed in 1935, which (among other provisions), created the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service which offers mediation and facilitation to workers and companies suffering labor strife. (In the video, Heidi erroneously referred to this act as Taft-Hartly Act of 1947, which is wrong.)
Noting the success of these efforts, mediators then began to offer their services in other contexts: family relations, community relations, environmental issues, etc. But this was primarily happening, at least originally, within the United States and to some degree in other Western, democratic countries. (Versions of mediation were also used elsewhere in the world, but their history is different.)
Peacebuilding developed about the same time, but for very different reasons. It began as a number of scholars coming out of World War II were insistent that such a catastrophe should never be allowed to happen again, and they formed several University-based peace research centers in the U.S. and Europe to develop theories and tools of peacebuilding. Early scholars such as Kenneth Boulding, Johan Galtung, and Anatol Rappaport trained hundreds, perhaps thousands of students and practitioners, who spread out around the world to offer peacebuilding services. Some worked closely with the newly-formed United Nations, which also offered peacekeeping and peacemaking (i.e., diplomatic negotiation) services.
Guy addressed Merrick's question of whether these initial goals need to be changed. He said that we need to redevelop a vision of what peace is.
One of the things that has gotten lost, I think, in recent years, is we have a much less clear consensus about what a peaceful democratic society looks like or, if we have peace, what does it look like?
The first set of things to focus on is different ways in which societies and cultures might choose to organize themselves. Throughout most of human history, societies have been organized around a power-over approach. There's a great Carl Sandberg poem that illustrates this, I think, very well. It tells the story of two guys who get in an argument over land:
I want your land.
Can't have it.
Where'd you get it?
I got it from my father.
Well, where'd he get it?
He got it from his father.
Ok, where did he get it?
He got it from his father.
Where did he get?
He fought for it.
Well, I'll fight you for it.
We [Heidi and I] often talk about "I'll fight you for it rules." That's a way of organizing society that inevitably leads either to total anarchy and chaos as different aspiring authoritarians duke it out, or it leads to brutal authoritarianism that gets entrenched with state police. And in the new era of 21st century technology, authoritarians have a kind of mind control that George Orwell didn't even have nightmares about.
We have been trying as a species, really, for centuries now, to try to figure out how to escape that trap. And democracy is what we keep coming up with. It's basically an attempt to replace power-over forms of social organization, with power-with forms of social organization. But there are real questions as to whether it will turn out to be strongest approach in the long run.
But it has, historically, been vastly more productive, because it rewards individual incentives. It is a way of organizing a society around the notion that for every problem, there's an opportunity for somebody who can find a solution to that problem. And that's the engine of social progress. And that's democracy's big advantage, even though there's lots of infighting and chaos.
But what we're talking about now ,and struggling with, is whether we can make power-with democracy work? As Ashok taught us in earlier conversations, it's a lot easier do to that in some cultural circumstances than others. And that there are real questions about how power-with societies interact with power-over societies.That's the geopolitical struggle of the moment, which has broken out into war in two major places. It could get a lot worse fast.
Ashok shared a very different history, based on his life growing up in India.
Growing up in India, I never experienced, even once, any attempt in either public life or in the civic space, any kind of mediative processes. And I was in India until the age of 36. What I found in India was very different. This is one of the reasons why, when I came to the US and discovered conflict resolution, I was bowled over.
The idea that you would even negotiate with someone in India was bizarre! Because negotiation was for those who didn't have the capacity to have their way. ... The only model that I experienced was power-over — consistently amongst classmates in school, in college, pretty much everywhere in India. When I came to the US and I was exposed to mediation and conflict resolution, it was like, "Oh my God, this is so evolved. ...
When I look what the Western model of peacebuilding and conflict resolution, I see that it is really based on an enormous interest in a negotiated settlement. But also, it's based on a whole host of assumptions, including the reasonableness of the other person. And all of this was for me, as I said, very attractive.
But at the same time, when I looked at the world outside of my mediation and conflict resolution circles, even while I was doing this work in Boston, I saw a very different world. And particularly after my experience in India from 1995 to 2017, when I ran Metaculture, I realized that even civil society was not even remotely interested in negotiation or dialogue. And then, of course, over the last 10 years with the Syrian crisis, Brexit, Trump in the US, Ukraine, and Palestine— it has become clear to me that the [notions of conflict resolution and peacebuilding] that were meticulously crafted by Western mediators and peacebuilders was unique to their own sensibilities. I call it the "Cosmopolitan, Western, Liberal Sensibility — the sensibility that we can reason, that we want peace. Even the idea that we have a responsibility to get along with people who are different. This is a sensibility of the Western, highly-educated liberal elite. It isn't representative of many other places in the world.
I really liked Guy's poem about the two neighbors. Of course, it's so crude; it's almost primitive. But if we look at the world today, including Israel and Palestine, it's that mindset that informs relationships. So one of the things I'm hoping will come out of this conversation is considering whether these assumptions of wanting peace over war are valid. It seems self-evident to many of us. "Violence is bad. If you can have peace, why would you have war? Or if you can have power-with rather than power-over, why would you have power-over? " I think these are culturally rooted assumptions. I think these are historically unique assumptions that don't necessarily work, unless the other party shares those assumptions.
Guy agreed that there are, no doubt, these cultural differences. And both he and Heidi agree that these differences make current approaches to peacebuilding in many war-torn parts of the world very difficult, perhaps impossible. And while we don't have any sort of agreement about how to organize societies and how to deal with different social and cultural issues, Guy pointed out that there does seem to be much more agreement about economic question. Guy observed,
When I was in graduate school before computers could make graphs, I did it by hand. And I plotted when there got to be 3 billion people on the planet. Now there are well over seven billion people. In the 1970s, it was considered absolutely, positively impossible to get to 7 billion people. We thought that there would be widespread calamity and famine. The society would overshoot and collapse. But it didn't.
And the reason it didn't was that we learned how to work together at an astonishing level. If you look at the global logistics chain that delivers to our grocery stores or to and from Amazon at our beck and call—we can get anything that we want. And it's always there. It's always fresh. You can have blueberries every day. If they have to come from New Zealand, they come from New Zealand. And the engine that did this is global. Many parts of the the Global South have had phenomenal success. The rate of poverty in pretty much every part of the world, except the "left-behind-class," many of the Trump supporters in the developed world, has been doing phenomenally well—more than anybody ever dared hope for back in the 1970s. And somehow the global economic system made that possible. And if we lose it, we're all going to starve to death, because the global population is supported by the efficiencies of that system. So, I wonder, if things are as bad as we paint them on the social side, how can they be as good as they are on the economic side?
After we discussed this observation for a bit, and whether or not it will continue (Ashok thinks it will not), he asked "where do we go from here?" He mused,
Of course, there's always a possibility, because none of us is a soothsayer, that something will happen in the next 5 to 10 years and things will settle back and the liberal world order will be saved. People like me would be delighted with that, because the current state of the world terrifies many of us. But let's just assume that it will not recover or revive as easily. Then what do we do?
Let's just take the US and Western nations. And I'm not talking of peacebuilders at all. We are almost irrelevant in the larger picture. But if the states, UK, France, Germany, US decide that they see value in maintaining the liberal world order and conflict resolution and peacebuilding and the whole package, they may have to create a separate zone within which these processes can work. ... I see that it's almost like going back to the Cold War era. I don't see the Russian, Chinese, or Arab states being part of that at all.
Don't get me wrong. I do believe that there will be negotiation and bargaining and game playing between these two blocks. But I see that the only possible way for us to salvage any of what we are talking about lies in creating a very strong fence, literally a fence ringing these societies so that, at least internally, domestically, they can continue to work under these assumptions of coexistence, of managing and accepting differences.
Now, what does that mean? How would you do that, when the threat from outside actors, authoritarian actors, is so strong? This is where (my peacebuilding peers detest it when I say this, but ) this is where Kissinger's realpolitik is so important." I don't know how many countries of the West will come together. We don't even know what will happen to many of the Eastern or Central European nations in the next 10 to 20 years. But whatever is left of the West will have to be so strong militarily that it can fend off, it can deter, any untoward attentions from the rest of the world. This might require war with, for instance, Iran, in order to protect Western democracy and coexistence between Western nations. It's not a happy situation.
I think what it tells me is that the idea of global peace is a non-starter. The globe is not run by America. Most of the globe in population terms doesn't give a damn for Western assumptions. Putin, Xi, India's Modi are very clear. They think western assumptions are ridiculous. They believe that the west has been bullying them for way too long. "We don't need it. We have our own ways of doing things," they say and believe.
Following this exchange, we began to discuss Ashok's notion of "critical thinking." Ashok has long asserted that the Western peacebuilding field has failed to do critical thinking, which would have enabled it to recognize that the assumptions on which the field was based and on which they were operating, were fundamentally wrong in much of the world — indeed, in many of the places that they work. Given this, Merrick asked the three of us whether there is a role for reason and critical thinking, higher order capability, in the context of peacebuilding, conflict resolution and coexistence writ large. Guy responded first by noting that:
We've never really built a neoliberal society that really quite worked. Democracy sort of works if you have a strong hierarchy and it's culturally homogeneous, and the people who are disempowered don't complain too much. That was the kind of democracy and democratic capitalist system that produced the revolution of the last several centuries that now supports seven billion people. But it isn't good enough to deal with today's world, which is vastly more complex. Our globalized economy has brought lots and lots of very different people with very different cultures and values together in an even more competitive situation. So we've got to figure out how to make that work. And that's where applying the smartest thinking we can possibly muster to peacebuilding is going to be essential. (This is taking the concept of peacebuilding quite broadly.)
He went on to talk about how we have to develop critical thinking and higher-order capabilities to enable us to deal with the immense complexity of today's societies. We also need to be able to deal with what he calls "bad faith actors." (Though I didn't say this during the conversation, while writing this up, I wonder if many of those people and organizations and even countries that Guy has long been calling "bad-faith actors" are the people, organizations, and societies from Ashok's non-western world who simply don't buy into the Western, liberal assumptions, who do business a different way. Having lived and worked with Guy for over 50 years, I also know that he would answer in part, "yes," but that we have many of these bad-faith actors within our Western liberal societies as well.
But, being an optimist, Guy then pointed out that every threat creates an opportunity. "But, f we break it up into enough pieces, there are opportunities for people to work on each part of it. And that's how you get out of this, or at least struggle through it, muddle through it." We explained that that is the idea behind our notion of "massively parallel peacebuilding" and "massively parallel democracy building" that we have been writing a lot about. (See Newsletter 282, Newsletter 285, Newsletter 288, Newsletter 291, Newsletter 292, among many others.)
Heidi wondered about the role of "reason" and "rationality" in our current approach to peacebuilding. While the conflict resolution field, exemplified for a long time by Fisher Ury and Patton's best seller "Getting to Yes" focused very much on rational, cost-benefit analysis (for instance, regarding whether one's BATNA —the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement—was better than the agreement that was likely to come out of negotiation), we have come to realize that much conflict is emotional, not rational. Somehow, Heidi argued, emotions need to be part of what we look at.
At this point Ashok observed that we hadn't defined what he meant by "critical thinking," and that Guy and I (and many other people he has dealt with over the years, didn't seem to understand it. Critical thinking he said is holistic thinking. It takes into account both rationality and emotions, but "emotions are seen as information-bearing nuggets that give us insights into the world."
The best way of defining it, it's not adequate, but it's interesting, is that critical thinking is thinking about your thinking while you're thinking. In other words, it's about metacognition. Metacognition is the capacity to watch your own thinking as you are thinking. When I teach people about critical thinking, I teach them how to observe your own thinking while you are in the process of thinking, while you are trying to problem-solve or analyze. You're not merely grappling with the content or the subject matter. You're also conscious of your thinking process. When you are conscious of your thinking process, you are also paying attention to the triggers, the emotions, the biases, the prejudices, the assumptions. You are literally mapping your mind and like a complex relationship map, you are mapping everything that's happening in your brain. Now, as part of the critical thinking process, like in any analysis or in the scientific process, there's information gathering, there's information selection, there's analysis, there's synthesis, all of that. But it is much broader than the traditional scientific process, which is what we normally think of when we say reasoned thinking.
I found this explanation very helpful, because it explained better than I understood before why Ashok so strongly believes that peacebuilders need to engage in critical thinking. They need to understand the biases and the assumptions, the Western "sensibilities," as he described earlier that they are utilizing, while also understanding that the people they are talking to and/or working with may well have a different set of biases, assumptions and sensibilities. Ashok explained:
I haven't done the hard work of really figuring out how we can integrate what I consider to be critical thinking into peacebuilding processes. But I suspect that just as peacebuilding and conflict resolution have become dogmatic, have become very invested in their processes and theories and assumptions, the world has shown us that that isn't going to work. Whether it is Trump, or Vance, or Xi or Orban, they are all telling us very clearly, "the way you folks [peacebuilders] are doing business isn't cutting it for us."
That's phenomenal information. That information forces us, (now I'm taking on the role as a peacebuilder) if I'm interested in, let's say, the Palestine-Israeli conflict, as a peacebuilder, I have to seriously understand the limitations of my own favorite theories and processes, because they are not working in action. Then I have to really understand the Israelis. And I have to understand the Palestinians. Then I have to understand Iran. In doing this, I not only have to understand the ground realities and the incentives that Hezbollah or Hamas has, I have to understand the incentives that Netanyahu has to perpetuate the conflict. I have to also understand China's role in this, Russia's role in this, and America's interests.
That complex holistic understanding is literally the only way as a peacebuilder, I can even presume to walk in there with a suggestion. And I don't say resolution of any kind. I'm not even talking about negotiating or mediating between the groups. But if I walk in there, having understood the enormous complexity, and I'm glad I finally used the word complexity here, because really critical thinking is nothing short of the study of complex behaviors, of complex systems. You have to take everything into consideration.
I'm way over my newsletter character limit at this point, so I'm going to stop. We talked much more about complexity, about how to deal effectively with complexity, we talked a bit more about doing peacebuilding in the Israel/Palestine conflict right now, we talked more about what "critical thinking" is an isn't, and how peacebuilders can, and indeed must, understand it and adopt it if they are going to be able to have any role in the coming few years of apparent widespread disintegration. And we agreed that we have much more to talk about. If you are interested in these topics, please go to the video or the transcript of our full discussion.
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Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is 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.
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