Samuel Cohn: Global Social Trends

John Paul Lederach has just written a wonderful book about how ordinary people really do stop civil wars: The Pocket Guide For Facing Down a Civil War. The book is privately printed, but it should have been picked up by the major trade presses. The Pocket Guide is absolutely outstanding, speaks to the most important issues of our time and is massively readable.

A longtime professor of International Peacebuilding at Notre Dame, trained in peace sociology at the University of Colorado, Lederach has worked in peace missions in Northern Ireland, Colombia, Somalia, Nicaragua and Nepal. He has met the local individuals and communities who have been active in peacekeeping and mediation. He has talked extensively with both active and former combatants. Few people know more about the ending of armed hostilities than he does.

Peace sociologists work differently from regular macrosociologists such as myself. We macrosociologists tend to study conflict and violence from the point of view of grand historical, social and economic trends. Modes of production, class structure, ethnic relations, international relationships of exploitation, demographic trends, and analyses of land tenure and state capacity figure heavily in our work. These larger forces SHOULD figure heavily in our work, because they are important predictors of violent conflict.

But peace sociologists such as Lederach know that, at the end of the day, these large-scale historical forces may be good at explaining conflict, but provide few realistic solutions to extinguishing civil wars once they get started.

Peacekeeping comes from the efforts of individual people, not grandiose social structures. Lederach has spent much of his life studying these people who choose to stand up and try to stop violence. The material in his book comes from hundreds of interviews with people who have dared to cross into the middle of conflicts, and have dared to convince combatants to put down their guns.

What makes people decide to become peace activists is psychological.

Culture matters.

Internal thought processes matter.

Peace comes from changes in people’s hearts.

Sociologists call such decisions “conjunctural”. They don’t arise from any obvious social structure. This makes conjunctural events hard to predict. Understanding peacekeeping requires examining those conjunctural events straight on. This is what John Paul Lederach did very well.

Lederach’s book is written in the form of epigrams. The epigrams are pungent and well written. My summary fails to do justice to his complete model or to the expressive power of what he has to say. But here is his model, albeit not presented as elegantly as he does.

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Civil War causes intellectual failure. There is a general decline into stupidity.

The stupidity comes in part because fighting a war, or avoiding dying in a war requires vast amounts of physical and mental energy. People in survival mode do not have time to reflect; they do not have the time or energy even to think.

Combatants maximize the amount of fear they generate in a population to generate submission and obedience. Violence is performative. There is an art to “doing a terrifying show”.

Fear creates a sense of threat - of “us vs. them”. The fear exists on all sides. Victims fear more violence. Neighbors fear the violence will come to them. Perpetrators fear revenge. The us vs them mentality eliminates communication of any of us with them. The emotion of fear is so unpleasant that all people care about is the removal of fear. This comes from obedience, committing violence oneself, and silence. Loose talk kills, so nobody talks.

The loss of talk and the loss of reflection means that perceptions are far more important than facts. People judge quickly. They judge on minimal information – much of which is wrong.

This leads to one of Lederach’s more startling arguments.

Civil wars are stopped by curiosity. In the world of fear, quick survival judgement is all about making a decision about people while knowing very little about them. Communities that stop civil wars, do so by talking to people. They talk to people from every side. There is nobody whom the peacekeepers will not talk to.

When they talk to people, they listen more than they talk. They ask questions. Their goal is to become informed. They may have negotiating demands. They may have things they need to accomplish, such as guarantees of safety for neutral places like markets. But they start by simply opening up to people and dialoguing. Because the combatants often legitimately may have very little knowledge about the villagers, the conversation is informative for both sides.

Another solution to the quick-and-lethal-judgement trap is to present oneself in non-standard ways that defy traditional friend-or-foe appearances. One way of doing this is to appear with someone who is seen as a friend of the viewer or is viewed as reliable by the viewer. Lederach writes about the anxiety of leaders who are terrified both of the enemy and of being betrayed from within. They try to control everything but, as a result, live lives of painful isolation. He describes how happy some of those leaders are to be approached as human beings by neutrals or members of the other side. Once leaders are willing to talk and appear in public with members of the other side, members of all groups – Side 1, Side 2 and the In-Betweens – become curious. They are surprised by people being together who are not usually together. This makes them want to learn more – which further extends the process of dialogue.

Lederach argues that “war is not politics by other means”. War is in fact the negation of politics. Fear and the paralysis that fear engenders slow administrative functioning to a crawl. Because legitimate authorities appear to be weak and to not be doing anything, they lose the confidence of the population. The population then defaults to supporting one of the two warring sides. Implied by this is the hope that maintaining or restarting normal government functioning can be a step in reducing long term hostilities. A useful mayor can do more than does a mayor paralyzed by fear.

Lederach places a great emphasis on teamwork and dialogue. Peacekeepers were almost never single individuals working by themselves. They were groups of community members who decided among themselves that violence had to stop. They acted in groups. They would visit combatants in groups. They would negotiate in groups. On one hand, acting and travelling in groups increased their personal safety. On the other hand, given the constant danger under which peacekeepers had to operate, mutual encouragement contributed significantly to overcoming fear. Group discussion among the peacekeepers also helped to undo the short-circuiting of reflective thought that comes from being in survival mode. Talking in groups over long periods of time allows people to think issues through clearly. They can set priorities, avoid making panicked decisions, consider multiple aspects of a problem and engage in collective learning. One set of peacemakers called the opposite of such group discussion “yo-con-yo” in Spanish meaning “I with I” in English. Real discussion establishes truth and permits acting in common collaboration.

These groups talked to everybody. They talked to people without any reservation as to whom they were talking to. And they didn’t just talk AT people. They listened more than they talked. Being willing to talk to people who are not the people one normally talks to is the first step in creating movement towards real and abiding peace.

Lederach’s writing parallels the work of other peace scholars in constructive ways. One of Lederach’s concluding arguments is that peace comes when parties who are in communication with each other come to realize their mutual interdependency. This mutual interdependency is real. The discovery process uncovers more and more reasons why the various parties need each other.

Interdependency and dialogue are lynchpins of the Peace Proposals of the Japanese philosopher Daisaku Ikeda. Most social scientists would acknowledge that nearly everything in human life is dependent on everything else. Human life is dependent on the environment. Economic life is dependent on value created around the world by people working around the world. Cultural life is dependent on foundations that come from everywhere in the globe along with innovations that occur all over the planet. Our preoccupations with our own lives and our own experiences often blind us to the contributions being made by people far out of our range of visibility.

Dialogue is one of the few ways to create peace in a world where nothing else quite seems to work. Capitalism has not significantly reduced conflict. People fight over economic opportunities. Communism has not reduced conflict. Democracy has not reduced conflict. Strong democratic countries willfully invade others. Nationalism has not reduced conflict. Nations go to war. Religions have not reduced conflict. Religious war is a constant source of violence.

Lederach notes that peace rarely comes from the top down. Peace emerges from the bottom up. People talking with a goal to “just ending the bloodshed” has been an enduring formula for getting combatants to willingly put down their arms.

Polarization is rising in many nations of the world. Nations are being divided by ethnicity, by religion, by secular values or by rich region versus poor region. The divisions are becoming increasingly toxic.

Lederach offers one way out of this endless fractionalization. Will the world be able to avoid acrimonious toxic polarization? Lederach says it all depends on groups of people deciding to end the conflict who make efforts to talk to everybody, and really listen.