Carl Stauffer (center), practicing the art

We were stunned to silence as a hushed whisper fell over the meeting hall. Representatives of the “enemy” village had just walked in unexpectedly, interrupting a community peace meeting we were facilitating. Vusi, my South African colleague and I had been toiling for months on a peacebuilding process in Majola, a rural region of the Eastern Cape Province in South Africa, consisting of 32 villages dotting the mountain side. Vusi and I had been invited by community leaders to accompany the Majola region in a quest for peace after the shooting death of two high school girls in January of 2001. These young girls, in school uniform and unarmed were caught in cross-fire while walking to school. This was more than the community could bear and a call to end this decadal violence was sounded.

In the 1960s this “enemy” village started a cycle of violence when they assassinated a chief from another village. In retaliation, the offended village raided the offending village and stole all their cattle (stock-theft). The revenge cycle of stock-theft continued with other villages being drawn in and an increasing number of killings occurring among the cattle thieves on both sides. In December of 1998, after decades of raids and violence, a gun battle broke out in the community leaving 16 persons dead in its wake. The national army was called in to stop the killing and restore “order.”

Back in the meeting hall, Vusi and I quickly regained our composure and after conferring with the local leaders decided to give this disruptive delegation a chance to speak. This village represented the “enemy” from within, conveniently being identified as the “scape-goat” and hoisted with the full responsibility of this destructive conflict and ensuing violence. As the delegated leader started to speak it became clear that we were only going to hear one side of the story. This spokesperson recited a litany of his village’s grievances and how many lives his village had lost, but there was not a mention of the grievances of other communities or responsibility taken for the horrific toll of suffering and death caused by members of his own village. This was a narrative of chosen trauma – a constructed script of perpetrator as victim. Those who were present grew restless and agitated as they were forced to listen to this lopsided version of history. The anxiety in the room was rising and ‘common sense’ would have required us to intervene and bring this distorted monologue to a close.

However, the Spirit nudged us otherwise. Defying all logic, Vusi and I, in consultation with the local leaders decided to invite the speaker to continue until he had vented all he wanted to say. We implored those in attendance to listen and promised them the opportunity to ask questions at the end. The speaker continued on for what felt like endlessly, but eventually the floor was opened for questions. Those in attendance began asking carefully crafted and probing questions of clarification. Emotions were high and clearly close to the surface and what transpired was a painful, but healthy dialogue giving voice to the many shades of past truth held dear to all the communities present. We closed with a challenge to the hope of reconciliation and the meeting was adjourned.

Vusi and I left the meeting discouraged. We wondered what we had accomplished if anything at all. Here we had given the “enemy” the floor to vent and they never acknowledged responsibility, expressed remorse or offered an apology. To add injury to insult, the listening communities were implored to bear this twisted testimony of an unrepentant perpetrator without having any opportunity to voice their own story of pain. This was backward – this was not how we planned it.

A few weeks later, the surprising news came. The community leaders went to visit this offending village and were received with a warm welcome, and open arms. They were invited to eat together and the offending village elders put forward five persons from their midst to serve as a mediation team. Each village was to choose a five-person mediation team that would be trained in the next phase of our intervention plan. Amazingly, this “enemy” village was the first to choose their mediation team!

What happened here? It seems that in the act of deep listening, a serendipitous transformation occurred. As the proclaimed “enemy” was given audience and a public voice their humanity was reconstructed. Some innermost need for recognition and dignity was satisfied and in that catalytic moment trust was restored – so much so that the formally marginalized were integrated into the whole.

[Carl Stauffer - PhD, MA '02 - is Assistant Professor of Development and Justice Studies at EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. This piece originally appeared in the Caux Communique, January 18, 2012.]

David Anderson Hooker, instructor at SPI 2012

After teaching at EMU during the regular terms and at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) for a number of years, this past September I began a PhD program at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, where my general area of study is Social Construction. This summer I will be teaching again at SPI, facilitating Multi-party Conflict Resolution as well as a training session for STAR: Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience.

My social constructionist perspective impacts the way I frame multi-party conflict because in my estimation there is not one “reality” that we are helping people to see, but rather the process of multiparty mediation and consensus-building is to create a shared meaning and an agreement about how to collaborate and “perform the meaning” that is made.

STAR workshops combine aspects of psychosocial trauma, restorative Justice, conflict transformation, community peacebuilding, and spirituality toward the development of healthy individuals, communities, and societies. In STAR it is interesting to consider that all of those fields, even spirituality, can be thought of as metaphorical frames in a process of assisting individuals and communities in establishing positive peace. Negative peace is simply the absence of war; whereas Galtung and others describe ‘positive peace’ as a circumstance in which structural violence and the impediments to a high quality of life are also removed at the interpersonal, intrapersonal, societal, and global/environmental level.

Scholarship…

The focus of my PhD research, advised by John Winslade, will look for models of engagement that shift relations of power embedded in discourse concerning race in the US. The hope is that the principles identified will be applicable to other circumstances of multigenerational trauma and disparity. I am particularly interested in this topic because this is where I see many dialogue models (including some at the CJP) fall short by failing to consider (identify/unveil) the relations of power embedded in the cross-group engagement. I am considering methods for applying narrative mediation to individual and group healing and also in establishing systems and institutional arrangements that are founded in a discourse where power is equitably accessed.

Because my research is all about understanding discourse, I am surprised every day by the ways that our unspoken assumptions about situations and about each other limit the possibilities for loving and peaceful relationships. I am also motivated by the fact that sometimes just making these assumptions more visible changes how people relate to their present and future relationships.

…put into practice

For instance, in Atlanta and throughout the Southeast, I am actively involved in mediations at the systemic and policy level that impact community structures. Recently I’ve served as mediator to the Atlanta Public School Board and I’m now working with other school boards throughout the state to create methods of deliberation that minimize the operational stagnation resulting from values-based divisions. Basically, I am teaching people how to play nice and get work done even when they don’t have shared values.

I am also part of a team from the University of Georgia that will mediate the division of local tax revenues in several jurisdictions around the state. This may sound boring until we realize that the division of tax revenues determines the service levels for public safety, social services, educational improvements, and arts in each jurisdiction. These are equity and quality of life mediations hidden in tax code language!!

Roy Hange, instructor of "Faith-based Peacebuilding" at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute

Over the years of teaching faith-based peacebuilding I have met students who are heroes of hope. Among them were:

• A nurse trainer who educates student nurses from three religious backgrounds to work with patients from the same three religious backgrounds. This nurse came with a vision to incorporate peacebuilding into the education of nurses.
• A professor of peacebuilding who has worked with former militants from religiously oriented conflicts and instilled in them a vision for peacebuilding. This student came with the vision of a better future for his country and faith community.
• A woman peacebuilder who returned to her war-torn country with a new vision for how the work of faith-based peacebuilding can bring hope. This student came with the vision for an end to war in her country.
• A producer of children’s television programming with a vision of integrating peacebuilding with the dominant faith of her home country. This student came with the vision that the next generation in her country would not face the challenges she did.

I have also seen fascinating things happen when these heroes of hope become friends in joining their visions and experiences in classroom discussions that spill over into lunch time conversations.

As religious parties emerge as dominant players in various Middle Eastern countries following or expecting political transformation; as religious and cultural sentiments are key elements of transforming the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan; as North Africa and Central Africa face emerging religious tensions with political consequences; as China is facing new challenges from the growth of Christianity and the emergence of Muslim identity in its western regions; and, as religious sentiments are playing a significant role in various elections around the world, the need for faith-based peacebuilding stands at the forefront of a better human future.

Each year in the Faith-based Peacebuilding course at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute, students gather from various continents to explore and imagine how the resources from their faith traditions can empower them to be more effective peacemakers. Each year’s class experience is enlivened by discussions among students and new relationships between students that create a visionary culture for peacebuilding. Each of us have left the week together in the course feeling that we have stood together on the holy ground of transformation.

Each year on the last day of class we send each other off with a blessing for the work ahead of us in our individual settings. After seven days together in the course we each have a deepened sense of what the challenges the other students face are. Often we have become a community of visionary hope for each other while holding that hope across religious difference. This hope is held in the realization that this work is not easy.

Reading the news since last year’s Faith-based Peacebuilding course has convinced me anew of the need for people of faith to find the resources from their traditions that promote peacebuilding.

[In addition to teaching "Faith-based Peacebuilding" at SPI, Roy and his wife, Maren, co-pastor Charlottesville Mennonite Church in Charlottesville, Virginia. Roy is also the overseer of the Harrisonburg District of the Virginia Mennonite Conference. Previously, Roy and his wife spent ten years in various Middle Eastern countries working with the Mennonite Central Committee. Roy holds an Mdiv from Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana.]

Photo by Jeff Frost via Flickr

In an impassioned op-ed piece over at NationofChange, Christopher Petrella paints a troubling picture of the state of corrections in the United States and the paths which brought us here. Particularly troubling is what Petrella calls “the circuitous pathways between race, citizenship, containment, and profitability.”

Not only is the phenomenon of for-profit prisons becoming more common, in the midst of state budget crises across the nation, California is even suggesting that inmates pay for the services of the correctional facilities to which they’re being sent. How inmates from predominantly impoverished backgrounds would actually be able to pay for those services (they couldn’t) is part of the scheme. Even after leaving facilities, ex-offenders would then be financially indebted to the facilities, effectively shifting their “incarceration” to another form, economic. As Petrella point out, these people cease to be “criminals” in the eyes of the system and now become “consumers.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way. One of the most important aspects of restorative justice is its emphasis on rehumanization of all involved in instances of wrongdoing, criminal or otherwise. A privatized corrections system assumes an anthropology of literally captive consumers (structured economic individualism), whereas restorative justice assumes an anthropology of relationship and responsibility amidst community. Restorative approaches seek to heal the personal and social wounds done in instances of wrongdoing, whereas a privatized corrections approach seeks to extract capital to buoy the ailing state. Therefore, restorative justice  entails an implicit critique of systems such as privatized corrections but also the assumptions that underwrite such approaches at levels social, political, and economic.

So to use capitalist jargon, the “return on investment” of restorative justice is a return to pre-modern understandings of justice, rooted in embodied, accountable relational networks rather than abstract ideals and institutions. Such a return is well worth the investment.

[Brian Gumm is co-editor of the Peacebuilder Online blog and in his final month of studies at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, with an emphasis in restorative justice. He also blogs at Restorative Theology, where this piece was cross-posted.]

Negotiating at Occupy Chicago; (Photo by Michael Kappel via Flickr)

James Cavanaugh, a retired ATF executive, offers a good picture of the role of police in the #occupy movement in this op-ed piece posted to Tickle the Wire, a site focused on federal law enforcement.

Most notably, he encourages the “greatly underutilized” resources of police negotiators to form relationships and build trust with #occupy movement leaders, and to coordinate plans on a day-to-day basis. As Cavanaugh states, “It does not mean that the police will do everything that the protesters want, but it insurers that police will not act without first building trust and communication.”

This to me seems right on. Part of the problem I’ve seen in citizen coverage of police presence in the #occupy movement is the militarized/SWAT stance. Granted, there is also a problem with how many in the movement view and antagonize police (including in said citizen coverage), so it’s not like protesters are beyond implication. Less emphasis should placed on militarized police forces and more placed on building collaborative relationships with protesters, and a segment of protesters/citizen journalists should stop demonizing the police. Such moves could encourage an already mostly-nonviolent movement to stay that way, and keep them on course toward substantive change.

De-politicizing the public square

I part ways, though, with Cavanaugh’s final assessment, that the movement needs to “(transmute) itself into an occupy the voting booth movement.” Here he conflates “public” with “political” (in the governmental sense) and ignores how deeply corporatized government has become in the U.S., which is part of what the #occupy movement is protesting in the first place.

While I’m not opposed to voting per se, part of the genius of the #occupy movement is its inchoate awareness that the government is not the public savior, providing for all of our society’s needs. Indeed, as political theologian, William T. Cavanaugh (no relation to James, I assume) has shown, one of the problems with the contemporary nation-state is that very view of the state, sucking out all sociality from public life and arrogating it unto itself. The #occupy movement by its very praxis combats this. Some instantiations of the movement setting up ad hoc food systems, for instance.

Complexifying public space, restoring sociality to non-government-mediated public life, is one of the strongest forms of witness the #occupy movement has to the powers that be. Sure, go to the voting booth, but stay in the square. For good.

Social media interfaces?

One of the topics we’ve covered on the Peacebuilder blog in recent months is the potential role of social media in peacebuilding. In particular, we have two alumni who are trainers of the Ushahidi conflict monitoring platform. I haven’t seen any conversation about how Ushahidi and the #occupy movement may intersect, but perhaps this #occupy/police relationship may have potential. If both movement leaders and police are contributing information to (via SMS texting) and monitoring situations on the ground via Ushahidi, the use of that platform could be part of the day-to-day review, which could follow an action-reflection model.

[Brian Gumm is co-editor of the Peacebuilder Online blog and is completing his MA in Conflict Transformation at CJP this fall. He is also a licensed minister in the Church of the Brethren, with a special interest in the intersections of peacebuilding and theology, on which be blogs regularly at Restorative Theology.]

Carl Stauffer, PhD

In the marketplace of ideas, the concepts and language of reconciliation have become quite popularized and at the same time diluted. Coming out of the turmoil of the South African political transition of the 1990s, it became abundantly clear to me that the term reconciliation was easily hijacked to serve the particular interests of any number of sociopolitical groupings.

For some, reconciliation was used to describe the political process of power-sharing. For others it referred to new political and legal democratic reforms that allowed former enemies to live together without killing each other. Still others would have used the term to describe a “good working relationship” with persons of another culture or race. While all of these notions have linkages to genuine reconciliation, they are only parts of the whole.

Authentic reconciliation requires us to move beyond mere social tolerance or political coexistence. It is concerned with repairing harmony in the life of a community or nation. By harmony, I mean the restoring of meaningful relationships—relationships of dignity, trust and collaboration. Harmony also infers a collective concern for the common good and a shared future view that gives hope and motivation to the idea of unity.¹

Tools for Agents of Reconciliation

There are volumes of published literature on what reconciliation is and how it is accomplished. (See figure above.) Drawing from this brief overview, there are at least six critical elements that need to be considered by those who wish to be agents of reconciliation at either an individual or collective level. With each element there are corresponding skill-sets that can be developed.

1. Psycho-social Support and Trauma Healing: Violence causes disempowerment and disconnectedness; reconciliation aims at the exact opposite—empowerment and connection.²
   Skills: Trauma awareness, education, debriefi ng and counseling skills
2. Personal and Public Grieving or “Lament”: The wronged and wrong-doer need a safe space to tell their story and a public space where society “bears witness” to the harm that has been caused.³
   Skills: Trauma awareness, education, debriefi ng and counseling skills
3. Awakening Emphatic Responses: The human brain is biologically “hard-wired” to make human connections and to build community through social networks.⁴
   Skills: Active listening, paraphrasing, summarizing, nonviolent communication and basic counseling skills
4. Facilitating Forgiveness Transactions: “An act of forgiveness must be understood as a complex process of unlocking painful bondage of mutual liberation. While the perpetrators must be set free from their guilt—and its devastating consequences—the victims must be liberated from their hurt—and its destructive implications.”⁵
   Skills: Active listening, paraphrasing, summarizing, nonviolent communication and basic counseling skills
5. Re-writing Historical Narratives: Learning how to “remember rightly in a violent world”⁶ entails dealing with the nationalpatriotic narratives, the historical memories, the lived experience and the current events.⁷
   Skills: Group facilitation, negotiation, mediation, appreciative inquiry, sustained dialogue skills
6. Engaging in Reparative/ Restorative Justice: Asks what harms have been committed, what needs have been generated, and who is obligated to make things right.⁸
   Skills: Victim-Offender mediation, Family Group conferencing, circle processes

In sum, the end-goal of reconciliation is like a horizon on the landscape; it provides us with the vision, inspiration and moral guidance on what harmonized relations could look and feel like. On the other hand, the skill-sets attached to conflict management, resolution and/or peacebuilding provide us with the necessary instruments or tools — the means — to arrive at reconciliation.

EndNotes

1. Catholic Social Thought provides a foundational guiding light in terms of defi ning the values, actions and ethics that should drive this kind of thinking and living.
2. Herman, J. Trauma and Recovery – The aftermath of violence from domestic abuse to political terror.
3. Katongole, E., & Wilson-Hartgrove, J. Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith after Genocide in Rwanda.
4. Early, C. & M. “Neuroscience of Emotion”
5. Muller-Fahrenholz, G. The Art of Forgiveness.
6. Volf, M. The End of Memory – Remembering Rightly in a Violent World.
7. Lederach, J.P. The Moral Imagination – The Art and Soul of Building Peace.
8. Zehr, H. Changing Lenses.

[Carl Stauffer, PhD, MA '02, is Assistant Professor of Development & Justice Studies at Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of A Matter of Spirit, a publication of the Intercommunity Peace & Justice Center, and is re-printed with permission.]

Leymah Gbowee (MA '07), 2011 Nobel Peace laureate

On Friday of last week, I had the most fun day at work ever. I had the fortune of being the web & social media nerd for the alma mater of a Nobel Peace Prize winner! Liberian nonviolent peace activist, Leymah Gbowee, was one of three women to win the 2011 prize. She is also a 2007 alumna of Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), where I have been studying and working for the past three years. Leymah has been back on campus a time or two since I arrived in 2008, and I even got to hang around behind the camera while one of my teacher-colleagues, Paulette Moore, filmed this short interview with Leymah about her time at EMU. She is truly an amazing person and commands a powerful presence when you’re around her.

In my 10+ years as a professional web nerd, I’ve never been involved in anything that’s “gone viral,” until Friday. We weren’t caught completely off-guard at CJP, as we’d been hearing rumors of Leymah’s being considered for the prize for months. But that still didn’t prepare for me for riding the social media tidal wave on Friday morning, when the winners were announced. It was the quickest 5.5 hours of my professional life, keeping track of the activity on Facebook and Twitter, watching with amazement when at one point on Friday morning, “Leymah Gbowee” was one of the top-trending phrases in the U.S. on Twitter. When the digital dust settled by Monday morning and I checked stats, I saw that the EMU website as a whole doubled its traffic on Friday alone, not to mention the thousands of “likes” on the EMU News article which announced her winning.

Making this all the more exciting for folks at EMU is the fact that Leymah is coming to campus this weekend – which is homecoming – where among other things she will be named EMU’s Alumnus of the Year. Here are a few links which document the online “Leymah mania” which has taken hold at EMU:

• New today: The “all things Leymah” page
• From Friday: EMU Alum Wins Nobel Peace Prize
• Follow-up: Nobel Prize Winner Connected to Peace-Church Tradition

Brian Gumm is Web & Information Systems Coordinator for EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). A licensed minister in the Church of the Brethren, he is also in his final year of graduate studies at EMU, finishing an MA in Conflict Transformation from CJP and an Mdiv from Eastern Mennonite Seminary. He blogs on theological peacebuilding at Restorative Theology, where this post originally appeared.

1. The U.S. response to 9/11 has cost thousands more people their lives
2. The global economic crisis is in part due to the U.S. response to 9/11
3. The U.S. is still on a path of “Domination” not “Partnership” in the family of nations
4. Americans lost their freedom to ask the legitimate question, “Why Do They Hate Us?”
5. The U.S.’s Global War on Terror has made the world less safe, more hostile
6. The U.S. is still not investing in a realistic security strategy

Read more…
(This post also appeared on the Huffington Post on Sept. 12th.)

[Lisa Schirch, PhD, is research professor at Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and director of 3P Human Security.]

Dekha Ibrahim Abdi (left) at the Women, War and Peace forum at EMU in June

In July of this year, Africa lost one of its premier peacebuilders in a tragic car accident in Kenya. While Dekha Ibrahim Abdi’s passing is a loss to peace efforts in Africa and around the globe, it’s also a loss to me. I lost a friend and mentor.

Where do I begin to write about how Dekha has shaped my peacebuilding and my life? So many good memories, so much learning, and so many things yet unlearned.

Others will write of her brilliant mind, her analytical skills, her ability to see connections, her incredible teaching and facilitation skills. I’ve learned much from her in all of these areas and will miss them. And yet during these last weeks as I’ve remembered Dekha and the very deep lessons I’ve learned from her, it’s her personal qualities that stand out. I want to share a few stories that illustrate this.

First, Dekha had a seeming inability to stereotype people; she was able to see beyond the title, the uniform, and the ethnicity, to the heart and soul of the person in front of her. The last time that Dekha was at EMU, just a few weeks before her death, we went shopping for gifts for her children and friends. We wandered into a shoe store, and staggered out three hours later with thirteen pairs of shoes for her daughters and others. During that time in the shoe store, I again watched in amazement as she made friends with one of the salespeople – a young, tattooed woman who, by the end of that encounter, had an entirely new understanding of Islam and women who choose to wear veils. By sharing her humanity, humor, and joy in buying those shoes, she connected with the saleswoman in ways that went far beyond that of customer.

Second, not only have I learned from Dekha the importance of not stereotyping myself, but of helping others break the prejudices that they have. Dekha’s first visit to EMU in 1998 was during the time that money was being collected to build a mosque in Harrisonburg. During that time a local Presbyterian Church had set aside their fellowship room on Fridays for the local Muslim community to have a place for prayers. Dekha was very pleased to be able to donate money for the mosque, and through the years talked often about how important it was for her to share the story of a church that shared their space with a Muslim congregation.

And Dekha taught me the importance of living by faith and values. Her rock-solid grounding in Islam became more and more evident during the years that I knew her and her work. Dekha’s life, her being, flowed out of that. We had many conversations through the years about Islam, Christianity, and faith. Knowing this deeply religious Muslim woman has moved me to a deeper commitment to my own Christian faith.

Finally, Dekha taught me about enjoying life. Her smile, her enthusiasm at each new experience, her joking and chuckle, even in the midst of difficult times, will stay with me forever. She loved life, she loved her children, her family, her friends, and her colleagues, and she welcomed everyone and every experience into her wide, opening acceptance.

Dekha once told me a story about when she was in Nairobi, in a shop purchasing butter, and two men behind her started speaking in English about “why this Somali woman was taking so long just making a simple purchase – that’s how all those Somalis are.” Dekha turned around and explained to them that actually she was contemplating why butter imported from New Zealand was cheaper than local butter, and trying to decide whether she should place more importance on her family’s budget by buying the butter from New Zealand, or whether she should support the national economy by buying the more expensive local butter. She laughed with pleasure as she remembered the way the men looked at her, and kept chuckling, still hoping she had changed the way the two men viewed “those rural women.”

The last time I was with Dekha, just a few weeks before her death, she spoke over and over again about her family, about how happy she was with her children and about how much her husband, her mother, her brother and others meant to her. Her smile as she talked about them engaged not just her entire face, but her whole being. Her life was very full, and she was content.

I will miss you, Dekha:  my colleague, my friend, my sister.   And the lessons that you have taught me will remain with me, in my work and in my life.

See also: EMU Grieves Peacebuilder’s Death in Kenya (EMU News)

[Jan Jenner (MA '99) is director of the Practice and Training Institute at Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Jan's expertise in project planning, development and management, community-based peacebuilding processes - particularly in Africa - has helped contribute to the literature of the field of peacebuilding.]

Bonnie Price Lofton, MA '04

Sometimes one wishes that our experts in peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) had called it wrong. One wishes that they had been mistaken in believing that a large-scale U.S.-initiated military response to the tragedy of September 11, 2011, would have serious global repercussions, worsening the destructive impact of the 9/11 attack rather than easing it.

But if you go back and read their post-9/11 essays, you will see that EMU’s conflict transformation professors— Jayne Seminare Docherty, Ron Kraybill, Howard Zehr, Barry Hart, John Paul Lederach, David Brubaker, Nancy Good, and Lisa Schirch, along with others — offered well-reasoned pleas to take a deep breath and to choose a truly restorative path after this tragedy.

They asked their fellow citizens and national leaders to step away from the natural, but ultimately destructive, instinct to strike back at the perpetrators. These professors of peacebuilding explained that such a reaction would feed the cycle of vengeance, cost us friends around the world, result in exponentially more deaths than those killed in the attacks, and actually play into the hands of the terrorists.

Five days after the attack, John Paul Lederach wrote: “The biggest blow we can serve terror is to make it irrelevant. The worst thing we could do is to feed it unintentionally by making it and its leaders the center stage of what we do. Let’s choose democracy and reconciliation over revenge and destruction. Let’s to do exactly what they do not expect.”

In a local op-ed piece, Ron Kraybill further elaborated: “Massive retaliation by U.S. armed forces is precisely the response most sought by terrorists. After all, terrorist organizations are relatively small and weak, and a primary goal is publicity and recruitment of new supporters. Their best hope is to provoke a reaction that earns new enemies for us and new sympathizers for the terrorists.”

Jayne Docherty asked that the U.S. “examine and address the conditions and policies that have given rise to the cycles of unrest, violence, and terror that have been escalating around the world.”

Nancy Good, who did her doctorate on psychosocial trauma, wrote: “We can’t transform the presenting conflict without uncovering—or somehow attending to—the underlying trauma. The conflict can actually worsen. Victims are re-traumatized and, if the trauma goes unhealed, the victim may become the aggressor; the abused may become the abuser.”

Though Good did not write about this at the time, her message on unhealed trauma is now pertinent to U.S. veterans who are returning, after multiple deployments, with not only physical wounds, but psychological ones.

Kraybill worried that “over confidence in the effectiveness of superior conventional force makes it relatively easy for states to be enticed into costly mobilization.” If, as a result, “heavy damage is inflicted on civilian populations, the civilian support base for the ‘unconventional’ group will be exponentially expanded.” (Kraybill’s fears were realized in both Afghanistan and Iraq, though General Patraeus earned wide praised for trying to reverse this tide.)

On the first anniversary of 9/11, Kraybill wrote of grieving over “the billions we have wasted on weapons, when true long-term security requires investments of a different kind.” Those “billions” quickly became tens of billions, and then hundreds of billions of dollars, spent on warfare and its attendant costs. (For fiscal years 2001 through 2007, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the U.S.  spent $602 billion on operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and other regions linked to the “war on terrorism,” as well as on veterans’ benefits and services.) Budget experts now speak in terms of trillions of dollars.

It is not a coincidence, unfortunately, that these massive expenditures have helped fuel one of the worst economic recessions in the history of this country—a recession that has sickened much of the world and rendered it less able to deal with other issues that affect life on earth, such as global climate change.

Though Osama bin Laden is dead, his aim of severely crippling the United States and other perceived enemies lives on.

Let me be clear: none of the EMU-based experts were arguing to do nothing to address the attacks of 9/11. On the contrary, they were arguing in favor of more effective, more collaborative, less costly, and less self-harmful steps to clean up the soil in which terrorism thrives and to ensure that terrorist groups attract a dwindling number of followers.

Writing in a recent Christian Century (8/11/11, reposted on Peacebuilder Online), John Paul Lederach reflected on the decade since 9/11. He noted that many U.S. citizens were led to believe that the world was divided into “us and them.”

“This was particularly true of how we understood and engaged the Muslim world, at home and abroad,” he said. “We spent our national wealth on war and isolating our enemies.”

In contrast, Lederach said the events of the past decade caused him to feel renewed affinity for Jesus’ admonition to befriend the enemy: “We find this in Jesus’ response to people who his closest disciples found unacceptable. He ate with his enemies. He went to their houses and he invited them in.

“None of this implied that he changed his fundamental beliefs or values,” wrote Lederach. “It implied that he reached out and built relationships with those deemed untouchable and a threat. He chose love over fear, engagement over isolation and separation.”

As an example of the possibilities of such relationship-building, Lederach cited the hundreds of Muslims who have gathered with Christians and people of other faiths from all over the world at EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute since its founding in the mid 1990s. Almost all of these people have returned to their homes, buoyed by new friendships, by new skills for working in their contexts for peace, and by hope for a world where everyone first reaches for the tools of non-violent conflict transformation, rather than for weapons that will further traumatize us all.

[Bonnie Price Lofton (MA '04) is editor in chief for Eastern Mennonite University's Crossoads and Peacebuilder magazines.]