“There’s been a lot of documentation that interventions from the outside can do more harm than good,” says Lisa Schirch, the director of 3P Human Security and a research professor at EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). “Good intentions aren’t enough.”

With that awareness in mind, many humanitarian and development organizations do trainings to develop “sensitivities” – conflict sensitivity, gender sensitivity, environmental sensitivity – to influence the way their staff design and implement projects. Joining the list recently is “trauma sensitivity,” as articulated on the facing page by former STAR director Carolyn Yoder.

“[International] agencies were often very, very eager to rush into communities that had been deeply affected by violence without having any real understanding of how [their work] could re-traumatize people,” says Lauren Van Metre, dean of students with the Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP).

STAR is being tapped to provide trauma-sensitivity training and develop other projects in Washington D.C. In addition to helping participants avoid unintentionally doing harm, STAR helps people rotating through field work to manage their own traumatic responses to extremely difficult work situations.

“The NGOs and the military are looking for trauma programs, and we’ve got one that’s 12 years old, and it’s proven,” says Elaine Zook Barge, current STAR director.

As an example, USIP found that its rule-of-law assessment teams working overseas began to report back that their investigations into traumatic events were causing fresh pain for the people they interviewed. STAR and USIP collaborated for a first training in September 2012, with another scheduled nine months later at USIP headquarters in D.C.

Van Metre says the STAR training at USIP has been particularly valuable for people who have been affected by their extended stints in conflict zones. Through its peacebuilding academy, USIP has also developed its own two-day training based on the STAR methodology.

In a 2009 interview with the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs, former CJP trauma studies professor Nancy Good said all relief and development workers can benefit from trauma training.

“I don’t think we’re doing our jobs if we’re sending people out to do this really important work and are only training them on things like how to work with building houses and acquiring clean water and sanitation,” said Good, now a wellness consultant with the Washington D.C.-based KonTerra group. “We need to [provide] workers [with] basic knowledge and skills for stress management, trauma healing and resilience.”  — Andrew Jenner

During 2012-13, Jean Claude Nkundwa of Burundi transitioned from being a graduate student (center) to being an assistant instructor in “Understanding Psychosocial Trauma,” taught by Al Fuertes, PhD. Nkundwa is a 2013 graduate of the MA in conflict transformation program at EMU. Photo by James Sauder.

Jean Claude Nkundwa came to the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding with a desire to help his country address its history of violence. Most people in the United States, when they hear about Tutsis and Hutus, think about the genocide in Rwanda, but genocide also occurred in neighboring Burundi and greatly impacted Jean Claude and his family.

Six years before he was born in 1978, Burundi experienced its “first genocide” wherein both Hutus and Tutsis participated in the killings resulting in over 100,000 deaths. Jean Claude’s mother, a Tutsi, successively lost two husbands, both Hutus, to the violence. She escaped death, but was greatly traumatized by her experiences, including temporary deportation and injury while pregnant.

People began to say that she was cursed because of marrying Hutus. Jean Claude’s father was a Tutsi, but this fact did not help his mother escape her traumas. She was an educated woman – a teacher and a journalist – but found herself unable to cope with the persecution she was experiencing. Jean Claude was sent to live with his grandfather so as to be provided a healthier home life.

Then came the second genocide of 1993. A Hutu, Melchior Ndadaye, won the first democratic election in the country, but was assassinated by Tutsi soldiers. This set off another wave of killings – over 300,000 civilians died. Jean Claude, at 15, was placed on the list to be killed by the Hutus because of his Tutsi ethnic background. Hutus scoured his home area while Jean Claude and an uncle hid in an avocado tree through the night. Jean Claude fled the next day as the violence resumed. He met two cousins, and they wandered for three days not knowing where they were going. Jean Claude and his cousins were stopped three times along the way, but they were let go. To this day, he is not sure why. He found a Tutsi army camp, where he was safe, and eventually made it to the capital, Bujumbura. Later he found out that several extended family members were killed, 45 in all in his community.

By 1994, the situation began to stabilize, though there were still tensions between the Hutu government and the Tutsis. Jean Claude began high school in 1996 – the year that his mother died – thanks to a program that provided a free high school education to victims of genocide. Friends in the peace movement helped him with the funding to obtain a bachelor’s degree in social work and community development from Hope Africa University.

His passion for peace and justice blossomed during a two-year peace education training program offered to him by Mennonite Central Committee in 2000. He decided that reconciliation with his family’s oppressors was a goal he should pursue and he visited with the Hutus who had killed his family members. He saw that they too had suffered and continued to suffer from past traumas, starvation and malaria.

Jean Claude has since served as the Burundi coordinator for the Peace and Reconciliation Program of Harvest for Peace Ministries. At a Great Lakes Region peace seminar organized by MCC, he met CJP professor Carl Stauffer, who inspired him to want to come to CJP to pursue a master’s degree.

Jean Claude began his studies at CJP in January 2012. He brought with him his wife Francine and his one-year-old son Duke. Through his studies here, he hopes to build his capacity and skills to work with civil society – churches and non-governmental organizations – to sustain peace in Burundi. He is particularly interested in transitional justice to assist his country in addressing past human rights violations in both judicial and non-judicial ways.  — Phoebe Kilby

In a paper on the issue, entitled “The Vicissitudes of Empowerment in Conflict-Afflicted Nepal,” Barbara Weyermann reported that project staff, “didn’t want to ask the trainees about how they or their families were affected by the war because they didn’t know what to do when the young men started to cry.”

The human tendency to avoid difficult topics, at both individual and organizational levels, is hardly unique. Weyermann notes that “in most ‘normal’ development projects, the effect of violence [on beneficiaries] is almost always ignored.”

On the other side of the world, Nicaraguan psychologist Martha Cabrera observed in the late 1990s that no one seemed to be taking note of the subjective, psychological or spiritual needs of her country in the post-conflict, post-Hurricane Mitch era. Development and humanitarian assistance projects abounded. Everyone had been “work-shopped” on various topics, but with few concrete results. Cabrera wondered why.

Using a health survey as a point of entry, Cabrera and her colleagues at the Valdivieso Center traveled to the worst-affected regions with a goal of addressing psychological needs. The depth and breadth of what they discovered staggered them. They found high levels of apathy, isolation, aggressiveness, abuse, chronic somatic illness and low levels of flexibility, tolerance and the ability to trust and work together, and reported their findings in a paper entitled “Living and Surviving In a Multiply Wounded Country.”

Nicaragua, the team realized, “was a multiply wounded, multiply traumatized, multiply mourning country,” and that had “serious implications for people’s health, the resilience of the country’s social fabric, the success of development schemes, and the hope of future generations.” Cabrera noted it is hard to move forward, to build democracy, when the personal and communal history still hurts.

What Weyermann and Cabrera describe are the effects of trauma on the body, brain and behavior of individuals, communities and societies.

In recent years, humanitarian and development organizations have recognized these needs and have increasingly included psychosocial programs when working with populations impacted by natural disasters or violence. Weyermann notes that the support provided by these projects can be vital to victim/survivors, but she points out two drawbacks: the stigma those receiving services often face; and the fact that addressing economic hardship—which can be traumatic in itself—is outside of the mandate of most psychosocial projects.

A way to address these limitations is for organizations to become “trauma-informed” so that a trauma-sensitive framework can be integrated into any project: economic, health, governance and others. This means more than putting a psychologist on every project team. Awareness of the repercussions of trauma needs to extend across the organization, to headquarters and field staff alike.

Being trauma-informed includes:
• Understanding the physiological, emotional, cognitive, behavioral and spiritual impact of traumatic events (current or historic) on recipient populations, and how unaddressed trauma contributes to cycles of violence;
• Going beyond traditional mental health diagnosis and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder as the measure of trauma impact, and also recognizing community and societal dynamics and behaviors that are indicators of unaddressed trauma;
• Identifying processes from multiple fields—human security (including economic security), conflict transformation, restorative justice, neurobiology, psychology and spirituality—that can address trauma and increase resilience; and
• Recognizing that addressing the psychological needs of populations creates the need to monitor staff for secondary trauma and to equip them with self-care skills and tools.

Trauma-informed organizations can design programs that are trauma sensitive across all stages of the programming cycle: needs assessment, design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation. Trauma-sensitive programming can improve project outcomes, reduce stigma around trauma, and provide new ways to address difficult issues that contribute to intractable conflict and violence.

Cabrera says the people they worked with were initially startled by the approach. But they thanked them afterwards because it helped them recognize their own resilience, find meaning in what they had lived through, and move forward in life.

Moving forward. That, after all, is part of what development and humanitarian assistance are about.

Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience (STAR) equips organizations to work with trauma-impacted populations. STAR provides consultations and workshops for home and field staff that prepare them to do trauma-sensitive programming. This article originally appeared in the September 2012 issue of Monthly Developments Magazine. Reposted with permission.

Fadi Rabieh

I believe in the goodness of human beings and in our ability to transcend above and beyond our painful history to find ways of coping and healing. Over the past two years there has been growing skepticism about the impact of people-to-people projects, especially among the young generation. It is extremely challenging to find people from both sides who are interested in meeting and listening to one another. People are tired of even talking! The cynics say we have tried negotiation and dialogue for over fifteen years, and it has gotten us nowhere. The other side is not genuine and does not seek peace. Yet these voices do not recognize that we have also tried force and violence for over fifty years, and that, too, has gotten us nowhere.

As Israelis and Palestinians we have been living in a cycle of violence for so long that each side’s sense of victimhood has only become stronger with time. Both sides have constructed a narrative that is rooted in this sense of victimhood and righteousness – a narrative that dehumanizes the other; we are the good people, they are the bad ones, we seek peace, they seek war, we are the victims and only defend ourselves against their aggression, we stand alone and the entire world supports them, etc. Both narratives have been created to bolster our sense of victimhood and righteous cause.

As a result of this sense of victimhood, our brains and senses become selective. We see the world in black or white, right or wrong, with us or against us. We become increasingly judgmental and only speak the language of “facts” and the only “truth.” Interestingly, we only see what confirms our narrative and pre-constructed worldview. Throughout the years of my work in the field of peacebuilding, I have been struck by the level of ignorance and negative images both sides have of one another.

Setting Aside Stereotypes

Palestinians and Israelis from all sectors and spheres must meet each other to change these stereotypes and behavior of prejudice. Teachers must collaborate to create a dual narrative that acknowledges each side’s connection to this land, and to present a more human story of the other to the next generations. Business people must find ways where both nations can build on their capital so that communities might prosper. Journalists and media people must find ways to present constructive stories that help people become hopeful and realize the other side’s dignity. Politicians must work to find creative ways to find a proper political framework and solution that address  the needs of all sectors and parties. Religious people must meet to find ways to prevent this conflict from becoming a religious one.

When the two sides come to the table, Israelis come to build a personal relationship with the Palestinians as if the occupation does not exist, and Palestinians come hoping such a meeting will end the conflict and overlook the impact of building a personal relationship. Palestinians fail to understand the collective fear experienced by Jews, and Israeli Jews fail to understand the Palestinians’ sense of loss and pain as a result of the Nakba [“catastrophe” in Arabic]. Both sides seek acknowledgment of their feelings of loss and pain. This is what any dialogue process tries to address. It tries to provide a safe space for the parties to discover the other’s humanity and have their identity needs (i.e. recognition, acknowledgment, and dignity) met.

Unlearning Hatred

Interestingly – and this is the good news – individuals and groups that engage in dialogue programs do have a positive shift in their attitudes. However, the bad news is that this shift is not sustained beyond the encounter (or the life of the project). Also, the change does not go beyond the individual to impact on the surrounding. It is naïve to believe that people will have a positive and sustained shift in attitude from one or two encounters. It is very easy to hate, and is even natural in such an intense environment. It is too painful to engage with the enemy and try to unlearn years of hatred and fear in order to trust and listen deeply. If it took people years to learn and experience fear and hate, how many years do we need to replace it with courage and acceptance?

For people-to-people encounters to succeed, they must take place within a political framework or process. The absence of such a process leaves most dialogue encounters sorely handicapped, and they fall short of having a larger impact on both societies. Relationship-building projects must coincide with progress on the political plane; otherwise the positive impact that such encounters may have will regress with the next escalation or increase in violence. Nonetheless, this does not mean we should wait for the resumption of negotiations in order to legitimize people-to-people encounters. People must meet and continue to dialogue. We need to increase the level of exposure Palestinians and Israelis have for each other, especially in light of the separation between the two peoples, and the filtered and biased news.

During the past year Palestinians witnessed an increase in so-called “anti-normalization” voices, which try to pressure and sometimes prevent Palestinians from meeting with Israelis. Despite my understanding of the rationale my fellow Palestinians try to present here (i.e., not to show that we have a normal relationship with Israelis until the occupation ends), I disagree and find it counterproductive. I believe Palestinians have a duty to engage with Israelis to get their message across, and counter a narrative that tries to delegitimize and dehumanize them. I have witnessed people change and maintain this change over a long period of time as a result of their exposure to the other narrative.

First Steps

The dialogue process begins with finding the “right” candidate and convincing him or her to engage. This in and of itself is a process of dialogue and unlearning! How do you convince people to join such projects? The personal connection is the best strategy. The core of this work is trust-building, and this involves us as workers in the field. Maintaining and expanding our relationships within and across communities – with the presence or absence of actual projects – is very important, so when the time comes people feel confident and ready to start their journey. It is extremely important to maintain our credibility within our communities and embody our values. Furthermore, people think dialogue programs must only take place between people who have not been exposed to those from the other side, or have negative perceptions. This is true to some degree, but some peacebuilding programs must also aim to energize, mobilize, and recruit active people who are willing to work for the dignity of the “other.”

I have come to realize that having a diverse group (which include people with positive experiences and perceptions of the other) is the best way to accelerate the humanization process. By witnessing the differences in opinions and positions among members of the same group, we can create the first fracture in the generalization and stereotyping of the other group (no longer do all the members of your “enemy” group look the same; some of them are actually good)! This fracture is like a seed that the dialogue process aims to plant and water. Also, those same agents help bridge the gap between the two divides because they can communicate with both sides and model the desired attitude.

Anti-normalization or convincing people to engage in dialogue are not the only challenges we face when it comes to people-to-people projects. The biggest challenge is to help people maintain open channels of communication at times of increased violence. When such incidents happen (i.e. Gaza or the Lebanon War) the dialogue process comes to halt and the goal becomes how to prevent what we have built so far from deteriorating. Sometimes one feels as if we are starting over from square one. And even in the absence of escalation in the conflict, maintaining a positive shift and relationship among group members for a long period beyond the project’s duration is a major challenge on its own.

Peacebuilders Unite!

In order to address many of the above-mentioned challenges (anti-normalization, conflict escalation, maintaining relationships and positive attitude shifts), we as peacebuilders – individuals and organizations – must think big and bold.

First, peacebuilding organizations might benefit from creating an umbrella body that could unify this effort to become more effective and efficient. Peacebuilding groups and organizations would largely benefit from having one voice, and a coordinated focused strategy to maximize their impact within their communities. Changing the culture from competition to collaboration and synergy among organizations and groups (i.e., sharing resources, expertise, and data of best practices and participants) is the best way to have long-term programs instead of short-term projects.

Second, peacebuilding organizations must transform their efforts towards a peace movement in both societies. Their efforts must be seen and heard publicly. The more peace organizations work in the shadow, the more they harm themselves. Therefore, the work must make it to the streets of Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Becoming vocal, especially at times of escalation, and taking initiative instead of reacting passively is the best strategy – not only to fill a vacuum that is caused by lack of a political process and filled by extremists and anti-normalization voices, but also to increase and regain the public’s confidence.

Here To Stay

Many people – and I am one of them – believe the two-state solution is almost over. However, this propels us to more engagement as two people to find new ways and solutions. We have no choice but to learn how to live and share this land with each other. We know we cannot defeat each other militarily, and that each nation is here to stay.

As peacebuilders we must not shy away from the challenges we face. We fight for the freedom and dignity of every individual and human being, Palestinian and Israeli, for our generation and generations to come.

This is not a matter of choice; it is a matter of destiny.
* * * *

Fadi Rabieh, who earned his master’s degree in conflict transformation as a Fulbrighter at EMU, is co-manager of the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, working out of the Jerusalem office of Search for Common Ground. He released this essay on Nov. 20, 2012.

Co-authors Thomas Norman DeWolf and Sharon Leslie Morgan

In 2001, I took a life-altering journey. A cousin, Katrina Brown, had made the startling discovery that the DeWolf family was the largest slave-trading family in United States history. Over three generations, they had brought more than 10,000 people to the west to be bought and sold. So I set out with nine distant cousins to follow the trail of our ancestors. We traveled to the family’s home state of Rhode Island, then on to Ghana and Cuba.

As we went, we filmed a documentary which was later nominated for an Emmy award: Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. On that trip, I began writing my first book, Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History, published by Beacon Press in 2008.

I learned so many important facts of history that I never knew before, and became viscerally aware of the legacy of slavery and its lingering damage. Standing in a slave dungeon on the rocky shoreline of Ghana where human beings were shipped off, never to return, I felt as close as I ever had been to utter despair.

Yet in spite of my enhanced awareness, when I returned from that international journey I had more questions than answers. I was left with a big dialogue bubble floating over my head that read, “Now what? What can I do about it?”

I can’t imagine what my life would be today without the first Coming to the Table (CTTT) gathering I attended in January 2006. In that program, which started at Eastern Mennonite University, black and white family members met to address the legacies of slavery in the United States. It introduced concepts from neuroscience, trauma healing and storytelling. But the heart of the experience for me was the stories we shared. Participating later in two levels of STAR training and in a week-long EMU Summer Peacebuilding Institute course in restorative justice helped ground me in a powerful set of resources.

All this gave me hope and began to answer the “Now what?” question.

The most significant project to grow from my connection to CTTT and STAR is the book project with co-author Sharon Morgan. We committed ourselves to living the healing model, which is grounded in the concepts of Truth, Mercy, Justice and Peace, and to writing about it.

Over a three-year period, Sharon and I traveled thousands of miles through 27 states and overseas together. A major element of our journey and what we wrote about is sharing experiences and evaluating them from two very different frames of reference. Sharon Morgan is a black woman. I am a white man. She lives on one end of the country. I live on the other. We have interacted with each other’s families and friends and shared many meaningful conversations about ourselves and our views.

With genealogy as an undercurrent, we visited ancestral towns, courthouses, sites of racial terror, cemeteries, and museums seeking to understand the trauma of historic slavery and present–day racism. We attended Civil War reenactments and visited former slave plantations. We slept in antebellum homes.

Along the way, we led a workshop at the John Hope Franklin Center National Symposium on Hope and Healing in Tulsa, Oklahoma entitled “Gather at the Table: A Path toward Reconciliation.” During our book tour, we’ve presented at conferences, museums, high schools, colleges and universities throughout the United States.

What have I learned from the commitment we made to live this healing journey? It’s a surprise to me that I feel more pessimistic than when we began because I recognize more than ever just how deeply embedded systems of oppression remain. Yet there also is reason for hope. Some of Sharon’s and my comments from the last chapter of Gather at the Table say it best:

“The actions of one or two people rarely make a significant difference in the world. But the commitment of many people, acting individually and collectively, has great potential. Hope springs when people take the STAR training: when members of Coming to the Table congregate on a conference call to discuss restorative justice, genealogy, or relationship building, when six women in Seattle create a weekly ‘Healing Together’ workshop, and when a man in Virginia inspires people in his community to explore the history and impact of slavery through Negro spirituals and to raise their voices together in song…

“This is our work: to repair unhealed wounds from the past and challenge systems that remain unjust and either dismantle them or work to heal the damage they continue to cause.

“We would love to say of our experiment, ‘Boy, this is it! This is the lightning bolt. We’ve found the answer.’ But it isn’t that simple or tidy… The lessons are in the quest. The answers are found in the journey. These are ripples on a pond. They spread outward.

“And on we walk…”

Tom was born and raised in California. He and his wife, Lindi, live in Oregon. They have four grown children and eight grandchildren. Sharon grew up in Chicago. She lives in a rural town close enough to New York City to often see her two grandchildren who live there.

For more information about the book, Gather at the Table, visit http://gatheratthetable.net/.

Lynn Roth

Our Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) was launched in 1994-95 to fill a need for people trained to address intractable conflicts in creative, skillful, knowledgeable, non-violent ways. CJP’s founders – who had worked in war and conflict zones of Northern Ireland, Latin America, Africa and Asia – had no illusions that sowing the seeds of peace in deeply divided societies would be easy or even that results might be seen in one’s own lifetime. This long-term view has proven necessary for peacebuilders working in the Middle East.

This issue of Peacebuilder highlights a remarkable group of people who have come through training of some kind at CJP, usually through the master’s degree in conflict transformation program or our annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI). They are persisting against what often seems like impossible odds to plant seeds for peace in the Middle East. They hope to see significant improvement in their lifetimes but, if that hope is not realized, they all talk of persisting on behalf of future generations. In the words of Dr. David Brubaker, one of our professors, “Optimism is often not warranted in our work with intractable conflict, but hope is something that has to be sustained.”

To date, 29 men and women from the Middle East – largely from Jordan, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine and Syria – have completed our master’s degree in conflict transformation. Nearly 200 people from the Middle East have taken SPI courses. Twenty-five of these alumni were interviewed and photographed by writer Andrew Jenner and photographer Jon Styer, sent to the region by EMU in February 2012. The reports Andrew and Jon brought back are both heartbreaking and heartening.

As this issue was going to press, we learned that the new president of Somalia, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, attended EMU’s 2001 SPI. Mohamud ran for an election on a peace-centered platform of representing all the clans and classes in Somalia. We wish him success in this long-term endeavor.

Our thoughts and prayers are with our alumni and partners in the Middle East, Northeast Africa and other regions where the important work of sowing seeds of peace continues on a daily basis, but must be carried by a vision that may take years to become reality.

In Peace,

Lynn Roth
Executive Director

Daryl Byler, ’79 EMU grad, is MCC program co-director for Iran, Iraq and Jordan. Photo by Jon Styer.

EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) has long enjoyed close ties to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). In fact, it exists in large part because of MCC.

In the late ’80s MCC staff in its Akron offices began discussing the need to train more peacebuilders by combining practical experience in conflict resolution with the field’s growing academic side, preferably in a faith-based setting.

Lunch at the MCC office in Amman, Jordan. Photo by Jon Styer.

Before long, John Paul Lederach (fresh from MCC work) and other members of the faculty and administration at EMU were exploring the possibility. In 1994, the vision became reality with the establishment of CJP – then known as the Conflict Transformation Program. Most of the program’s early faculty and staff were former MCC volunteers themselves. Now, about half of CJP’s full-time employees have extensive MCC experience, including executive director Lynn Roth, who spent 30 years with MCC, most recently as director of its U.S. East Coast program.

As soon as CJP was up and running at the university, MCC began sending staff from its partner NGOs and church organizations in the Middle East to receive training at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI). To date, MCC has sponsored 60 representatives from its partner organizations in Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Israel to attend SPI.

“Sending trainees to SPI has been an integral part of MCC’s overall peacebuilding program in Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” says Alain Epp Weaver, a long-time MCC volunteer in the Middle East now serving as its director of strategic planning and learning.

A rehabilitation program at the East Jerusalem YMCA, as just one example, now uses conflict sensitivity principles in its work with Palestinians disabled by Israeli military attacks, after MCC sponsored its director to attend SPI, according to Epp Weaver. Several staffers from the Wi’am Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center in Bethlehem have also received training at SPI, during which they were able to gain broader background in peacebuilding theory and skills, as well as share insight with others on their experience using traditional Palestinian reconciliation processes.

And in Jordan, MCC has begun working with SPI-trained staff from a partner organization to sponsor peacebuilding workshops and training to Syrian refugees in Jordan, as well as to Jordanians living in communities that host a growing number of Syrians fleeing the war in their country. — AKJ

Grateful acknowledgement: In researching and reporting this issue of Peacebuilder, Sarah Adams, Daryl Byler (’79 EMU grad), Rachelle Friesen and Ed Nyce (’86 EMU grad) – MCC staff in Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and the U.S., respectively – were extremely helpful.

Based in Amman, Jordan, Raghda Quandor, MA ’04, longs to work at building peace at the structural level. Photo by Jon Styer.

Peacebuilding is an inherently optimistic endeavor. While it can involve different means, there is a constant focus on an end – something different, something better, something yet to come. If you have no hope whatsoever, say many of the alumni interviewed for this issue of Peacebuilder, it would be impossible to do the kind of work they do. And yet, the track record in the Middle East seems to amount to little more than a growing list of dashed hopes and disappointment, of failure, of eyes blinded for eyes, leaving everyone blind. As this issue goes to press in September 2012, the Syrian civil war is estimated to have killed nearly 25,000 people over the previous 18 months. The possibility that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon, and that Israel or the United States will use violence to prevent it from doing so, continues to loom fearfully large in people’s minds. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has all but been abandoned, leaving intact deep, systemic forms of violence that traumatize both sides.

For some, these realities inspire pessimism and frustration that threaten to snuff out hope.

“You have to be hopeful,” says Fadlallah Hassouna (SPI ’10 & ’11), executive director of the Development for People and Nature Association, which works among youth in southern Lebanon.

But he speaks slowly, shaking his head, then admits he can hardly believe his own words, that he is afraid of what tomorrow might bring. Conflict is never far from the surface in Lebanon, he says. It seems inevitable again, and so he hopes that perhaps his work will at least serve to minimize its impact, to mitigate its effects.

Ruba Musleh, MA ’08, seeks to enhance work prospects for Palestinian youth in Ramallah. Photo by Jon Styer.

Structural Solutions Absent

In Jordan, Raghda Quandor, MA ’04, lists off the big challenges facing her country: hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees arriving over the past two decades, water insecurity, the status of the Palestinian people (more than 2 million of whom live in Jordan, according to most estimates).

“We have a peace that’s not a peace,” says Quandor, who has worked for several international NGOs, and conceives of peacebuilding at the structural level.

Large-scale change, though, seems impossible to enact. People feel powerless, they are more focused on day-to-day survival. It is a chaotic time, a hard time to think about and work toward a better future. If Jordan’s problems are a dripping faucet, she says, the solution so far has been to simply keep emptying the bucket. Quandor wishes she could fix the faucet.

“You need to create systems that resolve issues,” she says. “[But] I don’t think anybody’s interested. In some ways, I feel sad.”

In Ramallah, Palestine, Ruba Musleh, MA ’08, says the seeming hopelessness of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has led her to focus her attention inward, toward her own people.

“I don’t see anything changing in the near future, and that’s why I focus on working internally instead of with the other side. I think we need to build ourselves up first.”

Twenty years ago, she continues, Palestinian youth were energetic and motivated. They believed they had the power to change and improve their lives. Today’s youth, having grown up during and after the violent Second Intifada, have lost that sense of confidence in themselves, she says. Sometimes, if she thinks too hard about these kinds of things, it becomes tempting to throw up her hands and leave peacebuilding for a better-paying job in the private sector. The thing that has kept her at her work – managing a project to enhance entrepreneurship and employability skills among Palestinian youth – has been a desire to some day look back and realize that she did, in some way, make a difference . . . a motivation fed by her experience at CJP.

Based in Beirut, Sonia Nakad, SPI ’09, helps develop peacebuilding manuals tailored to specific cultures and situations. Photo by Jon Styer.

Can’t Give Up

Like Musleh, several other alumni place themselves somewhere between total defeat and blind optimism, discouraged by what they see but unwilling to give up.

“Nothing’s happening. We’re full gas on neutral,” says Maysa Baransi (SPI ’09), the co-director of All For Peace, the first joint Israeli-Palestinian radio station, though she still holds onto abstract hope for the future. “As a Palestinian, I can’t give up. Eventually we will get there. I just hope it will be in my years.”

Sonia Nakad (SPI ’09) says a curious paradox exists regarding public perception of “peacebuilding” in Lebanon, where she coordinates the Peacebuilding Academy with the Permanent Peace Movement.

Many people, especially ones from older generations, write off the entire field as misguided idealism, a nice concept, perhaps, but not something with power to effect change.

“Few people believe that this is the way to make things better,” Nakad says.

At the same time, everyone is sick of constantly fighting, and there exists widespread agreement that violent conflict resolution benefits no one. One project of the Peacebuilding Academy, aimed in part at encouraging broader society to invest in alternatives to violence, is the publication of peacebuilding manuals for Middle Eastern audiences, written by Middle Eastern experts. Democracy looks different in different places, she continues. So should peacebuilding.

“You cannot just move in a technique from outside,” Nakad says. “You have to take into consideration beliefs, culture and history.”

What applies in one place does not necessarily apply elsewhere. And what applies in one situation does not necessarily apply in another, says Fadi el-Hajjar, MA ’06. A long-time peacebuilding practitioner in Lebanon now managing a “strengthening civil peace in Lebanon” project for the United Nations Development Programme, el-Hajjar has begun to think more and more on the importance of wisdom.

After more than 15 years in the field, he has discovered that “the more you know, the more you know you need to know.”

In Search of Wisdom

Fadi el-Hajjar, MA ’06, avoids offering over-simplified answers. Photo by Jon Styer.

From this position of humility, el-Hajjar looks to the past for guidance for the future. Peacebuilders in the region, he says, should learn from mistakes, adapt, replace absolutes with nuance.

“If we balance things in terms of ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ there’s going to be simplified decision making,” el-Hajjar says. “But if you take into consideration the complexities, the long-term and other variables, you need some wisdom. Even if you are ‘right,’ I think sometimes we need wisdom.”

For example: when a war is happening, the people caught in the middle don’t care so much about who is right and who is wrong. They want the shooting to stop. Later, everyone can talk about who bears responsibility for what and why. Wisdom is pragmatism, el-Hajjar says; wisdom avoids absolutes. He hesitates when asked about using violence to stop greater violence. It is a very difficult question.

“When you think in terms of black and white, you think in terms of limitations,” el-Hajjar eventually responds. “When you think of these as the edges of the spectrum, then we have wide room to maneuver.”

Lessons From the Empty Tomb

Make no mistake, says Zougbi Zougbi (SPI ’98 & ’02; STAR ’03), these are incredibly difficult times, in Palestine, where he lives, and in the wider Middle East. All around him, he sees demoralization, degradation, social breakdown, injustices and spiritual poverty. Life in Palestine is life in a pressure cooker as a result of the illegal and unjustified occupation, he says.

Zougbi Zougbi, SPI ’98 & ’02, STAR ’03: “Hope keeps us sane.” Photo by Jon Styer.

“Now, we are at our worst time,” he says. “Though you are tempted to be very angry in this situation, we don’t want to think of alternatives to nonviolence. We as Palestinians would like to deprive the Israeli government of an enemy.”

At the Wi’am Center, a mediation and conflict resolution organization Zougbi founded and directs, he sees the symptoms every day. Husbands fight with their wives. Landlords quarrel with their tenants. Brothers dispute a few square meters of inherited family land, while thousands of dunams are confiscated to build housing for Israeli settlers. You can’t blame everything on the occupation, Zougbi says, but it is pervasive. It is everywhere, and it is inescapable.

With a staff of 10, plus around 100 volunteers and interns from across the world, Wi’am offers programs in mediation, diplomacy and trauma-coping (“healing” can only begin after traumatic experiences end) to numerous different groups throughout Palestine. Its primary goals include confronting injustice, promoting dignity for and dialogue between all people, and spreading values of peace, justice, democracy and human rights. The organization was recognized in 2010 with World Vision’s Peace Prize.

Despite the difficult and worsening conditions facing his work and his people, Zougbi looks to the future with a profound but cautious hope drawn from multiple sources. He finds hope in his faith, in which he sees transformative power. He says the stations of the cross parallel the Palestinian experience – terrible, cruel, oppressive – and yet, leading inevitably, some day, to the empty tomb that represents salvation and victory.

This Too Shall Pass

He also finds hope in his adult children, who turned down opportunities to live and work abroad, and came home to Bethlehem.

And he finds hope in history. The Berlin Wall fell down. Apartheid came to an end in South Africa. Everything crumbles and returns to dust some day; though it defies imagination from the current vantage point, he is sure the occupation of Palestine, too, shall pass.

“I believe that oppression will be defeated. Political, economic, social and spiritual oppression will be defeated. Hope is based on restorative justice that redresses injustices rather than avenging them. Hope is a form of nonviolent struggle. Hope keeps us sane and alive.” Zougbi says. — AKJ

Barry Hart

Barry Hart, PhD, professor of trauma, identity and conflict studies, pointed to recent neuroscience suggesting that humans have an innate desire to bond and empathize with one another. Framed in different terms, pervasive physical and structural violence is at odds with our own biology, and therefore will someday, somehow, come to an end. “You feel that in your bones,” says Hart. “That gives you not only hope, but strength and patience to go forward.”

Though often used interchangeably, hope and optimism represent different concepts, says David Brubaker, PhD, associate professor of organizational studies. Optimism, or lack thereof, is short-term, pragmatic and based on specific facts. Hope, though, looks above and beyond specific facts; it is rooted in an idea often referenced by Martin Luther King, Jr. – that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

David Brubaker

The distinction is an important one for peacebuilders working in challenging environments that don’t justify an expectation that things are soon to get better.

“Optimism is often not warranted in our work with intractable conflict, but hope is something that has to be sustained,” Brubaker says.

At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the reality of despair and disillusionment that often accompanies peacebuilding work.

“We do the field of peacebuilding a disservice if we only cast our work within a utopian future vision,” says Carl Stauffer, PhD, assistant professor of development and justice studies.

There are no quick fixes in “deeply complex, nuanced and layered” conflicts like those faced by alumni in the Middle East, he continues, although that should not be mistaken for ineffectiveness. Doctors are still valuable, Stauffer notes, despite the fact they have yet to eliminate disease. While he also finds hope in the idea that seemingly impossible conflicts will be resolved – the end of apartheid in South Africa being one example – he says that peacebuilders should not be afraid to acknowledge and discuss “discouragement or despondency among practitioners in a tough place like the Middle East.”

Better networking among CJP and its alumni working in challenging environments was identified both by alumni interviewed for Peacebuilder and CJP faculty as one way to address the discouragement they sometimes face. In its new strategic plan completed in the spring of 2012, CJP sets forth developing new programs to strengthen alumni networking for this very reason.

Jayne Docherty

To Jayne Docherty, PhD, professor of leadership and public policy, the shifting dynamics of conflict in the Middle East and the combination of hope and despair these elicit from alumni, also present CJP with an opportunity to evaluate its own role in peacebuilding.

“When the world changes around them, peacebuilders need to hold hope, practice humility and revise their practices,” she says. “What are we at CJP and in the U.S. peace community doing differently in response to the new realities in the Middle East? Have we examined our premises and our assumptions? Or, are we still promoting old practices [like] dialogue or taking the side of the oppressed? What can we learn from our graduates?” — AKJ

Peacebuilding Takes Time

Fadlallah Hassouna, SPI ’11, tries to cope with less funding. Photo by Jon Styer.

After a brief but bloody war between Israel and Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the international funding floodgates opened. Enormous amounts of relief and development aid poured into Lebanon, which had lost much of its infrastructure during the month-long conflict.

The Development for People and Nature Association (DPNA), a peace and development organization in southern Lebanon directed by Fadlallah Hassouna (SPI ’10), was one beneficiary of this wave of international support. The DPNA’s budget rose to $2.5 million, allowing it to work across Lebanon with a staff of 64 and about 1,500 volunteers.

But attention spans are short, and before long, other countries had risen to the top of international donors’ priority lists. The Arab Spring, in particular, diverted significant funding to Middle Eastern countries that experienced more upheaval and social change than had occurred in Lebanon. By 2012, Hassouna’s DPNA had just 10 staffers and a budget of $500,000.

Similar experiences have proven frustrating for other Lebanese SPI alumni, who have seen projects end and funding shrink in recent years.

“[Peacebuilding] is not something you can see. It’s a long-term process,” said Sonia Nakad (SPI ’09), who coordinates the Peacebuilding Academy for the Permanent Peace Movement, a Beirut-based NGO that promotes peace throughout the Middle East.

Nakad noted that the real work of peacebuilding begins only after overt violence has ended, and requires years of work across a wide spectrum of issues to create conditions for lasting peace. Funding commitments that end after a few short years, she said, leave this work undone and risk negating earlier achievements. Despite this problem, she and her colleagues are carrying on as best they’re able with whatever resources remain.

“Alone, we cannot do everything,” said Nakad. “We’re trying. It’s not easy, but if you believe in peacebuilding, you will be able to achieve something.”  — AKJ