Empowerment Leaders | Beyond Intractability

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A window into what we collectively know about more constructive ways of handling the intractable conflicts that threaten both our relationships and our societies.

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A window into what we collectively know about more constructive ways of handling the intractable conflicts that threaten both our relationships and our societies.

Welcome to the New Beyond Intractability
Find out about the recent upgrades to BI including our new Constructive Conflict Guide which organizes BI content around a framework for analyzing and then limiting or solving conflict problems, focusing particularly on hyper-polarization and threats to democracy (from both the left and the right).

Welcome to the New Beyond Intractability
Find out about the recent upgrades to BI including our new Constructive Conflict Guide which organizes BI content around a framework for analyzing and then limiting or solving conflict problems.

7. Massively Parallel Roles & Tasks

Empowerment Leaders are, perhaps, the most important of the power balancers. Their focus is on highlighting and correcting the society's most egregious power inequities and the unfairness that results from those inequities. Their focus is not on "getting even" (or instituting a system of reverse discrimination that allows the previously disempowered to enjoy the privileges of social dominance). Rather, they want to build a system that more equitably balances power in ways that all citizens will see as offering a path to a society that is fair for all. They build upon the long tradition of nonviolent civil resistance made famous by Gandhi, King, and Mandela. They embrace their commitment to nonviolence, their demands that ongoing instances of injustice be properly addressed (King's "the fierce urgency of now"), and their appeals for democracy to live up to the true meaning of its egalitarian ideals.

Empowerment leaders seek to level the playing field in ways which, going forward, provide equality of opportunity while, at the same time, providing assistance to victims of past discrimination and disadvantage. This is an approach that is much less widely used in today's hyper-polarized political environment, where those on the left and the right have so dehumanized one another that it is hard for anyone to imagine fighting for a future in which the other side would like to live. The result is an endless series of us-versus-them confrontations in which neither side ever achieves any sort of stable victory. While there are instances in which King's empowerment strategy is being advocated, taught, and used (see for instance, The King Center, Pace e Bene, the Addie Wyatt Center for Nonviolence Training, and On Earth Peace), such efforts and programs tend to be overwhelmed by those taking a more aggressive approach.

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