by Michelle LeBaron

January 31, 2022

Friends,

My contribution [to the Seshat discussion of Case 7, looking at state dissolution in Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen] will be in the form of a letter. I want it to be personal, as if speaking to a specific someone, not to an abstract, disembodied entity. I am writing to you as kindreds. Not someone whose values march in entire accord with mine, but someone who, like me, values openness, considered opinions open to change through dialogue, curiosity. Someone who acknowledges complexity and engages anyway not in naïve ways, but in ways that advance our collective seeing; someone who recognizes that no disciplinary lens will afford us even a glimpse of the “whole” we may seek, so that we must faithfully seek and apply multidisciplinary lenses to even begin to understand our worlds; someone who knows that our “rational” ways of knowing are always limited, and that we need our whole selves – feeling, sensing, intuiting, embodied, relating – to come together to yield ways forward. I’m glad you’re here.

We have case 7 before us about state collapse and domestic devolution, and a set of questions about what certain lenses might show us, or occlude. As we all know, disciplines are ubiquitous in the higher educational contexts in which some of us function, but they are too limiting a basis from which to meaningfully engage these cases. As a legal scholar with graduate training in counselling psychology, I have no good answer to the questions posed by the project organizers. Legal scholars, even when critically attuned to political, socio-cultural and structural factors, focus on ways of making and enforcing rules. The essence of the cases described here is that the structures themselves are groaning under the weight of complex dynamics interwoven with power plays, subterranean plots, rival rulers, divided loyalties, cultural and worldview disconnections and connections, likely and unlikely alliances, symbolic shifts, powerful rituals, and much more. My psychological lens taught me to view things through individualist lenses that accent agency and self-responsibility. Neither the legal nor the psychological lenses as I received them help me very much in seeking a helpful, coherent understanding of these cases.

Nor do my professional experiences give me a single lens through which to look at these cases. They are a kaleidoscope, as you, my kindreds, have also expressed (though they may not be reducible to a hand-held device through which beautiful colors dance in alternating patterns). Heidi [Burgess] and Peter [Adler], you’ve have written beautifully about what you can see from the edges on which you stand: about the essential importance of complex systems thinking, about the danger of the contemporary deep divisions in the US, and about the essential habits of thinking across, and engaging others across, diverse levels. You’ve helped me, now and over many years, think about the interwoven threads that are part of any intractable conflict. You have both reminded me at many times that how and where we stand, and which stories we choose to tell to and about our group and others, necessarily shape what we see, and also what we cannot see.

Here is how I have described the lenses I look through, and what shaped them. I share this with you, kindreds, because I want to lay bare the ways my thinking was shaped, and to give you a view into that shaping process, which continues still. I write with great respect because I know you are also constantly in the process of re-visiting these shaping processes in your own lives, personal and professional. I am an interdisciplinary scholar with a strong passion for arts whose career has been dedicated to uncovering ways of untangling intractable, intercultural conflicts.  My commitment to this work arose from early experiences in a small prairie city in Canada where relations between Aboriginal people and those of European descent were stratified and deeply disrespectful.  As a child, I suffered from the disconnects and the deeply denigrating disrespect in my home town. Something in my body said it was wrong. I dreamed of building gates in the fences – social and attitudinal - that kept us apart. 

Later, in my career as a scholar/practitioner, I sought to build bridges as well as gates as a facilitator and mediator in commercial, community, family and international settings. For the past several years, I have been privileged to work with dancers, visual artists, musicians, expressive arts practitioners and others whose vocations and practices are arts-based. From them, I have learned more about conflict than from any other source. I have learned ways that transcend the debates over framing and theoretical lenses so ubiquitous in the academy. But let me go back a step before proceeding, to a formative moment early in my career as an Associate Professor at the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University (GMU).

Among the well-known discourses during my time at GMU in the 1990s was Samuel Huntington’s phrase, memorialized in a book, “The Clash of Civilizations.  Huntington claimed that conflicts in the future would play out along cultural and religious axes.  My rebuttal, co-authored with then-doctoral student Jarle Crocker in the Harvard International Review, argued that conflicts arise from multiple intersections and are too complex to attribute to one or two large, reified sources. We were concerned that global clashes Huntington projected could fuel insular, protectionist policies that could paradoxically make worldview clashes more likely to occur. We were concerned (as many colleagues have

been, Marcia Caton Campbell and Jayne Docherty among them) about the power of framing, and about our potential as conflict analysts and intervenors to (mostly inadvertently) escalate conflict rather than ameliorate it. Any time we engage in conflict, we are joining the dance with all of our baggage, lenses, biases and bright ideas. These things we bring become a part of the choreography, so being aware of them is essential. Yet there will always be parts of our lenses of which we are unaware, so we must always come with humility. I sense you will agree.

So what beyond the things you have identified will help us refine our seeing, thus contributing to a more robust way of addressing conflicts like these, a way that will limit our potential to escalate harm? I am aligned with General Roméo Dallaire (who tried unsuccessfully to stem the Rwandan genocide), who said that what is needed in contexts like these are “armies of artists”.

Hearing General Dallaire’s call for artist mobilization had a galvanizing effect on my work.  It breathed urgency, possibility and inspiration into my research and practice. I love the uneasy juxtaposition in his call to connect “armies” with “artists”. We need to be better able to embrace paradox in our work.

Why are artists helpful to community members in transforming conflict? Artists are experts on navigating paradox, joining broken fragments into new forms, and noticing what is needed to make things whole.  Their work generates conversations and questions. It opens possibilities for connections and relationship that were previously unseen. They model creativity and hope, even amidst pain and destruction. They see through their bodies’ eyes, something that most of us who have completed “higher” education have long been trained out of doing. And yet it is bodies that enact conflict, bodies that feel and sense its tendrils, and bodies that may die in its midst. Bodies also are ultimately great, often-untapped sources of wisdom; it is essential that we use our whole selves to engage complex problems like these. Artists know more about how to be in our bodies, and how to access their wisdom, than other mortals. Artists also know more about where conflict lives and how it can shift than those trained in any social sciences discipline. For these and many other reasons, artists can be pivotal in engaging conflict in communities.

So, kindreds, what can artists offer in relation to this scenario and the tragic case studies [Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen] described therein? Engaging arts processes may unfold unexpected outcomes; they may turn the parties’ (and third parties’) eyes to the present and toward each other, offering new perspectives. Andrew Floyer Acland wrote about what dance showed him about working with complex public conflicts, observing that dance gave him a visceral experience of the importance of space. Floyer Acland quotes from Lao Tse’s poem The Uses of Not:

Thirty spokes meet in the hub,

but the empty space between them

is the essence of the wheel.

Pots are formed from clay,

but the empty space between it

is the essence of the pot.

Walls with windows and doors form the house,

but the empty space within it

is the essence of the house.

Reflecting on this poem and the dance and movement he had experienced, he observed that the physical work had turned his attention to “something that might bridge the gap between reason and the point in conflict work where reason is not enough.”[1] He continues: “The more I danced, the more I realized that the medium of movement enables people to bring into the open capacities that are otherwise locked within them in the same way as the work of the chisel elicits a form of life from a block of stone or wood.”[2]

Andrew concludes with this observation: “I finally understood that this is why mediators need to be artists as much as they need to be lawyers or psychologists or management consultants, because it is the job of artists to discern hidden possibilities, cultivate new tones and tempos, explore nuances of shade or meaning, and bring to life what is inherent.”[3]

What could be brought to life in each of these contexts, Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan? Where are the cracks through which the light can get through? These, and the questions posed “about the Low Gray Zone” on page 34 of the paper could be explored via arts-based experiences. Perhaps these practices could reveal additional nuances of the questions themselves, and places where answers are emerging in these three dynamic environments.

Kindreds, thank you for reading this far. That you for considering the value and essential importance of a sensory, aesthetic, embodied way of looking at these issues. If my words have failed to answer the question directly, I am heartened. As MC Richards’ wrote on conflict:

“How to come at it, how to come at it…..by the serpent’s path, indirectly, never straight on. Picking our way through all that befalls us and besets us, all the experiences streaming toward us as well as those we initiate. For in the intricate mesh of our mutual involvement, we befall each other constantly.”

Richards continues, suggesting that effectively engaging conflict requires “a special care of our inner being. Often we are helped by solitude and silence, to hear our inner voice from the house of self…..Sometimes it seems necessary to fall apart to begin from a new place, the way a seed falls apart to reveal a germinating center. It may well be the growth process that causes our conflicts in the first place. The bud, pushing from within, cracks the outer forms. It is these outer forms that feel the violence…..What a vessel we have to be to hold the polarities of our experience together.”[4]

Holding the polarities of our experience together, we come with new eyes to old problems. Perhaps this is what we as third parties can do most helpfully.

I leave you, kindreds, with the words of Seamus Heaney, who lived through the Troubles and still maintained hope:

“So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge,
              Believe that a further shore is reachable from here…”[5]