Heidi: Hi, I'm Heidi Burgess, and sitting next to me is my husband and partner and everything Guy Burgess and we are co-directors of Beyond Intractability. And we're talking today with Julia Roig , who is the founder and Chief Network Weaver Of The Horizons Project. We want to have a conversation today to talk about the Horizons Project and her work in peacebuilding and bridge building and social justice, there's a lot of overlap, with what we're doing with Beyond Intractability, so we explore some of those things. Let's start, Julia, with you telling us about the Horizons Project.

Julia: Yeah, well, thank you for the invitation to be in this conversation and just to say, You know how much I appreciate the work you do, and Beyond Intractability, you've got an audience out here or somebody who was very much a consumer of BI... Somebody who's tracked your work for my entire career, so this is a real pleasure for me to be with you both.

I am someone that comes out of the international peacebuilding and the democracy promotion space, so I've been running around the world for 30 years doing this work, mostly in Latin America and the Balkans is where I was based when I lived overseas, and then working with Partners for Democratic Change and Partners Global.

And so in about 2021 is when the Horizons Project as an idea was born and was incubated within my old organization, Partners Global, which was really focused on international development and peacebuilding and the intersection of conflict transformation and democracy, and it was just in January of 2022 that we decided that it deserved its own home and to really focus on the conflict dynamics in the United States. So from that perspective of working in other countries for as long as I have, with different types of people who are both within movements and peacebuilding organizations, those who wouldn't even call themselves peacebuilders, but are doing that type of directly work with communities and the relationship they have with each other in governments. I always thought to myself, it was never about needing to spend more money on the problem, and of course, I worked with big donors and the US Government, World Bank, you all those folks, and we didn't need more money, we needed better coordination between the good people doing good work in the countries where I was working, and I was always in a support role of our local colleagues, to do the good work that they were going to be doing.

And so in order to, as a real gift to be able to have the platform and the funding and the confidence of some partners to be able to take that approach and bring it to the United States. So together with my co-lead of the horizons project, Maria Stephan, we really take this ecosystem organizing approach to say, "it's not necessarily about the one answer or funding one silver bullet, but it’s how we're bringing different actors together to see themselves as a part of a movement. And that's really challenging in a country that is as complex and as big as the federal system that we have in the United States. But that's kind of the intention of the Horizons Project.

So when I talk about the ecosystem of social change that we're trying to affect, we really draw a very big circle around that system. So there's a lot of people playing these connector roles right now, because I think we're all figuring out that this is one of the of gaps in the way that we work.

The circle that we draw around the system we're trying to effect includes the folks who would consider themselves Bridge Builders or peacebuilders, who really come from a problem statement or a theory of change around empathy around dialogue around finding each other, across difference, and then there's a whole other group of folks who are very focused on the technocratic aspects of democracy, which, of course, includes voting rights and gerrymandering and corruption, and all of the things about the way that institutions have to function. And then there's a whole other group, which is the social movements, those who really come from a civil resistance framework, who have a completely different problem definition and a different way of thinking about how change happens. And so that's the ecosystem that we've drawn. Our big circle around that, we're trying to find each other in this moment when it's not either or, it's both and. We need all of these things. And yet there are some certain gaps, I think, in the way that we may be thinking about how we all fit together.

Heidi: Tell me more about what you are doing to bring all these folks together.

Julia: Well, it's funny because it does sound very esoteric, that's kind of at the systems level organizing, but we really do consider ourselves as organizers and so What do organizers do? If you're a relational organizer, you spend a lot of time talking to a lot of different people, and as we're kind of scoping... Well, okay, who do we need to be in relationship with? We've prioritized those folks who probably are more... Not necessarily in a grass-tops versus grassroots role, but who are network nodes, who are placed within a space where they're also convening and facilitating and helping to organize a constituency.

And so I felt very freed up when I was talking to one of our advisors, John Paul Lederach who is working with Humanity United. He's been on the project's brain trust since the beginning, and he has his insect metaphors. I read his work, and something that was very powerful when we were first starting out was him saying, you don't necessarily need to be the convener, always, you don't... And so, some people say, "Oh, so you're convening people." Well, not always, actually, we make sure that we're in a lot of other network meetings and that we engage in those conversations and we listen to what people are saying, and so, if you're like the spider, you're here, and then you go over here and you talk to this person and you talk to this person, you sit in on this meeting and you might leave a little insight or idea, but you're also hearing where people's energies are, and then the web kind of ends up following behind you, and it's a metaphor that I appreciate that we don't necessarily need to be convening people, but we definitely want to make sure that we're participating actively in a lot of different spaces, and that we also are prioritizing that relational work. So, it's a lot of one-on-one time with different people. We're a small team, there's five of us at Horizons, and so we definitely do segment out who we're going to make sure that we go very deep with different sectors and people, and then there's kind of sub-groups that you end up connecting people saying, I think we should get together and have a conversation, and then you try and make sure that that conversation continues. So ,we have salons, we have groups that come together just for solidarity and kind of nourishment that we bring together on a regular basis, but these are mostly folks who are also thinking in this kind of systems way in network weaving.

Heidi: Great, I think you answered the question that I was thinking about as you first started talking, when you said that there's lots of people who are playing connector roles, and since we started our discussion about hyper-polarization, we have gotten involved with the few of them. There's the group that Walt Roberts is organizing, and we've just joined the Trust Network, and we talk Kristin Hansen, who is doing another thing that sounds similar to this, and I find myself thinking, how do you connect all of the connectors? And I think you just answered that question, which is, you read the web, which is a wonderful way of imagining it. What do you do to strengthen the web and really get everybody... I see a sort of meta-organizing where we have the notion of massively parallel peacebuilding, and the notion is that not everybody has to be totally coordinated and all on the same page and following the direction of one particular leader, or organizer, but you're still all sort of, approximately, working towards the same goals and that they have some of the same values. Is there anything of that sort in this web building or working in the same direction that matters so much?

Julia: Yeah, so... It's interesting working in the same direction. I love your metaphor of the adopt-a-highway and the Google Map and how it's curated by crowd sourcing. I find that very inspirational. I don't know that is the same path is what we're going to achieve, but what I do think is that if we at least see ourselves in as a part of the same system, so the map metaphor that's okay. That's actually okay. We don't actually need. So ,you had mentioned on the cover of our website, that we say we've got to chart a common direction, which is different from the path of getting there, I think. And so, I think how we see each other in this work and how we relate to those who have a different theory of change is important, and so I do see... I actually think we're pretty far away from the kind of cohesion that we need in this country. I think we're recognizing that that is a need, and yet I think naming when there are some pretty glaring gaps is important. And so, I do think part of the network weaving is also addressing where are their gaps in how we are approaching this.

You started out by asking about the tension between a peacebuilding approach or a bridge building approach and a power building approach and a social justice approach, and I think that that's one of the challenges that we have right now, quite honestly. The common direction, you can use the words like a pluralistic, multi-racial democracy or whatever, people have words that you use, and some words are better suited to certain constituencies than others, but I do feel that the nature of the threat right now... The nature of the problem in and of itself, the real harm that's being done in the country, I think there are those that just have the privilege of not seeing it and not experiencing it, and then having the ability to not have that be front and center to their work almost to the point of then, I would say, doing more harm than good sometimes, with regards to even a negative peace. "Let's just make sure that we bring down the heat" and that's what you all have been trying to elevate with this conversation. And there's also this, in the name of bipartisanship, the kind of technocratic aspect of democracy promotion, I think it's devoid of a need for a real kind of truth, justice, healing, transformation process with regards to our racial history.

And so a lot of these technocratic voting rights are an aspect that I think is really trying to address racial justice, but most of the kind of solutions-oriented things--like "let's just make democracy work for citizens" isn't necessarily taking into account the need for addressing the racial justice and healing processes that I think we do bring from an international perspective of the work that people have done overseas, understanding how important it is to have these hard conversations...

Guy: The thing that I find myself reflecting on as we've been talking is that, first of all, the wisdom of thinking of society as networks, and that we weave those networks together, and then fundamentally the glue that holds it all together is communication. Information we get about what other people are doing, what they would like to do, what they've done, what the history is comes through communication. Some of our work that we're trying to do, and what you're trying to do we think, is to weave a more constructive web of communication, which is running counter to this gigantic distorted communication system that surrounds us. We're in our own little bubbles, which are all different, and I think part of the issue is how we correct what's wrong with the system of mass communication and social media and all of that, that's distorting our view of the world. At the same time, we try to create something different. But I wondered whether you've been thinking about whether one of the pillars or legs of this whole effort is how to improve this larger societal communication process.

Julia: Yes. Hmm, there's no easy answer to that. How do we start? We start, actually, without own personal practices. That's where I start. I start with a commitment to that abundance thinking with regards to information I have and information I want to share and connections I want to make.

I think that we spend a little bit too much time figuring out how to scale things, like somehow we're going to find the right words or the right communication channel, and then we're going to bring it to scale, and then we're going to have this big, major impact on the big systems that we want to change. I know that that's what needs to happen, and I guess I've... The way that I've seen the transformational change happen in other places, it has to start with just a group of people who commit to working together in a certain way and that then kind of expands throughout their networks based on shared values, but a commitment to being together in this work.

Obviously, there's people like Lisa Schirch and Search for Common Ground and folks who are trying to deal with social media and trying to deal with these kind of big systemic communications channels that we have that's feeding the outrage machine, and folks like IREX and Kristen Lord, who's such a leader on combating misinformation and disinformation and all the rest. So I know that this is one of the things we have to solve, and the people who are trying to solve that particular problem need to be working together, and I think the only thing we can commit to is how we do our work and how we model how we want this too, and so I do think that there is a bit of infusing into the system training, skills, building, awareness raising.

There are things that we need to do differently. So one of the things that Horizons is doing is bringing together a group of trainers, like nodes of trainers, who work with movement leaders who work with grassroots organizations as trainers, and those who work with conflict resolution to bring them together to look at like, "Okay, well, how are you offering kind of support and training to your constituencies, and what are the frameworks and how do we need to be adapting to kind of have this new way of working?" I think part of it is the systems thinking and the relational organizing and the brain and behavioral science of why are we marinating in outrage and responding the way that we are? Those are some things, and I think as a part of our network weaving, what do we think needs to be on offer right now within these networks of networks? But I try and keep the work very manageable with regards to my own ability to make a difference, and I think I make a difference through modeling what I'm trying to see in the world.

Heidi: That makes a lot of sense. I think we've gotten into quite a few debates over the last six, nine months, however long we've been at this polarization discussion, that we've been having about whether hyper, or toxic, or just polarization is good or bad, and whether or not we should turn down the heat. I think there are some assumptions that some people are making that are different from the ones that were making that lead to confusion.

One is that calling for diminishing hyper or toxic polarization or turning down the heat means that we're calling for everybody just being nice and getting along and sweeping the big issues such as racial justice under the rug.  I want to clarify that that's not at all our intention. But we think that when you fight for racial justice in ways that induce the outrage among whites, that it's going to be counter-effective. You're going to raise resistance to what you want to do more than you're going to change minds and get to the goals you want to.  We think that there's constructive ways of doing advocacy and destructive ways of doing advocacy, but we're not at all against doing advocacy. So that's one thing that I wanted to point out. And I think it's what you're saying, I think, corresponds to that notion. So I'm really interested to find out more about how you see the advocate, the social justice, non-violent action piece, getting in with the bridge building on maybe the government reformers. I don't see that one as strong. Maybe I'm missing something, but I think there's real potential for the non-violence folks to help the bridge builders see better ways of doing their work and vice-versa.

Julia:  Yeah, well, there was a lot that you just said. have a lot to say about that, and I have learned so much from being in relationship with the civil resistance community, that has not traditionally been my community. I have been in the peacebuilding world and adjacent to movement infrastructure, but I've always been, when we've been working overseas, positioning partners and the groups that we work with as the facilitative stakeholder within movements. So that we could help to resolve conflicts within the movements. We try to help them to define agendas, expand participation. Of course, conflict always erupts within movements as well, and so that was my space.

Now that I'm doing this work in the United States, in my own backyard, dealing with the conflict dynamics that are so difficult here, and it's where I started my career, I started doing mediation in the US a long time ago. It is not up to white people to tell people of color not to be angry and not to express that anger in their movements, because it will then make all of our job of as peacebuilders harder. That is a truism that I truly believe, I think there is a place for righteous anger in this moment, and I think that how that anger and grief is channeled is important, and yet the message of the tactics that we needed to use to make change.

There's a whole bunch of leadership that is unfolding with regards to a reparative approach to movement building and resistance. We need to repair a society, but we cannot say, as white people, don't be so angry, because it's really making our jobs as bridge builders harder.

So we're not going to say that because to a certain extent, anger, anger that is then channeled in disrupting the complacency, is needed, that's when we're talking about polarization right now, we're talking about disrupting complacency, and that is different from dehumanizing and toxic othering that then feeds into an authoritarian playbook of divide and rule, which is using race and gender issues to drive a wedge between us.

But I really feel strongly that we cannot say “defund the police” was a bad slogan, because it gives so much fuel to push against those who are deeply concerned about security. Now, okay, we know, we know from literature that there's the tension between radicals and reformers and movements, there's the gradual and there's the abolitionists, and we will always have these tensions between these movements, and so then therefore, I think the work that needs to be done is intra-group work, right now, within the conservative movement, we need to support conservatives to have courageous conversations about what is happening within their movement, and we need to have intra-group work within the progressive movement around what a reparative approach to our organizing is going to be.

I think that because there's been such a focus on bringing red hats and blue hats together to empathize with each other, that that's actually not, in my opinion, what's most needed right now. Because there's an equivalency, there's both-sidism, the harm being done to our democracy, is from the extremes on both sides, and we just need moderation, and we need to come and we need to bring down heat so that the centrist can actually start problem solving for us. I think this is a misdiagnosis of the problem.

So I got my diagnosis, I've got my problem statement, I've got my theory of change, and I share that theory of change and we discuss it. These are the tensions that we have to discuss. But the sideism--the their call out culture, and all of the things that's happening on the progressive left, and shutting down conversation on college campuses… Yes, we absolutely have to deal with this on the progressive movement. But the danger to our democracy is with an authoritarian infection within the Republican Party right now. And until we actually address that and have a movement mindset that to go on offense against this authoritarian faction, I actually think we're going to dialogue ourselves off an authoritarian cliff soon, actually, sooner rather than later!

So we need to be in solidarity with those who are naming a problem and experiencing the harm of the problem. In a way that I think is the hardest conversation to have right now, because we're experiencing these divisions. But I don't think we're going to do it for them. When I say wait! I don't think Julia as a mostly progressive leaning white liberal outside of DC is going to be doing that work. But I will be in solidarity and relationship with those who are.

Guy: One of the things that we've written about for years is something that we call the Crane Britton effect.  Crane Britton wrote a book titled The Anatomy of Revolution that I read as an undergraduate, and it's one of the books that has stuck with me. It tells is the story of five revolutions, and most notably, the French and the Russian Revolutions.  What it talks about, and this is a story that is repeated again and again and again throughout history, is that there are times when regime—whether it's a monarchy or an authoritarian regime or a democracy that isn't working very well. Or any sort of combination, when the regime is widely seen as having failed the population, there's a rebellion. Everybody agrees that they hate the existing regime, and you have popular movements on the left, and on the right, and everybody wants to change things. So the regime relatively quickly collapses. But then you run into the fact that the revolutionaries don't agree on what comes next, and you go through a period where the revolutionaries fight each other, and eventually the most ruthless and violent faction wins and you get a new tyrant, and the challenge on both the left and the right in the United States right now, a lot of discontent with our government. Many of us are feeling for different reasons and for different purposes that this isn't working, and we ought to get rid of it, but if you don't have a vision of a society in which everyone would like to live afterwards, then the revolution, or even if it is a political revolution, using Bernie Sander’s, term, isn’t going to succeed.  So I wonder whether you had been thinking about what kind of vision for what democracy should be, that could allow people with very different views to come together and to get past this competitive... I'm right in your wrong frame which seems to dominate at the moment.

Julia: Yeah, and I'm glad that you brought that up. Why revolutions? If we're in this moment, we need to think about what comes next. Is so important. I totally agree. I'm totally geek out on all of the futures thinking work that people are doing right now, imagination skills, and there's the future of democracy report that just came out that Suzette Brooks Masters put out, which is fantastic. And I think of it though, in phases. The organizing work that we've been doing, actually, we spent a lot of time saying, Are we a negative coalition? Are we against authoritarianism? So then therefore, there is a very low bar to participation, very low. Or are we a positive coalition were for democracy? But when you're for something, you have a higher bar of participation because you've got to agree on certain values and you have to negotiate what that democratic future looks like, and there can be components of both, and in fact, we need both right now. But I actually feel like we are in a moment where we need to a certain extent, a negative coalition, and that the authoritarian experts would say, for all of the pro-democracy organizing that's been successful in other countries, you've always needed progressive and center-right.

It can't just be one side fighting the other in the name of democracy, I think that that's part of what's happening right now is we're having a hard time... We're not going to vote our way out of this problem. There has to be, we have to be organizing around a pluralism that we want to see that is ideological pluralism, so we're not fighting over policies, we're fighting over a system that is an equal playing field for all of us.

And that's challenging right now because of the economic disparities that we have, so it's a concept of a level playing field.  I'm for contestation of how that even works. So that the networks of networks of networks have to include this kind of broader cross-ideological vision of pluralism, but a vision of pluralism that is going on offense against the forces that are actually trying to essentially destroy democracy, which has been consolidated in a lot of the states right now. There is one-party rule in a lot of states, and the authoritarian playbook.  People don't like that word. I mean, it sounds scary to talk about authoritarianism in the United States. What do we even mean by that? And I'm the one who can't say what I want to say anymore because what I'm being shut down from the left. But there is a playbook of eroding democracies and we are experiencing it. So, I guess what my point is, you have to block and build at the same time.

But it's a movement mindset of what we are creating. So that there is the blocking part we are going on offense, and we have something that we're working on now at Horizons, which is our Pillars of Support Project, because there's this idea that there are sectors in society that are propping up the authoritarian regime. it's not just one person, it's not in the name, but there is financial support through businesses, there's faith, there's moral support through religious institutions, there is security sector support of not necessarily actively being involved in a coup by the act of not acting. All of those things... We keep saying It's not going to happen here, and to a certain extent, it is!

And so, I think by having a more targeted analysis of where we need to go on offense, which is the blocking, at the same time thinking about what we're working towards, it has to be this concept of pluralism.

But the problem is... That's the long horizon. There's the medium and the short-term horizon, too, so meaning the three horizons of what we're working towards.  I think that where we're struggling right now is a system, is the ecosystem. You want to work for pluralism, and so then, therefore, you're talking about pluralism, you've got a vision of the future, you're bringing people together, but so much effort is being put on that, the future vision, that we're not working on blocking and going on offense against the forces that are actively with agency trying to really erode democracy. And so, I think that it's a both-and of course. But I guess my point is, is that it's not just about coming up with this vision for the future, and yet within, let's say, progressive organizing, we can't wish the other side away.

We have to recognize that we are building a country with our neighbors, and so there's a lot of folks that are doing that work, but not just in the name of these kind of future values in a way that's saying, where are the red lines of what we won't support now? Let's build towards what we want in the future.  I get a little frustrated, so I'm totally down with the future vision, and I think that it's fun to do that part, and it's interesting and it's galvanizing, and it brings people together, but it doesn't motivate the kind of resistance to the forces that are actively eroding democracy in the way that we need...

Guy: There's a near-term vision problem, which is what is the banner under which you can glue together a coalition that is strong enough to resist the authoritarian-wannabes in our society? Some of the polling numbers that I was looking at just yesterday are worrying. Biden’s position against the hypothetical runoff against Mr. Trump has deteriorated dramatically since what it was when he barely attained a victory. So there is a question, just in the short term, you need to have enough of a banner for people to rally around… and I'm not sure we have that.

Julia: I agree, which is why I think the work... The work in the short term is supporting our conservative allies to do the organizing work that they need to do within their movement.  I wish more attention was being spent on that with regards to holding on to their conservative values, holding on to their conservative identity, not asking them to transform into progressives. But deciding where they feel that their movement is going, what are their red lines, what do they stand for? To actually be in solidarity with them.

That's where I feel like the networks of networks is how do we help make their job easier. And the academic term is creating either the off-ramps for the hate and the vitriol and the undemocratic practices, at the same time that we are looking in our own backyard and at how we also need to help this cause. But yes, their electoral politics have consequences and after the mid-term elections with the amount of organizing the women, which was incredible, everybody kind of signed this big sigh of relief, but we're not out of this yet. We're still in deep trouble.

Guy: I found it disturbing the degree which Democrats actively turned against Republicans that helped them, for example, in the investigation of January 6, and spent money trying to get radical republicans nominated, thinking that would help them win the general election more easily.  Which turned out to be sort of true, but boy, that's a scary...

Julia: Yes, that was awful. It was totally undemocratic in my mind as well.

Heidi: And they're doing it again! So that's scary. I'm struck by this statement that you made earlier, that the framing that I think we are using that the problems are the extremes on the right and the left, and what the needs to happen is the center needs to come together more effectively. I can quibble with that, but I think we basically, that’s where we are going. If you're looking at how can you stop the authoritarians and how to help conservatives coalesce their movement... I think that's really talking about the same thing, because the problem that I've been reading about on the conservative side is that the center conservatives are getting completely disempowered and most of them are quitting or moving out of the powerful roles because if they aren't voted out of the office, their lives are made so miserable, that they decide it's just not worth it anymore. So the right is getting increasingly extreme and the  MAGA Republicans are holding increasing amounts of power. And if anybody is going to reverse that trend, it seems like it has to be folks from the middle rising up and saying “this isn't addressing our concerns, it isn’t getting our traditional conservative values achieved. I think we need to go a different direction. And it seems to me that empowering the center makes sense there.

Julia:  Let me address what you just said about what it means to be supportive of our conservative colleagues. I'm channeling my colleague Maria now, who would be much more eloquent about this, but you know there's an inside game and there's an outside game. And the inside game is very quiet. It's the quiet levers of influence that exist within the power structure at both at the elite level, but also at the grassroots level. Those are the folks that are going to be doing the organizing work, group by group, person by person, about the values that they hold and how they want to be, what they want their leaders to represent, and how they want the system to work. And we need to be in relationship with those folks and to be supportive of them in whatever way we can.  And I'll talk about what that looks like. But there's also an outside game of pressure, and it's boycotts and its  And it's the actual resistance, tactics of strikes, of the mobilization against actors and actions. When there is public pressure, there will eventually become a calculation that it's no longer expedient to be in that camp.

And so I think that we need more of both, but we need the pressure.  So what we've been trying to do is we've been collecting examples from other countries, but also collecting examples from the US’s own history of when have the levers of influence been effectively wielded both within sectors… So whether it was a faith group that stood up in a certain way, and/or when pressure was put on that group, let's say advertisers of a certain media outlet, that then allowed for a lack of support of that authoritarian regime. And so I think that that's why I keep talking about going on offense, and because it is an inside game and an outside game, and so we have to have kind of allies, and it's not just a generic kind of, let's do more social media campaigns to hit the general public, it has to be... It has to be a strategy. So we're doing an analysis right now in Georgia, only in Georgia, a one state, trying to determine where are the pillars of support for an authoritarian system? Where are the levers of influence? Where are the relational kind of inside work and the points of pressure to go on offense on the resistance work? So that we can then say, here's a map for thinking about how to think about those pillars and those strategies that are needed, that then getting that into the hands of other organizers and other states, and I don't know whether it'll kind of percolate up to a national level map or not.

And then the other thing I wanted to say about the sides of the extremes that I just... again, I think that there's a both-sidism that we fall into as peacebuilders, that we just don't want the extremes to be so extreme when... we need a system where we get back to the point where you can be passionate about what you think, you can debate the ideas that you have about a Green New Deal or whatever it is that you want. People say “stop talking about the Green New Deal, you're making us susceptible to the socialism label, and we just need to kind of be moderate and have the incremental change about the transportation or infrastructure,” and that's... I just think that the both-sidism isn't true!

Now, the toxic othering is something else, we have to be calling in our own colleagues, as opposed to calling out, when we see dehumanizing language being used, we cannot engage in the dehumanization, and I believe that. But that's different from having strong policy views and a call for justice that somehow has seen as extreme when we're facing a faction that used to be in the Democratic Party, that we say this all the time, the authoritarian faction in the United States isn't partisan. It was squarely in the Democratic Party during Jim Crow era. And it just happens to, it's been a faction for the beginning of time in our country, it just... happens to be in the Republicans right now. So the call for moderation and the centrist to just come together and offer solutions, I just think isn't going to make that faction go away, or de-incentivize that faction, and we need to de-incentivize the support for that faction.

Guy: I think there's a lot to be learned from  the giants of non-violent resistance—King, Gandhi, and Mandela who used non-violent civil disobedience and other forms of protest to change the relative power relationships. But then they’d be willing to negotiate. And they’d go back and forth. While they pushed for radical changes and the kinds of changes that they advocated were every bit as ambitious as what we're talking about now, they left the place for the people who were associated with the regime, So King made it very clear that there was this fierce urgency of now…

Many of the Nobel Peace Prize winners that we really learn about and look up to, were not intermediates. They were advocates pursuing what we call “Constructive Confrontation.” They were trying to change relationships, but did so in a way that left room for a new society in which everybody would want to live.  I think that's the challenge we have. One of the lines that we use a lot is that “conflict is the engine of social learning.” The basic interaction, is that “the world would be better if you do something differently”. And that person doesn't want to do something differently. And then what really matters is, do we have a process that makes wise, equitable, efficient, non-violent decisions about what changes do happen? And it does it in a way that saves the relationship?

Julia: You're preaching to the choir here. I get 1000% agree with you, and I feel that the analysis of the power imbalances right now is something that we need to still be grappling with, which I feel like you are grappling with the conversation around social justice and bridge building.

And there's a question of like, well, why aren't more people of color participating in these dialogue programs, how can we diversify to like... Well, part of it is the power dynamics that seem to be glossed over a little bit. And when it's not just color, is it... That's where I feel like the race-class narrative work is really needed in the US. And there's a lot of really good organizing work that's being done around the solidarity that we find across different identities. Yet when we don't bring in an analysis of power into our peacebuilding work, which I think the international peacebuilders do…when you go, that's part of the stakeholder analysis that we would always do if you were working within a country, because you see underlying grievances as a driver of conflict, and so you would understand that those deep seated grievances have to be incorporated in any kind of process of collective action that you're asking people to engage with. I think that there are certain elements of the bridge building community and/or solutions community that aren't doing that.

That’s what I mean, Heidi, you had asked “what do you mean when you say the democracy technocratic world isn't necessarily taking into account the racial justice equation. Part of it is when you prioritize saying, well we need more civic education... Well, of course we do, yes, we definitely need more civic education. We need to address gerrymandering. Or we need to address in money in politics. All of this is true, it absolutely is true. But there's a reason that there's a huge swath of society that does not participate in our democratic institutions, and it's because of a history of feeling just totally excluded from our democratic institutions.  And so it's actually a participation issue. It is an invitation to be a part of a system that is going to work for you, which historically hasn't worked for you! And so I do believe that incorporating this lens, this lens of historic injustice, and this lens of white supremacy and institutional racism, which is such a hard topic to talk about right now when you use those words and people immediately say, Oh, we can't have that be a part of our dialogue. We have to figure out how to have these hard conversations.

Heidi: I think the key is figuring out how to have these conversations is how to have them without placing blame on other people such that they withdraw. I just wrote a post that hasn't come out yet on the blog about an idea first developed by Stone, Patton, and Heen in their book Difficult Conversations.  They point out that when you blame somebody for something, they immediately get defensive. They say they didn't do it, or it didn't happen, or they withdraw from the conversation.

But if you talk in terms of “contribution,” what I am contributing to the problem and what are you are contributing to the problem, then that leaves open the question of how could we solve this problem together? Then you could make a whole lot more progress together than you can with blame. The problem that I have with a lot of the discussion about systemic racism is the extent to which it puts blame on one part of the society that doesn't think that they are to blame.  Now, of course, they have contributed to the situation, and so have a lot of people on the left contributed as well.  But I think if we frame it more in terms of contribution and plan, we can get a whole lot further.

Julia: I totally agree, which is why I feel like infusing into our democracy, name the verb: revitalization, reform, renewal, re-imagining. All of the work that we're doing around democracy has to include what you just talked about. That's why I feel like the reframing of these conversations is important. And that's why there is work to be done within the group of movement leaders who are asking for these issues to be addressed, and within the kind of folks who have the aperture to make a difference within the systems. We all do have a role to play, but how we have these conversations is going to be just as important. I agree with you. I actually feel like this is why a reparative approach to change and to the way that we do our work, constantly thinking about the way the tools that will repair society as opposed to you feeling the blame and the outrage without saying, “don't be angry.”

Heidi:  I totally agree. I want to go back to statement that you made earlier that surprised me, and it relates to what we're talking about now, you said that you thought demanding “defunding the police” was a good idea, and I think it wasn’t.  I think that campaign was harmful for two reasons, One is nobody really wanted it, it was a catchy phrase that actually, if you pushed, it meant something different. It meant changing what the police were doing, it meant taking some of their responsibilities away and handing them to people in the middle health field and that sort of thing. But nobody really, if you pushed them, really expected the police to be defended. It also is very much a blame-the police kind of frame, so all these problems are the police’s problems. And it's not a case of one bad apple in the police department, it's the case of the whole police system, and we have to throw out the system and invent something new, because the whole system is corrupt.  That's sort of the same as throwing out the authorities in a revolution before you have something else in place. And so my reading of the reaction in a lot of minority communities, and they didn't want to defund the police because they wanted the police to do a better job of providing security for their communities. So they weren’t even on board with it. So I was surprised when you said that you thought it was a good idea. I’d like to hear you talk about that a little bit more.

Julia: Yeah, so I'm so glad that you gave me a chance to clarify because if you heard me say it was a good idea, that was not what I said. I thank you for bringing it up again. I have spent so much time over the last six years really delving into narrative practices, how do we communicate about the change we want to see, how do we build partnerships, how do we communicate with constituencies, and from a narrative perspective, “defund the police,” we could say objectively was not successful. For all the reasons you just said. My point was, that we, as white people, can't say to a coalition of people of color, “you did that wrong.” You're organizing to at least get the conversation on people's agenda, because if what you're trying to do is get people to talk about black people being killed by the police. We are talking about it now, so I don't agree. And I think the abolitionist movement, which is an abolitionist movement, let's reframe security in the United States, which of course, I've spent all sorts of time to re-brand “peace,” which is the exact same thing that we're trying to do.

How do we get away from a militarized society, a militarized solution of punitive responses to societal harm... My point, what I was saying was, is I think that there are movements in the United States that are crying out for acknowledgement of the harms that are being done to their communities, and for us as white people to then say, “yeah, that was really unhelpful. Thank you very much.” That's what my point was.

Heidi: Okay. I agree with that. It's my understanding—tell me if I’m wrong—that the phrase “defund the police” mostly came from white people at the beginning, not from African-Americans—am I wrong?

Julia: I don't know, I don't know enough about it.  I do know that there's tensions within that movement and exactly how you just described, I don't know that all communities of color don't want police in in their communities, all of the nuance that you just said and that that is the problem with thinking about coalitions, strategic communications through slogans, it actually kind of cuts off the nuance, doesn't it... Of the conversation is, it's such a complex problem. It requires the police to be a part of the conversation, it requires the police unions to be a part of it, and the mayor... We all need to have a conversation about this problem. And if the way that we're communicating closes down complexity, well, then we are shooting ourselves in the foot, and so I do think it's another initiative we have at Horizons around narrative engagement across difference. It's a challenge for progressive movements who want to win the narrative war, who want to shake people out of complacency, who use communication strategies to build power, that's how we think about it in this, again, almost kind of zero-sum game, we need to win.

We need to win this battle of the narrative, the toxic narratives need to end, and I think it's one of the new competencies that we need in our movement ecology, which is how do we think about complexity in narratives as opposed to simplifying them. And so I think defund the police was a simple narrative that obviously it didn't allow for the nuance and complexity of the conversation, but it did get the conversation going. We're talking about it a lot, it just became a polarized conversation, so, that was my main point, is that I don't know that we have the right to criticize and yet where it started from, I don't know.

Guy: An interesting word to explore in this context is “systemic.” The notion of “systemic oppression, systemic racism, systemic all sorts of problems, can be read two ways. The way that it often gets interpreted, which I think makes things worse rather than better, is the problem is with “the system, “and we need to disrupt the system, anything that we do with disrupt the system is good.” Anybody who's associated with the system is bad…that’s where the demonization comes in.  And the other way to interpret the word is that there's a system, a very complex system that produced grotesque levels of inequality, terrible stories of injustice. And we need to understand that system. It has lots of different causes, different people are responsible in different ways, we need to work to figure it out and start solving our problems. They are two very different ways of looking at it. A lot of our difficulty, I think, is that we don't think systemically in the second sense of the word anywhere near enough.

Julia: Yeah, and I agree. And I also think about attacking the systems of government when we also want government to work for us. And so demonizing these bad systems, when politics and government and governance is what we do together as a collective for our own mutual benefit, so even just the narrative of the “bad systems” can perpetuate, probably, an idea that we don't necessarily want. So I agree with you, with regards to the second narrative, and in fact, I don't know if you follow the work of the group Race Forward, which is a racial justice organization.  You should definitely check them out. They focus on working within local governments and they do a lot of other work, but they partner with governments on the systemic change that needs to be done. Because they believe that there are good people within systems that are operating in a not very healthy way, and then we have to work... We have to run for office, but we also need to work with the planning commissions and need to work with all the good folks that are trying to do work inside of government, and that's one of their main focuses at a very local level. They also do national level advocacy and policy work. We have to put our money where our mouth is and engage with the system and the systems that we're trying to change, and this is really challenging.

By the way, I do a lot of work on leadership training on leadership skills and the rest of it. And we are not trained to think in systems. And our incentive structures, once we get out into the work world, don't incentivize us to be working systemically, with regard toward our log frames and objectives and measuring impact and all of the ways that we are funneled into our siloed ways of working and thinking. It doesn't allow us to kind of lift up our heads and say, “What am I doing and how does it impact what other people are doing? and oh, do I see where that... I'm just constantly sense-making about like, okay, I did this thing. What happened in the system? And who do I need to be in relationship with? And what system am I trying to impact? It's overwhelming actually, because of the uncertainty and the ambiguity and the volatility that working in systems implies. I think there's going to be kind of a renewed human consciousness that will evolve in this new modern era, and I hope that my kids can incorporate this, and I hope their kids can incorporate a different relationship with uncertainty and ambiguity that's needed for functioning in the modern world, in order to then be able to do the work that we're talking about now.

Heidi: I have to laugh because as you talked about a new human consciousness, I was thinking about AI consciousness and ChatGPT.... about whether that was going to completely take over everything that we do, but that's just my doom-and-gloom thinking at the moment.

Julia: I feel more optimistic. I think we will incorporate those new tools into our tool box.  I've been playing with it and it's been writing some tweets for me that I find helpful, but the work of relational sense-making, how we make sense together... I think I will never be replaced.

Guy: I think we need to cultivate generalists. We are a nation of hyper-specialists, and we don't have enough people who are thinking in terms of the big picture and how all of the pieces relate to each other. Which is, in a sense, another specialty.  But it isn’t the sort of thing that there are academic departments for. Everybody is all super specialized within one field, or not even at the level of a single field. And to do so in a way that recognizes the humanistic side of the story, not just the technical side, is very important.

Julia: I also really appreciate, from working in other countries and now observing a very American tendency of the attitude: “let's just get it done! What are we doing?” There is a way that we work, which is just like what are we doing? Let's come up with a solution! Almost like negotiation one on one, what are your interests? Let's come up with a solution. Let's brainstorm what works, let's start testing it out. Let's just do it.

And I think a little bit of what we're talking about in this, both generalism, but also a systems way of working, takes some patience. We actually need to slow down and spend the time observing what's happening, and then thinking that part of the work is the relational work of sense making. It's not just doing all the time. So, I think that, when the whole sector, everyone, is so burned out, when they are exhausted by the meetings and all of it, everybody is just totally exhausted. And so now there's the nap ministry and there's everybody's trying to think about personal wellness and... But I think that there's a way of working that also requires a little bit of slowing down for the sense making to take place and not constantly doing that we’re going to have to incorporate that a little bit more.

I like the US ingenuity, and I used to... When I worked in Latin America, I was always the one who was saying, all right, that's all great. Because every meeting was poetry, it was just beautiful discussions of democratic ideals and the rest of it, and I was always the one in the meeting would be like, Okay, but what are we doing tomorrow? I was very on the spectrum of my American culture. And I am really appreciating the need to incorporate a little bit more of the slowing down in order to understand the systems, and that this is a systems practice... Actually, is the slowing down. ‘

I'm sure that I sent this article to you because we're on so many of these email chains together, but I talk about this article all the time, and it's a writer in Australia, Luke Craven, if you want to be a systems leader and thinker, and I love everything that he writes, and he wrote this wonderful article called “There is no elephant.” Did I share this with you? I share it with everybody because I love it so much. I love the concept that the metaphor of the blind men feeling the elephant and understanding the world differently because they're feeling the trunk, they're feeling the leg, they're feeling the tails, they've got this completely different perception and this idea that if we just got them to be able to talk and have the right conversation, that they would understand that it's actually an elephant, and it's such a problem-solving frame of mind, and his point of working within systems is that there is no elephant, there's just different perceptions.

We need to have different conversations about how are you experiencing this right now, what is happening for you, how... And of course, there's technocratic, I'm not saying that the technocrats and the specialists don't have their place. Of course they do. But the systems level work has to allow for there not to be an elephant, and for us to just be constantly sense making and hearing from the different perspectives. I think this is a huge shift in how we're taught to think and work.

Heidi: I want to go a little bit of a different place to this conversation, and I'm looking at my last question that I had  written to you, which refer to your Ted Talk. In that you said that everybody can be a peacebuilder. We've been trying to make that point to for a long time, and I think if you really say in terms of systems, the only way we're going to get out of the massive mess we are in, is if everybody realizes that they have some role to play.  They have contributed to getting us where we are, and they have a contribution to make to getting us out of where we are. When I say “everybody could be a peacebuilder, I don't necessarily mean being an intermediary and doing the sorts of things that you and we do, when we do traditional peacebuilding. I'm just saying, everybody has a role to play to make this situation we're in better... How do you get people on board with that? How do you get people to, indeed, stop being so complacent, although I would argue there aren't too many complacent people anymore. But how do you get people to understand that we all have to be in this together, we all have to contribute to a solution together.

Julia: Well, what's really interesting is how much in the US context, my colleagues don't like the peacebuilding frame, the word peace, that word... social cohesion, all of the good bridging work that we do. And somehow being a peacebuilder does not resonate. And I'm actually trying to change that, we're working with this big group of advertising agency gurus to try and re-brand peace... It's literally the name of a documentary that we're making to rebrand peace. There's a couple of reasons for that. I think one is, because it's been a frame of international foreign relations, and so where we make peace is in another country. So even if the peacebuilding movement that came out of the Vietnam era, that was seen as hippies and love beads and the rest of it, so that's kind of a brand. But also I think that as the peacebuilding field professionalized in the last 25, 30 years, it's also seen as incredibly elite and academic, and so these frameworks of the UN, World Bank and how we measure peace is just not as accessible to some of the folks doing the grass roots work in the US.

And so, I think that for those of us who wear the moniker peacebuilder, I think we need to get real with who's in and who's out of our field, and I say that as the Board Chair of the Alliance for Peacebuilding right now. We do think deeply about being a profession and field building, and yet we do need more of a movement mindset in the United States. The reason that I love the Institute for Economics and Peace framework of Positive Peace Indicators is because of it's not just about addressing violence, it's about keeping societies peaceful, and all of the different indicators that they have about access to information and the role of human rights, and so that wherever you find yourself within those different aspects of positive peace, you are contributing to helping to keep society peaceful.

I think that there is a piece missing though about justice-seeking within that framework, and so I think that's why we're trying to find these new ways of... movements also. Would they see themselves as peacebuilders? No, they definitely wouldn't. And yet, if we were in another country in conflict, that saw itself as a country in conflict, than all of those who were working for change would probably understand that we are working for a country that is at peace and not in conflict. I think there's an acknowledgement that we are a fragile state right now, we are a country in conflict. So the reason I'm working as hard as I am about the peacebuilding framework and umbrella is, first of all, so that we actually have a vision for a peacebuilding effort in this country that does include the institutional reforms that need to happen and the community, all of the frameworks that we use overseas or needed here, but also just to acknowledge that we are a country in deep conflict that requires us to have this peacebuilding framework.

So how you do that?  I think we continue to do the one-by-one conversations, I don't insist on language, by the way, because there's so many people who receive that word is a negative peace, you just want me to be quiet, and so we need to have that extra level of conversation saying, No, no, that's not what I mean. Being a peacebuilder is the stronger position, it's the harder position to take, it's the more courageous act to take if you're going to be building peace, and then... We have to paint the picture of what that peace looks like in practice. So we did a lot of social science research on how to talk about peace and peacebuilding, and interestingly enough, being a bridge builder resonates with people, but also that  active, it's not passive. We are actively building this country together.

Heidi:  Is there anything that you were really hoping to talk about that we haven't?

Julia: Well, I don't know, this was a great conversation and thank you for letting me kind of just blabber on about how we're thinking about this. I would say that I do think that there's a lot to learn from other countries right now, and there’s such as American exceptionalism that makes that difficult.  Of course, every country thinks it's exceptional. And yet I really do believe and we need to be having more conversations with our colleagues from other countries about the challenges that we're facing right now, and be in conversation with them, one... because we're having a lot of shared challenges, but two, I think there are folks who have been where we are, hit rock bottom, got to the other side and are looking at what's happening in the US with alarm saying, Don't go to rock bottom. You don't have to go where we went, so I am interested in ensuring that we have more of these spaces for learning from international colleagues.

Heidi: I think that's very true. When I was teaching a course on peacebuilding, I used to do an exercise with my students where I had them imagine that peacebuilders from Rwanda and South Africa countries that have been through serious racial conflict and have gotten through it, I have them imagine these folk coming to the United States and trying to figure out what they could do here to help us. And the  students had a really hard time with it. They frequently would come back to me and say, “This is ridiculous. It would never happen.” And then they give me all the reasons why America is different. Were exceptional, we don't have anything to learn...And I’d say “ I know, okay, fine. Just humor me. . nd they do get through it and they learned the things that I was trying to teach them about how we look from the other side when we come in to help other countries. And then I got an email from a student four or five years later saying, Oh my God, it really happened, because she’d seen Ebrahim Rasool’s talk at AfP. (Rasool, a former U.S. ambassador from South Africa gave a great talk about how America can learn from South Africa’s experiences.)

Julia: That's right. And a lot of organizations are doing this... If you follow the Western States Center, work at all in Portland, Oregon. They've had colleagues from Northern Ireland and South Africa come and speak to them. And even here, a lot of the de-radicalization work that is happening in Europe and the Middle East and other parts of the world, compounding extremism, these are frameworks that are very needed in our country right now, so it's not that that's not happening. I just think we should encourage more of it...

Heidi:  Unfortunately, we're not as receptive to it is we should be, I don’t think.

Julia: Just to say thank you, keep doing what you guys are doing, cause you're weaving too, aren’t you. You guys have the time to bring all of these ideas and people together, and I point people to your website constantly, and really appreciate the deep thinking and connecting that you guys are doing.

Heidi: Well, thank you very much, and we appreciate what you're doing as well, and we welcome you to contribute more of what you're thinking about to our discussion.. we're hoping that it will go on for a while. So thank you to very much for what you're doing and we really appreciate this conversation.