Heidi: Hello, everybody. I'm Heidi Burgess. This is Guy Burgess. We are partners in everything, but what relates most to this is that we are co-directors of Beyond Intractability, which is a very large online knowledge base on better ways of handling difficult and intractable conflicts. We've been at this for about 25 or 30 years. And somewhere along the way, we ran into Ashok Panikkar. And we found that we were thinking a lot about the same things, and particularly since October 7th, we've been corresponding by email quite a bit.

Ashok came up with the idea of us having a conversation, and it morphed into the idea of doing a live conversation where we talked about some of the issues in more depth that we've been exchanging emails on. And Ashok published one essay on our newsletter on Beyond Intractability. So we thought it would be fun to have a more in-depth discussion about those ideas.

Ashok's background is that he's been working in the areas of communication, critical thinking, negotiation, mediation, diversity, cross-cultural issues, and strengthening democratic values for a long time, longer even than we've been at it, I gather. And he started with something called Metaculture, which was a consulting firm that he ran in India for about 12 or 13 years. And then he brought it to the United States. And now he's closed that down, and he's running something called Village Idiot Studio. And I thought his description of that was very fitting for today. He says that "my work is designed to help intelligent and conscientious citizens look beyond commonplace understandings of democracy, human rights, diversity, and party politics. The Village Idiot, through all its projects, hopes to engage with the genuinely curious on the vital issues of our time." That's exactly what we hope to do today. We're facing a lot of really critical and difficult issues, and quick and easy answers just aren't going to do it. So we'd like to explore some more difficult answers and difficult questions. And we're going to start just with a conversation among ourselves.

And then on towards the end, we're going to start engaging with and we may do this beforehand too, engaging with the questions that folks have sent. We've gotten quite a few. Thank you much. And when we open up the chat, we encourage you to put questions in the chat, and we'll try to get to those too. But we decided not to open the chat initially because we want folks focused on the conversation and not on the side conversation that might be going on in the chat. (We've seen that happen in other Zooms, and we don't want it to happen here.

So I thought that I would start by asking Ashok to talk about the title. He's the person who came up with the title of this session: Peaceful compromise or compromised peace, how an illiberal world requires us to rethink peacebuilding. And my question to you is, what was behind that title?

Ashok: So the first thing, firstly, thank you for the introduction, Heidi. Good to see you, Guy.  I don't know if we've ever met before. I can't recollect. But a kind of mini confession here, I love playing with words. This has been my downfall amongst the many downfalls. So I love titles because I love playing with words.  And I didn't want to use the same title as I did for the article, which was Growing Strawberries on Coconut Trees. So I thought of something else, but it turns out, almost by accident, that this is, in a way, what I was trying to say.

The whole idea of the whole idea of "peace" is something that I have struggled to understand in the last 10 to 15 years. Prior to that, I was very clear about it.  Like many people in my generation who grew up in the aftermath, or in the days of, the civil rights movement, growing up on John Lennon and the anti-Vietnam War, I thought I knew what "peace" was. And peace was anything that didn't, one, lead to violence. And two, that wasn't oppressive. And I had enormous clarity. This was part of the reason I got into conflict resolution in the first place, almost 30 years ago. But few things changed.

One, of course, is the world, as we are now finding ourselves in, peace is becoming very difficult for anyone to actually manage. In my work over the past few decades — I'm a practitioner, I'm not an academic, it's taken me into the depths of what it means to be in conflict and to get out of it.  And particularly working with the corporate sector and labor unions and NGOs, I realized how the best of intentions are completely dependent on a completely different force in the marketplace. Then I worked with Hindu and Muslim and Christian fundamentalist. That was a multi-year project, and there I discovered how stuff that I had learned from the gurus of conflict management and negotiation coming out of Harvard and MIT, mutual gains approach and interest-based negotiation didn't work south of the topics for the simple reason that collectivist and traditional societies understand the world very differently from the contractual world that particularly the US, and to some extent, the West lives in.

So when I look at "peace" now, and I don't have any answers, and this, I think, is the first thing I just want to put out there. I don't know anymore how to create peace. And the two things that come to mind to me are that it looks as though peace entails enormous compromises. But the idea of a "just peace" or an "egalitarian peace" doesn't work. So that's in terms of peaceful compromise.

And two, that any peace requires compromise. And this for me is a very difficult thing to come to terms with, because like many other people, I have grown up with the idea that I can have it all, maybe not wealth, maybe not material goods, but I can have as much justice, fairness, egalitarianism, compassion, and peace as I want.  But I'm starting to realize that there are huge trade-offs, that democracy itself is a series of huge trade-offs. Long explanation, but I'm hoping that this will stir some thoughts in you folks to push further on this idea.

Guy:  Well, I'm listening to your comments and thinking back on how we got into all of this. I guess it was in the late 1980s. The Hewlett Foundation started to support university theory centers in conflict resolution. And we put in a grant for the University of Colorado, and we got a lot of money from them. They supported our work for almost 20 years. And when we went around and started telling our friends, especially friends who were activists, either civil rights activists or environmental activists, "Hey, we got this big grant to study conflict resolution and compromise." They looked at us like we were traitors, They said, "Oh, my God, you're compromising, or this is the big fight for what really matters." But we still dutifully sent out invitations to go to seminars about conflict resolution and all of that, and nobody came.

And then one day, we got the bright idea to sort of flip the question on its head a little bit. And we said, "Well, let's send out an invitation and ask people how they can fight more constructively." Because everybody was in these big fights, and they knew they didn't like it, but they didn't want to give up on the things that they really cared about. But once you reframe it and start asking, "Well, how can we fight better?

How can we fight for the things that we care about in a more constructive way?" Then all of a sudden, we went from literally a 90-plus percent rejection rate to a 90 plus percent acceptance rate. And the people who are in conflict don't come to it from the intermediary perspective, trying to get everybody to stop fighting. They come to it from an advocacy perspective. And so now we're trying to figure out, okay, how do we build a culture in which people can fight constructively?

And part of that involves limits. The real test of a democracy is not whether the good guys or at least the guys who think of themselves as good come out ahead when the election rolls around. It's how the people who lose the election feel. If there is a place where the losers can feel, "Well, yeah, things will still be all right. I can try to straighten these guys out next time." Then democracy works. If it feels like it's gone forever and you're disempowered and you will be forever, then you're in real trouble. And sadly, in the United States at the moment, that's really where we are. And in far too many other parts of the world, it's this power over.

And so what we've been trying to think through is two visions of democracy. There is a power-with vision in which we try to find a way to make coexistence and tolerance and letting people live together despite their differences really work. Or we can have a power over world in which the good guys try to somehow prevail over the bad guys. And then you have the kind of hyperpolarization that we have, and we're in real trouble. So those are some thoughts to start with.

Heidi:  My first point, just on yours, is that everybody thinks they're the good guys. So I mean, it's not that there's half of the society who says we're the bad guys and we're going to have to lose. Everybody thinks they're the good guys, and everybody has this existential need to win. So you have an all-out battle. We see this in the United States now, and it's going on in other places, too. A lot of people in the United States say, "Oh, well, it's just Donald Trump and his very adversarial way of campaigning." No. Look, all around the world, we're seeing the same thing. It's much bigger than one person.

I was thinking, as Ashok was talking, about a phrase that I've heard from a friend recently, which is, "Peace is a process." Yes, it is an end goal, but it's an end goal, no matter how you define it, that we're probably not going to get to. But if you think of it as a process, then it's more along the lines of what Guy was talking about, and we use the term "constructive confrontation." It's a way of dealing with our differences in a constructive way. Now, we are academics and scholars and teachers and all that. And in Conflict 101, you always teach that conflict is natural. It's unavoidable. There's no way that you're going to get rid of it. So the key thing is to do it well. And if you do it well, it leads to social change that benefits most everybody. And if you do it badly, it can lead to catastrophe. And that seems to be what we're looking at now. So as Guy said, we've always been interested in how to do it well.

The other thing that came to my mind is that we're actually greedier than Ashok. We don't want just peace or "just peace." I'm interested in reconciliation, which is a concept that  lots of people have written about, but I really like the formulation of John Paul Lederach, who says that reconciliation is "the meeting place" of peace, justice, truth, and mercy. So it's a meshing of those four things. Can we get there? The answer is no, we probably won't.  But the journey is extremely important. And it's extremely important to realize that we have to balance our goals for peace, which you could define very simply as lack of violence. It's much more than that. We make a distinction between positive peace and negative peace. But let's just be simple, lack of violence. But you also need justice, which is fairness, and you also need truth, and you also need mercy. So you have to be willing to forgive, accept apologize, move on.

And the last thing I'll point out, and then I'll get quiet, is that we heard a talk in 2020 by the former South African Ambassador to the United States. His name is Ebrahim Rasool, who talked about what they did in South Africa to get beyond apartheid. And I was just incredibly moved by his talk and completely revised my notion of reconciliation after hearing it.

He said that the first thing you have to do is understand that "the other is here to stay." In South Africa, the ANC, the African National Congress, which was the Blacks, realized even during apartheid, that the whites weren't going anywhere, that many of them were born there, and they didn't have anywhere to go back to. This was their country too. And then he said, "You have to begin with the end," by which he meant you have to have a vision of a society in which everybody is living together in peace and happy. You have to have that vision first and then figure out how you get there.

And in fact, the vision that the ANC created was the notion that "South Africa belonged to everyone who lived there," which just struck me as an incredibly powerful statement. And I put it on the United States now and think to myself, what would it mean? And I'm not making a comment on immigration now. It's broader than that.  What would it mean if we accepted the notion that "America belongs to everyone who lives there" and try to create a society where everybody, no matter what side of the political divide they're on, and there's more than two, of course, where everybody would want to live. And that's the goal that we're working toward, realizing that we probably won't get there. It's a process.

Ashok: You raised so many ideas, and I have to say, I'm completely split. There's a part of me that for most of my professional life, thought the way you did. And I still want that. There's nothing I want more than the kind of world that you envisage. And this is where the split comes. My interest in history and my huge interest in geopolitics, apart from my practice in working with genuinely intractable conflicts, where power is very unevenly distributed, which is almost the case everywhere, has made me ask myself, and I don't say this for anyone else, but it's forced me to ask whether an ideal vision is itself dangerous.

And here's what I mean. I don't even want to go into what happened and what is happening in South Africa after the heady days of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and all that. But the fact is that today's world is not anymore a place where peacebuilders or diplomats or liberal and progressive statesmen and women can come into a conflict or come into an environment and try and get people to engage in one conversation. How do we all get along given that we are all here to stay? I love that statement and I love that thought. I was paraphrasing, of course, because that idea that we have to accept that the US or India or France is what it is. Leaving aside, increasing immigration. You know, I agree with you. Let's not go there right now.

But the idea that if we take today's demographic in any conflict, including a house, parents, children, maybe a grandparent, if we look at that and say, we have to coexist, that sounds good until one of the parties, the strongest party says, only on my terms.  In other words, we can coexist, but on my terms. And when I look at Ukraine, when I look at Israel, Gaza, when I look at India and the state of the fate of Muslims and other minorities in India, this has been [what is going on].  It's almost like a journey into an illiberal and authoritarian place. And I struggle with this. I really struggle with this because, for me, at this point in time, theory has come to an end. And I believe— no, I don't believe. I don't believe anything. I wonder if we need to rethink theory itself. I just want to put it out there for the two of you and for the others who are listening.  Perhaps we need to rethink on the idea of power and linked with it the idea of oppression.

One of the things that I'm realizing and I'm teaching this in my courses right now is that the last 30, 40 years, we have started seeing power itself as a negative because it has the potential for oppressing those who don't have it.  And I realized that most of the things that I value in life, freedom, justice, reasonable amount of prosperity, equality was only possible because the US was an 800-pound gorilla that had the power to enforce the liberal world order. And the US didn't do it gently.  The US overstepped its bounds in so many countries. And even internally, we know how the FBI or the CIA or whatever worked. But it kept the world relatively free and open for about 50 to 60 years. And with the US undecided as to whether it wants that role anymore—the Republicans definitely don't want that role.  And in any case, threatened by China, Russia, the Arab states, Islamist states, I think we need a different formula for peace, that the idea of having— forget all of it — but having a lot of the good stuff in there, fairness, justice, egalitarianism, respect, dignity.  The more we front load into this process, and I agree with you, it's a process, the less likely we are to get any of it. And as I said, I don't have the answers, but I'm just going to stop here to have you folks you know help me deliberate about how it really works.

I definitely am not enthralled with the Superman or Nietzsche, and I don't see that as deliverance of any kind. But I do recognize mine and most of the world's helplessness in the face of overwhelming power. 

Guy: When I was in graduate school, I was lucky enough to spend five years working with a fellow named Kenneth Boulding. And that was a time when he came out with a book that won a lot of awards called Stable Peace. In that, he drew a continuum in terms of relationships between peoples, from stable war, where you have a seemingly endless series of wars, and nobody can imagine when a condition of war isn't going to exist in the future. Sadly, that comes pretty close to describing the situation between Israel and Palestine. And at the other end, he had stable peace.

Stable peace was a relationship between countries where the possibility of war is so remote that it doesn't enter into anybody's calculations. And he talked about how the countries of Scandinavia used to be fighting all the time, in a condition of stable war. And then one day they decided, "This is stupid." And they quit. I guess this would have been the early 1800s. So  Scandinavia is what he saw as the first region of stable peace, where previously warring countries quit doing that.

And this expanded slowly. It included Western Europe after World War II. The history of Europe has been a history of terrible wars forever. And they decided, no, we're not going to do that. You drive around. They have a common currency. The borders are, apart from Brexit and all of that, [essentially internal borders.] It's an astonishing accomplishment. He thought that there ought to be a holiday in the United States for the Rush Bagot Agreement. If you remember US history, there used to be a line 54°40', or fight. That meant that the United States was going to go to war with Canada if we didn't get Banff and Jasper and Whittier Blackcomb and all those great ski areas. And we decided not to. We demilitarized the Great Lakes. The region of stable peace came to include the United States and Canada It picked up Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Rim.

And in the time that I worked for him and knew him in the 1970s, we went from the region of stable peace being fairly small. And then by the end of the '80s and the fall of the Soviet Union, it seemed like the region of stable peace had expanded to include the former Soviet Union. There was this era of euphoria where we thought, "Hey, war is over!

Heidi: It's the "end of history!" 

Guy: And now we're seeing with remarkable and terrifying speed that the region of stable peace is now shrinking.  I used to tell the story thatf if you would call up the Pentagon and ask for plans to invade a country. If they laugh at you, you know that there's stable peace. But now we're talking openly about civil war in the United States. Our us-versus-them divides have become so deep that people are on both sides really starting to think in those terms.

And the technology of war is changing very, very rapidly. You look at the enormous technological advantage that the United States had in the beginning of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and all our smart weapons. Now everybody and his uncle has them. They're making them in factories and basements in Ukraine. It's dramatically changing things. The same is true with information warfare. Foreign Affairs has an excellent article looking at deliberate disinformation as a strategic weapon to tear countries apart. So we've lapsed into this terrible us-versus-them series of conflicts within countries and between countries that is truly terrifying.

And one last thought is that we also used to talk about something we called "the BATNA effect." This comes out of Fischer, Ury, and Patton and negotiation theory, and it stands for the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. But what that really is, is a recognition that negotiations and peacemaking occurs within the context of power relationships. Nobody's going to agree to anything if they've got an alternative way of getting what they want. And this notion that you leave power at the door [when you negotiate] — that it's not the way the world works. So somehow, you've got to find a way to build [peace], based on empathy and goodwill and all of these relationships between people who have very different power bases. And you can't just wish that away. You've got to learn to deal with it. And that's something that I think is a challenge that we've gone a long way from having met.

Heidi: During this conversation, I'm wishing that I was 22 again.  I have many reasons to wish I was 22 again. But I would love to do a history project and look at what it was that made the Scandinavians say, "This is stupid. Let's stop fighting." I've long been fascinated, but I'm not a historian, and I haven't done the research. I'm just curious and I wish that one of my students would have written a paper that I could have read on how it was that the EU came to be. I find the EU fascinating because I learned when I was in graduate school that sovereignty was the be-all and end-all, and there's no way that countries would give up their sovereignty. And European countries largely did when they entered into the EU. I mean, the notion that France would be willing to give up some of its sovereignty to this overarching entity is mind-boggling. What was it that made them say "enough is enough?" That's what we need to figure out. And indeed, that's what we're trying to figure out in terms of the United States. Guy and I are primarily focused on the United States because number one, it's where we live. It's where our expertise is. Number two, so much of the world depends on what's happening in the United States. Just like you said, Ashok. Pax Americana was oppressive, but  then again, it brought stability and some form of peace to a lot of the world. And it's breaking down now.

A couple of years ago when we decided to somewhat change our attention from global intractable conflicts to primarily the political intractable conflict in the United States, I said to Guy, "I'm worried because I know a lot of Beyond Intractability's audience is coming from abroad, and they're not going to be interested in this. And he said, "Oh, I think they are." And he was so right. We have been gaining a lot of readership, and a lot of it is coming from outside the United States because people outside the United States are looking at what they used to see as the beacon on the hill with as much horror as we're looking at it saying, "My gosh, if they fall, what's going to happen to everybody else?" So it strikes me — we have a saying that all one variable theories are wrong— and we're really against simplistic answers all the time and saying you have to complexify and all that. But given all that, I would love to figure out the key to get people to say, "This is stupid." We're tearing ourselves apart. We're not getting what we want. We don't have any hope of getting what we want. We've got to come up with a different way of engaging.

And that's what we've been trying to do with Beyond Intractability, is to convince people that the way we're engaging in conflict now in the United States, in the world, it isn't working. Violence doesn't work. We need to find another way.

Ashok: I want to just play the devil's advocate for a moment here. Two things. One, Heidi, you identified two very interesting examples, the Scandinavian countries and the EU. I know only superficially about what happened in the Scandinavian countries. I am very conscious of what's happening there now, which is a different horror story. But I have actually spent a fair amount of energy trying to understand the EU and its formations. And very, very briefly, there are about two to three things that happened which allowed the EU to grow to the extent that it is now. That should give us an idea about the kind of conditions that would allow for, say, France and Germany to work together, even though they were historic enemies.

So the first thing again, America was the common denominator. America emerging from World War II as the sole superpower. And America being responsible for Germany's rebuilding, reconstruction, and France being extremely tired and a conquered country at the end of World War II. This helped America literally rebuild relationships within the Western continental Europe, and, of course, the UK. So that's the first thing.

The second is political unification came after economic unification. The origins of the EU were not in political —it was not about borderless travel. It was in the coal industry. They started something called European coal.  If I'm not mistaken, the coal board or coal agreement where coal and then steel and other materials would be traded across boundaries. That then developed into the European Community Market, I believe it was called — ECM or something. And that developed into the EU. So I guess the important thing here is one, power was very important. The power of the US. And fear of Soviet Union. So American power, the idea that during the Cold War, it was very important for Western powers to work together., facilitated by America, of course. And two,, the advantages that economics brought to all the partners of the trading block, the European trading block. When I look at that, I'm not surprised, I have to confess. The conditions were propitious for economic collaboration and political collaboration.  Even though it is not complete political unity, Brussels has a fair amount of say over each of these countries, which is what gave rise to Brexit, of course.

But here's the thing. If I strip away all the details, two things come to mind. I really want your thoughts on these two. First, as I said again, it's power, a hegemon, someone who is able to take leadership and to, if necessary, tell squabbling children to shut up and get in line. That's one. The second is when it is amply certain that there is gain and benefit in collaboration. As long as there is gain and benefit in collaboration, it's easier to make the case for collaboration. Even then, you can have populists or mischievous actors, bad actors, wrecking the collaboration.  But there is a solid case for collaboration. And this was the idea of the end of history that if countries are trading with each other, there's a McDonald's in every country, they won't go to war. Now we know that's not the case anymore. But EU breaks down, the European model breaks down as soon as, let's just say France, hypothetically. France becomes ungovernable because of the tensions with their Algerian or Moroccan or Muslim residents or citizens. And you get a right-wing government. It could happen as soon as in the next couple of years with Marie La Pen. But even if she doesn't come, even if it happens in 10 more years, the same thing could happen in Germany.  And Europe is extremely fragile even without Brexit. And it raises the question, and I want to now move to the peaceful compromise idea. I'm wondering if the only shot we have for peace is if we privilege the idea of power, rather than if we treat it with a certain kind of pain?

Oh, powerful people are oppressors, rather than powerful people are the only ones who can maintain order. And if we want an order that is humane, and if we want an order that gives dignity to most people, perhaps we have to genuinely — to use your language — work with power. But to work with power, we may have to give up the idea of egalitarian access to power.  I'll stop with this. One of the things I realized doing different kinds of conflict resolution, not just mediation, for about 30 to 35 years, is the most stable relationships were unequal. Equal relationships were extremely vulnerable.  Personally, the peace that an egalitarian system has is a very tenuous peace — because let's just take democracy, Freedom of speech, equal rights. Wonderful. It's what I need. But it allows me to be a spoiler. It allows me to attack the system if I don't feel I'm getting what I need. Even as one person in a crowded room, I can create problems. And that's because the odds of that are more likely if I believe that if you have more power than me, that's inherently oppressive. So my question here is, should we accept a certain kind of hierarchical differentiation between those who have power or the quantum of power and those who have less power? And then should we work with that in order to manage and create a more benign, healthy, constructive peace?

Guy: Yeah.  A couple of things. I guess what I'd like to do is to add another idea to this whole discussion, which is something that we've been struggling with, and it overlaps very much with power. And it's what we call the "bad-faith actor problem." There's an underlying assumption that as long as you have people of good faith who are trying to find some reasonable accommodation, and that will invariably involve compromises, that people who have more, tend to still want to get a little more, and people who have less will want to get more. That's the whole idea of a win-win agreement or a solution to a problem — it is something that lifts everybody up or a positive sum approach. And trying to get everybody equal on everything is a challenge for the next generation.

One of the other ideas that Kenneth Bolding used to push, which I think is very important, is the distinction between peaks and mesas. The idea is that you can think about the problem of finding of what the future should be or what your goal for society should be in terms of a peak. So you're trying to find the penultimate best— where you finally have equality and power and everything else and all this humanity. Or you can think of the humanity's choices more as a mesa, where there's a top, and it'd be nice to get to the top of it. But what you really don't want to do is to fall off the cliffs at the edge. So the focus is on avoiding catastrophes, rather than trying to find this optimal distribution of justice, in which there are no microaggressions in the world.

So I think that trying to focus on things that could go really bad is important. And right now, we're very near the cliff. One of the things that we've been writing is talking about "the failure of the imagination." And that was the line that was used after 9/11, where nobody had imagined something like that could happen. Right now, we're not imagining what could go wrong with the current political catastrophe with anywhere near the realism that I think is required. And if we had a better sense of how bad things could get, maybe, as I say, we quit worrying about microaggressions and start worrying about macroaggressions, where you have outright wars and terrible, terrible inhumanity. So that's one thing.

And the other thing is I tend to think of society as kind of a contest where most people are good-faith actors, who would like to find a way to make the system work for everyone. But there are enormous incentives in the system for people who can figure out how to drive people apart and profit from doing that. On the one hand, you have foreign powers who like to destabilize geopolitical rivals. And there's a lot going on in that respect. On the other hand, you have authoritarian wannabes that want to follow the sort of time-tested route to dictatorial power of divide and conquer that try to divide societies, demonize the other side, get their side so committed to them that they'll vote for them and support them no matter what.

And you also have media companies who figured out conflict sells. And they build giant lucrative audiences by telling people how terrible everything is. And all of these things exploit psychological vulnerabilities that we pay more attention to things we should be afraid of than things we should be hopeful about. That has deep evolutionary roots. And that's the kind of thing that can be exploited. We all hate to think about the possibility that we might be wrong, so we don't. And there are a whole series of group dynamics. It's very hard to challenge your group orthodoxy. You'll get ostracized, and that's very, very painful. So we tend to lapse into group think. And all of these things are being exploited by these bad faith actors.

In a sense, the real contest is to figure out how the good faith actors can bind together in a kind of collective security agreement to recognize that we've got to combat these bad faith actors, both internal and external.

Heidi: I had two thoughts listening to what you said, Ashok, that split and went two entirely different directions. So I'll follow them both briefly. One of them was that you asked early on how our thinking had changed, that we've been in this field for a long time. And we got interested in intractable conflicts early on because everybody else was looking at better ways of negotiating and better ways of mediating. And we were a new center. We got funding from the Hewlett Foundation after a number of other centers did. And we wanted to do something that would set us apart. And it was clear that nobody else was looking at these things called "intractable conflicts" that we could kind of put our flag there and do something different from what most other people were doing. And that served us well.  and the other line that I used as well. was if nobody looks at those conflicts, they're just going to get worse and worse and they're going to get out of control. So really, it's important that we look at them. But we stressed that "intractable" does not mean impossible. It means very difficult.

So that I assume that there are ways out. And indeed, we're trying to figure out how to get people to work towards reconciliation and how to get them to work together more effectively. And then October 7th happened. And that really made us rethink a lot of the assumptions that we've been making. We had always assumed that Israel-Palestine was intractable. Again, meaning very difficult, not impossible. But I lacked imagination. I had no expectation that something as horrific as October 7th could possibly happen. And that has made us revisit our thoughts about how to deal with these situations. And we've been writing a bunch on this. And a lot of people have been writing back to us, absolutely horrified, saying that we're violating everything else that we preach in Beyond Intractability because we're not being neutral. We're taking a side. And what October 7th showed to me was sometimes you have to take a side. Sometimes there is so clearly a right and a wrong, and there's a lot of people who think we're on the wrong side of that one, that Israel is in the wrong and the Palestinians are in the right because they've been oppressed for all this long. I'm not going to go into a long discussion about why we're not there.

But it really drove home, more than I had realized in the past, that sometimes there really aren't win-win agreements. Sometimes you really do have to use power to resolve a conflict or even briefly settle a conflict. And what are those times? How do you tell that you have one of those situations? Well, there's a lot of ways. But one is when one side says, in no uncertain terms, that their raison d'etre is to destroy the other side. I find it mind-boggling that it's Israel that is being accused of genocide when the Hamas Charter spells out very clearly that its goal is the elimination of Israel and the killing of all Jews.  And they have set up a situation where they're using their own citizens as human shields, which forces Israel to kill massive numbers of Palestinian civilians, not because they want to, but because they don't see any other way to defend themselves. And that's where I say, yes, you need force, you need power, and you need to shut down that kind of approach.

The totally different direction that I wanted to go was, again, back to Kenneth Boulding. Kenneth was really very important in formulating a lot of our ideas. And he, together with one of his colleagues and our colleague, Paul Wehr, came up with the notion of "the power strategy mix". And the notion is that power isn't just force. Most people think in terms of power as just force. But power actually comes in three different forms. One is integrative power. We gain power by working together. We gain power by cooperating and by networking and working together. The second form of power is exchange power. If I can give you something and you give me something in exchange, that makes us both better off. That raises our power.  And the third kind of power is coercive power, where I'm going to force somebody else to do something against their will. And what Kenneth and Paul argued is that the optimal power strategy mix is different for different circumstances. But most often, you have a situation where people will be reasonable. And if you reach out to them and try to persuade them that working together will bring benefit to everybody, oftentimes it will, and you will be able to use mostly integrative power. Maybe you need to throw in a little bit of exchange power to grease the rails, say, "Okay, look, I'll give you that if you give me this and you can work together." Paul and Kenneth both argued, and we do too, that it's relatively rare that you run into a bad faith actor, as we call them, where they're not going to play those integrative and exchange games. They're just going to try to use force to overpower you, to kill you, to whatever. And then you have to use coercive power to get them under control. But we tend to try to look at, is there a way to use integrative power? Is there a way to use exchange power? Very often, the answer is yes. Sometimes the answer is no.

And the answer is no when you're dealing with an adversary that is hell-bent on destroying you, is not interested in exchange, is not interested in collaboration. They just want to destroy you. You don't have any choice. At that point, you have to play, unfortunately, their destructive game.

Ashok: Thank you. Thanks for explaining that, particularly for viewers who don't know about the theory. So a couple of things. But the two of you have said so much. I've written down a couple of things I want to respond to. Guy, you talked of avoiding catastrophe, peaks and mesas and the cliffs. And that reminds me of the primary difference between Americans and the rest of the world. The rest of the world, we grew up with the idea that catastrophes just around the corner.  The idea of avoiding catastrophes in our DNA. I remember a cousin of mine who worked with an IT company, a technology company in Boston, not allowing his children to play in the yard in a suburb. And he said, Ashok, you don't understand.  If something goes wrong and he breaks his leg, and if he's maimed forever... Americans have gotten used to the idea of enormous, and I call it a privilege, that they have security, they have safety. If nobody else, the government will take care of them. They have grown up with the prosperity that allows them to believe that even if we are bankrupt today, I have the means to pull myself up and recover my family's fortunes. That's not the way the rest of the world functions. My family is, I say this very often, fourth or fifth generation college educated in India. But everyone is utterly terrified of losing everything, including health, all the time.  I'm not talking about my family per se, but that is how the rest of the world looks at life. That's one of the reasons why religion is so important. Another reason why superstition and astrology are so important. Because we are so terrified that terrible things will happen and can happen anytime. We design our lives based on avoiding catastrophes.

All strategies are not based on success. They're based on avoiding failure. So that's a fundamental difference between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Its's more American than Western because even France, Germany, Sweden, all these countries, people have had to work very, very hard and they've experienced tremendous amount of deprivation until the post-World War II era. So that's the first thing. I love the idea of avoiding catastrophe as a strategy. My sense is the ancients knew something that we've forgotten. And I'm in a way American myself because I have been so influenced by America. People may not think it, but I have directed my own life with enormous optimism thinking that I can do what I want. I can follow my bliss. But I think what the world is telling us now, what geopolitics is telling us, what climate change is telling us, what capitalism, global capitalism is telling us is that everything is finite. We can't get everything we want. We can't bounce back from every tragedy.  And my feeling is, when we are looking at peace, we need to come at it from an avoiding catastrophe perspective, rather than a perspective where we can get as much of all the good stuff as we can. So those peaks, I think those peaks are extremely seductive and very dangerous. And I speak as someone who has always focused on peaks.

One of my favorite quotes, I forget the English poet who said it. What is the sky for?  If my grasp can't exceed my reach, what is the sky for? My grasp was mediocre. My reach was the peak. I was always persuaded that as a human being, a sentient, intelligent person, I had the capacity for imagination and vision and to go for the peak. And in a way, while I talk of Americans being privileged, being a misfit in the Indian context, and being educated, I was very privileged. That privilege allowed me to reach for the sky. So that's the first thing.

The second thing is about good faith actors coming together. I love it. I think, Guy, you mentioned this. And I want to just say that we are not going to see, necessarily. another Cold War. We may be we may be entering an era where the world is literally split between two good faith actors. As Heidi said, nobody thinks they're going to wake up this morning and go out and destroy the world. Everybody thinks they're good faith actors. I think the East, and by that I mean the collectivist, the traditional, the authoritarian East and South is going to split away almost completely from the West. And this might include many parts of Eastern and Central Europe. It's not going to be a Cold War, because I think we are going to continue to have skirmishes. The equivalent of Korea or Vietnam, from the post-war era to now, You know, terrible wars that don't disturb general equilibrium of the planet. I think we are going to see many of those. But even trading, even globalization is dead. It will continue because the momentum has been created. And countries like India will have to choose very soon whether it stays with the East or it comes to the West, primarily because we are scared of China. But I think both sides will consider themselves good faith actors. How will we split it?And that may provide the basis for some kind of tenuous, but good enough, peace. So I see peace itself as coming out of a split world.  I think the biggest mistake we made, and by "we," I mean, the people in power over the last 70 to 80 years was to presume that you could have a globalized world, the global village where we could trade and collaborate and cooperate and eat each other's cuisines and basically live in peace and harmony. It's not possible.

This brings me to the civilizational aspect of it. There is nothing that the East, broadly speaking, the authoritarian traditional East has in common with the West. The only reason why the East has followed the West so far and aped it and aspired for Western values and standards is because the US has been extraordinarily successful and was that 800 pound gorilla.  But today, when I talk to my friends in the East or even in the US who are from the East or the South, however you put it, they are fairly contentious of America. I cannot even tell you how demeaningly they talk of this society and this culture.

One group, of course, are Muslims because I've worked with them for a long time. They're dripping with contempt because in their way of looking at it, and this is also true from my non-Muslim friends in the South. They look at the West, but mostly America ,as doing everything wrong in order to do everything right to destroy its own society. So there is no breaching of this. But in the interest of peace, we have to divorce. The world needs a divorce. And then we need to figure out a way to avoid catastrophe. Across, what do you call it? Checkpoint, Charlie. You know? The whole world will have a Checkpoint, Charlie. And we need to figure out a way to prevent that from exploding into a nuclear war.

So I'm just going to say one last thing. I love the theory I've read about it earlier about different kinds of power. And the idea that we can avoid coercive power is more likely in contractual societies that see value in collaborating. In many parts, even as an entrepreneur in India, if I go to meet a client in India, highly sophisticated businesses, they don't deal with me thinking they want a  win-win.

01:08:57.000 They deal with me thinking he's got something we need. We are willing to do him a favor by giving him a project and we will extract whatever we can from him. So coercive power, I love the idea of the right balance in the mix. But in general, traditional hierarchical societies see the use of coercive power as absolutely legitimate. And the inability to use coercive power is a weakness. And this is another reason why authoritarianism comes naturally to the East and the South. In the US, now, we are starting to recognize with Trump, that the US is also recognizing or many people here are recognizing that there is something to be said for someone who has the "courage" to use coercive power.

Heidi: I wish we had time to talk about that more, but I'm noticing that we're already at 9:10, and we said that we were going to open up, start talking about questions at 9:00 and open up the chat. So I don't know who of us is are you able to open up the chat? Yes. Chat is now open.

Ashok:  Can I make a suggestion, Heidi, that you pick up a couple of the questions. You pick the questions that have come to us, whichever you feel fits in with this conversation.

Heidi: I'm thinking that the question that most related to what you just said is a group of questions around human rights and international law and the notion of whether human rights just apply to Western societies or whether they apply to these authoritarian Eastern societies that are more coercive in their social organization. And if they do apply worldwide, how can they be enforced? There were a number of people who asked questions that kind of surrounded that. I'll go ahead and start with one answer, one provocative answer, and throw it back to you two. Guy and I have had a long-running discussion. I make the assertion that there really is no such thing as international law because I claim that it can't be enforced. We've got the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We've got the Responsibility to Protect. But when push comes to shove, very little is ever done to enforce that. So of course, there have been horrific human rights abuses all around the world. And the great power of America, very seldom did anything about them, certainly nothing effective. And quite often, we didn't even try. In Rwanda, we didn't even try. So I'm of the very negative opinion —and am not an international lawyer. I'm not a lawyer at all, But I make the assertion that international law really is a fiction, and it's nice to think about. But I know Guy strongly disagrees with that.

Guy: I think the book that came to mind when you raised this was one that was written a number of years ago called Rights Talk. And if I remember the author right, it's a woman named Mary McGlendon. She observed, and this was a book focused on the United States, but from what I observed, it certainly is a dynamic that has been happening to varying degrees around the world. And the thing about rights is, if you claim a right and that your right is violated, then you have an absolute claim to have that fixed. You don't have to compromise. It's not your grievance against their grievance. And there's been a proliferation of rights. We started off with a set of fairly core human rights. And then we keep adding to it. And it's got to the point where we have friends that argue that sticks and stones have the right not to be disturbed by human development. And so when you frame everything that you want as a right, then you don't have to compromise. You don't have to recognize the competing interests of anybody else. So that suggests that we really ought to concentrate on a few core universal human rights and try to at least build a consensus to protect those. And then within different communities, there are going to be different arrays of rights that those communities want to enforce. And we need to recognize that.

And this goes back to your original title. There comes a point when the peacebuilding field needs to compromise more. We tend to think of ourselves as champions of the culture of peace, which looks a lot like progressive orthodoxy, and that any deviation is not tolerable. And the truth is, that we've got to be prepared to recognize that different people want to live in different ways.

One of the phrases that plays on words that we've been playing with lately is "what we need to do is to get past us-versus-them politics and start thinking in terms of us-and-them politics, where we recognize the need to coexist. And the fact that other people are very, very different, and we might not want to live there, but the truth is they might be smarter than we are. 

Ashok: Yeah. I'm sorry we have so little time. There are so many things here, threads that I think we can pick up and run with. Just on international law, I'm not a lawyer, but I have spent a fair amount of my career working on human rights.  And one of the things that peacebuilders, who are generally progressive, never seem to remember when they are fighting for human rights, international human rights, is that most countries in the East have consistently attacked the idea of universal human rights. Singapore is a great example. All Arab countries have consistently said that there is no such thing as universal human rights. That's a Western concept. But the same international NGOs that are fighting for human rights elsewhere in the world, outside of the West, never seem to recognize that those countries don't necessarily want to be judged by those same standards that the West uses for itself. So I agree with you. Not only is there no effective international law, there are no universal human rights. It's a social construct. By my reckoning, a very beautiful social construct. It could only come out of the enlightenment. It is so precious. It's philosophic. It's political. It's intellectual. It's spiritual. And it is Western. So that's the first thing.

The second thing is there's a question here that Raju asks, according to our best talent that goes into the UN and NGOs is being wasted and could be better utilized somewhere else. Where? So I'm going to say something provocative. I think we have lost enormous amount of talent and probably hundreds of millions of dollars in the last 30 to 40 years trying to promote democracy and human rights outside of the West. Whether it's the Carter Center, whether it's all the big names running to ensure free and fair elections in Burkina Faso or outer Mongolia, it's an absolute waste of effort. And it is taken away enormous energy and resources that were needed in the same Western countries to strengthen their own democracies. It's been almost irresponsible focusing on parts of the world which don't want American values, but went along for the ride because they thought they could get something out of it.  In a way, and here's where my bias as an Easterner shows. I think Western values in many ways would completely decimate Eastern societies. Individualism would destroy everything that is precious about Arab or African or Indian societies. It's already doing that in the cities. Literally. Anyway, I'm going to stop there. But we need to change the way we look at not just the East, but democracy and what it means to lead good lives. I think the Western model is one view, but it is not transferable. The West needs to ask itself if this works here, let alone using it elsewhere.

Heidi: Well, we would completely agree with that. And we've been preaching that for quite a while, which is why we've been focusing in on the United States because we feel we're so messed up here. Who are we to be going abroad and telling other people how to do it?

But let me pull this back to the questions, a whole bunch of the questions that we got from readers that really focused on whether or not it is possible, or the role of the United States, or the role of some sort of UN type entity, although one of the questions was about the impotence of the UN and what to do about that.  But is there a role for some overarching power to move into situations where there are really grave abuses? Rwanda comes to my mind. Israel-Palestine is on everybody's mind now. All of the genocides that we've seen around the world, do we just sit and say, "Well, that's okay. That's the way they prefer to run their society?" Or is it somebody's responsibility to do something about it? Who's and how?"

Ashok: Can I just add very quickly? I think this is where power comes in as a very important fact. See, I don't wish to ever make a case for authoritarian regimes. But the beauty, or the one advantage of an authoritarian system, is it can also use coercion for good.  I just give this very quick anecdote. There was a bully in my middle school who was obnoxious. He tormented me and many other kids, smaller kids. But if he saw someone bothering anyone else, and he felt it was going too far, he would step in and basically shut down that bully, the smaller bully. So when you talk of an overarching power, I think, if you leave the world to evolve organically, we will end up with a hegemon, an authoritarian power. like the Roman Empire, for instance, that will sometimes do that.

But I know that's not what you're talking about. You're talking of a new version of the United Nations. My feeling is it'll be a good thing, but I don't think we can ever get to that place until we shift our gears and move away from the present Western, liberal, progressive approach towards human rights, egalitarianism, and peacebuilding. There are a couple of questions there. Would either of you want to take some of them?

Heidi: Well, yeah, we've gotten one comment and a question that I just wrote and said that I didn't think we'd have time to cover, but maybe we will. I just want to read Barrick's comment quickly, which I think is a good one. It says El Salvador's government use of coercive power to subdue crime and social violence has been effective and broadly supported by voters. It's also come at a steep cost of privacy and individual human rights.  There are risks in this context, but few alternatives. This seems like an example of protecting core rights and compromising while sacrificing others."

I think that's a great example of what we're talking about, of needing to really focus in on some things that matter. We see this now in the United States and the cities that are crying out for more crime protection, that they're willing to sacrifice certain rights in the interests of others. Rights are always a balance. So that's a really good example.

Another comment notes: "building on Heidi's point of reconciliation and Guy's on compromise and peacebuilding, does it require us to move away from equality, justice, and freedom and attempt to work towards reducing injustices, reducing inequalities, and getting some freedom so we don't throw away the good in the favor of the best. It fundamentally challenges liberalism's ethical theories, which is focused on being too normative."

All sorts of interesting questions there. But I think that my reading of that is, yes, despite what you said, Ashok, about peaks and mesas, I think we need to follow John Paul Lederach's  notion of reconciliation being a balance. It's always a balance. You can't have all peace and all justice and all mercy. You can't have all freedom. We have to give up some freedoms in order to be able to have some justice. And it's all a very careful balance. And each one of us would probably tip the scales in a different way.  So it's a negotiation and a power contest about how we're going to balance it out. But the folks who are going for all of any one of those things, A, you're not going to get it, and B, it's causing a problem.

Guy: There's another John Paul Lederach  idea that I think applies here. And this is the distinction between elicitive and prescriptive approaches. The prescriptive approaches is what we normally think of when some country or some place is having a problem. We come in and we know how to handle it. We write out a prescription and implement it, and everything will be fine. The elicitive approach, by contrast, is where you go and you talk to people in the region and people who are affected by the conflict. You talk about what within their tradition and their culture can they learn from that would teach them how to deal with the situation. So it's not an imported solution from another place. It's actually a facilitation process designed to help a community and maybe give them the resources needed to find their own solutions. And that's going to be a lot more likely to succeed. These situations can still be very terrible, but building on a local culture and the wisdom of that culture, rather than trying to import something from the other side of the world by force of arms is a much, much smarter approach.

Ashok: Can I make a suggestion, given that we have only four minutes left? Each one of us can give a one-minute summation or closing. And I would also invite any of you participants to put down your thoughts about this conversation. Did you find it useful? Is there a takeaway for you? Would you like to see more of it? Your candid thoughts about how this conversation went for you.

But Heidi and Guy, do you want to say something to wrap it up from your side?

Heidi: Well, I want to expand upon what you just said. We've gotten a couple more comments in the comments that we're not going to have time to deal with now, and we didn't even get to all the ones that were written. And we may do this again because I'm looking at somebody who's saying that they'd love for us to do this again.  But beyond that, if people have thoughts, extensive thoughts about what you've heard today, we would like to continue this conversation on Beyond Intractability. And I'm going to put in the chat the way that you can contact us. And we are publishing essays that we get from readers and watchers on these topics. We publish everything, including things that very strongly disagree with us, as long as they're reasonably well-written and aren't extremely malicious. And we haven't gotten any that are extremely malicious. But the reason that we haven't opened it up to people being able to post directly is that we don't want Russian bots to be able to start writing on our discussion. But if you have ideas about this and you would like to contribute them, we would really like to encourage that and continue the conversation there. And I'm going to turn it over to Guy, and I'm going to put the address in the chat.

Guy: Yeah, the closing thought I might offer is an optimistic one. One big topic that we didn't really get to is complexity theory and how it is that societies evolve. It's not by some mechanical means where somebody comes up with the perfect plan and everybody will do all the right things if he just starts it off properly or comes up with the right policy. The real engine, and if you look at the superpower that made Western civilization so influential in the world, is that it has embedded in it the learning engine of the invisible hand. That is basically the freedom that's embodied in liberal Western democracies that we are in danger of losing, I think. It basically tells anybody that "if you see a problem in the world, and if you can find a solution to that problem, even a partial solution, you can sell that either through the for-profit market or the world of nonprofits and get support for implementing your solution." So it is a system that, instead of having an authoritarian top-down, this is the way it's going to be, system, it's a grassroots system that solicits ideas from everyday citizens for making the world better in the full range of ways. And that's what produced the wonders of the modern world. And it is the engine that I think can get us out of these problems.

We've been, in conjunction with another project, building a catalog of all of the different efforts that are out there to try to repair and restore democracy.  And by one account, there are 10,000 such projects in the United States. So part of the problem with this learning engine is it's lagging. The problem shows up and then people respond. But I think there's real reason to believe that there is a constructive positive response, and we can get past a lot of these things.

Ashok: Thank you. I have nothing more to add except that and this is where I keep talking for another 10 minutes after saying I have nothing else to say. But two things. One, this conversation is this is just scratching the surface. And ideally, this kind of a conversation should happen over weeks, ideally in person, because there are many ways in which the technology we are using right now does not allow for a real conversation. The real conversation, the real dialogue has to be face-to-face, where we are able to pause and walk out for a cup of coffee, come back. And all I want to say is that this itself is a highly restrictive model and format. And that affects the quality of the conversation itself. So I'm personally happy with this conversation. But I also know that the level of complexity that we are dealing with requires literally nothing short of a one-month retreat. Nothing short of that. And after the one-month retreat, we might need more time together again with everyone. So I just want to leave it out there because this is my bias against the virtual world. It's too easy for knowledge building to degenerate down to information sharing. It's too easy to trade information or opinions and viewpoints. And that doesn't help build knowledge. Anyway, that's where critical thinking comes in for me. And I just want to offer this as a last thought to everyone. Keep in touch. Heidi's sent her link. Please write to Beyond Intractability. You can also write to me directly. And I'd love to have this conversation continue this conversation in as many formats as possible because we don't have too much time. I just sent a note to an email to an NGO, international NGO. I said, if you don't make time now to talk about these issues in a couple of years, there will be no need for dialogue at all. We are operating with a very short window of opportunity to talk, to really talk. Because in another couple of years, the die will be cast. On that optimistic note, folks, enjoy the rest of your Sunday.

Heidi: Thank you, everybody, for coming. And as I put in the chat, we will try to get to some of these other questions in a blog post. So if you keep an eye on the Beyond Intractability discussion, there will be more there. And the address for that is beyondintractability.substack.com. And it will ask you to sign up, but you don't have to sign up. Sign up is free, but you can just click no thanks, and then you'll get to the discussion anyway.  But we encourage you to sign up and to contribute to your thoughts there in a continuing conversation. So thanks. Thank you very much. Thanks, everyone. Look forward to interacting further. Thanks.

Comments Shared in the Chat

• Responding to Ashok's observation that UN and NGO efforts to bring democracy and Western-style conflict resolution to the East and the South has been wasted effort, one listener asked "So, essentially, accordingly, our best talent that goes to the UN and NGOs is being wasted and could be better utilized better somewhere else?  Where?" 

  • Heidi's response: They should work in their home countries.  The West is in need of plenty of peacebuilding too, and here they know and understand the culture.
  • Ashok added: In addition, the Western notion of a peaceful world and peacebuilding as a field/process is fanciful, and itself situated on the fleeting prosperity and stability provided by US hegemony after WW2. In a finite planet, this prosperity could not continue indefinitely, and as soon as American society weakened, this stability was going to end. This means that most current peacebuilding theories and premises have to be revisited today— because they assume a world that no longer exists.     

• Regarding the protection of core rights, a listener observed that "El Salvador government's use of coercive power to subdue crime and social violence has been effective and supported broadly by voters.  It has also come at  a steep cost of privacy and individual human rights.   There are risks in this context but few alternatives.  This seems like an example of protecting core rights (compromising), while sacrificing  others.  Please expound if you see fit. 

  • Heidi had already discussed this briefly in the live discussion here.

  • Ashok added: For years I have been teaching that there is a hierarchy of values and needs. People yearn for freedom, human rights and equality only after they feel safe and their basic material needs are satisfied. Most people will gladly trade away their free speech and sexual freedoms (to mention just two) for the physical safety of loved ones. This has huge implications for activists and peacebuilders—if we want 'peace', we have to de-link it from other values such as equality or justice. Peace should be seen as having value for most people even as a stand-alone value and state—even if discrimination and oppression continues. To recognize it is not to "sell out" to oppression, but to accept reality. Furthermore, I would say that the strategies and processes needed for promoting peace on one hand, and promoting justice, equality, dignity, etc. on the other hand, need to be different. Peace itself, might be seen as a precondition for the other values and interests.    

• Building on Heidi's point on reconciliation and Guy's on compromise in peacebuilding, does it require us to move away from equality, justice and freedom and attempt to work towards reducing injustices, reducing inequalities and gaining some freedom so that we don't throw away the good in the favor of best.. it fundamentally challenges liberalism's ethical theories which is focused on being too normative.

  • Heidi talked about this briefly in the video here and

  • Ashok addressed it in the comment immediately above. 

• How do you help intractable conflicts end? 

  • Heidi's response: We will take this up in a later conversation, but sometimes, you need to wait until the time is "ripe."  We have several articles about ripeness including two written by the scholar who "invented" the concept, William Zartman: Ripeness and Ripeness-Promoting Strategies. We also have one post that addresses this concept in terms of the Oct. 7 Israel/Hamas War: Does the Concept of Ripeness Apply to the Israel/Hamas War? 

  • Ashok's response:  I think ripeness presupposes a fruit or plant that matures and at some point will be ready to pick. I think that is an optimistic and even deterministic assumption. It is just as possible that some cultural/ politically driven conflicts will never "ripen" and that only decisive victory and defeat will help create conditions for peace. 
     
• Who decides that the conflict is “hot” enough and must be negotiated/facilitated to a close? Perhaps the parties have a higher tolerance for violence?
  • Heidi: This is a great question too, and relates to my comments about ripeness above. But we'll talk about this too, either in a coming blog post or a further conversation, or both.
  • Ashok:  I would suggest that the very idea that anyone (including peacebuilders) can decide whether a conflict is "hot" enough for negotiation, is itself a sign of the arrogance of Western liberalism that has suffused our thinking about these matters for the past 80 odd years. This arrogance, as I keep reminding, comes from the very American experience of ordinary people having power and agency over their larger world. Historically, few people anywhere have had the power to control or subdue the larger forces that act upon their world. The particular conditions that led to the development of the USA and its unquestioned prosperity and power for most of the last century allowed its people and the professions that grew out of there to assume an agency that wasn't there. If Vietnam showed the limits of American military power, Afghanistan showed the limits of Western nation building, Palestine shows the impotence of Western-led peacebuilding. If we are serious about salvaging the field of peacebuilding, we need to (a) recognize the world for what it is and (b) cultivate some humility about our own agency.