Whither Peacebuilding? Is There Life After USAID and USIP: A Video Conversation with Heidi Burgess, Guy Burgess, and Ashok Panikkar

Rukmini: Hello, and welcome to this conversation. My name is Rukmini. I am joining in from Mumbai, India, and it's my pleasure to facilitate this conversation today, a conversation that I believe is both timely and rather urgent given the times we live in. Please note that this conversation is being recorded, and therefore, we request that you stay on mute while the speakers are speaking. If you prefer not to be seen on the recording, please stay off video during the conversation. We will have time for questions at the end in the last 15 to 20 minutes of the conversation. So we'll request you to hold your questions till then, and we'll pick them up at the later part of the conversation.

We are here today in the shadow of rather significant shifts in the world. And the shifts are visible not only in the geopolitical sense of the term, but also in the more quieter unravelings and reconfigurations within the space of peacebuilding, particularly. And the recent decisions around the future of USAID, USIP, and other peacebuilding institutions are not only isolated events, but they're also signals of a broader and a more foundational reckoning for the world. So what is the future of peacebuilding if the structures that once sustained it are receding now? That's the primary question we're sitting with here. We're asking ourselves, "What kind of a world are we navigating now? Who must we become as peacebuilders, as practitioners, as systems thinkers, and also as citizens, as all of us are? How do we meet this world with courage and with clarity?" 

With us today for this conversation, we have three people who have shaped and challenged and deepened this field in their own profound ways. We have Heidi and Guy Burgess, who are Co-directors of Beyond Intractability. And we have Ashok Panikkar, who is the founder of the Village Idiot Studio and formerly the founder of Meta Culture.

This is not a panel discussion. It is a live thinking conversation, and we hope you, as listeners, as the audience, engage with the questions and prompts yourself as much as the speakers do. We may not be offering definitive answers, but we will trace the contours of critical questions as we go along.

In my role as a facilitator, my attempt will not so much be to moderate as much as to inquire and to hold space for complexity and to invite deeper reflection for all of us together. Our conversation will flow through a few broad themes today. We will talk about how we understand peace, how we understand peacebuilding, how threats to peace have evolved over time, who the future peacebuilders must be, and whether the field by itself needs to be re-imagined and reconfigured.

As we start, I'd like to invite all of us, speakers and listeners alike, to pause for a moment. As you settle into this space, I invite us to ask ourselves, "What does peacebuilding mean to me now, here, in this world I live in?" And please continue to hold that question and let your own responses emerge for you as we go along. And with that, let's begin. And as we go on, I invite all of us who are listeners to also reflect on the prompts that we pose to the speakers and go ahead and notice for yourself and perhaps even note down for yourself, if you wish, your own responses and your own beliefs as they emerge for you. So, Heidi, if I may start with you, what is peacebuilding?

Heidi: My thoughts about peacebuilding really goes back to Boutros Boutros Ghali's Agenda for Peace, where he laid out the difference between peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding. Peacebuilding is where you're trying to bring together the grassroots people. The leaders have negotiated a settlement to a conflict, and peacebuilding is trying to establish that agreement and mend relationships at the grassroots level. When we started working in the field, being in the United States, we thought that peacebuilding was something that happened abroad, that Americans went somewhere else, and they helped other people with other conflicts do peacebuilding. 

Ever since 2016, maybe earlier than that, we really began noticing that we needed to do peacebuilding here in the United States as well. We didn't have a civil war. We didn't have a negotiated peace agreement. But we sure had deep divisions that needed mending. And so we have been working since that time to try to bring peacebuilding concepts into the domestic US space. 

Rukmini: Thank you, Heidi. Guy, shall we go to you? 

Guy: First, before we go any further, my understanding is for this session is that we're going to be focusing on the big-picture view of the future of peacebuilding and efforts to avoid war more generally. There's an immediate crisis surrounding the defunding of peace programs in the United States, which I don't think any of us are really prepared to address. But the Alliance for Peacebuilding is doing a lot of excellent work there. And for people concerned about the defunding of peace programs, I suggest that you look to them. 

And also just an expression of sympathy for the people whose careers are being upended by all of this. Something very similar to this happened with the Reagan administration, just as Heidi and I had graduated from university. And it's absolutely wrenching, and it takes a while to get through it. But if you stay focused on what you want to do, you'll find a way to do that. So don't give up. The threat of war and threats to peace are as serious as they have ever been. So take this as a setback, a chance to learn and go forward. 

And with that, I think to build on Heidi's comments about Boutros Boutros Ghali, and the Agenda for Peace and the term "peacebuilding."  Peacebuilding includes all of the things that it takes to build a peaceful society.

The flip side of that is how quickly we're sliding into overt shooting wars and the kinds of brutal wars that we thought we'd gotten past. These wars have reemerged over the last couple of years. But there's also a new kind of warfare that's variously called hybrid or gray zone warfare, which involves a whole range of new techniques and tactics and weapons that we're very ill-prepared to deal with. So, I don't discount the possibility of a global world war, even though it's likely to look very different from what we might have imagined earlier This is the most serious problem facing humanity, and we can't take this setback and give up. We've got to work hard to avoid this looming threat.

Rukmini: Thank you, Guy. You started us off with a warning. We'll continue to build on that. Ashok, let's bring you in. How do you relate to peacebuilding?

Ashok: Since both Guy and Heidi have been at it longer than I have, which is to say, I've been doing this for about 20, 25 years, as a practitioner, not a scholar. I'm not an academic. So my relationship with peacebuilding is not with peacebuilding per se. I got into this work primarily because I was deeply committed to open, free, liberal societies. And without going too much into it, I think it's important for me to just put out there the two formative experiences of my life that put me on this path. 

First was my family moving to the Arab Gulf, which had both theological and despotic, autocratic regimes. Suddenly I realized I had to be careful what I even said. I found my father being careful even saying something in public because he could get arrested. 

And then when I went to college in 1975, within one month, Mrs. Indra Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, established a state of emergency which went on for a little more than two years. And all civil liberties were basically curtailed, and she abolished Parliament.

So these two events made it extraordinarily clear to me that everything that I valued was dependent on the existence of a healthy and robust liberal democracy. 

So from there, I went into teaching people how to think, critical thinking and creative thinking. And through that I got into mediation and conflict resolution and diversity work and then peacebuilding. And I wasn't particularly excited or passionate about one approach over the other— whether it is mediation or diversity work or dialogue or peacebuilding. I love all of it., But my primary passion is for the protection and the thriving of open and free societies. I see peacebuilding's primary function being keeping societies free and open. So to that extent, I must confess, I'm not terribly excited about doing peacebuilding in Burundi or Colombia.

My interest in peacebuilding was in building relationships, the kind of relationships that Heidi mentioned: amongst the stakeholders, amongst the people in the villages and the towns and the men and the women and the majority and the minority and the leadership. Because it's in those relationships that you build peace. And frankly, I don't think you can do that in Saudi Arabia or Burundi or Colombia because they are not and have not been free and open societies.  My relationship with peacebuilding is because it is an intrinsic and ongoing process in creating and maintaining liberal democracies. So I'm just going to stop there. 

Rukmini:  So just repeating the invitation that Heidi put out earlier, as we pose questions and prompts to the speakers, please feel free to also respond to them either within yourself ,or if you feel like, also feel free to share it on the chat and also to introduce yourself on the chat if you'd like to do that. Ashok, since you spoke about the idea of peace in certain contexts, could you unpack the term "peace" itself?  What does it mean for you? What does it include? Is there something that is left out there? 

Ashok: Thank you. If I understand Heidi and Guy and most people in the field, "peace," for most people, is not just the cessation of hostilities. It's not the absence of war, even though that's a very important condition for any genuine peace.

My idea of peace has evolved over the last 10 years or so. Until then, I had unthinkingly bought into the cliche that real peace is peace with total justice. That you can't have a peace if everybody doesn't have justice and equality and opportunity and everything else.  Even as I practiced as a professional, I had kind of assumed that to be true.  But now, I have veered away from that idea.  I have a less ambitious and less broad definition of "peace" today. 

Yes, it is more than the absence of violence. It is more than basic security and safety. It also is a set of conditions that allow people to engage with each other with a modicum of dignity. For me, this has become very important—a modicum of dignity. But not complete justice or equality, because those are extremely dangerous ideas because they are impossible to achieve, given what we call the "crooked timber of humanity." I think what the last 10, 15 years has shown us, whether it's in terms of Xi in China, Putin, the entire Arab world, India's Modi, and now Trump, is that we have to work with the material we are given. Trying to make humanity perfect is almost a recipe for extraordinary cruelty. So peace, for me, is the set of conditions that allow people to engage with each other with a modicum of dignity and agency. 

Rukmini: That's an interesting thought to stay with. Guy, would you like to chime in on that? What is the term peace for you?

Guy: When I talk about this with my students, I cite a famous Carl Sandberg poem, which features two guys talking across the fence. One guy says, "I want your land." And the other guy says, "You can't have it." The first asks "Where'd you get it?" The answer: "from my father."  "Where'd he get it?  "From his father"   "Where'd he get it?" "He fought for it." "Well, I'll fight you for it." 

And what peace really is, is a society in which we get away from what we call "I'll fight you for it rules." It's based on an agreement that we're not going to fight and try to take things from one another. And that requires a collective security commitment that we will band together and resist anybody who does try to use I'll fight you for it rules, and that we will have a fair way of resolving disputes amongst ourselves based primarily on the Golden Rule, which Karen Armstrong pointed out is a major feature of all the world's religions—the notion that you should treat others as you would like to be treated. So that's one side of it.

The second part is the concept of "stable peace." When I was in graduate school, I was lucky enough to work with a guy named Kenneth Bolding who was one of the true founders of the peace and conflict field. Kenneth published a book entitled Stable Peace that made a big splash in the late 1970s.  Kenneth defined "stable peace" as a condition in which the possibility of violence or in this broader sense, people using all fight you for it rules, is so remote that it doesn't enter into anybody's calculations.

He described a continuum that goes all the way to stable war, which is a situation in which people can't imagine a situation in which people aren't using violence to try to advance their interests. And he talked about how the regions of stable peace had slowly expanded. The countries of Scandinavia used to be at war with one another all the time, and then they decided, "No, that's a stupid idea. We're not going to do that anymore." He talked about how the Rush Bagot Agreement  of 1817 ought to be a national holiday. That's when we demilitarized the border with Canada and decided we weren't going to go to war with them. He talks about the emergence of this vast liberal, democratic, capitalistic region of the world after World War II from the Cold War through North America and around the Pacific. 

After the end of the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union, it looked as if the region of stable peace was spreading further. And with the Arab Spring, it seemed like stable peace was going to emerge all over the planet. 

But in the last 25 years, we've seen that trend reversed. Now regions of stable peace are shrinking almost everywhere, even within countries that used to be considered stable, peaceful, successful democracies. Now they are at war with one another.

And that's what the Trump administration and the progressive left, also, are doing. They're just barely short of a shooting war. There's Murkowski's statement last week about how senators are afraid. There was firebombing of the governor's mansion in Pennsylvania. We're just lurking at the edge of violence. 

Rukmini: Thank you, Guy. Heidi, would you like to chime in? 

Heidi: When I think about peace, I actually do think of it more narrowly, going back to what Ashok said. I think of it being linked in a way that John Paul Lederach long ago laid out in a couple of books. Building Peace, his best-known book. And there was also Journey Towards Reconciliation, which I think came first. 

In both those books, John Paul pointed out that there's four concepts: peace, justice, truth, and mercy. All of them are both linked together and opposed to each other. And he created an exercise about that.  I won't tell the whole history there, but the exercise asked people to personify peace, justice, truth, and mercy. When Guy and I facilitate this exercise, we ask people to think that they're in charge of an NGO that seeks peace, justice, truth, or mercy. We ask questions such as what do the concepts mean to your organization? What are your goals? What are your objectives? What are your ways of reaching success? And you quickly find out that peace and justice actually have a lot in opposition to each other. Because people get angry when somebody else goes after them because they think they were being unjust. And people who are trying to hide injustice don't like truth. 

John Paul (and we) put people in small groups and they figure out what each of these elements is working for. He then has them come up to the front of the room and present their answers to everyone.  It then becomes clear that each group is working for something that is at least somewhat opposed to what the other NGOs/concepts are working for. So John Paul mediates with them and comes to an agreement.  He points out (as one of the participants in the original exercise did) that "the meeting place of peace, justice, truth, and mercy is reconciliation."

So the big, overarching, term for him is reconciliation. And that is where everybody lives happily ever after. And peace is one piece of that.   Justice is one piece of that. Truth is one piece of that. Mercy is one piece of that. And all of them have to give up something in order to obtain other things and in order to obtain the ultimate goal of reconciliation.

So I see peace and justice along with truth and mercy as a very delicate balance. And you sometimes need more of one, sometimes more of the other. And when John Paul did the exercise, he asked people which should come first, which should come second. And he juggled people around the room in different orders. It was all very amusing, and people laughed. But it's hard. And the balance is different in every single case. But there has to be a balance. 

Rukmini: Thank you, Heidi. And yes, as a practitioner, I particularly resonate with that tricky balance and a conflict, really, between peace and justice. So thank you for naming that. Guy, a little while ago, you named the idea of gray zone conflicts, which are now sort of shaping or reshaping our understanding of what constitutes violence now.  Would you like to speak more to that? 

Guy: There are a lot of things that are happening in the world of military technology and security technology. This is something that some peacebuilders tend to shy away from. They tend to think that, well, all these security folks, they're all evil and we don't need to pay attention to them and what they are doing. And I think that's a big mistake.

One of the good things that came out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the emergence of USIP as a major institution and the construction of its building on Washington Mall that Musk just took over, was a partnership between the security establishment and the peacebuilding community. They realized that they're really in the same business. They haven't quite figured out how to collaborate effectively, but peacebuilders have learned that they have to pay attention to security issues.

If you look at the world of high-tech propaganda and target casting and the kinds of insidious things that are being done, its really sobering. With a modest amount of money, an army of folks sitting in warehouses in China or Russia somewhere can gravely harm our open society. They can (and are) altering the way Americans think of one another. If you think about the possibility of cyber warfare, just think what would happen if an enemy took down the credit card system in the United States. Nobody could buy anything. There are all sorts of sabotage. that is possible. Sanda Kaufman (who was on the call) and Heidi and I were part of a big project on hybrid warfare. And one of the people we met was a security person with IBM. She sent me their threat matrix. And it must have had a listing of 100  different ways in which IBM's computer systems are constantly being attacked.

We run Beyond Intractability. It is being attacked every few seconds. And if you look at the way in which military technology and the war in Ukraine has evolved, you had new technologies that were great for about two months, until somebody figured out a counter to them, and it goes on and on. The speed with which the technology is changing is jaw-dropping. In the Gulf War, the United States had a monopoly on smart weapons. Now you can buy them on Amazon. It just goes on and on and on like that. We really have to be very, very smart to navigate this. And in our current dysfunction, we're not. 

Rukmini: Thank you, Guy. Ashok, go ahead. 

Ashok: Thank you so much, Guy, for making the connection between the security forces, the military, and the peacebuilding community. It was fascinating for me to hear you mention the fact that they realize they are on the same side and they are trying to do the same thing.  I think this is the big shift that is happening in the 2020s or even in the 2010s. That that happy coming together of the interests and needs of the security establishment with the peace establishment is not what was happening 20, 30 years ago. 

I think this brings us to, at one level, the primary challenge that we are here to discuss, which is that what I sometimes refer to as "the age of idealism, the age of love, peace, compassion, empathy." That was literally created in the US and the Western world, starting from the '60s and '70s, I think the world has given us a huge reality check about that. 

Anywhere else outside of the West, this idea that peacebuilding, as a function of civil society and the military having much in common and should be working together, would be laughed out of existence. It was possible in the US, because of the extraordinary wealth, the security that came from the wealth, the economy, military security, and the development of a very strong civil society.

All of these allowed for that kind of idealistic and even intelligent thinking to take place. And now I think what the 2020s are teaching us is that this is not really sustainable in a world where everybody doesn't accept the same set of rules.  It was easier for Americans to dream of a world without war, even more than Western Europeans, because we don't have the history of being brutally attacked (other than an isolated Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Most other parts of the world are not that secure. 

Nations can be divided into two groups. One group are those that are incapable of waging war because they are too small, too weak, or too dependent on their neighbors. The other group are those that are capable of making war and therefore, by default, will constantly look for advancement, whether in terms of geography or land, or influencing their neighbors.  China, Russia, India, Pakistan, these countries are not necessarily bad or evil countries. Their reality just doesn't take into consideration the vision and the ideals of peacebuilding. For me, this is something we need to grapple with as a field. 

Now, don't get me wrong. If American peacebuilders or German peacebuilders only wish to work within their own borders, it's a different ball game.  But the moment we are talking about international peacebuilding, we have to account for the fact that for most nations, war has enormous benefits. War gives meaning to nations. So I think peacebuilding needs to account for the fact that the glorious, idealistic theories and practices that came out of the '60s and '70s in the United States and Western Europe are no longer applicable, at least, for the immediate future. 

This is my hope as an idealist. If in another 30 to 50 years, we are able to recreate a global set of agreements that we will no longer fight, we will no longer wage war. We will decide to use negotiation or dialogue or whatever else to come to an agreement. If we arrive at that world, then we can go back to our peacebuilding theories and our best practices. 

But it is very disturbing for me, because what this moment is telling me is that we need to think completely afresh. None of the American models of peacebuilding will work anymore.  I don't know how else to put it. I 'm going to stop. Thank you, Rukmani.

Rukmini:  A rather grim reality there. Guy and Heidi, I'll come to you. Based on the backdrop that both of you have painted, Guy and Ashok, how do you think we have landed here in terms of peacebuilding? Are there questions or are there assumptions that we failed to question as practitioners?

Guy: The story that I tell my students is a metaphor that I think explains what's going on. I explain that when I was a child, we were terrified of polio ——for a very good reason. If you read just about what that disease does to kids, it's really awful. And then one day in the mid 1950s—and I still have a vivid memory of this—— we went to the basement of our local elementary school. And they had sugar cubes with a purple dye in them and little cups, the kind of paper cups that you put cupcakes in. Everybody ate a sugar cube. And that was the end of polio. And we thought "WOW! It's just unbelievable." 

So then in 1970, Richard Nixon got the idea that we ought to have a war on cancer and do the same thing to cancer that we did to polio. The war on cancer is now over 50 years old. And cancer is still this terrible scourge. 

The same thing, essentially, happened with peacebuilding. In the euphoric period following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the Washington Consensus,  we really did think we could have a rules-based international order, just like we thought we could create a vaccine for cancer. For one very specific set of problems, it worked.

And now we're coming to grips with the fact that this larger problem of war and peace and conflict is vastly, vastly more difficult. Just like cancer, it's not one disease. It's a whole class of diseases. And the disease progresses differently depending upon the environment of the individual, their genetic makeup, and it requires zillions of different cures. And that's what we're facing with peacebuilding. We have to, and I think this is Ashok's point, we have to recognize that we're up against a vastly more formidable challenge than we'd like to have previously thought that we were up against. 

So it strikes me that at a minimum, we need at least four tiers of peacebuilding processes. On the one hand, we've been very good at figuring out how to resolve conflicts within the highly homogeneous community that its detractors describe as the "woke progressive left." The progressive left has a whole set of rules about how to interact with one another. And within that community, conflict resolution and peacebuilding work pretty well. 

The problem is that even within Western liberal democratic societies, there are a lot of people who don't agree with those rules. And they're the source of the populist rebellions that are tearing apart democracies all over. So we need strategies for working within progressive communities, and now we need a new set of strategies for working on the conflict between these progressive communities and the larger populace. That's a place that there's lots of opportunities. 

The next area that we really need to deal with is how do we interact with countries that are aggressive authoritarians that are using the same old might-makes-right model. This is China and Russia, and there are lots of others in the world. Here we fall back on the ideas such as real politik. Authoritarians will make deals, so you try to craft those. And you develop and work within "spheres of influence." A lot of this is disagreeable. But if you do it carefully, and are a little lucky, you can avoid large-scale war. A lot of people wind up living in pretty horrible conditions as a result, but you don't have large-scale war with nuclear, chemical and other weapons of mass destruction. So you need a set of rules on how you deal with authoritarian regimes. 

And then there's another class of problems where you have entities that are absolutely committed to the total destruction of another group of people. I put Hamas in this category.  It is so committed to the destruction of Israel and the Jews that it will absorb staggering losses and place its civilians directly in harm's way in an effort to achieve its goal. It's an almost nihilistic philosophy. You have this with mass shooters in the United States, people who are so alienated from modern society and so hostile to it, that they just want to destroy it. We need another set of rules for dealing with those folks. 

So we need to start thinking big about the multi-faceted conflict problem.

But when I give a dismal lecture like this, I always try to end it with an upbeat point, which is that the thing about social problems is that all problems create opportunities for people who can figure out how to solve them. And we've just been handed a gigantic stack of problems. And there is an opportunity for a new and very exciting beginning as we figure out how to grapple with all this.

Rukmini: Thanks, Guy. Heidi, I want to latch on to the opportunity that Guy named there and ask you, in this shifting world with the problems and opportunities that we seem to have currently, what does the peacebuilder of the future look like? What would be the knowledge, the skills, the dispositions that a future peacebuilder or for that matter, even a peacebuilder here and now today needs to acquire? 

Heidi: We've developed a concept that we call "massively parallel peacebuilding."  This framework lays out roles for over 50 different kinds of people who all need to work together, not directly coordinated, but all working towards the same end goal, which in our writing, is liberal democracy along the lines that Ashok was talking about.

But there can be other goals, as well, because we realize that not the whole world is interested in adopting liberal democracy. It was that assumption that got us into so much trouble, or at least one of the things that got us into so much trouble. But there's many, many different roles that need to be played. And peacebuilders have long relied on what we see as too narrow a set of tools.

So dialogue, for example, is a very commonly used tool. And peacebuilders assume that if you can just get 10 or 20 people sitting around a table and everybody gets to understand each other and their needs and walks away happy, that will have a significant effect on the whole society. And very simply, the numbers just don't add up. You can't possibly hold enough dialogues.

There's trauma recovery workshops of various kinds. They are small too. There are a few tools that peacebuilders commonly use. That's where we talk about "Hammer's Law," (To a hammer, all the world's a nail.) Regardless of whether it's the best tool, it's what we do. So we go in and do it. And we really think that the peacebuilding field as a whole needs to massively enlarge their toolbox.

Not everybody. You can't possibly do everything on our whole list. But we suggest that people look down this list of 50 roles, and say, "Well, I'm doing that," or, "I could learn how to do that." "I'm interested in that" and so on.  They can figure out where their piece is." But they need to be aware that they're one of 50 different kinds of roles, and they're certainly not the only ones. There's hundreds of people and organizations that are doing each one of these things. And that's the good news!  There is actually a lot of valuable work going on, still.

Another part of the peacebuilding problem was too many people thought, "If I just do my dialogue, it's going to solve everything." Or if I just work with reintegrating child soldiers into the society, that's going to fix everything. It's going to take a massive full-court press on 50 plus different problems in order to see real progress. And so peacebuilders, I think, need to figure out much more broadly what the problems are that they're facing and how they might be able to add up to a much larger whole to deal with it. 

Rukmini: Thank you, Heidi. Guy, if I may ask you to build on that, Heidi spoke about the idea of the massively parallel approach that you propound. Could you expand on that and perhaps share something that's in practice around that? Perhaps an example?

Guy: The metaphor that I use to try to explain this is what I call the "Google Maps/Adopt a Highway Metaphor." And I assume everybody's familiar with looking at Google Maps and especially Google traffic and seeing all those terrible red lines and traffic jams and little icons for crashes and bridges that are out and all this sort of thing. So the idea is what we need for conflict is a map like that which highlights all of the areas in which things need to be fixed. And it's equivalent to making a Google Map and adopt a highway program. So somebody say, "Well, there's a whole big mess here, but I'm going to take responsibility for fixing this little part of it." The idea is that the way social change really works is not by somebody coming up with the magic bullet (to switch metaphors), that all of a sudden causes everything to go in just the right direction and everybody lives happily ever after. Rather, it's a lot of individual actions that slowly nudge the system in a more positive direction. 

Another way to think about this is that democracy is a giant dispute handling system. And it is a complex system, not a complicated system. Complicated systems are mechanical. All the parts behave in highly predictable ways. You do the same thing. The same thing happens every time. 

People tend to think of conflict in mechanical terms —like making the perfect pool shot.  I have a PowerPoint slide that I show my students, in which someone is trying to line up a perfect pool shot that will cause all the balls will go in the pockets just right,

But what we're really dealing with in a complex society is a table, not with 16 balls, but with billions of balls. And you have millions of people trying to take the perfect shot on the same table at the same time. And that's chaos. But if everybody's trying to nudge the balls in one general direction (and this requires some vision of a future that you want to live in), then the whole system is more likely to move that way.

And going back to Ashok's point, you can't predict the future, but you can predict that a particular action will likely nudge the system in a more positive direction. and another approach will likely nudge it in a bad direction. And if we all try to nudge it in more positive ways, we'll be better off. 

Rukmini: Thank you, Guy. I love the metaphors that you've been using. Ashok, what are your thoughts on this? Do you think peacebuilding as a field needs re-imagining? 

Ashok: I think we need to question the agency, or the power, or even influence, that the average citizen in a nation has in order to influence its external affairs, in order to influence whether the leaders go to war.

Again, I'm coming back to the '60s and '70s. This was a freak situation historically. The development of civil society, as we understand it, is an aberration, a lovely, beautiful aberration. Because in most countries, an ordinary person does not have any influence at all. We need to appreciate that the West has been existing in a bubble of extraordinary political, military, and economic hegemony over the rest of the world, which allowed them to acquire  surplus wealth and allowed its people the freedoms and rights which otherwise would not be possible.

The USIP building came out of that extraordinary privilege. Don't get me wrong. I think diplomats and military leaders have always had influence to do peacekeeping and even some rudimentary form of peacebuilding. But what we understand as the field of peacebuilding comes out of a very specific historical era.  But having said that, I don't want to presume that we will not have the conditions again sometime in the future for the field to reestablish itself in some shape or form. 

Rukmini: Speak to what we need in that situation.

Ashok:  In other words, if in 20 to 50 years, we are in a position where the professional peacebuilder will be needed again because somebody is going to be paying them. I keep using this example. Who pays for peace? It's not the people who are affected by war —for instance, it is not those affected by civil war in Sudan.  It's not the Ukrainian who is being attacked by Russia. It is rich, well-meaning countries and their taxpayers who pay to establish peace elsewhere. So there is no consumer, or at least, the end user is not paying for it. This means that the peacebuilder is forever trying to sell the idea of peace and peacebuilding to those who have excess money, who will pay for the privilege of creating peace elsewhere.

This makes it, as a profession, extremely fragile and tenuous. Dentists and plumbers don't have to struggle to make their case. Society needs them. Even the poor person needs a dentist and a plumber. But peacebuilders aren't in the same position. But having said that, I'm struck by something Emily just wrote there on chat.

I also want to also pick on something you said, Rukmini, in your opening statement, you used two words, "courage and clarity." These are absolutely necessary. And I see courage and clarity as interlinked. It's not the foolish marching on Washington and yelling slogans. That doesn't require courage, unless you are in China. 

The first quality —and I want to talk of dispositions, more than skills—the first quality that a want-to-be peacebuilder, and in a sense, we are all now want-to-be peacebuilders, because nobody is paying us to do what we think we can do. The want-to-be peacebuilder needs to understand the nature of reality, the world.

In other words, starting from the '70s, we came into this field with passion and idealism. And then we learned some tools, or we went to grad school and got a master's degree in peacebuilding. And then we had techniques and tools and strategies and exercises and dialogues, facilitation, and we brought all that. And we thought we could make a difference. As Heidi said, people could do a trauma workshop or reintegrate child soldiers or run a dialogue. I did that for 15 to 20 years. And I thought I was making a difference in terms of the larger peaceability of that environment. And it turned out to be false. 

The first thing we need to understand is the sheer astonishing complexity of the world, what Guy referred to when he talked of the conditions and the extraordinary complexity of cancer as opposed to polio. That is a very difficult thing to grapple with. 

So first, a would-be-peacebuilder needs knowledge. Not knowledge about the field. Knowledge about the world. We have too many humanitarians, too many do-gooders who have extraordinary specific technical knowledge about their area of study or the intervention that they wish to bring to the world.  But without understanding how the world works. 

The second thing peacebuilders need is humility.  If you have clarity, if you can appreciate the extraordinary complexity of the world, then you are most likely to have extraordinary humility. It can't be otherwise. Then you can never be self-righteous. You can never walk into Sudan, as  a nonprofit leader, told me once, "You can't walk in there and try to do peacebuilding work and try to also sell ideas about sexuality and gender to the villagers in Sudan." That's arrogant.  That's worse than presumptuous. And I think this is the fundamental problem with the field. We've become way too big for our boats. I mean, I love the I.M. Pei building, the USIP building. Because of my background as a designer, I can see that it is stunning. It's beautiful. And it made us think that we were exceptionally special, like that building. We saw it, we were in it, and our minds soared. This is like a mecca, a cathedral. I think there's enormous arrogance that comes from that. So I'll just stop here. But in summary, first, we need to understand the nature of the world that we wish to make an intervention on. And coming out of that, we must approach our work with extraordinary humility. And we can't afford to take our personal political or philosophical or spiritual biases into the environment that we are hoping to help serve. 

Rukmini: Thank you. There's a lot to chew on there. Ashok, you mentioned about Western hegemony and privilege. As a practitioner, I'm also thinking of how Western thought processes are very much alive and kicking in the rest of the world today.  And increasingly, I've been reflecting on peacebuilding as a very subtle form of colonization that seems to be thriving. And that has its own,  very unnamed and very complex impact that we're dealing with right now.

One last question for each one of you, and I'll invite very quick responses to this, and then we'll open it up for questions and reflections from the audience as well. Heidi, let's start with you. If you could name one reframing or one pivot that the peacebuilding community and practitioners need to embrace right now, what would that be?

Heidi: Well, I'll echo Ashok and say humility, that we need to realize that we don't have all the answers. At best, we have questions, but I think we even need to rethink our questions. We need to realize that we need to both learn a lot about the world and listen to the people that we're working with and respect the people that we're working with. Don't demean their views or think that they're wrong and that we need to set them right. We need to figure out how we can help them and their opponents work together more effectively. But we have to honor where everybody is coming from at the beginning and not come in with our overarching agenda that we want to impose. 

Rukmini: Guy, would you like to respond to the same question?

Guy: What I think we need to do is to recognize that at its core, peacebuilding is a do-it-yourself activity. The most important thing is to demonstrate that we can build a peaceful society of our own and that it functions. And the fact that we (in the United States) can't do that and can't show that it works here, shows that we have no business telling the rest of the world what to do or to do what we're doing. And so I think that the first thing to do is to go back and rediscover a lot about what we know about how to actually collaboratively solve problems, find win-win solutions, bridge differences, but not someplace far away, but in our own backyard. 

I think back to a lot of consensus-building processes that were successful in the United States, mostly in the '70s and '80s. There's much to be learned there. If we can demonstrate that it works and build a society that works, then we become a role model worth emulating. Right now, we're demonstrating that peacebuilding and consensus building doesn't work. And we have to build a society that works in the face of what we call "bad-faith actors". These are people who have, for selfish reasons, decided that they want to sabotage a successful democratic society —both internal and external enemies. And we're not being very good at that. We're falling into the anger trap and the hate trap that we accuse other people of doing. "Walk the talk" is, I think, also a good line. 

Rukmini: Ashok, you partly responded to this, but is there something you want to add, one pivot or one reframe that we urgently need to adopt? 

Ashok: I want to just say whatever I have said so far should not be taken to mean that I do not sympathize with the tens of thousands of people who have lost their livelihoods or whose livelihoods have become extremely fragile. I should know something about that, because I have basically been canceled and shut out of my own professions over the past seven to eight years. I haven't had a proper livelihood for eight years. So I get it. This is earth shaking to an individual. 

Having said that, I would say the most important thing we can do is see this as an opportunity to learn and grow. Despite the fact that I've been brushed off from the field, I still consider myself still kind of peacebuilder. Upheavals like this present us with an extraordinary opportunity to step back and ask ourselves why we want to do what we do, why we believe it is so important and whether we are the right people to do it. 

I think the idea of "following your bliss" is another American idea which has been basically brought down to earth. These are, again, extremely privileged notions which would not have been possible anywhere else. And I think if a young person or even someone in her 30s wants to be a peacebuilder.  You need to ask yourself, "What is it about me, and who I am, I that brings me to this work? 

And here's the route.  If you want to do it, don't expect the world to pay for it. If you want to do it, do it. You are an extraordinary human being. But be willing to pay the price for it. 

I'll just end with this. The professionalization of the nonprofit sector has made it very easy for people to be idealists, to follow their bliss, and have the taxpayer pay for it. This is a ridiculous state of affairs. The collapse of the system was inevitable. Does this mean that we shouldn't be doing it? No, we need to do it. We need to be willing to pay the price to do it. Not expect someone, a plumber in Idaho, to pay for me to go around the world to do my "white savior" or, in my case, "dark brown savior" work.

Rukmini: Thank you. And as we step into engaging what the listeners have been sharing, I'll invite us to take a moment to receive what has been shared. I imagine there's a fair bit of churning for a lot of us. So stay with what's present for you intellectually, also in terms of your feelings, what's happening in your body. Let's acknowledge that for a moment before we go ahead. 

Here we went into the question-and-answer section, and unfortunately, the chat didn't get saved, so we don't know the names of the people who shared comments or asked the questions.  We apologize. 

Question/comment:: Hi. I have a reflection and a question. My reflection is I used to be at the LBJ School of Public Policy. One of my professors was Barbara Jordan. I was inspired by her. I was inspired by public service. And one thing I was told was, "Don't worry, you'll always have a job." It wasn't about solutions. It was, "Don't worry, you'll always have a job." And it was true when the Republicans came in and the Reagan group came in to Austin, I got caught in that wave, and all the Democrats were fired, and we were all given a job. And then when the Democrats came, we were all fired again. So it kind of continues like that.

It seems to me that public policy has always had some intricacies involved other than just the solution. Solving peace, you know bringing peace to the world, and those kind of things. There's so many other intricacies, it seems. So yeah, I was very surprised the United States Institute of Peace was dismantled. But then I look around and I say, "Where is the peace?  How has peace been increased?" Those are the questions I've asked myself since some of these things have happened that I wouldn't normally ask myself. Is that something you have been hearing from your students —more questions about  where, actually, is peace? And like you said, Ashok, who's actually paying for the peace and reexamining those kind of concepts?

That's part A of the question. Part B of the question is I've been doing something called Global Social Witnessing with Thomas Hübl in San Francisco. And I heard a woman speaking there. She was from Pakistan. Her family had moved to India, and she had listened to her grandmother and grandfather talking about the partition and how much pain they had. And in that talk, there was such a shift— from 300, 400 people listening to this one woman. And she had a shift from where she was in her pain state to a place of optimism and hope. Her energy freed up. Imagine that happening to a million people or 5 million people. Why not? Why can we not imagine that happening to a culture who is still angry?

And look what happened last night in India and Pakistan. And look what's still happening, all this anger towards each other. So that's the second part of the question.

Rukmini: Thank you, Roger. Heidi, would you like to respond to Roger.

Heidi: Yes, I have a response to the first part of the question anyway. We started with the Alliance for Peacebuilding way, way before it had that name, when it was kind of a social club of about 50 people. And their meetings were really exciting because they were really broad thinking and really came up with innovative new ideas and things that we could all go home and work on. It was just really inspirational. And over the years, more and more, they got involved with USAID, and it became much more of like a trade association that was trying to compete effectively for USAID grants and carrying out USAID grants.  The imagination was gone. The excitement was gone. It just was seen as a job, just like you said, or maybe it was as Ashok said, just like a plumber. It was a job. And they were doing it for the money, a lot of them. Not all of them, certainly, but a lot more people seemed like they were doing it for the money more than for the cause.

Now, I heard Ashok say we should do it out of love. We shouldn't do it for money. And unfortunately, most people can't do that. So I do recognize that people do need a career. They do need money. And I very much hope people will go into this career. But I also hope that they go into it with some passion of learning and doing new things and good things and innovative things and not just be the journeyman who does the same thing over and over again that they were trained to do in order to get the USAID grant.

So while I am sad for all the folks who lost their jobs and a lot of my friends were among them. I think it's partly due to the fact that we got stuck in a rut and we lost that imagination, and we haven't been very successful. And if we had been as successful as plumbers, we'd have lots of work now. Plumbers aren't in any trouble of losing their jobs, but we haven't been as successful at doing our job as plumbers have been. And we need to look at that. 

Guy: A couple of quick thoughts. One is I had a little graduation lecture that I gave to my Peace in Conflict Study students. And I explained that there aren't really a whole lot of jobs out there for peace and conflict studies, where that's your full-time job. But there are an enormous number of jobs out there where knowing something about how to deal peacefully with difficult conflict is critically important. And the thing to do is to integrate those skills into all of those other jobs. And there certainly is a sense in which a field can be distorted by the flow of money. Heidi and I are finding that we've been vastly more productive since we retired and since we started getting our work funded by Social Security and have quit having to chase foundation grants.

This goes back to the creativity that Heidi was talking about. And this is an area where we need some real creativity. If we can figure out how to solve these problems, then money will follow because these conflicts are enormously costly. People understand that they're costly. 

One of the stories we like to tell is that we originally got a big grant from the Hewlett Foundation to create a Conflict Resolution Consortium. And we told all of our activist friends we had this big grant for conflict resolution, and they were aghast! They hated conflict resolution because they thought it forced them to compromise their basic values. But when we reframed what we did and we said, look, we're looking for ways in which we can fight for things that we think are important in more constructive and effective ways, all of a sudden, people were very, very interested.

So the way to do this is to spin what we're doing as helping people not only advance their interests, but to understand how to reconcile and work with the interests of others. So it isn't just, I'll-fight-you-for-it rules, but we really can get more if we work together. And we have an economy, a global economy that depends on working together. And if it fails, we're all going to have trouble getting enough to eat.

Rukmini: Ashok, quick response from you, and let's move to the next question. 

Ashok: Actually, are you going to take up Ryan's question? That's what I wanted to talk about. Ryan asked: "While humility is essential, why shouldn't peacebuilding also be well-resourced and celebrated institutionally, like a Google campus for peace or a monumental center like USIP? And why can't peace education be elevated to the level of STEM learning?" That's Ryan's question. And it's a great question. I wish the answer was, "Why not? Let's do it!" The problem is, again, it comes back to this. Who's going to pay for it? It's obvious that the US government can't pay. And guess what? Neither can the Norwegians or the Scandinavians pay anymore. They have to double their defense expenditures to make sure they don't get eaten up by Russia. So peacebuilding is not going to get government funding anymore —and for good reason. I think it would be wonderful if private foundations helped pay for it. In other words, the capitalist system (which I have major problems wit), but that's how you generate money. If the capitalist system inspires capitalists, who will then create foundations that can set up their own Google campuses or USIP beautiful buildings for us to do our work, that would be great. 

But I'm interested in something you mentioned before when you talk about why is it that peacebuilding cannot be elevated? I think that's really interesting because traditional societies (and here I'm going to say something that is not going to go down well with people), but every traditional society, including the West, pre-20th century, the education of the elite included both war and peace.  Elite societies have always paid enormous attention to creating the well-rounded philosopher kings. Whether it's the Greeks, whether it's ancient India, the warrior classes, the Brahmans, it doesn't matter, but a very thin sliver of society had the opportunity to be trained as people who were sensitized and whose sensibilities on all these factors were developed.

The idea of Western universities was the same. Unfortunately (and folks won't like me saying this), we democratized our education system so much that we lost the elite quality. And I have no problem with people like me, who are not elite, getting an opportunity to go to Harvard—provided we deserve to go to Harvard, and we work our butts off to understand and to take advantage of the extraordinary learning that the Enlightenment era, that  Western civilization could offer me. Unfortunately, the universities got completely supported with social justice and everything else, and the standards were destroyed.

But my primary point is that traditional societies have always paid attention. not just to war, but peace. And I think in a way, if we continue as a profession, we need to go back to square one and develop ourselves as well-rounded individuals before we can presume to go out and create peace in the world.

Rukmini: Two more questions before we start moving to close. I'm synthesizing Peter's question — Peter, would you like to speak to it quickly? 

Peter: Okay, sure. I guess you saw my question in the chat. And thinking about it more myself, I'm thinking if the United Nations was much more powerful and the United States would allow it to have more power and try to work more within the United Nations for diplomacy ,rather than having so much war, maybe that would be helpful. But I also wonder how much our economic system actually contributes to war and unrest in the world where the quest for profits goes over the quest for peace. And our materialism maybe is hurting our spirituality. And spirituality, I think, trying to do the right thing, works towards peace. So I see our whole country contributing more towards war in the world right now, due to maybe the way our economic system is set up. I don't know if there's much we can do about that. 

Ashok: Can I respond to Peter, please? Peter, actually, what you are asking is very heartfelt. I see it as heartfelt. And I want to just say when I see this as a foreigner, while I am an American citizen now, I grew up outside of America. I spent most of my adulthood outside of America. And I've done this work outside of America. The US is far more peace-loving than most other societies in the world. In no other society would field like peacebuilding ever have developed.  And I think while the US is also an 800-pound gorilla that has created havoc in many parts of the world. 

If the US couldn't successfully manage the League of Nations or the United Nations, no other country can do that. If anything, because I've been tracking the development of the United Nations for the past 50 odd years, the rest of the world, or rather most of the world, is interested in the United Nations only for their own very narrow self-interest. And for most of my life, the Arab world, Soviet Russia, the entire Soviet bloc, and even countries like Singapore that I admire, have been completely against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They have challenged it. The right-wing Hindu nationalist government, now for the past 11 years in India, has made it very clear. We don't believe the Western idea of a liberal democracy or secularism or human rights works for our 5,000-year-old culture. So I just want to put it out there that we need to probably also step back from the idea that the US is to blame. Without the US, we wouldn't have had even this rudimentary order in the world today. 

That  doesn't mean I'm a fan of capitalism.  I've written a lot about it. Capitalism is extraordinarily destructive. But if you're talking of peace, never before in human history, has the world seen as much of relative peace and peacebuilding as the last 80 years. 

Rukmini:  I'm going to turn to each one of you for a 60-second, let's say, pearls of wisdom that you want to leave us with before we close. But before that, I also want to acknowledge Sanda's lovely reflection on the chat and a question that seems to be emerging from there, which is how can peacebuilding efforts remain grounded and context-specific, particularly when small-scale interventions are often undermined by larger systemic forces and when basic survival needs like food and security are not met for a lot of people, if any of you would like to respond to that.

Guy: I've been thinking about a chart about the difficulty factor associated with building a liberal democracy that really lives up to its ideals. And I think a big part of what we're struggling with is that democracy sort of worked in the United States or certainly in certain areas of the United States that were culturally homogeneous. And there were a few downtrodden groups, but they didn't complain too much. It was all, sort of, okay. But now we're dealing with a vastly larger, international system. The diversity and the differing cultural beliefs are vastly greater than they used to be. The complexity of the system is greater. Basically, it's a whole lot tougher problem. And that the thing that we need to do is to figure out and set about the systematic business of analyzing every aspect of this problem, figuring out ways in which we can take these incremental steps that will make things a little bit better. 

Universities need to abandon the orthodoxy, this notion that they've got it all figured out, and the thing is to get everybody on the same page and to punish anybody who dares deviate. We need to start asking the really hard questions about what it's going to take.

There's also this great paradox. The world seems to be coming unglued. But then on the other hand, we have this astonishing global economy and the number of cooperative agreements that make that happen. When I was in graduate school, I plotted a graph that showed that when the world population hit 3 billion, we'd overshoot and collapse. It's now over 7 billion.

When I wrote that — in the 1970s, the notion was that there would be an overshoot and collapse and the world population would just starve to death. There was no way we could get to seven billion. Now we've done that with increasing standards of living. But it all depends on this web of agreements and relationships and these kinds of enormous corporate efficiencies that we don't like because they've got some very rough edges. But we really all depend on it to eat, quite literally. So I think the big challenge is to recognize that this is an extraordinarily complex and difficult problem. The good news is, from our Beyond Intractability work, there are a lot of people who are doing very creative, thoughtful work. And we just need to build a community and work through this. And I think there's real potential if we do, but it's not going to be easy. But it is going to be an exciting career opportunity for the next generation.

Rukmini: Absolutely. Thanks, Guy. I'm going to turn to each one of you and ask you to offer perhaps one sentence or two that you'd like to leave us. Heidi, would you like to start us off? 

Heidi: Well, I'm just going to repeat something that's been said, I think, by all of us. Rather than moaning and groaning, let's look at the current situation as an opportunity and figure out how we, as individuals and professions and a society, can grab that opportunity and turn it into something better than what we had before rather, than bemoaning what we've lost.

Guy: I would invite people to follow our Substack newsletter, Beyondintractability.substack.com. We also have a major website that's about to be dramatically upgraded and improved, something we've been working on for many years, which is a window into all of the fabulous things that people are doing. It isn't like nobody's working on this. There are a lot of great ideas. And we invite you to get involved and contribute yours. 

Ashok: My last thought is —I just have to repeat myself. This is not a time for action. I know we are predisposed to action. We always keep saying, "Stop talking and start doing things." I think it's our actions, our doing that's created a horrendously complicated and messy world. Just stop. Just stop. Take a step back and ask yourself some really tough questions. Because really, in a way, I speak for myself. Who am I to try to do all this stuff at a macro level? I didn't take care of my family, my neighborhood. And I was flying around the world trying to set the world right. I think we need to just take a step back and ask of each other, of ourselves, not even anyone else, some hard questions. And any clarity that comes out of that will be humble. And I think it will make us stronger in terms of anything else that we want to do in the world. This is an opportunity. The crisis is unfolding. It's going to be far worse than most of us imagine. And coming out of it on the other side, only those who have genuinely reflected and tried to understand themselves and the world will be in a position to do anything about it.

Rukmini and all: Thank you, everyone, for coming. Thank you. Yes. Thanks, everyone, for churning together.