Newsletter #350 — May 1, 2025
Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess
Intervenors Coming to the U.S. A Role-Switch Thought Exercise
This exercise is intended to help students—and conflict resolution practitioners—understand how recipients of conflict resolution services might feel when outsiders come in to help them solve their own conflicts. Too often, Americans travel abroad and present themselves as "the experts" who know more about how to solve another community's or another country's problem than its citizens know themselves. The same can sometimes be true for mediators working within the U.S. This exercise lets participants consider what it feels like to be on the receiving end of conflict resolution services, and consider what providers can do to make their services both more palatable and more useful for their intended "clients."
Note: I created assignment 11 years ago, when the issue it highlights (a police killing of a black man) was recent, big news. It is startling to see how little has changed. Some students, particularly non-US citizens, may not remember these particular incidents--but that doesn't matter--similar (and related) things keep on happening. So the article--and this exercise--are still very relevant.
Before participants can do this exercise, they need to read the article If It Happened There: Courts Sanction Killings by U.S. Security Forces. This, as you may be able to tell, is a news report of the aftermath of the 2014 Ferguson, MO and New York, NY police killings of black men and the subsequent court decisions, written from the point of view of another country "looking in"—a much the way we "look in" and "report on" other world trouble spots.
Continuing from that point of view, we asked students to consider how we, in the US, might respond, if peacebuilders from abroad (let's say a team from South Africa and Rwanda--places with a lot of experience dealing with the aftermath of racial and ethnic conflicts--decided they should come to the U.S. to "help us" deal with this and related situations. (Alternatively, you can look at what is happening with respect to race (or immigration) in the U.S. currently. You could look at the fights over deportations, or look at more recent police killings of racial minorities or police treatment of people of color more broadly). The same questions apply regardless of your focus. The consider the following questions:
- What roles do you think the outside peacebuilders would and should play?
- What could be done that would be well received? What might they do that would not be well received?
- Consider the possibility that the peacebuilders came without an invitation.
- What if a local leader invited them? A congressperson? How would that change things?
- Lastly, what does your answer to this question have to say about US peacebuilders going into other places? Did it teach you anything?
See more details here.
John Paul Lederach's Meeting Place Exercise -- Heidi's Best of All Choice!
Many years ago, I participated several times in an exercise I call "the Meeting Place Exercise" (I don't know if John Paul calls it that), but it was described in Chapter 4 (“The Meeting Place”) in his book Journey Toward Reconciliation and was also described in Chapter 3 of his more famous book, Building Peace. Guy and I have also run this exercise countless times ourselves. I consider it to be the best-ever conflict resolution exercise because it gets people thinking very deeply about questions we tend to take for granted, and it forces participants to make discoveries about themselves and others that can be very profound.
In both books, John Paul explains how he developed the exercise when he was working with the Mennonite Central Committee, running conflict resolution workshops in Nicaragua, during the civil war. He worked with a "conciliation team" that was mediating negotiations between the Sandinista government and the Yatama, an indigenous resistance movement. He described how that experience transformed his understanding of reconciliation:
Given the context of war and the deep-rooted animosities that persisted, these were highly charged meetings. At the opening of each village meeting, the Nicaraguan conciliators would read Psalm 85. The psalmist refers to the return of people to their land and the opportunity for peace. In two short lines at the heart of the text (85:10), the Spanish version reads (in translation), "Truth and mercy have met together; peace and justice have kissed." Hearing these powerful images time and again in the context of a deeply divided society, I became curious as to how the conciliators understood the text and the concepts that form a pair of intriguing paradoxes.
He created an exercise to explore those paradoxes. In his version he had people discuss each concept (truth, justice, peace, and mercy) as if they were people, "describing the images they brought to mind, and what each would have to say about conflict." Guy and I found students found this easier to conceptualize if we said they were leaders of four NGOS: Truth First!, Justice Now! Advocates for Peace, and United Clergy for Mercy and Forgiveness. We asked each NGO to discuss what their goal(s) were, how they planned to reach them, how they would know when they had attained those goals, whose help they might need along the way (in other words, who they might collaborate with), and which of the other four NGOs was most likely to be an obstacle to their success. After giving them at least a half hour to discuss these questions, we asked each NGO to choose a spokesperson to come up to the front of the room to present their decisions.
In the presentations, it would become obvious that the goals and theories of change were not only different, they were often in conflict with each other. Like John Paul, we would mediate between the different groups, asking such questions as what might "justice" give u, to allow "mercy" to meet its fundamental needs? What might "mercy" give up to allow "truth" and "justice" to meet their needs? What would peace give up to allow justice to emerge? Etcetera. Eventually, we hoped we could attain an agreement where all four NGOs/people could be satisfied. Again quoting John Paul from Journey Toward Reconciliation:
As a conclusion, we put the four concepts on paper on the wall, as depicted in figure 1. When I asked the participants what we should call the place where Truth and Mercy, Justice and Peace meet, one of them immediately said, "That place is reconciliation." What was so striking about this conceptualization was the idea that reconciliation represents a social space. Reconciliation is a locus, a place where people and things come together.
When we did this exercise, we explained that if we are be able to create a future in which almost everyone will want to live (our definition of "reconciliation," we have to create a future in which peace, justice, truth, and mercy are all balanced. We cannot, as we said before, impose one side's views on the others. That will not be acceptable to justice, nor will it long be acceptable to peace. At the same time, we cannot ignore what happened in the past, failing to find truth. But we also cannot use truth as a bludgeon, wiping out mercy and peace. We have to find a balance between all four of these elements.
There is no recipe for doing this. It will be different in every case. But it will always involve a delicate balance. I have participated in the exercise twice with John Paul running it, and Guy and I have run it ourselves maybe 30 or 40 times. The outcome is almost always different. And we learn something from the experience every time, as people ask different questions, apply the scenario to different conflicts, balance the factors in different ways. There are many more ins and outs to this exercise too. Unfortunately, we have never written this exercise up on BI, as we have the others, but we have a video which describes this exercise, and we discuss it and explore the four components of peace, truth, justice and mercy in the three newsletter series Newsletter 184, Newsletter 206, and Newsletter 214.
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About the MBI Newsletters
Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
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