• Restoring Justice, Cultivating Hope: A Scholar/Practitioner Conversation

    This panel features an interdisciplinary look at the pursuit of justice and social change through the lens of conflict transformation.

    Panelists:
    • Netta Avineri, professor of TESOL/TFL at MIIS and head of the Graduate Pillar of the CT Collaborative (moderator)
    • sujatha baliga, attorney, restorative justice practitioner, and MacArthur Fellow
    • Sarah Stroup, professor at Middlebury, NGO scholar, and CT Collaborative director

    Sponsored by the Conflict Transformation Collaborative

    McCone Irvine Auditorium

    Open to the Public
  • ELP Fall Lunch Meeting

    This is an opportunity for the ELP participants to join together for lunch and discussion.

    McCullough - Mitchell Green Lounge

    Closed to the Public
  • ELP Fall Lunch Meeting

    This is an opportunity for the ELP participants to join together for lunch and discussion.

    McCullough - Mitchell Green Lounge

    Closed to the Public
  • ELP Fall Lunch Meeting

    This is an opportunity for the ELP participants to join together for lunch and discussion.

    McCullough - Mitchell Green Lounge

    Closed to the Public
  • ELP Fall Lunch Meeting

    This is an opportunity for the ELP participants to join together for lunch and discussion.

    McCullough - Mitchell Green Lounge

    Closed to the Public
  • The Vermont Restorative Approaches Collaborative: a community discussion

    The Vermont Restorative Approaches Collaborative (VTRAC) was established in 2019 through a VT Agency of Education grant in order to support the development of restorative approaches in schools. In this lunchtime discussion, Lindsey Halman will describe the work of VTRAC and lead a discussion of Middlebury’s own needs and efforts in restorative practices. Halman is executive director of UP for Learning, a Montpelier-based nonprofit supporting youth empowerment in educational institutions.

    McCullough - Mitchell Green Lounge

    Open to the Public
  • ELP Fall Lunch Meeting

    This is an opportunity for the ELP participants to join together for lunch and discussion.

    McCullough - Conference Room @ the Grille

    Closed to the Public
  • ELP Fall Lunch Meeting

    This is an opportunity for the ELP participants to join together for lunch and discussion.

    McCullough - Conference Room @ the Grille

    Closed to the Public
  • ELP Fall Lunch Meeting

    This is an opportunity for the ELP participants to join together for lunch and discussion.

    McCullough - Mitchell Green Lounge

    Closed to the Public
  • ELP Fall Lunch Meeting

    This is an opportunity for the ELP participants to join together for lunch and discussion.

    McCullough - Mitchell Green Lounge

    Closed to the Public

Past Events

  • A flying white dove with colors coming out of its wings and tail feathers.

    International Peace Day

    The Language Studies Department invites you to celebrate the International Day of Peace with us on Thursday, September 21 at the Samson Patio from 10am-12pm. This event will include short speeches and reflections on peace in multiple languages. Cohorts from Arabic, French, English, Japanese, and Spanish will be presenting in their target languages. The event is open to the campus at large and we welcome all students to share how to say “peace” in their native languages. The UN theme for this internationally recognized day is “Actions for Peace: Our Ambitions for the #Global Goals.”

    McGowan MG102

    Closed to the Public
  • ELP Fall Lunch Meeting

    This is an opportunity for the ELP participants to join together for lunch and discussion.

    McCullough - Mitchell Green Lounge

    Closed to the Public
  • ELP Fall Lunch Meeting

    This is an opportunity for the ELP participants to join together for lunch and discussion.

    McCullough - Mitchell Green Lounge

    Closed to the Public
  • Image of a blue knot

    Building Compassionate Communities with Mindfulness

    Summer Convening on Experiential Learning and Conflict Transformation

    In July 2023, we will gather diverse stakeholders who are engaging with conflict transformation through experiential learning to:
    - Deepen our understanding of conflict transformation as a framework for relationship building and social change;
    - Build connections and share learning among students, educators, and community partners;
    - Explore mindfulness as a skill for connecting with others across difference and transforming society.

    Axinn Center 104

    Closed to the Public
  • Image of a blue knot

    Responding to Conflict as Engaging in Community

    Summer Convening on Experiential Learning and Conflict Transformation

    In July 2023, we will gather diverse stakeholders who are engaging with conflict transformation through experiential learning to:
    - Deepen our understanding of conflict transformation as a framework for relationship building and social change;
    - Build connections and share learning among students, educators, and community partners;
    - Explore mindfulness as a skill for connecting with others across difference and transforming society.

    Davis Family Library 105A

    Closed to the Public
  • Weekly CT Lunch Meeting

    This series is an ongoing Conflict Transformation focused lunch meeting. It will

    McCullough - Conference Room @ the Grille

    Closed to the Public
  • Weekly CT Lunch Meeting

    This series is an ongoing Conflict Transformation focused lunch meeting. It will

    McCullough - Conference Room @ the Grille

    Closed to the Public
  • Transforming Conflict: An Interdisciplinary Conversation

    Join the Graduate Pillar of the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation for a day of dialogue, storytelling, and discussion about conflict transformation at local and global scales - community-based advocacy, countering extremism, environmental conflict, intercultural engagement, peacebuilding, and more. 65 Conflict Transformation Fellows as well as faculty and staff will share in a range of formats about their year-long projects, courses, research, immersive experiences, and community engagement focused on social change.

    Middlebury Institute Campus

    Open to the Public

Conflict Transformation Talks

Conflict Transformation and Liberal Learning: What It Means and Why It Matters

Conflict Transformation

- Good evening everyone. Before we get started, our crowd control manager, Selena, would like to offer you some information about the exits.

- [Selena] Yes hello everybody. My name is Selena and I’ll be your crowd control manager. So just to keep in mind the exits, there’s an exit here, exit right here, one in back, and the one to my right, which might be your left. Keep in mind to please keep aisles clear of any personal items or any debris just in case of an emergency, please. And I hope you guys have a lovely night.

- Thank you. Thank you all for being here tonight. My name is Sarah. I am a professor of political science here at the college and the new director of the Katherine Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation. I will be brief tonight, but I wanted to begin with one invitation and a few words of gratitude. First, an invitation. The Clifford Symposium is an early conversation about conflict transformation at Middlebury. There will be more. Our team is in listening mode this weekend, so this conversation is for you. We want to hear from you, but we are around, so please reach out with all of it. Your questions, comments, criticisms, thoughts. With that, I will move to gratitude. The work of conflict transformation is grounded in relationships and I am personally grateful for the encouragement, the aid and the support of so many people. The conflict transformation collaborative staff has taken on an enormous load in these first few months. Many thanks to Erin Anderson, our program manager and April Lajeunesse, our program coordinator. I have a lot, so I hope you’ll clap for all of them. The faculty, staff, and students who are supporting the grant and presenting at the Clifford are leading this conversation from within. Thank you for joining them tomorrow and the next day in the Mahaney Art Center on Saturday and in Wilson Hall in McCullough tomorrow. Okay, you can save your applause for all of these thank you to the college staff in communications, facilities, catering, media services, the Knoll, Mahaney Arts Center, Center for Community Engagement Events Management and more. You may not see these people up on the stage this weekend, but this set of events would not be possible without them. Michelle McCauley started off the collaborative and then took up a bigger load this summer as our interim provost, her early plans shaped the wonderful programming that we’re offering this weekend. Our president, Laurie Patton, has made it possible for us to invest deeply in this work. Finally, and I hope you will applaud for yourselves and all of these wonderful people. Most importantly, thanks to you for joining this conversation. You have invested your time. It is time that is the essential and yet seemingly scarce resource that we need to do this work. Thank you for being here and welcome.

- Thank you Sarah, and welcome everyone. It’s so great to see folks here ready to come and talk and listen and engage. Just a reminder about the person that inspired this symposium, the Clifford Symposium was named after professor of History emeritus Nicholas Roland Clifford. Nick Clifford taught at Middlebury from 1966 to 1993 and also served as a trustee, a vice president and a provost at the college. He was well known during his many years on the faculty and in the administration for his ability to cultivate critical inquiry, the kind of inquiry that we’ll be exploring over the next few days. And during this annual event of this symposium, which is in fact the kickoff to the academic year, this year’s theme of conflict transformation is particularly timely. As Sarah just mentioned, we have been the recipient of a grant that has allowed us to create the Catherine Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation. And it’s an initiative that we intend will embed the principles and practices of conflict transformation in the full continuum of a liberal arts experience from high school through a graduate school with a seven year 25 million grant supporting courses, research and projects across our institution. Middlebury serving as an incubator for the development of a research base, pedagogical tools and student experiences that will reach across multiple states and more than 100 partner universities around the world. And today I am honored to introduce to you one of the central thinkers in this field. John Paul Lederach. John is senior fellow at Humanity United Foundation, which is looking at all of the world’s challenging problems and creating really pragmatic solutions to them. He’s also Professor Emeritus of International Peace Building at the Joan B. Crock Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. And he is perhaps most importantly for all of us today, a practitioner in conciliation processes who is active and has been active on long-term basis in Latin America, Africa and Southeast and Central Asia. John Paul is well known for his work in developing culturally appropriate approaches to conflict transformation and the design and implementation of integrative and strategic approaches to peace building and where he goes peace slash. We served as the director of the Peace Accord Matrix initiative at the Crock Institute and is currently a member of the Advisory Council for the Truth Commission in Columbia. He’s also the author at editor of two dozen books and manuals including Building Peace, sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, published by the US Institute of Peace Press and Moral Imagination, the Art and Soul of Building Peace published by Oxford University Press. And those students, faculty and staff who are involved in this initiative have all read his little book of conflict transformation, which in its ideas is not so little at all. And I wanted to share with you a few of his words before we hear from him to frame what we are doing here at Middlebury as we continue to explore conflict and its transformation. He writes, “In conflict before we even hear what the other side has said, we assume we know what they mean. We have already attached motives to their messages and even before they have finished are developing our responses. But John Paul argues if we develop our moral imagination intentionally, we will listen differently and be able to make a dent in the systemic forces of oppression and violence that we ourselves are a part of. This capacity of peace building as moral imagination is an instrument more powerful than force and peace building as an endeavor that no longer is a function of outside interventions demanding outcomes foreign to those inside the conflict. Peace building instead becomes a local endeavor, often slow where local actors lead and where we are not cut up in a fascial reflex of “forgiving and forgetting”, but rather remembering and changing. And remembering and changing is a great description of the work of liberal learning.” We are so fortunate to have Jean Paul here with us today speaking to us on conflict transformation, the challenges and promise of this century. Please join me now in welcoming Jean Paul Lederach.

- Thank you Laurie for this welcome and Sarah and others for such a a wonderful day today. In the conversations that we’ve had, it’s the first time that we’ve, my wife and I have visited Vermont and the first time in this famous Middlebury campus. So it’s really an honor and a privilege to be with you for the Clifford Lecture. And I was telling Laurie the other day, that she succeeded where I failed all of you in many regards, some years back attempting to bring the notions of this idea about conflict transformation into the mainstay of the liberal art endeavor. So this this beginning point, this starting point that you’re at is an extraordinary moment. I’m hoping that it ripples into many, many locations. I have, as Laurie stated, come mostly from a practitioner scholar background and this has been a lifetime endeavor starting back in the 1970s until now. I am getting gray hair. I can’t calculate how many decades that is, but it’s a few. And much of that engagement over the years has mostly been in settings of really violent conflict. Journalists sometimes call these war zones local people that I tend to work with I think understand the challenges and the odds that they faced. But they have mostly been my teachers. And I’m always a bit taken aback when people assume that these people who are the teachers are sometimes referred to as the victims because I experienced them as artists, artists of resilience, artists of resistance, artists of social change. So you can imagine that over these years at times my soul has sought to find the ways to sit with suffering and with time my activism as a younger person began to find its way toward more of a contemplative understanding. I go on meditative walks almost every day and I write haiku. Small side note, in fact, my dear wife who’s sitting in the back room here, the back of the room sometimes says that if I had not met her, I might be a monk in the Himalayas. So it gives you some idea. Over these past five years, I have been writing centuries what I call centuries. It’s a kind of a odd style of writing it. It has some roots that trace back to the 14th century mystics from England to the desert fathers and the desert mothers, a way of carrying with them their learning and their understanding in a simplest form that could be remembered at least in my case, this kind of writing falls somewhere between poetry and probes and so it’s mostly unpublishable. It’s not an easy, an easy task to accomplish and to find its way out into the world. It requires kind of letting your hand follow your heart more directly. So not totally circumventing the head, but finding ways that the embodiment of experience moves more directly into the page. It works a lot with paradox. It can move by associations back and forth you hope. Of course for the occasional bit of wisdom, the century name comes from the fact that they were typically numbered one to 100 and that completed a century of ponderings. So I have a book of that’s nearly completed, 10 chapters numbered one to 100, that is 1000 ponderings and I promise not to share them all tonight. But the book starts with something that I learned from a mentor of mine teacher, a Quaker, a pioneer in the peace studies field whose name was, Elise Bolding and she and her husband Kenneth Bolding were two of the founding people who really began a lot of this field here in the US of peace studies. She always taught us through a little exercise how we can locate ourselves in the 200 year present. Now you could take the word present to mean gift and it was a gift what we received from her, but she was referring to a temporal present as in the past, present, and future. And so I wanna start this evening with a little interactive exercise with you because I would like for you to take a moment to locate yourself in your 200 year present. Now I’m gonna follow the basic instructions a bit circumvented because time is short and you can do this in your head if you have a piece of paper, you may want to take a small note or two, but it goes like this. So please join me think for a moment as a starting point of the earliest memory that you have of the oldest person who would’ve held you, tussled your hair, or played with you. So the earliest memory that you have of the oldest person that would’ve held you just get that image of that person. Maybe there’s more than one, pick one. Now if possible, I’ll give an example. Mine would be my great-grandmother, Lydia Miller. My great-grandmother lived to be nearly a hundred years old, ages three, four, and five. During the summer visits I would sit on her lap. Now with the image of that person in your mind, do a rough calculation back to their birth date or better yet to their birth decade, roughly what decade might they have been born in? So I’ll go back to my grandmother, Lydia Miller. She was born in the 1860s. 1860s. Okay, now jot that number down, whatever your decade number is of the earliest memory you have of the oldest person at that time that held you and we’ll segue to the second part. And the second part is to think about your extended family and friendships. Who is the youngest person in your extended family or in your close relationships? The youngest person that you have tussled their hair, played with them or held them on your lap. In our case, it’s our little grandson Issa, who is now three years old right now. Once you have the image of your youngest person in mind, think out ahead and imagine they live a robust life, a robust life. To what decade might they live to enjoy their children, their grandchildren, possibly their great-grandchildren. I think in our case little Issa probably has a very good chance to live past the turn of the century and possibly in past 2110. 2110. And he might be a grandfather by then. So here comes the 200 year present. Take your two numbers, the number of roughly the decade that the oldest person that you knew was born compared with the number of how far out the youngest person of your extended family might live and do this little mathematical equation where you subtract one from the other. So in my case, let’s just take 2110 and 1860. That’s about 250 years, 250 years. Elise would say that is your 200 year present. These are the lives and the people that have touched you and these are the lives and the people that you will touch. It’s an extraordinary thing to imagine our location across centuries. So as a starting point, two thoughts and then I promise to go to conflict transformation thought one, maybe this is the century, maybe this is the century. The century when our ability to imagine our common humanity as a global family will shape whether our species survives. This could be the century of whether our imagination about our humanity as a global family will lead us in the direction of finding the survival of our species. We might call this centuries and centuries forward. Looking back, oh that was the century when humanity found its vocation Thought two, our species vocation and we don’t usually talk about a vocation of a species. I’ve been exploring this question of what is the vocation of a species? Ecosystem Biologist, take note that when a species go missing, all kinds of things start to happen in the ecosystem, which means they have a niche, they have a place, they have a purpose. What is the vocation of the human species? This innate pull to find humanity’s unique niche in our wondrous world where we live. And I do not think that our vocation sits primarily with our capacity to create miraculous cures for the life deadening challenges that we ourselves have wrought. Lemme repeat so that it’s clear. My sense of vocation is not that we invent miraculous cures for what we have wrought our vocation. This is thought two. So thoughts always require counter thoughts. Thought, two, our vocation lies with the imagination we bring for how we stitch repair and weave our way from harm to healing. How we weave our way from harm to healing. In all that has touched us and in all that we touch in our 200 year present, this I think is the century of transformation. We will either get it or we won’t. So hold on to those thoughts. So what’s the seed of this thing? That sounds a bit odd when we use the phrase conflict transformation. You have no idea how odd it sounded when we first started using it with the accreditation boards in Virginia, North Carolina and the southern states that were a part of the association where we first proposed a program in conflict transformation. I imagine here that on occasion people hear it and quirk their head to say, “Hmm, what is this exactly?” It can ring a little odd. So let me start with a story. Where did it happen that for me this became a formative way of understanding my life vocation? I guess you could title this, the story of how a single question gave me everything I needed to ponder for a century of work. I hope in your lifetimes you have a single question at some point in your life that shakes you up enough that you ponder the whole of where you’re going and the purpose that you have. My timeframe was Central America in the 1980s. It was my first deep engagement with peace building in a context that contained at least three civil wars and other countries that had deep social divisions. They were devastating. I was asked by a humanitarian and aid organization whether it might be possible to correspond with and respond to local community leaders who are facing a lot of violence around their question of how do we respond differently and better to these patterns that are tearing us, our communities and our countries apart? I was coming through a program that was focused on social conflict. I have been trained primarily in the skills and approaches of conflict resolution and mediation. So after much consultation, I developed a proposal and met with 30 leaders in Central America from Mexico to Panama, 30 significant social leaders. I vetted my proposal, it was well consulted, it was contextually oriented, it was practically focused and I outlined this around what could happen in a three to five year period. And then we opened up for discussion and that’s when the question came. That’s when the question came. It actually came from a good friend from Honduras. Now let me take a side note for just a moment. Authentic friendships hold honesty and grace together, which is why good friends are usually weird friends because they’re gonna be honest enough to point out things about your quirky life and graceful enough to stay with you. The psalmist once called this kind of friendship, the place where truth and mercy meet the place where truth and mercy meet and went on to say. It also happens to be the place where justice and peace kiss apparently they’re making out. If you can imagine the place where truth, mercy, justice and peace meet, that would be an unusual location in this world. But that’s where the friendship sit. So remember, the friendships that we need for transformative social change are the ones that keep us alive enough to notice what John Lewis, for example, always called good trouble alive enough to notice good trouble connected enough to nurture our courage and vulnerable enough to be reflective, honest and invitational. And I think this is what my friend did. He publicly stood and asked me this question, My friend conflicts we certainly have in this region. I’m just not sure I understand the second part. What do you mean by the word resolution? What do you mean by the word resolution? Because if resolution means that you come down here to solve our problems without changing anything, we’re not interested. We’ve had way too much of that already. There’s a lifetime vocation in those three sentences. Let me just list them out as they hit me in waves for a few years until I had the courage to peer deeper and longer and with a sustained set of conversations with these good and weird friends, the clarity that indeed conflict is with and will stay with us. The simple unveiling that what dominates is a tendency to want to solve problems quickly get rid of them but not really change anything that produces ‘em. The personal journey that he opened up when he said, if you’re coming down here, that’s an onion. I gotta start peeling onions. When you peel, you may notice, have a certain olfactory capacity to spread a room full of smell and often create no small level of tears. Peeling the onion when somebody says who are you? To be able to look at that with honesty was maybe the greatest gift that I received in the early years in Central America. In a word I think he was asking the question, how do we put change at the center? How do we center the changes that we’re after more than the temporary solutions that are often given to us? What is the nature and what is required of us to pursue real and significantly lasting constructive transformation? That’s where it started a shift in my language, my writing and my books that began from that time period forward. It’s always hard to know in a short conversation like tonight’s talk what all to include or not in this wide reaching idea of conflict transformation. In fact, I think Sarah was today asking if all these things are in what’s not in? The big umbrella. And I said, well mostly everything is in because change requires some very significant ways that you hold different streams and understandings. So I thought I would just share a few as a starting point tonight. And the first goes back to that basic notion that conflict is a normal part of human relationships. We were just ordering breakfast the other day. My wife and I and I went up to do the ordering because they had this kind of leftover COVID approach where you would go through a line and they would bring things out, but they weren’t quite full restaurant yet. So I went in and ordered and she likes her eggs a certain way, which where she grew up in in northeastern Indiana, her father always cooked the eggs and he would give them three options. You can have your egg over easy, you could have your egg scrambled or you could have your egg dutched. Dutched, exactly. Big question, right? So I have this in back of my mind that dutch is what she really likes and dutched is when you put your fork in the egg and you fry it. So it’s what some people call over hard and I actually used the word dutched kind of unexpectedly and the person looked at me and said exactly what you said “Dutched?” Well it reminds me of a story that Wendy tells of when she was traveling for the first time in the southern states, I think it might have been Georgia. And they sat to get breakfast and the waitress said, how would you like your egg? And she said, dutched. And the waitress with her southern accent said, “Dutched?”. And Wendy said, “Yeah, you know, without the yolk”. And the waitress looked at her and said, “Honey, any way you fry that egg, you bound to get a yolk. Any way you fry that egg, you bound to get a yolk.” Now that’s conflict in human relationships. Any way you mix the human relationship, you bound to get a little conflict and that is usually not appreciated because conflict kind of messes stuff up for us. What we don’t always notice is what it might offer. And I think it offers a couple of gifts. We don’t always experience it as a gift, but it seems to me that that really is where it’s at because conflict can be the great disruptor of our life, but it can also be the great revelator. It unveils things, it lifts things forward that aren’t fully visible. It functions often as kind of a motor of social change and perhaps least understood conflict offers us a chance to learn to human together better. By the way, spell check has never liked my use of the word human as a verb, so I’m just gonna keep with it. It helps us to learn to human better. This in many ways, sits alongside of the fact that conflict can spiral and it can spiral in nasty and destructive ways. It can move in ways where we lose sight of who we are, where we question everything that’s happening and where it harms our relationships. And there are a lot of dynamics that go with that. But I want to start with the basic point that the question that we face is not whether we’ll have conflict. The question that we face is how and toward what purpose will we mobilize the energy of conflict? And this requires a kind of a mindset shift. A paradigm shift of sorts. And I think the transformational with a transformative understanding often has us looking at a set of deep paradoxes that never really go away. Paradox is the opposite of contradiction, not the pure opposite, but contradiction is one excludes the other paradoxes there’s something of deep truth in both. Yet they are so different that they seem exclusionary. At least three or four of those that I think we face pretty consistently. Conflict will pose the paradox of how we dignify memory while unleashing the creativity of imagination. How do we hold what we’ve experienced with what might be possible, especially when harm has happened? How do we hold nonviolent social civil resistance which escalates conflict in order to lift forward something that is not right with dialogue and engage forms of facilitation and mediation that may be trying to deescalate that which has gone destructively out of hand. How do we hold a place where it’s possible to have both? How do we navigate through the fact that conflict will always be a combination of the personal and the systemic? We are embedded in systems and we are acting as human beings as people who are a part of those. How do we, similar to the psalmist, how do we pursue justice and healing? Those are rarely placed side by side. Those are rarely seen as parts of a bigger equation that’s not fully yet visible. I think my friend in Central America was intuitively on this horizon. He was asking about what image we had of resolution, not that he was opposed to solving a problem but that he had experienced that it takes away the motor of change if it’s dealt with in a way that doesn’t attend to something deeper. And he was begging for something deeper. I think he was right. The transformative lens does not come at this by offering you quick answers. It opens up to discovery and learning. It helps us explore a more holistic understanding of the patterns of harm and the strategies of change and that those have a horizon that we’re aimed for into dignity, repair, healing and flourishing. And in the middle of that, change will always be relationship centric. It will evolve around the quality and the nature of how we organize our relationships, how we experience them, how we respond and nurture them. I often get asked the question, so in this big picture, where do we start? And I do not believe there is only one starting point, but I do think and I lean toward that, a good starting point is some form of proximity. Start with what you have most at hand. What is accessible to you? What comes from the places that you live and the relationships that you have? Because there is a fractal nature to the whole of the equation. Fractal meaning the patterns are similar whether in microcosm or in systemic expression. I sometimes use a small raspberry plant as a way to describe at least two of the significant levels of conflict transformation. Raspberries I used to grow or tried to and discovered, I don’t know if any of you have raspberries here in Vermont. They’re one of those plants that have a mind of their own so to say. You pick place in your garden to plant ‘em and by next spring they’ve arrived in other places where other zucchinis or something were supposed to go and they keep just cropping up because raspberries are one of those plants that have a life above the surface that’s very visible, gives a lot of fruit and a life below the surface that’s very generative. And if you want it, the analogy, it’s very simple, we often pay a lot of attention to what we see above the surface. The times when conflict rises with tension and difficulty, often calling our our attention because it’s creating something that is both painful and difficult below the surface, less visible below that content of what we’re fighting about above the surface is the nature of our relationships, the relational context in which things happen over time and is ongoing. So conflict is often like the raspberry that’s cropping up and you don’t want it there so you may get rid of it only to discovered that you’ve reinforced the dynamics and patterns underneath the ground that will then shoot up these children in other locations. And this is part of the challenge that we’re after in transformation. We include the creativity of a finding good solution to what presents itself as a problem today. But we understand what is being presented as a window and avenue of opportunity into the patterns and the dynamics of the relational context that are ongoing. Maybe take a simple home dorm, vacation home, Challenge that we typically have. Who does the dirty dishes, who left all these dishes in the sink? That’s usually the question that gets asked. I don’t, this is not something that comes from our experience. Of course we have this all sorted out, it’s good transformational people. But I imagine that some of you have faced the question of who exactly is responsible for doing what in household care. It is amazing how dishes can talk. I do not know if you’ve ever noticed this, how something that appears to be fairly straightforward and simple can at a moment’s notice open up into something that goes deeper and further than you could possibly imagine. And when two tired people are back and forthing over who’s doing the dishes or who didn’t do them, sometimes what comes rushing up is the whole of the relationship. And I think that relational context, if you look at it really carefully, tends to pose three questions that get repeated over and again, even if nobody says them. ‘Cause one of the challenges is while we can fight over the content, we have not been so good at finding the vocabulary to locate the deeper dynamics that may be unfolding in our relationships. The three questions are pretty simple. They’re just hard to answer. Who am I? Who are you and who are we? Here’s a simple formula for you to try out. If you fight with the same person three or more times over, basically the same thing. You’re not fighting about the thing, you’re fighting about your relationship, you’re fighting about the nature of who you’re choosing to be with each other and how things are organized. This could be dishes, it could be centuries, could be dishes, could be centuries. Take our country, take a question like belonging, participation, freedom, dignity, say like the way they talked about it in the sixties. I wanna stop a minute and just ask you when I said you know the way they talked about it in the sixties, which century did you locate your sixties in? Was it 1760? Was it 1860? Our civil war? Was it 1960, our civil rights movement or were you thinking out ahead to 2060 and maybe asking the question, is this the century? If we ask? So what is it that sits at the heart of the relational context from a transformative view? I would suggest there are three things that I have almost always found present. Power, identity, and building shared meeting. The first, power. Power has everything to do with the quality of our relationships. Who matters, who is included, who has access, who has influence, who has voice? Who has decision making power? How will the public good and the institutions fulfill their need to serve people and who is served and who is not? Who benefits from the structures, the ways we organize our collective relationships. These questions just keep cropping up at all times in violent conflict, when it goes nasty it often has a deeper resonance around the question of who has been invisibleized, who has not been visible and has had to move to that recourse of last resort? They say that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. What they don’t often say is that powerlessness is a seed bed of violence. The sense that there is no other option. What Bethelheim once commented, As the person who chooses violence, whether against self or other, has no longer seen or imagined the alternative. It’s all that’s left. So it’s one of the biggest challenges is how these things are driven around power and the ways that that is shared. I have never met a relational or social change process that has not traversed the terrains of power and powerlessness, of dignity and humiliation, of exploring the hidden aspects of how much human flourishing ties in with the ways that we organize our interdependence and our mutuality. The second thing always present is identity and identity has a lot to do with how conflict speaks into and back from our sense of place, our sense of belonging, our sense of wellbeing and the experiences on the other side of that, that we are excluded or that we fear or that we see a threat to our very survival. The easiest way to hear identity and conflict is just to listen to the opening of sentences. So if sentences start with you and it’s usually the you with one finger pointed out and three back, well nobody notices the three back you. It’s often coming with accusation and blame and responsibility displaced to the other. That often goes hand in hand with they this generalization about larger groups of people who have created this. The lack of specificity that often comes with that and the circle of kind of us and them-ing that begins to go round and round. These destructive patterns of conflict can be described by the ways in which division defines the boundaries of who’s in and out of the narrowing of groups and of the sense of belonging. They are an interesting and necessary part of finding ways that we associate, but they also can take the patterns of rising polarization until they reach toxic polarization. As conflict intensifies, we tend to have less and less contact with people who disagree with us and we have more and more contact with those who do agree with us. And curiously that contact we have is usually only with people who are like us and already agree with us and we have less capacity to sit with that which is different. We talk a lot about them, we just don’t talk much with them. Here’s another rule of thumb I learned a few years ago. It came out of people that do large scale data visualization and they created these two giant bubbles, red and blue, and they were tracking the blogosphere back in the election of Obama and the blogosphere had them all separated except for a little tiny bit of some ties that went between the two and in the middle of their visualization article, it was based on large scale tracking of how communication flowed in two separate communities. They said this 91 percent of the discourse stayed in the community where it originated. Now one could speculate all interesting things about polarization. I actually kind of took it as a personal question, so lemme pose it to you. Did 91 percent of your communication this week stay only in a community of people that mostly agree with you and that are like you? The third one, creating meaning. Human beings are rather interesting and extraordinary. We have this human interplay of perception and interpretation. It sits in the middle of everything conflict precisely because conflict serves as a disruptor, it often stops us short. We have to look and look again at what exactly is happening and it demands that we look more carefully at ourselves, at others, at what has transpired at what might be coming. But most significantly we find ourselves asking, what does this mean? What is this about? We are so intriguing that we are capable of hearing one spoken word and creating five ways it can be interpreted. That’s our capacity. We hear one spoken word and we create five ways that it can be interpreted. And for good measure we throw in interpretation about the five things that were not said. Even silence speaks when conflict disrupts in conflict. Silence is never the absence of words. Silence is always the presence of something interpretable. These dynamics can be so powerful that it actually has the capacity to change our body functions. I’ll give you at least one example in deep polarization, we start listening with our eyes. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this. I more than I care to acknowledge this actually happens to me. Well let’s put it honestly more than I like. We listen with our eyes because we look first to who is saying it and who they’re associated with and then we determine what it means according to who they are, not to the quality or lack of with reference to what they say. Sometimes our feet do the talking. I dunno if you’ve ever noticed this. You’re coming down a hallway, say after a good faculty fight may, maybe it’s a student related thing that took off in the wrong direction and you just noticed at the other end of the hallway somebody who you just disagreed with and you find your feet going “Looney Tunes” exit stage right. And off you go because you’re moving quickly to avoid having to have that human contact with that which creates discomfort In all of this, the court of understanding the transformative approach is how we understand this multifaceted nature of what is happening. So let’s go for a moment to the systemic changes, to the ways that systems evolve. Since the late 1980s, I have been engaged with Columbia. It’s the country where I have had the longest and most significant relationships around the peace building and conflict transformation work. Columbia is a country that has come through 60 years of civil war. If you’re unfamiliar with it, let let that phrase settle in a moment. 60 years of civil war, Most of my work has been with local communities, many of whom have had to face waves and different decades of people that were coming and going with weapons and demanding their allegiances. Close to 5 million people were displaced in Columbia, over these years, it’s a number that defies the imagination in some ways, but now it’s coming out of a half century of war. Six years ago, a peace agreement was fashioned and was embedded into the national ethos and commitments. It’s come through a change of presidential elections. It’s been moving slowly but surely. As part of that agreement, a truth commission was established. I always say that in the National Peace accord, when they established this particular truth commission, it must have been a poet that wrote the title because it’s almost impossible to translate it back from from Spanish to English. So this might be a great location to give it a try with a range of students. My best approach to this in English is the following. The commission is what we refer to in short. This is the commission to shed light on truth, living together and never repeating violence, the commission to shed light on truth, live together and never repeat violence. Now how would you possibly fulfill that mandate coming out of a 60 year war? For the past five years, I’ve accompanied the commission in particular Father Francisco Deru Pacho as we know him, a Jesuit priest who was chosen as the president of the commission. He and I had worked together in a number of regions. He has a deep understanding of various of the worst hit areas in Columbia. And now suddenly he was at a national level leading 12 commissioners and 200 employees in the search for truth across 60 years of war. I want to just take this a little bit so that you can unpack the significance. How do you listen to the suffering of a whole nation? How do you listen to the suffering of a whole nation? This is it, it defies in many regards the the very nature of what we’re accustomed to think about. How do you accomplish that when the war lasted 60 years? How do you, according to their mandate, acknowledge those who in repeated ways experienced deep harms? The plurality of victims in a 60 year war is nearly unfathomable. How does truth contribute to healing these? These are the questions that the commission struggled with just a month ago, couple months ago, they delivered their findings after five years. It would be impossible tonight to summarize their 10,000 pages. Maybe it’s captured in the remarks that Father Francisco Deru gave as he delivered the public delivery of the report to the incoming president. In the course of that delivery, he said these two sentences of the more than 500,000 people killed in the armed conflict, 80 percent were unarmed civilians of the more than 500,000 that were killed in the armed conflict, more than 80 percent were unarmed civilians. And then he said, “If we took one minute to remember each victim, it would take us 17 years. If we took one minute to remember each victim, it would take 17 years.” In the course of accompanying this commission and watching the evolution of choices that they made for how they would address the deep harms that were experienced in their country. I could not help but think of our own country here in the United States. It seems to me that while Columbia is climbing its way out of the hell of civil war, we seem hell bent on climbing into one. It’s often said that the first victim of war is truth. Let me add two other truisms. The first victim of divisive conflict is trust. The first victim of toxic polarization is curiosity. Toxic polarization will kill curiosity, divisive conflict taken deep will kill trust wars, eliminate truth. Truth, trust, and curiosity. If we are to find a way to transform conflict from harm to healing, from toxicity to flourishing, I think these are the three pillars we will need to nurture. So here’s the three lessons that I have taken from Pacho and from the Colombian truth-seeking process. If I’m reflecting on what might be interesting here at home. First their listening shifted. Their listening shifted in the direction of what St. Benedict called, “Listening with the ear of the heart.” Much of the kind of presence they had to create was not about only looking at statistics and reports and data they had that what mattered was the quality of presence they brought to the communities and the families that had suffered. We aren’t accustomed to listening with the ear of the heart, especially when we’re listening to people we may not like. I think it reminds us that that kind of listening is partly what it takes to move from knowing to acknowledging these seem like such connected and simple words. Knowing and acknowledging. But there’s a world of difference. Most of us in the middle of conflict know that harm has been done. People in Columbia know that harm has been done. Why is it so hard for us, whether at an individual or at the level of a whole nation? Why is it so hard to acknowledge the harm? Partly because acknowledgement peels some layers and the biggest layer it appeals is that it unveils, it reveals it. It shows us the things that have been there but not fully understood from the perspective of the lived experience. This is very significant because what acknowledgement does is that it visualizes and validates that the experience of harm that you’ve had is seen. You are seen and it was wrong. Remember that the next time you are in any level of conflict, the difficulty of knowing that those things are there, but the challenge of how they are acknowledged and done so in a way that brings a wider public validation. The second thing this commission did was it worked day and night to reduce the distance between the national and the local. They did this through a number of mechanisms. One certainly was the travel that the 12 commissioners made. The second was the establishment of nearly 30 houses of truth located in the territories as they call them. The locations of the country were the worst of the suffering had happened so that it was proximate and close to the people who had suffered. Reducing the distance is one of the biggest challenges that I think we have. The third element they did, which had never been done by a truth commission, was that they dedicated resources in people to circulate around the world to all the locations where there were exiled and displaced Colombians over the last 60 years. So that the residue of the pain and the suffering that led people to flee, they actually had the commission hold local direct conversations with those 28 countries where exiled communities live. This is a fascinating thing that went hand in hand with open and public interviews of the five presidents who agreed to make what they often called in Spanish, their contribution to truth. For those of you that speak Spanish, contribution to truth, I find it kind of a fascinating thing that truth is not just something you’ll go out there and discover like hanging out somewhere, but you’re gonna need contributions. And that often came hand in hand with people speaking publicly about their responsibilities with communities gathering under the facilitation of the commission to actually meet and talk about where they had harmed each other and how because the commission had this mandate, how you gonna live together? I mean one of the things that happens in a place like Columbia that happens in a place like the United States is that if we look carefully, the conflicts are not half a world away. They’re in our backyards, they’re in our neighborhoods. So part of what was happening was the ability to travel to rather than convene in. To spend time and presence with, to visualize the systemic patterns of what was emergent across those decades of how it could be that across five to seven presidencies the same patterns could repeat. How could it be that even when you had peace agreements that failed the patterns repeated, even this one that we’re talking about today. I think this approach exemplified this commitment to truth, to reestablishing a sense of trust and the ability to sustain a curiosity that was opening and invitational. I think that they in many ways put at the very center a proposal for transformation. Their recommendations by the way, I wouldn’t expect any of you’ll read all 10 of the volumes, but among their recommendations is one that implicates us here in the United States that the war on drugs failed and that new ways of understanding the changes that have to emerge must be acknowledged and invested in that extradition under the war on drugs often removed people who needed to give public testimony to the Colombians but are found in Pueblo, Colorado and outside Sarasota, Florida. In many regards, the commissioners would tell me, we find it strange that people we don’t even know come up and with sometimes tears in their eyes are just telling us, thank you, thank you. And they say, we were so tired we didn’t even know we did anything. I think they embodied hope. I think they embodied hope. Now I cannot tell you how many times my dear friends in the academic world, policymakers and philanthropy that I now work with, how many times I have been told hope is not a strategy, but I have never seen a significant process of transformation without hope. Jorge, the Argentinian poet was one time asked what his view of hope was and he responded, “Ah, hope, ah this hope, this beautiful memory of the future, this beautiful memory of the future.” maybe hope is the muscle that links memory and imagination. Because hope, as I understand it from the communities who continued to seek change was never a thing about waiting for an ideal future to be delivered to them. Hope was them taking a step that embodied the change that they were seeking to build. Hope is the step, not the waiting And maybe we need to exercise this muscle of hope. So let me conclude with a little exercise that I’d like to invite you into to conclude this talk. We started with our 200 year present. I once told a story, it happened to come just after September 11th. I won’t go into the detail because time doesn’t permit, but the story started with this phrase. Everything in this story is true except for the parts that haven’t happened yet. Everything in this story is true except for the parts that haven’t happened yet. So I’d like for you to take a minute and I’d like for you to imagine your 200 year present. I’d like for you to think about that young person. I’d like for you to think about one change, one significant transformation that you would love to see happen in the course of that young person’s lifetime that likely for most of us leads close to the end of this century. One change you hope we can accomplish this century. And when you have time, write the rest of the story. Write it as if you can imagine you telling a great-grandchild how it happened. I think that’s the transformational orientation. It refuses to separate memory from imagination. It understands the difficulty and the complexity. It knows that we traverse a multifaceted ways that change happens, but it comes back, it comes back to us. How are we gonna choose to show up? Thank you.

- We have microphones for questions on both aisles, so maybe we’ll take a round of questions or thoughts and responses and then give our guests a chance to respond and we’ll keep going for a few more minutes.

- [Amy] Hi, thanks very much. I’m Amy Morsman. I teach in the History Department here and I also direct a couple programs at the College and I really appreciated your insights and I kept trying to relate them to my everyday life here and my work and maybe also at home and thinking about conflicts and I loved the verbs that you used human as a verb and then listen and acknowledge, et cetera, et cetera. And I guess I’m wondering if you could speak a little bit more to how important or is it important for both parties or however many parties there are in a conflict to all be understanding conflict transformation? Or does it only require that one party understand what you’re talking about? Thank you.

- [John] Okay. That’s such a good question.

- Just go for it, huh?

- [Audience Member] Would you address that question? Okay. Well it’s, I have rarely had the experience that everybody’s on the same page. Sometimes it happens. But you know, I come from a Mennonite kind of Quaker background if you aren’t familiar with Mennonites. And I learned most of what I needed to know about dealing with Somali warlords in church pacifist conflicts where supposedly we’re all on the same page and we’re all trying to be nice and we end up nice each other to death. So even when we are on the same page, it doesn’t always work in in exactly that way. So I don’t think that it requires that everybody has exactly the same thing. I do think that there are ways in which, because we are, whether it’s even interpersonal or family or something like a faculty or city of Middlebury, as you go on up, every one of those creates a kind of a system and a system of interaction. And often when it’s conflicted, it’s a system of interaction that has a lot of reactivity to it. And the reactivity is not exclusively, but often based on harm that has been experienced or fear. And so the reaction expresses itself quite often in some form of blame or projection or accusation, which is another way of saying I can escape ‘cause if it’s your fault, it’s not mine, I can defend. And that reactivity creates a kind of a cycle back and forth that often makes it difficult to be on the same page. Now having said that, what we know from systems theory and in particular family systems theory ‘cause you were mentioning kind of something a little more proximate and microcosmic in nature, is that as even one or two people within the system define themselves in ways that is proactive and invitational, the system itself has a capacity to rise. This comes from stuff that’s kind of odd in its origins, but it was a lot of family system therapy is based on the idea that you can take out a person from a system who seems to be expressing a lot of the symptoms and work with them individually, but when they’re reintroduced the patterns keep coming. So the questions that I would pose is not so much getting the need for everyone to have exactly the same frame of reference, but the capacity of people to take note of the dynamics in the system and to make intentional choices to be less reactive, more prepositive, more open to hearing, more invitational. There are small things that can sometimes make bigger nudges. Now there are patterns that we are looking at in some of those contexts that date way back around things that may include exclusion and forms of a range of things that might require us to think in much bigger terms. But I think to the kind of question you’re asking, more often than not, the starting point that I’ve experienced is that not everybody’s on the same page. And one of the things you try to work with is clearly that you get people to agree to a kind of a process. If you’re using that dialogical approach, that can be very helpful. But the dynamics even with a good process, are likely to continue. And so the question becomes how do you take note of them and in particular, how do you take note about how you participate in it and what might you do that shifts that a bit? Faculty meetings are a great one. Now as an example, they tend to have the residues of generational conflict, and they kind of cycle back. Yeah, I one time proposed that I thought the whole of the campus could use tea time. I think if there are people that are, you’re having difficulty understanding, perhaps the best thing you could do is go to tea once a week. And that proposes to students as well. You got a four year experience, look out across this campus, find the person who you imagine might be the most different from you find, maybe somebody’s slightly different than you, but reach, you have in your microcosm of these years difference, available, accessible, present. They have a life story. Don’t take it from the angle of something they said in class that you’re rebutting. Take it from the angle that tea coffee once a week offers the opportunity not to agree or solve a problem but offers the opportunity to understand the life story that a person brings. And this is, I think part of what we haven’t fully, fully understood that it’s not just about a technique or arriving at a particular solution or consensus it, it is about how and by what means we rehumanize those things that actually have very subtly slipped into forms of dehumanization and distance.

- Hi, I wish I were a member of this wonderful college, but I’m not. I’m a member of the community and for 25 years I was a mediator for the state of Vermont in special education, did divorce mediation and I taught conflict management and I failed a lot. And what I learned was when I was most successful is when I could love the students and the people I was with and had time to do that. That seemed to bring some progress, not solving problems, but it, it helped a great deal.

- [John] It’s a great observation. I think there was a back here Sarah, there was somebody. Thank you for sharing that.

- Hello, my name is Liam. I’m a first year here at Middlebury College. My question would be in contexts of violence, is transformation always a discussion or at what points does discussion turn to physical violence when there isn’t a clear solution? I guess my question more generally be what is the interplay between physical violence and discussion and conflict?

- Yeah, well.

- Quite so. I don’t know if you’re thinking of a context that might be international in nature or here at home violence is usually the extreme expression of very toxic polarization and often a sense of that are very… that the options have reduced so much that there only are few things that we can do for survival’s sake. Those situations are the ones that I’ve had a lot of opportunity to work with. So similar to what you’ve just heard, I don’t have like fantastic recipes that I’m gonna give you that you will always work. I think what I’ve learned is it takes about as long to get out of a conflict as it took to build it. And so if you’re in a place where it’s been going on for a long time and violence is very prevalent, I think it’d be wise to think in decades if not generations. The second is that many places have combinations of structural and open violence, structural being forms of exclusion, less access, things that are less visible, and direct violence being weapons and the whole kit and caboodle. These are places that I think require a real commitment to understanding the significance of what it means to be born into repeated cycles of this. And how trauma is not just captured by the understanding of a post traumatic event, but that trauma is carried in the body and can be transferred generationally. And so this again, kind of pushes us in the direction that much of what we need to do is to create the spaces for people to feel that they are attended to, even when they express some of the worst behaviors are attended to for the purpose of understanding more deeply where they have come from, what their life is about and where they’re hoping to get. And that it’s kind of a form of bearing witness more than a form of taking in solutions. So I think my friend in Honduras, just to give you an example, what he was saying, you’re coming down here is, as they say in Spanish, you do gooders that are arriving with the answers. We don’t need that. We need people that are gonna be alongside of us. So in those settings of violence, I have a somewhat different approach than some of my colleagues in the international world of mediation in that most of my explorations have been in the direction that even in the situations that appear to have fewer, no resources are often places that are filled with people who do have ideas and resources and relationships. So I’ve worked mostly with an approach that if the technical term was used, we might say, rather than an outside neutral that kind of moves between and tries to get people to reach a ceasefire, are approaches that are working with people who are embedded in the conflict, but whose relationship keeps them proximate and close to one or another side, but who have an ability to bridge and where a few of the inside partial rather than outside neutral, where even a small number of them have a capacity to coordinate and circulate. Something happens within that resourcing that has a deeper connection to the context, a better understanding of the meaning that people are giving to things and an ability to hold the conversation over the periods of time that will often be needed. My Central American experience was initially of that model, of that approach between the indigenous armed groups in the Sandinistas government in the 1980s. The people who were involved in that early conciliation were not outsiders. They were people who were mosquito and from Managua, from the capital city. But who had the trust of each side, but who was a team created a repository of a circulating trust. The same exact thing we found to be true in the prisons in Northern Ireland. So working across loyalists and Republican para militaries, the day that they began to catch an imagination that given the long history of what they had participated in could be transformed in the direction of them contributing to ending the violence, which for most of their views was something they did not want to transfer to their grandchildren. So that’s the starting point. Quite often it’s this notion that you understand that the wellbeing of your grandchildren is actually tied to the wellbeing of your enemy’s grandchildren. When that started to happen, there was something that created, I think the social tissue that helped the Good Friday agreement stick, even though they were not primary negotiators and they were much more proximate to the street violence. So their capacity to know what was happening and to move in a way that could both coordinate and alert and to move back in a way when it was too dangerous was extraordinary. I’ll go on to one more. It’s the same exact thing that I’m finding with the engagements that we have here in the US where to take Anacostia outside of Washington DC they have sets of what they refer to as credible messengers. Credible messengers are people who are mostly people who have returned from prison and who at an earlier stage, were a part of very significant levels of some form of violence. Now in the place that they are in life, they’re opening up mentoring relationships on the street level. And they’re credible messengers because the younger kids carrying today know who they are. I could not do that work. That’s not the kind of thing that I can do. Now, what I, what what can be possible is I can give, I can give encouragement, accompaniment support. I can be a sounding board, but it’s people who have captured that imagination are often the ones that are most proximate to the situation and are able to mobilize the resources that are most needed for the hardest of the situations. And yeah, so it’s not easy. Violence is so much harder to back down and away from what happens with violence. And so this whole notion of finding ways to prevent it before it gets there is really key, which is a lot of what the credible messengers work with. They pick up what’s happening where they try to move quickly in a way that alleviates the need to create the next cycle of some form of back and forth, either revenge or killings or drug related stuff that sometimes happens. So context matters. And I think it’s the power in many ways of culture that we misunderstand from the outside because we only see it as something that’s bereft of everything that should be good. The opposite in my experience, is true. There’s extraordinary resource and most often in great proximity to places that are the hardest hit.

- [Moderator] I think we have time for one more question.

- David Stoll anthropology, judging from some of the examples you’ve just mentioned, which would include I think violence interrupters in Anacostia peace negotiations in Northern Ireland, Columbia, would you accept that what you’re doing is trying to build up a peace party of people may have been on one side or the other, but now they realize they’ve lost a lot more than they’ve gained? Their mother’s surviving brothers, some of them did buy into one side or the other, but it’s a burned over district. Columbia after 60 years definitely a burned over country. And so in effect, you are looking for people who are willing to talk to each other, which sounds great to me. That’s wonderful. But if that’s what you’re doing, then there’s a separate problem of who you can’t really talk to because they have benefited so enormously from the status quo and to deal with them, I’m not sure, well, would you accept that basically to deal with the capos, the Vladimir Putins, the Mexican cartel leaders, who are now making extortion a way of life. They apparently get more of their money from extorting their fellow Mexicans than they do from selling us drugs. Basically, you still need some combination of police in even military, military domination in some of these cases, and then in other cases, really tough policing. Would you accept that? Obviously quick and nasty summation of what you might or might not be trying to say.

- Yeah. Well the answer is from a practitioner scholar, where the realities of a situation create the contours of who you need to deal with. But this is also a practitioner scholar who’s one change this century is that we move away from the production of weapons, is the way we handle our differences. So yes and no. There are realities that you have to deal with and you don’t walk away from ‘em. But on the other hand, even the Putin’s right now of the world, this rise of authoritarianism, there’s a lot of things that facilitate that. It’s not exclusively that they’re somehow just bad people. And there’s a lot of ways in which have we, if we can develop… So to take your question, yes, I am trying to create a peace constituency. One that believes that humanity has the capacity to understand ourselves as a global family, and one that believes that it’s possible that we can reach the evolution of the aspirations of most of our deepest value structures, which are those that we respect dignity, and we encourage words over weapons, but our investments are not going those directions. And there is a lot of people at benefit. So one of the big challenges is the fact that Mexican cartel, where do most of those guns come from? It’s not just Mexico. It’s a extraordinary stream of flow of weapons that is in this world. There’s a lot of money in it. The Columbian peace accord posited the shift in production of cocaine. And you have to imagine the challenge of establishing a capacity to shift small production farmers from coca into something different when you’re looking at a chain of value that runs globally. And so I what I want to try to express as clearly as I can, I do not negate the complexity of the challenges that lie before us, but I believe that we are capable of finding ways to do it differently. And little by little, I think those are the steps we take. So yeah, I’m a pacifist who’s spent most of his time sitting around table with people that carry guns going through their neighborhoods. And the thing that I found is basically this, we’re not called upon to judge the choices that other people make in that kind of a situation. I think our challenge is how do we imagine alternatives that they can find acceptable to move away from it? And that’s where my invitation is. I’m looking for a lot more people to help sort that out. And it’s gonna take every single discipline and student that we can possibly think of to move in that direction that may be unsatisfactory. But welcome to my life.

- [Moderator] Thank you all for being here. For tomorrow’s events and Saturday’s events, please check out go/Clifford for the schedule. Hope to see you soon.

Constructive Conflict at Many Levels

Dialogue, Race, and Conflict Transformation

Harm & Forgiveness in Restorative Justice

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Speaker] So true.

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Speaker] Exactly.

- [Julian] Hey, guys.

- [Speaker] Hi.

- [Julian] How are you?

- [Speaker] Good, good,

- [Julian] Nice to see you.

- [Speaker] You too.

- [Julian] How’s your weekend? Yeah. So it sounds like and then question and

- [Speaker] Yeah, it’s on the second. It’s the second slide on the page. You just want to compress it and see the results. Yeah.

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Speaker] Okay.

- [Speaker] Yes.

- [Speaker] Yep, that’s a good yep, and it was the ones that you guys suggested so that is in poor slide.

- [Julian] Are we good now?

- [Speaker] Yeah, yeah, so you get up there. You say this

- [Speaker] You say the slides

- [Julian] Okay.

- [Speaker] Am I

- [Speaker] Okay, all right, aperture that’s what she told you

- [Julian] Okay. you wanna?

- [Julian] I don’t have time

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Speaker] Yeah. Okay. Yeah, okay.

- [Speaker] It just causes you to

- [Julian] Right, right.

- [Speaker] Going super meta off the whole thing.

- All right. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome one, welcome all. My name is Julian Portilla, and I am one of the instructors in this very exciting, thrilling course on conflict transformation with the new center for conflict transformation. And boy, it’s a lot of fun. One of the great things, I’m sorry, is that better? Yeah, okay, great. So I’m Julian, I won’t repeat all that, but one of the great things about teaching this course on conflict transformation is that we get to invite all these wonderful people from all over the world who do fascinating work. And one of those people today is Sujatha Baliga. I’m super excited to have her here today. You can Google her and find out all kinds of details, but here’s a few highlights. Her work is characterized by an equal dedication to crime survivors and people who have caused harm, that should give you pause. She helps communities to change their justice systems, looking for ways to implement RJ practices, restorative justice practices rather than maybe more classic approaches to justice and order. She’s been a third party in a large number of conversations involving restorative justice. Now in just about every category of terrible crime that you can imagine and has some really powerful stories about the outcomes of those conversations. She’s a lawyer. It’s okay. She went to to Harvard and then to Penn. She’s been a Soros Justice Fellows. She was a Just Beginnings Collaborative fellow. She was a MacArthur fellow, maybe you heard her name on NPR when they interviewed her about her. It was pretty neat. And she’s got personal and professional connections to Vermont, which is fantastic. And I can also tell you that her husband is a great mountain biker and he is a lot of fun to hang out with as well. So I’m delighted to have her here. She has so much wisdom and thoughtful experience to talk about and share with you. Welcome Sujatha.

- Thank you, Julian. And thank you everyone for having me here. It’s just been a joy to be back in Vermont. Before I get started, we are gonna start with a question that we would like you to discuss with your neighbor and you’ll see it up there. So take a moment now to find a person to chat with. Maybe there’s somebody behind you if you’re sitting solo. And I’d ask you to briefly introduce yourself, and then discuss this question. Imagine a community or society in which there’s no such thing as punishment and yet everyone agrees that their society is moral, fair, safe, and just. Serious harm does occur in this society from time to time. How do you imagine such harm is addressed without punishment yet results in the shared belief that theirs is a moral, safe, fair, just society? So let’s take a few minutes to discuss amongst yourselves, introduce yourself. Maybe pick somebody that you haven’t been married to for decades if you happen to be sitting next to someone to whom you’ve been married for decades, and say, hi, introduce yourself and have a little chat about these ideas. Thanks folks. I’m sensing the lull that is coming. Did y’all notice that it all kind of got quiet at once, so maybe that’s a good sign. So there’s no right answer, but it’s a real, I’d like to encourage you to go home and journal about it, think about it, draw about it, pain about it, meditate about it. Not just sort of technical terms and things, but like literally what does it look like? Like what does it look like? What does it smell like? What does it feel like? These kinds of processes in this kind of world in which these folks are living in. And then sort of you go to bed, maybe dream that we’re all headed there. That would be really wonderful, ‘cause dreaming is the way to start. So before I get sort of into the meat of the talk, I’d love for you all to share a moment with me in silence. It really helps me center myself and I hope that it will help others sort of welcoming us to enter this space and to become present to ourselves and one another and the space and the ideas we’re gonna be engaging with. And so let’s start with a moment of silence, maybe it’ll be about a minute. I’m just enjoying the silence if that’s something you enjoy or if you so choose to pay attention to your breath as it comes and goes at its own natural pace. And so maybe you might notice your belly rising and falling. If you feel like sharing this time with me doing this, just notice your belly rising and falling. Or maybe you notice some sensations in your nostrils or above the upper lip. Just take a moment to acknowledge our true friend, the breath, as we’re noticing the breath, we can think about how our breath is our first and most constant friend who’s literally been here since our very first breath and will be with us until our last breath. And it’s a really wonderful tool in conflict transformation and in restorative justice, and in any kinds of relationships that we’re in, including parenting. Our breath can say to us in this beautiful non-judgmental way, Hey, I’m here, and I’m sensing that you seem agitated and we take a moment to notice our breath. We can see there’s all kinds of information that’s giving us without any sense of judgment. You had a friend telling you, you seem agitated, you probably wanna punch him. We don’t punch the breath, right? So let’s take some time to really be grateful for the breath and how it lets us know how we’re doing without any sense of judgment. Thank you, everybody. So the title of this talk is Harm and Forgiveness in Restorative Justice. And I’m gonna take those in sort of a completely mixed up order. We’ll start with a little bit about what is restorative justice and within that we’ll talk about harm and maybe in some ways in which it might differentiate, be differentiated from, or maybe sit up under the larger umbrella of conflict transformation. There’s a lot of debate about whether or not that’s the case. And so happy to sort of add questions to that without any concrete answers. And then we’ll get a little bit to the topic of forgiveness. And I know that a lot of places I go, and I really appreciate the sentiment behind this that we spend time thinking about the folks who came before us here on this land and doing a land acknowledgement. But something that I have learned from many Indigenous folks that I have the incredible blessing of learning from and spending time with is that that’s not how they do things, right? They don’t start with thinking about how, they’ve been wronged and all the things that they’ve lost, but rather that they start with something what the Maori people call Whakapapa, which is to talk about your own lineage and genealogy. And the reason that you do this, they literally talk about like the canoe that left, everyone knows the canoe that their lineage comes from that left Hawaii and came to New Zealand, Aotearoa as they say. And what was the canoe? What is the mountain that they originate from and who their lineage is. And it’s a beautiful thing to remember who we are when we are so privileged to be able to do so. But it also really builds a sense of relationship and understanding from the beginning of the conversation, to whom do we belong? And to whom are we, who are we in reciprocity with and in an obligatory reciprocal relationship with? That tells us a lot about one another. And so there’s a similar question that I see all the time in Oakland, California where I do most of my work. When I’m sitting in circle with kids who are at risk of being criminalized, an opening question is often, who shoulders am I standing on? And so when I first heard this question, who shoulders am I standing on? I was really uncomfortable with it because when I think about my elders, like that’s the last thing we do. We actually touch their feet. We don’t stand up on their, but our feet do not go on their bodies anywhere. This was an interesting thing to notice in myself. And so I think of it as whose feet do I touch? From whom do I get my blessings? And so I’ve learned from so many Bodhisattvas masquerading around as public defenders and peacemakers and things of that nature. And so in particular, it’s great to be back in Vermont where I learned so much right out of law school from Judge William Sessions, who I’m so pleased to see here today. I was a federal clerk, a law clerk for him in the federal court and I chose working for the judge because, and I was so lucky he chose me to be able to do so, because he was one of the very small number of federal judges who was previously a public defender. There were like literally a number you could count on two hands at that time, I think. So that’s why he was very much on the short list of judges I wanted to work with. And so I’m so deeply grateful for that year I spent in chambers and for the relationship that continues to this day. I’m also deeply indebted in my work to the Tibetans who kept an Ancient Indian Buddhist set of teachings alive, the Nalanda tradition and it’s a Sanskrit school of Tibetan. Now Tibetan Buddhism lost to India. But in those teachings, there was a whole lot about justice, about how we treat one another, literally including like you should never have solitary confinement like this stuff was written down thousands of years ago. And so really grateful to his holiness Dalai Lama, and all the Tibetans who kept these kind of fundamental teachings of our interdependence and how we might have justice that flows out of our knowledge and wisdom about the interdependent relationship, nature of human relationships, sin of all of existence. I’m also deeply, deeply indebted to Howard Zehr, and many other Mennonite people who actually coined the phrase restorative justice by reading their Bibles and trying to find their way to a thing that they used to call a covenant justice. And one of my principal teachers as well is Justice Robert Yazzie. He is the former chief justice of the Navajo Nation, who teaches me that when Indigenous people say all my relations, they are talking again about this notion of universal reciprocity and collective responsibility to one another. So there are countless other people whose shoulders I’m standing on, people in the restorative justice movements who have worked really hard to center racial and ethnic disparities in the way in which restorative justice has rolled out. I’ve been incredibly blessed to work with people like Fania Davis and Cheryl Graves and so many others. I also wanna name, today, that I’m gonna be talking a little bit about my own personal history and how I came to this work and it involves my survivor journey. And so just there’s a general sort of content warning that I wanna put out there. And I won’t be speaking about details specifically, but I just wanna let you know that if you need to return to your breath or leave the room when I’m talking about this stuff, I do not take that sort of thing personally. I encourage you to take care of yourself. So in that, you know, it’s interesting to think about, again, when I think about the Maori folks who’ve taught me about Whakapapa, they pushed me to talk about my own personal lineage about which I was quite uncomfortable doing in part because I am both the product of, but also deeply disconnected from the Gaud Saraswat Brahmins Konkani people who gave me my first language. And I feel in my bones though, this is why I had to really sit with what they were asking of me, both the casteism that I grew up in and the racism that I grew up in rural South Central Pennsylvania. And so I feel in my bones that their survival of the cultural and religious genocide by the Portuguese implanted in me a capacity to survive the racial violence at school, on the school buses, and the playgrounds and the sexual violence that I was enduring in my home in rural Pennsylvania in the 1970s and 1980s. And so for that capacity to survive, I am deeply grateful and I’ve learned so much. So I’ve been on a long and winding journey from victim advocacy to being a public defender, ultimately to the field of restorative justice. And all of it has really been driven by this motto that was given to me a few years ago by a fellow child sexual abuse survivor. And it is, “Be who you needed when you were younger.” “Be who you needed when you were younger.” And so my work has been leaning more and more towards explicitly naming the necessity of engaging with abolitionist concepts around the criminal legal system. Because what I know is that what I didn’t need when I was a child was for my father to be locked up or for child protective services to take me away from my amma and my akka, for there to be potential immigration consequences for my family. And so that I knew as a wise child and because I knew all of that, I never told anyone what was happening. I like most survivors of these types of harms, remain silent about the things that I was living through. And the data bears that out on a number of fronts. So we know that in a hundred incidents of child sexual abuse, depending on the state, maybe 10 to 18, we think, because it’s so under-reported that it’s hard to come up with this data are reported to some version of the authorities, six people out of a 100 are prosecuted, less than three are convicted. And when you think about what those convictions are for, it’s usually for something that’s pled way down, not what it is that had actually happened often. And so another thing to think about is that in terms of intimate partner violence, that 50 percent of survivors don’t contact the system at all. And of those who do only 20 percent say it made them safer. And so the system I knew, and then as I started to learn more about the data around these particular crimes and many others as well, that we needed to find another way. So I started looking and I heard about an amazing community, an Ojibwe community in upper Manitoba called Hollow Water. And I would strongly suggest folks who are interested in learning more about it to check it out. It’s a film that is available freely from the Canadian Film Review Board. And it is about how a community that was dealing with transgenerational trauma around sexual harm started with the boarding school crisis where children were taken away and experienced severe harm in the boarding schools, came back to their communities and perpetrated those same harms against the children in those communities. And then the state wanted to step back in and take those kids away again. And they said, hold up, that’s what you did the last time, and now we’re in this mess, so is there some other way we can do this? And they had forgotten what they called their medicine and they learned it from the neighboring Cree tribes and started doing circle process in order to heal. And they had basically an ending of child sexual abuse in their community through open dialogue, direct dialogue with all the family members who were involved in the harm, the people who experienced it, the kids who experienced it, the parents were perpetrating it, other adults who are perpetrating the harms. And so I thought, oh my goodness, how do we start that here? And I tried for a few years and realized that was not a place to start, but I did think that there were other places that we could get these things started in California, found some district attorneys and judges who are really willing to think about doing it in the youth diversion context, not around sexual harm in the beginning. Eventually we got there, but that’s sort of the trajectory of my work. So I like to also, when I go to places, tell people where they stand in terms of the stats. So how does Vermont’s incarceration rate compare? So doing really well compared to the rest of the country. But since Vermonters we know very much more think of themselves as Europeans, I think in a number of regards, I would ask you to look at the other nations here beneath the Vermont numbers and just sort of gives a sense of where it is that you sit. And in thinking about racial and ethnic disparity is a really important thing to consider. We don’t actually have this many people incarcerated in Vermont. These are per a hundred thousand people. You can see the disparities here in racial and ethnic disparities with regard to incarceration rates, important things to consider. So with that, these and so many other problems with the criminal legal system as it currently operates why I wanted to get involved in restorative justice. So what is it? Everybody uses the words restorative justice for everything these days. And my former boss used to joke, he says, this is Sujatha, she runs our, that’s not restorative justice project. I spent all my time telling people I love what you do. Your gang tattoo removal program is wonderful. That is not restorative justice. I love that you’ve started a youth court in which you’re teaching young people what the actual system currently is, but just having kids run a thing that is exactly like the thing we do or some version of it is not restorative justice, right? So what is it? So one of my teachers, Robert Yazzie, thinks it’s hubris to define it, and he believes that it is deeply tied to Indigenous peacemaking at its roots. And he says life comes from it. That is how he talks about it. He talks about moving forward in a good way. And he says things like, start from the east and walk clockwise. And I have to spend lots of time with him to begin to understand what he might be meaning by that. But in general, I just need to start by saying Justice Yazzie says, he can’t define it, but Howard Zehr says you can. So Howard Zehr is known as the grandfather of restorative justice, and is a dear friend and mentor, and he says “It’s an approach to justice that involves to the extent possible all those who have a stake in a specific harm or offense to collectively identify and address harms, needs, and obligations, in order to put things as right as possible.” So that’s a lot of words, and I could spend a lot of time breaking down those words, but I would just encourage people to just, you know, go back and look at this, it’s everywhere on the internet. And really think about each clause and what it means and why each word might be there. Because Howard spent a lot of time thinking about it and I think it’s very powerful definition of what restorative justice actually is. And so he also really frames it as a paradigm shift. And so when Howard first coined the term, there’s a seminal text in the field written over 25 years ago called Changing Lenses. And in that text, he talks a lot about Thomas Kuhn’s structures of scientific revolution and about the nature of paradigm shift and how we ought to be thinking about restorative justice as a paradigm shift, not as a way of making our current systems as in the paradigm that they’re in, a punishment based system, slightly less punishing let’s say. But really to think about it as a complete shift in the way in which we’re thinking. So what questions do we ask about wrongdoing today? Whether we think about school discipline or the criminal legal system, if someone’s done something that crosses some boundary that we believe shouldn’t be crossed, we often ask questions like what law was broken? Who broke it? And how should they be punished? And restorative justice by contrast asks a completely different question, set of questions. It asks, who is harmed and what do they need and whose obligation is it to meet those needs? So if we were only asking those first two questions like who is harmed and what do they need? That’s just what we should do anytime. Anyone we love or care about is suffering something terrible, right? Like what happened? Like what do you need to have happen now? But when we add that question of whose obligation is it to meet those needs, that’s where it becomes a justice paradigm. And to leave that question out really, to my mind, you can do restorative practices with the who’s harmed and what do they need or what happened and what needs to happen? But that without explicitly asking about whose obligation it is to meet those needs, and we’re not gonna have a real feeling that justice has been done at the end. So when we look at these two side by side, it’s really interesting to think about to whom and what do we attend and who do we attend to first in a sense, right? And so when I meet with crime survivors, when I’m getting them ready to participate in a restored justice process, sitting down and asking them how they were harmed and what they need is a real, it’s really overwhelming for them sometimes, right? Because nobody’s ever asked them that before. They think that it’s like, well, there was a rule that was broken, I have to get my testimony together to do what the system has already decided is the right outcome. We’re moving in this direction. And so it can be a little bit destabilizing and that’s why it takes time. Although I will say on the whole restorative processes don’t need to take more time than court processes need to take, especially when there’s delay after delay after delay. And so just sitting with the distinction between these two, and particularly, the starting point as a survivor myself, feels really liberating, and yeah, centers me. And so what is interesting about this is that people often say restorative justice is like being soft on folks or whatever. And that it’s not for survivors, it’s for the folks who caused harm. But if we’re operating within this framework, it literally starts with a crime survivor and what they need. And having my self-identified needs met through a process. I can’t think of anything that might be more empowering than that. So the big picture in restorative justice is that crime is a violation of people and interpersonal relationships and those violations create obligations. And the central obligation is to as much as possible do right by the folks that you’ve harmed. I put crime in quotations here, because I’m not really necessarily wedded to these Western definitions or notions of transgressions of law because I think there are all kinds of harms that we can be addressing through restorative processes that can feel and be quite severe without it being a transgression of some rule or law. Yeah, and I’m more interested in harm in how it’s defined by families and communities and the people who’ve experienced it. And so in thinking about the paradigm shift view, I’ve been thinking a lot about, “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” was one of my favorite books in college. And I think about the worldview in which the view and that centered, when we think about a big paradigm shift phrase, we used to think that the earth was in the center of the solar system and then we figured out that the sun was in the center of the solar system, right? And so this is my terrible drawing of, I don’t even know what continents or whatever are there, so forgive my artwork, but this notion that the Earth was in the center and the sun was revolving around it, and that what was actually going on was, the sun was in the middle, right? And for 200 years, there was a raging debate and there were trials and inquisitions and all kinds of things in which scientists who said that they believed that the sun was in the middle were punished and severely so. And what was happening was along the way, the current system, there were anomalies that were starting to show up, right? Like planets were going retrograde, and maybe gravity didn’t work sometimes or I don’t know, I’m making it up now, but that’s the science part I shouldn’t try to talk about. But what was really fascinating about it, right, was that there was such deep weddedness to the present system that they kept trying to resolve the anomalies in some way that kept the current system going, right? And so when I think about this, with regard to, and then eventually that resolving didn’t work and ultimately, all the answers got solved by just putting the sun in the middle. And then 200 years later, everybody believed, most everybody believed that the sun was in the middle. So when I think about this from the perspective where we are today, when I think about punitiveness in the carceral state, I think of the heliocentric paradigm, the one in which we put the sun in the middle as one in which, one of my friends, Cheryl Fairbanks and a Tlingit woman talks about the three cousins she says of Indigenous peacemakers and restorative justice practitioners and transformative justice practitioners that we’re over here saying, we think the sun is in the middle y’all. And that we’re gonna be in this place of 200 years of figuring it out together. So as a former victim advocate and a former public defender, it’s important to me to not start to criticize all of the trying to resolve the anomalies as sellout work, as letting the steam out of the pressure cooker, as incrementalism, that people get accused of as we’re trying to reform systems. Because when I think about the human beings that require our attention and our love and our care, we have to be doing what the current system is doing as well as we possibly can. And we have to be pointing out the anomalies, right? Pregnant women giving birth in shackles. So it’s great when legislation gets passed to stop that, right? Or people serving 25 years for a crime they didn’t commit like a friend of mine, who got a big settlement from the state because he was locked up for so long. So saying that it’s incrementalism or some sort of sellout thing to be, trying to make reforms in the current way, we’re doing things I don’t think is very wise. And I don’t think it’s a position folks take when they are sufficiently proximate with the people who are suffering in the current system. So it’s an important thing to consider. So what does it look like and feel like? I mean I could tell a hundred thousand stories and I don’t wanna do that ‘cause I wanna leave lots of time for Q&A in discussion, but I really like this picture, President Obama sitting in a circle in Chicago with some folks and it can look and feel anyway, it can look like a lot of different Indigenous practices and it can also look and feel like this in a classroom. And one of the things that I see the most is the way President Obama’s got his elbows on his knees and he is listening, listening, listening, deeply listening as if everything else in the world has disappeared, and whoever it is that is sharing is getting his undivided attention. And that is the majority of what it looks like. It looks like really listening to understand one another. And when we’re taking turns going around the circle and each person is speaking in turn to suspend the notion that we have to be coming up with an answer to what that person said. And if the circle is big enough and strong enough what you were gonna say gets said before it comes back around and some deeper knowledge and understanding comes about. So in particular in circle process, what I really love is in the first round, people get their stuff out there and in the second round, people sometimes spend a lot of time debating, which we weren’t supposed to do ‘cause we’re just supposed to be listening and thinking from our own place but it happens, and in the third round, there’s some more resolution, and then in the fourth round, in the fifth round, in the sixth round, we start to spiral from downwards to upwards. And it is a really beautiful moment to feel that shift into really hearing and understanding one another. And then there’s a certain point at which folks start to talk about what needs to happen next. And at that point, we stop and we eat, because hungry people are angry people and they can’t come up with good solutions. And often if it’s a serious situation in which somebody has caused harm and it’s not something we’re just trying to understand better together, that person will leave the room with their supporters and family and come up with a draft plan to repair the harm. And then it gets brought back and gets brought back to the group. And the first person we ask about, how’s this plan look, or did what you say get heard? And are your needs getting addressed in this thing? Is the person who experienced the harm and everybody keeps weighing in, and then we start thinking about who’s gonna help this person complete this plan? Because going solo, and without the support of the people in this room is how we got in this mess in the first place. So let’s buttress this person, let’s support this person to make things right. And so that is a gross oversimplification of what it is that we do. But there’s lots of stories in writing and things out there that I can get to your professors and have you get some good examples of what it looks like in practice. I think the most important thing to say about in practice about the work that I did for quite some time with an organization called Impact Justice, I’m very proud of them. The restorative justice project which I started there, is that we really centered ending racial and ethnic disparities and to not net widen and to center crime survivors voices in need. So those things may feel like they’re all at odds with each other. But the truth is, is that one of the reasons I sometimes shy away from calling restorative justice conflict transformation is because there’s an understanding in a lot of conflict situations that people feel like they’re operating at odds with one another’s needs, that I have this need and you have that need and we’re bumping up against one another, right? Sometimes is the way it’s understood. And with restorative justice I often find that everyone’s needs are actually perfectly aligned. There’s a person who actually needs to apologize and knows that often. There’s a person who needs to hear an apology. There’s a person who feels the need to be unburdened by the weight and the guilt that they carry and they want help in turning their life around. And there’s a person who wants things being made right, they want maybe that fence rebuilt or they want something. And I know some of you are in classes where you’re getting to watch that Tinkerbell video. If you watch it, you know it’s really funny, we could have never imagined that this crime survivor would say, what I want is a six foot tall painting of Tinkerbell. Like you don’t know what people are gonna ask for, what’s gonna make them feel whole. And so it’s a very powerful thing to see how individualized it is and how different people have different needs. And so you can learn more about that whole thing from something called the RJDToolkit.org. Every single thing that a community-based organization might need to try to start a restorative justice diversion program, pre-charge felony crimes, working closely with your district attorney to make sure that there are no racial and ethnic disparities in the way in which it rolls out. All the things you could possibly need to do that are in this thing RJDToolkit.org. It’s also a great thing for research for your college papers or whatever. There’s tons of definitions and glossaries and videos and documents and all kinds of things in there. And so the other thing I’ve been working with is called CHAT, which is the Collective Healing and Transformation Project. And that has been sort of new frontier of our work around sort of coming home to what it is that I most wanted and needed and when I was a child, which is working an intimate partner in sexual violence. And so we are doing this work completely off the grid, which is that people come in the front door to a family justice center and say, I’m not leaving my husband or boyfriend or I’m not leaving my partner and I want the violence to stop. And so we actually work with both parties and their families and communities in order to come up with sort of safety plans for moving forward and shared custody and living arrangements and all the things and we build it together. And that has been an amazing process. It’s nascent, we are learning a lot and going slowly, but that’s been really amazing. Facilitators, I think about restorative justice facilitators, who do you need to be in order to do this work? When you think about some mediation programs teach you to be neutral, I like to say think we need to be equally partial. We have to fall in love with everybody. And what that means is you hold with equal compassion and care the people who caused the harm, the people who’ve experienced the harm and the family and communities that undergird the whole process. And it’s really built on this notion which was a part of the truth and reconciliation commission’s work and it’s a Ubuntu, this word Ubuntu, it’s Nguni Bantu word that means a person is a person through other people or I am because we are. And when I think about my father, it’s a very literal truth, right? I literally am because he was. And so that is a hard truth to sit with and also a truth. And so there’s sort of no outdoor way we can throw people too. We have to figure out how to work it all out together. Another way to think about it is what Dr. King said, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality, and it’s also what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “Interbeing” that we all inter-are, I love those notions. And so family and community I put in the center actually here is because it’s how it actually works. Not just as support and witnesses, but these are the people that are most poised to help, make things right and make sure that it never happens again. From a Buddhist perspective, I like this idea of Indra’s net and it’s this idea that there’s an infinite web that permeates all of space and time, and it has an infinite number of junctions where these pieces of the net come together and at each juncture there is a gemstone. And that gemstone has an infinite number of facets and in each facet is reflected all the other facets, right? And so that is how the universe operates, that is our belief. So this is the fabric of all existence, and so that is something to think about. So a little bit about the roots, again, I mentioned Mennonite people in the U.S. and Canada in the 1970s sort of coined this term restorative justice. Millennia and millennia ago, some Indigenous people, and I say not all cause we can’t call ‘em all peacemakers and everybody does the same thing, came up with notions that are very much akin to what I’m talking about today, different processes like family group conferencing comes out of Aotearoa, the Maori people, Navajo Diné peacemaking, and so many other tribes. And in most cultures, if we went far enough back, like I’m studying with the Tibetan and Indian systems of justice, particularly Tibet prior to Chinese occupation, really amazing Buddhist roots of restorative justice are there. And every one of us, including what we cannot remember about white indigeneity, my son is half white. And sometimes when we are doing a lot of stuff around say Black Lives Matters protests, et cetera, he can start to speak very negatively about white people. And I always need to correct him and remind him that not only is he half white, but also it’s not all any kind of one people. And I took him to Stonehenge and showed him the circle that is there, right? That white people knew how to do this too. How to build a beautiful contraption that shows us when the solstice comes and to know to bury the folks with disabilities in that space and to pray for those folks that that’s white folks stuff too. So let’s not forget that we have forgotten, but we can always re-remember lots of things. So briefly about measuring success about the work that I was doing in Oakland with the youth diversion programs. We found a 44 percent reduction in recidivism, crimes, oh, even if it’s measured by re-arrest, which I really hate arrest as a measure of recidivism because kids of color get arrested for being kids of color. So I don’t really think that’s a good, but even, even with re-arrest as a marker, 33 percent reduction in re-offense. And crime survivors have a 91 percent satisfaction rate, couldn’t do a comparative analysis, because interestingly the criminal legal system does not keep track of victim satisfaction data. They conflate conviction with victim satisfaction. But it doesn’t start with a question, is that what you wanted? ‘Cause it wasn’t what I wanted so. Also significant cost savings. I mean depending on what jurisdiction and where these numbers vary, but when you think about what the cost of incarceration, let alone just probation, all kinds of things of that nature, cost is obviously much, much, much less expensive to hire community-based organizations to facilitate these dialogues. I’m coming up on closer to, I’m not sure where I am, what time? How much time do I have left there, Julian? You can tell me.

- [Julian] 30 minutes.

- There’s 30 minutes left, okay. I’m gonna move kind of quickly through the next couple of slides. So I would make a plug for thinking about language and particularly what kind of language we should be using and what we should be abandoning. So Justice Yazzie taught me that there’s no word in Diné for, so most Indigenous languages have verb based languages. And so this is really powerful. There are very few nouns at all or things that would even qualify as nouns. So instead of saying offender, the phrase is acting as if he has no family, are acting as if she has no relatives, no relations. That is what no relations, I should be careful, acting as if they have no relations. And Eduardo Duran told me that there’s no word like for woman in his language. He said, instead of saying there’s a woman sitting over there, you’d say womanning is happening over there. So there’s this beautiful book called “Braiding Sweetgrass” that everybody should read by Robin Wall Kimmerer, she’s a botanist and an Anishinaabe woman. And in one of the chapters of that book called Learning the Grammar of Animacy. She writes, “A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans trapped between its shores and contained by the word, but the verb wiikwegamaa, to be a bay, releases the water from bondage, and lets it live. To be a bay holds the wonder that for this moment the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers because it could do otherwise become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive”. So this moves me deeply because it really speaks to the heart of what we’re doing in restorative justice. Please don’t leave me fixed in time, don’t leave me stuck in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania when all those terrible things were happening to me and I was a victim. I adopt the word from time to time, especially when people are saying the victim’s lobby wants this and the victim’s lobby wants that. And I’m like, did you ask this victim, right? But mostly I a shoo all these terms. We tend to call the young people we work with responsible young people, and all the meetings that are held in that, right? You are responsible for the thing that you did. And when they complete the plan to repair the harm, I’ve been a responsible young person. It’s so beautiful. I joked about this earlier with folks that I recently was a speaker at a statewide association for the treatment of sexual abusers. And I said, why are you still calling people the thing that you want them to stop doing? Like don’t leave us there. Don’t leave me there. Don’t leave my father there. Don’t leave any of us there. Let’s keep it moving. So I think I covered these folks. So I talk a little bit about forgiveness. What I wanna just say extremely, I’m writing a book about forgiveness right now and what I would say is people really conflated I think, with restorative justice or see it as an expected outcome. So it’s neither a prerequisite for participation nor an expected outcome of processes. It’s lovely when it happens, but we shouldn’t be making victims survivors, folks who’ve experienced harm feel that they need to forgive in any sort of particular way or time if it’s for them at all. And it really is an intra individual personal journey that may or may not come. And I think we need to be really, really gentle with folks. I had the incredible privilege when I was 24 years old of this wonderful and long and crazy course of events, which I will not talk about too much today. Had a private audience with the Dalai Lama when I was 24 years old, and I was begging him for advice about, I was a hot mess, I was yelling at him for most of the audience actually. And I was begging him for advice about how to forgive my father, how, how you’re, how, and tell him about my work. And it was raging and he wouldn’t give me advice. He kept speaking in these beautiful, lofty ideals that I felt completely incapable of ever understanding and I really kept interrupting. I was like, how? And he stopped at one point, he shushed me, and he sort of reached out and he took my hand and he asked me, with all the compassion in the world, he said, “Do you feel you’ve been angry long enough?” And it was an incredible gift. And so I would encourage us to, when we’re working with folks who’ve experienced harm, please give them that wide birth in their own healing journey. I myself decided that I had been angry long enough, and so that’s kind of how I define forgiveness. Angry long enough. There are all kinds of other definitions out there. I really like one that Oprah throws around, which is giving up all hope that the past could have been any different. And there are other definitions I’m working with over time, but it really is about a personal relinquishment of anger that we have every right to feel on our own timeline. In the end, I would just say when I close out a little bit with these notions that I’ve received from my dear friend and mentor Father Greg Boyle, who talks about loving me with no matter what-ness. It’s not a free pass to be my worst self, but it’s a weight off my shoulders. I think like sort of like the universal basic income of love, right? Like that we’re all standing on this ground together and it frees me up to be my very best self. And so I’m gonna skip this slide, unfortunately, it’s an important one, but I have gone over, I think. There’s some big questions that we need to answer. I will just say about appropriation of Indigenous people’s practices and what we ought to do. And that probably should just be a whole other talk and we’ll move past that. So when I think about today, there’s this incredible urgency, and I think about the children that I have met who have been in cages for far too long. The adults are in cages for far too long. The survivors who the criminal legal system has failed on countless levels. The parents have had their children taken away for reasons that have more to do with their race than anything else. And when I think about this, I remember that this debate between the two worldviews was going on for 200 years. And sometimes there can be this incredible urgency like we have to do it now and to burn it all down now. And I really, really understand that and relate to it. And that’s definitely how I was when I met his holiness. I was definitely in a burn it all down mode. And I do think that the way we are currently doing things needs to not just tinker and shift and change, but ultimately, we need to go through this paradigm shift. But there is both and that we are being called to right now, an urgency to move into new ways of being with the patience of how long it’s gonna take us to get there in a good way. Yes, children are being locked in cages, and Indigenous wisdom and language is being lost and the climate is moving quickly towards irreparable damage to Bhumi Devi, Mother Earth, and that urgency, and that there’s this urgency for us to all see that we inter-are, with all these things for the sake of the very planet. And paradigm shift is messy and it takes a long time. So it’s not something that can be well seen with the eyes of urgency, right? That is limbic brain thinking. And we need our prefrontal cortex and our whole hearts and souls to be involved. We have to stop and breathe and be present to one another and what’s happening even as the world is burning. So will we get to see this in our lifetimes? I think maybe it’s hubris to think so, but maybe not. Who knows? That would be thrilling. If not, I like this quote, which is “The seed never sees the flower.” I think I am making cave paintings. I think of the RJDToolkit as a cave painting. And I hope the books that I write will be cave paintings, leaving behind a trail of information of things that can be done in a good way so that we can get to a good place in a good way. And it’s really important to remember what Arundhati Roy says, that “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” And so with that, I’m gonna ask you to turn back to a neighbor and have a little bit of discussion time about what stood out, what resonated for you, what’s something you have a question about. So spend a few minutes in that and then we’ll come back together. Thanks folks.

- [Sujatha] Should we move to Q&A?

- [Julian] You tell me.

- [Sujatha] Yeah, sounds good.

- [Julian] Yeah.

- [Speaker] Let’s do it.

- [Julian] Okay. Okay. So I imagine some of you have some questions for Sujatha. This is some fundamental stuff, some stuff that I imagine touches some nerves and both in good ways and provocative ways. So what are you curious about? What are you wondering about?

- I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you. I appreciate that we’re in a 200 year process. I work in restorative justice in Chilton County and one of the things I struggle with is that we, the paradigm we’re trying to move away from is very punishment focused. And so when I’m working with someone who’s been impacted by crime, often when I say, what do you want? Their response is, I want the beep, beep, beep to go to jail. And that’s not what we do. And we’re also fundamentally against sending to be people to jail. So as someone who’s been a victim advocate and works in this work, I’m wondering, I know that sometimes the anger lowers and it moves to other things for people. My work has deadlines. How do you support a process through that when that is the wish of the affected party and you’re trying to center the affected party in the work?

- Yeah, this is a really, really important question, so thank you. And it’s something we really struggled with for a long time. So you are right that often time. So there’s two pieces. One is that there’s an analogy that I use all the time from my friend Danielle Sarad, who says, she talks about how, we think all crime survivors are super punitive and sometimes they tell us they are, but it’s only because like, so you think about it like a bunch of people are walking through a desert and there’s a hamburger truck and it’s been four days since there’s been food, and it’s been a day and a half since there’ve been water. And there’s like a hamburger truck with free water and free hamburgers or whatever. You can’t say that the hamburger truck is the best hamburger truck in the desert because the data is that everybody’s lined up at that hamburger truck, right? You can’t say who’s a vegetarian and who’s not because as a vegetarian, I myself would be lined up at that hamburger truck, right? So we’ve only offered people one thing for decades and decades and decades. And so people have come to believe that justice is the harm that is done to someone else, right? And they haven’t had space to imagine otherwise, right? Or to even consider centering their own needs. So do you really have a need for another person to be punished? And what else do you need and what else do you need, and what else do you need and what else do you need? Not to dismiss that I don’t, I say there’s nothing that can be promised on any fronts and that’s not what we do. I would like to know what else you need and I’d like to know more. Tell me what happened and tell me what your needs are in relationship to what happened and what did you need then and what do you need now, right? Just spending more and more time in the preparatory work around truly helping folks identify their spiritual needs, their physical needs, their financial needs, their, you know, their need for safety, all of the needs, right? And there’s a conflating most, I’m assuming knowing a little bit about the Vermont system that the kinds of stuff that people would like to see folks locked up for, they weren’t gonna get locked up anyway, so was, yeah, a lot of the diversion that we do across this nation is I worry that we do net widening actually. But that being said, restorative justice is a wonderful thing to offer in any situation where people really want it, but it wasn’t gonna happen anyway, right? Unfortunately, a lot of DAs send cases and this is why I focus entirely on pre-charge felonies because then we’re doing real diversion of actual things that would’ve resulted in a criminal conviction and time usually. So most of the time we’re not, people aren’t gonna get what they wanted anyway, and even if it was a case where they could have gotten it, right? Our conviction rates are abysmal for a lot of the stuff that people are most in need of the, they think they’re in need of, and I’m being careful with my language ‘cause I don’t wanna be patronizing, but they’ve only been told that justice looks like the person who has hurt them, being hurt, and that they actually haven’t even taken a moment to imagine what all their other needs might be, right? And so when I think now back on my own childhood and what I needed, I didn’t need my father in a cage. I needed him to stop doing what he was doing. I needed therapy, I needed my family to know what was happening. I needed assurances that would never happen again. I needed us to be apart from each other for a while, but not for me to be in some family that they didn’t speak my language, eat our food, et cetera. So pray to our gods, right? Really I needed something different. And so in asking those questions about what do you need and what else do you need and what’s the need under that need is really a way to help people step away from that. Especially when yeah, I’m real straight with folks too. I’m like unfortunately or fortunately, I don’t even say I don’t, I never put my politics on, I’m like a full on abolitionist, and most of the people I’ve worked with would have no clue, right? So that is a really interesting thing, because the program is such that that’s not what we do. So if you need that then there’s other places for you. But unfortunately, those other places are probably not gonna deliver that either. And I tell people that I say, the chances of you getting that over there are pretty slim. You could try, but I’m still here. And the time limits on when, so statue of limitations are really long actually, and cases are usually not going stale that fast. And so I push really hard for the DAs who divert to us to give us a lot of time to finish, is respectful of crime survivors to let them go through their whole process, right? So that is hard to get them to do, but I’ve been very lucky to work with wonderful DAs who are super, super progressive, and will give me most of what I ask for. So that’s really good. Yeah. There’s one, there’s one over here behind you and the other, yeah.

- Hi.

- Hi.

- My name is Judy.

- Hi, Judy.

- And I just wanna say thank you very much to share your story in today’s talk, and I have two question, I think. The first is that just like leading into the future, are we thinking about like using restoric circle this kind of practice to like reduce like jail time and maybe one day, like instead doing jail, maybe like all we do is restoric circle and the other question we kind of have in our group is that like, how do we prevent like criminals to like manipulative use the restoric circle to get away from what they do and then go out in the society to like make more harm?

- Thank you so much both of those questions. So it is my dream someday that we would be having, I mean I don’t know if we’re gonna call it restorative justice in 50, a 100 years, whatever, but that there would be other ways that don’t center sort of punishment as the way in which we address things, right? And that we are really centering, meeting crime survivors needs and putting the onus on folks, supporting folks who have caused harm to be directly accountable to their crime survivor’s needs as the way we do business, right? And in Aotearoa, New Zealand, prosecutors have to file something to take cases out of restorative justice, right? It’s an automatic that the cases go to restorative justice, and it’s understood nationally that that’s what’s gonna happen. And so that is very powerful to my mind. But it has to be properly resourced to happen that way. So what frustrates me is that there’s all of these demands put on restorative justice to solve everything without the sufficient resources in which we can really even put up proper demonstration projects. And each time I get one up and running, it’s like this funding stream gets cut and that funding stream gets cut, and so that’s been really hard. And so, again, that’s why I kind of rely on the cave painting thing to hope that we’re at least leaving something for other people to pick up when the conditions are better for so doing in the future. So that’s one thing. And then how do we stop folks from manipulating the process? So people are manipulating things all day, every day. They’re manipulating all kinds of processes, right? And so when you think about the current system and the current process, people are manipulating those processes in all directions at all times, right? And so I think that the most important way to stop people from behaving in the ways that we would like them, to helping people behave as their best selves is to bring the right people into the circle. So early on we ask questions like, who helps you be your best self? And who holds you to be your best self, right? Who is, right? And so making sure that those folks are in the circle is absolutely critical to the success of a process. Making sure that the person who caused the harm is supported to complete a plan to repair the harm, right? So there are processes where if you just like, if you’re not really attending to the self-identified needs of the person you harmed, then if there’s no like concrete outcome in a sense, then it maybe you could just like have some fake sorry, but everybody feels it when it’s a fake sorry, right? So what does it look like to bring the kind of people into the process that help that person complete that plan to repair the harm? And honestly, restorative processes aren’t, they’re not easier than court. They actually are often way more involved. The stuff that you have to do that you yourself have agreed to, that the process ends in a consensus-based outcome that everyone has agreed to. And the last question I always, the last two questions I ask is I ask the person who’s experienced the harm, are you truly satisfied with this? If all of this got done, would you really feel like today sitting today, I know you can’t ever know, but today, do you feel like you would feel like, ah, that’s good, like things turned out okay for me, right? And then I turned to the young person who’s caused the harm and the person who’s caused harm. And I say, do you feel like this agreement is a setup for your failure? Have you said you do things that you’re never gonna do? Do you have all the help you need? Have we filled out this plan sufficiently that the people, that you can count on those people to help you get or done right? ‘Cause it’s a pretty intense plan most of the time. And if it’s done well, it really does turn that person’s life around. So yeah, I think that it’s also about having facilitators who are really not conflict averse and bringing in no bullshit people, pardon my language into the circle, right? Having people who can really just smell like if there’s some funky going on and having them be the brave people who say it, be like, nobody believes that. Somebody’s gotta say that sometimes, you’re never gonna be able to do that. Or grandpa, you’ll never get those kids to school. Or like, people just have to keep it real. And that’s a really important part of the process.

- All right, we got time for one more. Who wants to take the last one? Yeah.

- Hello, I’m Jackson, and I had a question about the urgency and patients, and I’m just thinking about the whole situation in general with just certain groups being persecuted at just like extremely high rates and just wondering how it’s been that way for a lot of years already. And so at what point do we not, do we place the emphasis on the urgency versus the patients, and say that I should have be able to have that expectation that in my lifetime, I’ll be able to see a significant paradigm shift versus say that I can do things to set people up in the future. But I think that’s kind of, in my own opinion, it feels like that’s already what has been done. And so I think now it feels more like the time for us to push that urgency versus to try and start an actual paradigm shift versus like, I guess think about these things and then continue to chip away slightly versus actually makes real noise, I guess.

- Yes.

- In the space. And so, I mean, obviously, I understand that it’s not that easy and you have to go about it in meticulous ways because the whole system is built, so that it’s not easy to take it all down. But I’m just wondering at what point do we really try and push the envelope to a point where it’s like, all right, we’ve been thinking about this for a couple hundred years at this point and it’s just been change, like the things that we’ve been seeing have just been changing forms. So how do we get a ahead of the curve and stop it before it changes again to another way in which we can’t touch it?

- Ooh, Jackson, thank you so much for a beautiful, beautiful question. I misspoke earlier if I was not clear, there’s something that is really, really important for folks to look up, and it’s this thing called vent diagrams, V-E-N-T, and they’re on Instagram, and you just draw a regular Venn diagram and on the one side, the two sides, the things on the two sides, do you know about it, Jackson? No, so it’s like the two sides are things that seem diametrically opposed that they can’t coexist and so you draw a Venn diagram and one of them is the urgency of now, and the other side is the patients of a thousand years, right? And where we need to live is in the middle of that Vent diagram, right? So if you say now I’m like, yeah, now, like I was yeah, now, yes, right now, right now, we have to start now. We needed to start 200 years ago, but yes now, right? I’m not saying not now, absolutely now. I just know that when we run on the now energy without any of the patients of a thousand year energy, we burn out, and we are the soldiers that have to stay strong, right, in the battle for collective liberation. And I’m not crazy about battle language ‘cause I’m like a 100 percent about nonviolent. It’s a journey. It’s a long, long walk, right? And I think Dr. King was right, the arc is bending slowly towards justice, but sometimes I think like some of us might just jump on that thing and grab a hold of it and bend it a little faster, right? And so it is no way to dismiss the absolute necessity to do it now and yesterday. And I think that a part of our work, it’s like sacred work. It’s sitting in circles. It’s being in deep relationship because particularly when we come with the now energy, we also tend to come, punitiveness starts to rise up in us and we find the enemy. And I like how Adrienne Maree Brown talks about how that, in her book, “We Will Not Cancel Us” that all of this like now and move now, and these are the things that we’re gonna do, is that we’ve turned some of that, we’ve lost our, who’s a comrade versus like who’s our combatant. And I kind of feel like, I would like for us to also start to expand our hearts and minds to understand that even the people that are actually oppressing us are being harmed by the oppression that they’re causing, right? And Dr. King’s style and Gandhi’s style, like I wanna free the oppressors of oppression that they’re living with perpetrating on us because they’ll be happier too. And that kind of stuff takes like deep contemplative, prayerful, spiritual, or scientific, right? Like I love the scientists who feel just almost like theologians to me and their love of like what they’re seeing in the web telescope now. And like we gotta be looking all the way out there for the answers. And that is not stuff that comes from this limbic brain, lizard brain kind of desperation to save ourselves and our people, such a legitimate feeling. But if we can’t slow down and breathe and have a barbecue and dance and love one another, we’re not gonna get there. So I think that that’s a little bit about what I’d say about that, but thank you for that point of clarification. It is urgent that you brought that to our attention. Thank you.

- All right, well, we are at time, and I wanna thank you Sujatha for sharing your wisdom, for coming up and sharing your story. And I want to thank all of you for coming out today, and let’s get one final round of applause for Sujatha. Thanks to you for coming.

- Thank you. Thank you everyone.

- Thank you.

- [Julian] Yeah. No, yeah

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Everyday Peace in the World

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Conflict Transformation: A Middlebury Collaborative

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