Shared Future vs. Shared Vision with Byron Bland
Ceejay Hayes:
This is CounterPol. Today we're speaking with Byron Bland, a pastor and peace facilitator who worked for decades on negotiating peace in some of the world's most high-tension conflicts. Peacemaking in conflict zones is unsurprisingly incredibly challenging. Success is never guaranteed, and there are often incompatible views between opposing sides of what is right and just. How do you negotiate that? And how do you build consensus on what is an acceptable outcome for all parties involved? Byron's experience lends itself to a few compelling observations. Let's get into it.
Byron Bland:
Well, I was for about 12 years the associate director at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. and it was a small research center at Stanford, but had very prestigious faculty members associated with it. Part of the things that they let the associate director do was engage in a project that we wanted to. I partnered with a colleague of mine, Brian Lennon, who's a Jesuit in Northern Ireland. I'm a Presbyterian minister, and I partnered with him to figure out if we could do something that would help the situation there. So that at a research center, I had to kind of claim a expertise, and I couldn't match the scholarship in the fields that were there in any way. So I claimed, what was the relationship of theory and practice? And what I meant by that is that if researchers knew everything that practitioners knew, what would they think was important and interesting? And if practitioners knew everything that researchers knew, what would they think would be significantly important to them? And so we tried to focus on that intersection. And so much of my work was trying to put into the practitioner's language the research of theorists and scholars in the field, and vice versa, to take what practitioners were saying and experience and frame it in ways that researchers would find interesting. And so that was the nature of my involvement. That's been about probably about 35 years now in Northern Ireland. And I've worked about 25 in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When I began it, my interest was really focused on the three conflicts that were most intractable, which was South Africa, Israel, Palestine, Northern Ireland. and I wanted to see what might be done in those conflicts that would be helpful. I never did much directly in South Africa, although I studied the literature a great deal. But a lot of it was the interplay of our experiences in and around Jerusalem and in and around Belfast, and what were the parallels we saw, what were the differences, what were the things that we felt could be made generalizable from one conflict to the other. And so that was the large part, the focus of my work. I retired a couple of years ago. And when I did, I began to focus more directly on here in the United States and the polarization and dysfunction that we were experiencing. And I wanted to see if there was something in the work we had done that would be applicable to here and dealing with that polarization. And so now where I keep contact, in both places. Primarily, my work is trying to see how what we learn there is operable here in the United States.
Ceejay Hayes:
How would you define polarization or what it means to be polarized?
Byron Bland:
What it means to be polarized basically means that you can't disagree safely. if you think about it in relationship to peace, peace is a lot of things. And when you're doing scholarly research, it's important to have definitions that are usable. When you're dealing with people's experience, and sometimes that's counterproductive, because you're restricting something that they experienced in broad terms. And so I think the notion of peace in a society includes lots of dimensions, some of them relational, some of them attitudinal, some of them situational. And you have to figure out, what is it I'm going to focus on? And so as I began to look at polarization in the United States, I felt that the main thing was that it wasn't safe to disagree. And if it's not safe to disagree, then disagreement can't be creative. And when that's the case, we lose a lot. And so I wanted to focus particularly, which is something we didn't do in community dialogue in Northern Ireland or Israel-Palestine, which was how are the terms and concepts that we used and developed, would they be useful in making it possible to disagree safely here in the United States? And so in that sense, what I think polarization is closest to is a term that we coined, hostile peace. And we coined that term because when we said to particularly folks in Northern Ireland, you're in a post-conflict situation, they were quite emphatic that they were not posting anything. the conflict was still raging, and so they hadn't moved past a lot of what the post-conflict terminology assumed. We didn't want to have to rehearse that again each time we brought it up. We felt we had to come to another term that captured the dynamics. And the notion of hostile peace became really important. And a hostile peace is a calm, but it's a calm that no one's content with. And it's a calm in which both sides feel that unless they check the goals and aspirations of the other side, they're going to lead to a situation they cannot bear. And so the issues almost don't even matter. What matters is the symbolic relationship between people. which they see every advance of the other side as a threat to their future existence. And so, in many ways, I think what polarization is, is the formation of a hostile peace. And as it grows, it becomes more polarized. But fundamental to that is that you can't find a way to disagree and live with one another.
Ceejay Hayes:
This reminds me of Johann Galtung's theories on peace, like negative peace versus positive peace, how negative peace is sort of just refers to like the absence of violence or pessimism, the lack of something versus the presence of something. Whereas positive peace is more structural integration, actual relationships existing between people as opposed to just not the presence of violence that's present in a negative peace. So you talk a little bit about peace. Can you talk a little bit about what a non-hostile or perhaps a peaceful peace is and looks like, but also what justice is? We talk about those two things like they're interchangeable, but you make a distinction between the two.
Byron Bland:
I think that central to the notion of peace is what we call a vision of a shared future. And that essentially means that when I hear the other side talk about its dreams and goals and aspirations, I say to myself, I could live with that. I might not like it. And in fact, I may work politically to achieve different outcomes than they're seeking to have. But if theirs came about, I could live with it. I could tolerate it. I could bear it. And that to us is the foundation of peaceful existence because it allows for disagreement. Most people approach this as if what you need is a shared vision of the future, which means we agree about where the future is going. And what we discovered was that that's almost a nonstarter, that you can't get going if what you do is require people to agree. It is the goal within a vision of a shared future to create a shared vision of the future. But that's a political process. And that's one in which you get various degrees of success about that. Politics is about disagreement. And politics is about a way of living with those disagreements. And having a vision of a shared future is foundational to that. I think that when you bring in the notions of justice, it's really important. Because like peace, justice is a lot of stuff. In research, you need to define it precisely what you're talking about. But in people's daily experience, they don't define it precisely, and it ranges over a number of different domains. What is key to me is how the notion of peace modifies what justice is. so that if I'm in some calm, in some kind of relative nonviolent state, justice becomes fairness in the Rawlsian way of I'm put before a veil, I don't know who I am, what would appear fair to me if I didn't know whether I was agent A or agent B in this? And I think that works fairly well and approximately in people's minds that they put themselves in other people's shoes and they wonder, does that look fair? That's how justice functions in a peaceful society. When a society in conflict, it shifts dramatically and justice becomes getting that to which I feel entitled. And that's where usually the conflict revolves around. And so if you're going at, let's create a just peace and don't realize that perceptions of justice is at the heart of that conflict, it exacerbates things. I was taken by a lecture given by the philosopher Abishai Margalit, in which he asked the question of, is peace and justice like fish and chips? Is fish and chips one dish, or are there fish and are there chips? Are they two dishes? And if they're one thing, then you can talk about them as one thing. But if there are actually two, it's important to talk about them as separate things, and then what's the relationship between them? And that's the framework that I find better. When I start talking about how in the midst of disagreement can you create some sense of justice, I actually find that it's important to somewhat flip the terms. That what I'm talking about is not creating justice, because that has certain aspirations into it. What I'm trying to do is to reduce injustice. which I think is really fundamentally what we do in politics and other stuff. It is awful hard to know what's a full-blown conception of justice is. And there always seems to be things that are arising outside those frameworks, no matter how we define them. But the notion that there are certain things which appear to us unjust, even in the midst of conflict, And can we alleviate those seems fundamental. This becomes important in democratic politics because the experience in democratic politics is one of losing. Because I'm always making concessions. That's what the process is. It's about making concessions to reach some kind of way to move into the future. And so my experience is one of receiving less than I hoped I would. And I think that one of the overlooked tasks in democracy is how do we make those losses acceptable and bearable to those who have to suffer them? I think that that's really critically important overlooked dimension of politics in the United States and everywhere where polarization is taking place, because we tend to think that peace is equated with defeating the aspirations of those who oppose us. where I think peace is actually how do you take those aspirations into accommodation and live with them. And living with people who I disagree involves minimizing the injustice that living together imposes on us. I prefer that framework to those who make strong claims about positive peace or those who simply make negative peace claims. They're somewhere in the middle of that.
Ceejay Hayes:
So I have a question that's sort of related to that. I think you could tie in the theory. What is happening in polarized democracies as it relates to trust, threat and the plurality of ideologies and values?
Byron Bland:
I think that what drives polarization is distrust. And I make a distinction of that, of mistrust, that we tend to put them and conglomerate them together. You have to define the terms this way to make the distinction, because in general usage, they're all over the place about that. And what we define distrust as is the expectation of harm. So that I know that in any relationship with you, in any encounter with you, I face harm. I'm worried about how I'm going to be harmed by that encounter or by this relationship. Mistrust is one in which I simply don't know enough whether I should trust or not. that I don't know enough about you. I don't know enough about your dreams and aspirations. I don't know enough about what you're hoping to do in life or how you envision our relationship. And so since I don't know enough, I don't know whether to trust or not. Distrust drives fear, and that fear exacerbates polarization. But mistrust is fundamental to the democratic process. When I am engaged with people with whom I disagree, I need to be curious about why. I need to know why it is that you're having the goals and aspirations that you are. How it is that I'm blocking those in certain ways and whether I really want to or not. How is it that I could accommodate your dreams and goals and aspirations within my own? How do I learn more about you so that we can address those together? Now, that's mistrust in the most positive sense. But it is there is a possibility with mistrust, and it's not there distrust. Distrust is at the heart. When we talk about mistrust and distrust within society, we often make too much of a jump. I don't think you can go from distrust, which is expecting harm, to trust. I think it has to go through mistrust. And so much of what I think polarized societies have to do is to take distrust and how do we transform it into a mistrust, which can then be creative in our relationship.
Ceejay Hayes:
This brings up an interesting point because you named three conflicts as intractable, South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel-Palestine. And the fact of the matter is that violence does exist in each of these contexts, but perhaps the drivers of polarization are not the ones who are experiencing violence, but the ones who are perpetrating it. And you can tell me if that is true or not, given your experience. But I get this sort of sense that when I think about this in the US as well, the people who are called to action and really polarizing and populist narratives are people who are of an identity, who have perpetrated a lot of violence. You know, so not accusing the individual of perpetrating violence per se, but having an identity whose relationship in the history of the United States is one of perpetrating violence. And so it's interesting because I'm actually having a hard time understanding distrust and polarization, because in my mind, it's people who are already mistrustful of a particular group acting on that mistrust in direct, cultural or structurally violent ways towards another community who are disempowered and thus are recipients of violence. Are people acting on mistrust and then establishing distrust in others when it comes to polarization in these conflicts is mistrust enabling distrust.
Byron Bland:
So you mentioned at the beginning the three conflicts that I looked at, and they are polarized societies, but I don't think that's what links them together. I think what links them together is enemy relationships. And so just to go back to the earlier thing about negative peace and positive peace for a minute, if you're taking negative peace as the absence of war, you're basically dealing with conflicts and how do they escalate into war and can you de-escalate them out of war into something broadly called non-war or peace. In positive peace, you're using relationships to achieve some positive goal, whether it's justice or other related goals. But you're trying to, within those relationships, achieve those goals. I think what is really central to the notion of peace is neither one of those things, but they're both important. I'm not trying to say they're unimportant. But what unifies this is enemies. By enemy, I don't just mean somebody who you find distasteful. It means that this is someone who's seeking my destruction, in my view. And I cannot have a positive relationship with someone who is seeking my destruction. And so the key to peace studies or to other peace building is how do you take what are enemy relationships and transform them into peaceful relationships, or at least a different kind of relationship. And by peaceful, I mean adversarial, I mean oppositional, I mean all of the things that imply conflict. But what they don't imply is violence and destruction of the other person's existence. I think that's what unites them. It's enemy relationships that drive the polarization. And enemy relationships are fundamentally relationships of distrust. because I expect harm to come from you or harm to come from my enemies. That's what I think is at the heart of the polarization we experience, if not in actual enemy relationships, those that are approaching enemy relationships and those who have the characteristics that we think our future existence is at stake. And I think doubt about our future existence is at the heart of the polarization here in the United States and in other places around the world. Once you're in those enemy relationships, how do you move out of them? And I think moving then to mistrust as a stage in which you could then develop greater trust is critically important. I don't think I can go from thinking that you are a threat to my existence and a harm to me to trusting you. There are a lot of steps in between, including what has changed. So that if you've been shooting at me for, in the case of Northern Ireland, the last 50 years or so, what happened that you're now sticking out a hand and want me to shake it? So I think that moving to where we can begin to say, you know, maybe there's harm there, maybe there's not. Let me find out more about what the potential of this relationship is. That's the critical step.
Alan Jagolinzer:
I was wondering if you had some opinion about the potential for a spectrum of emotional energy around polarization, because when you speak to the United States, for example, I see people who are probably more capable of finding some sort of medium engagement or some interactive engagement, and then I see people who are, in some ways, theatrical, who are exploiting the potential to create a polarized narrative and to agitate and exploit the scenario. The reason why I'm asking is if one is approaching a depolarization, how do you reach the people who are capable of finding some consensus or whatever it is, taking the heat down and getting away from the influence of those who have incentives to exacerbate the polarization and exploit it?
Byron Bland:
Let me start with emotion. What I think an emotion is, is a sensation with an interpretation. that I have some agitation, some arousal, something that I experience. It's not clear what it is. What makes it into anger or hate or fear or something else is my interpretation of the situation in which I'm in. Even if I ask you to tell me about being afraid, you'll tell me about a situation. And so key to that is the interpretation of the situation. And so I think the way you can move what are negative emotions, like anger, fear, hate, you work on the interpretation of the situation. I think key to that is to ask participants the question, where would you be if the other side got what it really wanted? And if the answer to that is bad, you're in a troubled situation. You're in potentially enemy relationships. And so you have to make that, it might not be what I want, but I'd be OK. That's the key emotional shift that I think has to happen. And that goes back to developing a vision of a shared future, that I have a way that we can live with one another in my mind. I envision that there is a possibility of living together. in some relative calm with one another. When we're dealing with those emotions, the transformation occurs in the looking of the situation. What is difficult is that if I want to stay in political power, what I need is for you to support me, but particularly I need for you to fear my opponent and what my opponents would do. And so I am always telling you what will happen if they get what they want. And I'm the one who stands in the way of preventing them from getting what they're wanting. Short term, political, positive for you, it's long term disastrous because it means I can't do anything. If I'm constantly checking your aspirations and there's no grounds for improving or governing the situation at all, I think that's why it's important to name it as a hostile piece. because it isn't a comm that allows a shared future to come into existence. It's a way of preventing a shared future from coming into existence. So I think that you're constantly trying to get people together to look at, is there a different way of doing this? And how do you engage people in that? It then almost gets theological for me, that you have to want to. You have to think that we're better off together than we were separate.
Alan Jagolinzer:
there are some people who are innately receptive to it within the otherwise polarized communities, and then there are people who are, if you will, the polarization theatrical leaders, either because they legitimately believe this is the way it should be, or because they don't necessarily believe it, but they're getting something out of maintaining it. Clearly, there's some people who are receptive, and how does one reach them knowing that that threatens the politicians or the leaders?
Byron Bland:
There were studies done here at Stanford on polarization, and they came up with a number of things, and key to them were that you create an alternative. that people don't see an alternative to this. And so the creation of an alternative, the presentation of an alternative is key. That has a parallel side, which is that the one way to promote democratic relationships were to scare them. What's the consequences of if we don't? And I think it's a little bit of both, that one is I have an option, another is it's very clear to me where the continuation of this goes. Because I think there's an asymmetry between the two sides which mirrors one another, which is that I think when I win, the other side will accept it. But I think if they win, I'll never accept that. And what we should be really realizing is that that's on both sides. Both sides would never accept defeat. And so the only option open is then how do we live with this disagreement? I think Ceejay raised earlier the critical point with how do we deal with historical harms. And that's something I'm trying to work through in my head now. I grew up in the deep segregated South. My high school was the first integrated high school to graduate from my town. The sense of historical harms, I live with that daily. And I'd like to do something about it. I don't think that you simply say to people, well, you know, wait. No, I think they have to be dealt with. I'm also aware of the other side, which is that we're not going to get everything we want. and that living together democratically, which is key to addressing historical harms, involved my accepting losses about that. And how do you pair those things off? I don't know yet. I'm wrestling with what are the ways you can bring those two things together. What seems key to me, though, is that what fuels much of the debate around historical harms from those who have been harmed is distrust that society is going to do anything about it. So I think that it is key to communicate that, yeah, we're going to get there, but it's going to take some steps. And it's going to take some steps of us trying to do things and failing, since I don't know exactly what would heal historical harms. We're going to have to do it in steps, which means that at different points, we're going to have less than what our ultimate goal is. But we need the partnerships together to do that. I think that that's key. One of the overlooked dimensions in historical harm is class, that it centers on largely identities. and identities used in strategic ways, I understand that, but that what is overlooked is the class dimension. And I don't know how in the United States you're going to deal with racial historical harms without dealing with class historical harms, because it requires those who are experienced in their level of poverty or deprivation to unite together rather than being divided about that. I think that one of the ways you can avoid dealing with them is make sure that there's that division. There's a racial division on who has been hurt. That will make sure that nothing happens. Partly what has to occur is find ways that we overcome that and really begin to look at the impact of class on our society.
Ceejay Hayes:
There's a whole field political economy called racial capitalism that literally looks at this, the sort of interlinks between racialization and class-based stratification and how those two interplay with each other. And there are tons of writers who write on the subject matter. Hopefully we'll get one of them to speak on the pod. But I think you bring up something that's very real, which is the way that we in the U.S. race becomes this sort of pivot point where if you are white, you automatically receive all the privileges of the United States. If you're not white, you receive less and less of those privileges. And that's what it looks like on his face. But in reality, white people have suffered a lot. And this is not to make any kind of false equivalency, but there are generations of white communities in the U.S. that have been disenfranchised. for centuries and in more contemporary times. If we're thinking about the de-industrialization of the U.S. that happened starting from the 1980s and the 1990s and the lack of social mobility that happens for those communities. And so I think perhaps there needs to be a reinterpretation of how harm gets distributed in the U.S. while still accounting for different stratifications and different gradations of harm. You talked about historical harms and how we sort of overcome that. I think a big thing, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this, is accountability. Understanding that your community is accountable in the creation of those harms. It doesn't elude me that the US became particularly more polarized around 2016, but around the time that we were having lots of Black Lives Matter protests. And there was a large national conversation on acknowledging racial inequity and racial historical harms. And I wonder how much of the backlash against that and the polarization that was exacerbated during that time was a lack of willingness to be accountable.
Byron Bland:
Yeah, I do. They're not maybe completely well thought out fully yet, but I'm thinking about that. And it seems to me that the future is very important and is often overlooked. So that if you look at Hannah Arendt's notion of what creates human community, it is, in her mind, forgiveness, which calls off the reciprocity of harm to one another. And a future, which is a domain of promises that we make. So that I should not be able to create human community because the bumping up against one another that happens in living together between you and me keeps generating more and more and more conflict. And that I live in a sea of uncertainty. I don't know what you're going to do in the next moment. In fact, I'm not even really sure what I'm going to do in the next moment. So in the midst of that reciprocal back and forth and uncertainty, human community just can't exist. And what she thought was the keys to that were the human capacity to forgive and the human capacity to make promises about it. When we began this stuff back, and mainly trying to think about it in the 90s, there was Rwanda and all that, and there were great calls for, let's let the reconciliation process begin with not a whole lot of idea of what that meant. And so we felt that it was key to focus on the promises aspect of this. So what are the promises we are making to one another about the society we want to create? And I think that's key to that and often overlooked in the accountability literature. I may, if I'm able to get to a future, which is a shared future, look back and say, I'm sorry I did those things, was accountable for doing those things. The future we are creating is overcoming those things. That's important. In the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, what is often lost, particularly in South Africa, was that Mandela won. The future direction of society had been set. It was going to be one person, one vote. It was going to be a non-racial governance and policy thing. That was established. It wasn't what was at stake. in the thing. Once that's been done, I can go back and deal with the historical harms and other things that have been done. And I have a possibility of creating a future in which those harms are overcome, and I'm there with my dreams and goals and aspirations as well. If you don't do that, then dealing with accountability means the negation of my goals and aspirations to attain to your goals and aspirations. And that doesn't seem to me to be a fruitful context for addressing them. Rather than strictly accountability and the kind of legal notion of that, I'm much more interested in what are the promises we make one another about the future we want to live and how do we get there.
Ceejay Hayes:
I think this might be tangentially related, but maybe not. What do peace building strategies look like when one side of a conflict is operating from a set of values that represent a threat to the livelihoods or even existence of the other side? So think racism in apartheid South Africa. Think anti-LGBTQ policy or anti-immigrant policy in the US. Think the expansion of Israeli settlements into Palestinian territories. How does compromise factor when competing with a worldview or political view that challenges another person's identity, circumstance, livelihood?
Byron Bland:
I think at one level of abstraction, it's not that they're competing values. I think they're the same values. I think that oftentimes where they get implemented and interpreted in the conflict situation, do they become opposing in the way they manifest themselves to one another. But I think that if you talk to people about things that they hold in common, that you can create that kind of commonality. Putting it in our terminology, I don't know what a shared future looks like. I think that that's much more difficult when you're in a situation than when you're outside it. And that's one of the things that we learned by taking it back to the United States. We used to just say, well, key to this is developing a vision of a shared future where you live with one another. Go do it. And when we got back here, we said, OK, let's follow our advice and that was a bit harder to do than we imagined. So it then became to ask, how do you figure out what it is? And I think there are three keys to that. We have a four question framework. One of them is, can you envision a shared future? Can you develop trustworthiness? Can you accept losses? Can you rectify injustices? That's the four question framework we look at conflict through. In our original concept, it was a vision of a shared future that drove the other two. Now we found we don't know what that is. Can we use the other three questions to interrogate what a vision of a shared future might look like? And I think you can. So that if I don't know what a vision of a shared future looks like, I'm particularly concerned to foster dignity, safeguard livelihoods, and encourage respect. The difference between dignity and respect is dignity is what I think about myself, respect is what I think about you. If you don't know what to do, then begin to look, how do we achieve goals? How do we use our relationships to pursue those three things? And I think their vision of a shared future emerges from that. I want to push back a little bit.
Ceejay Hayes:
understanding what our goals are. But I'm thinking about your writing on contact theory and how this notion that it gets researched quite a lot, that if we spend time with each other, we will become less polarized. But you argue that to not be true. Is that sort of a feasible thing to imagine that is possible, that there are enough overlap in goals between enemies that can create the foundation for a even tenuous kind of peace?
Byron Bland:
First off, who knows? I mean, I don't know whether that's possible or not. But I know if I'm going to try in this direction. But I may fail. That's a possibility. I think that there are certain people who have certain ways of looking at the world. that I cannot bear or tolerate. And so I think that at some point we should talk about compromising concessions. But I think there's a limit to compromise. I don't compromise relationships in relationships that are cruel and humiliating. On principle, I don't do it. I don't matter what the outcome is. It doesn't matter what the payoff, how you configure it. If it endorses and support cruel and humiliating relationships, it's ruled out. And that would constitute some of the values that you're talking about. There are people with whom I cannot compromise. And those are those that impose cruel and humiliating relationships and circumstances on people. But I'm not sure that all of those who disagree with me fall into that category. And so I think that it's trying to identify and build relationships with those who don't. So that I'm a human being who's trying to make a living for my family. who's trying to raise a family, raise kids, if I'm doing that, who's trying to pursue a good community. I mean, a whole bunch of normal, good things about it. And I'm placed in a context which pits us against one another. I can take those same values and change the context, and they work just fine together with one another. it is important to try to build those visions of a shared future that work and that may have meaning to one another and people can participate. And realizing that this is no magic bullet, I could fail at this. I could discover that it's not possible. But the consequences of realizing that are really horrific. I think it's better to try.
Ceejay Hayes:
I agree. I mean, the opposite of trying is not trying and just accepting things as they are. And then if we do that, well, we can see that it could go left very quickly.
Byron Bland:
But key to that is also if I can move those barriers, those identity relationships, to one that are not distrust. An encounter with a different identity group brings harm to me, to one of I don't know enough. I've done a tremendous move a really critically important move, because I'm now able to engage you in about what your dreams and goals and aspirations are, and how are the things that I can do to aid in that. We sometimes talk about trust as encapsulated interest, so that I perceive that my interests are encapsulated in yours in such a way that as I pursue my interests, I further yours. And that has to do with framing and other kinds of stuff. But it seems to me that that's always a possibility before us. And for me, that's a theological possibility. I believe that it is always possible to have a mutuality emerge from this. It doesn't always do so. It emerges flawed in various kinds of ways, but it is still a mutuality upon which you can build and move forward. And I think that's my goal. Is it always there? Maybe it's sometimes naive to think so. I want to give it a try.
Alan Jagolinzer:
Why do some of these conflict positions retain themselves over generations? Because I think some of the potential avenues to get past this would be working with the youth, for example. I know the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Seeds of Peace, was trying to work on projects for youth going back decades, as one example. And I don't know what the efficacy was, but could you speak to the generational hangover effect of this and why we can't see some growth with a younger generation saying, okay, we've had enough?
Byron Bland:
I may just go back and say a word about whiteness, because there are books and scholars who say that that was a created term around the Bacon Rebellion in Virginia, in which indentured servants and slaves made a coalition to rebel against the landowners. And the response was to make sure that never happened again. What was developed in that was the notion of whiteness that wasn't present. There were hierarchies, but they had to do with ethnic hierarchies, largely in Europe, within the U.S. society. And what they did was mold those things into whiteness and said that you got certain privileges by participating in that identity. We deny to those who are not that. And for those who are struggling, getting a leg up on getting food on the table and family relationships is not a bad thing. The question is, do we want that framework for it? How do I learn to distrust someone? Well, I learned that a lot through history. I learned that a lot through what the society tells me about these relationships, how it is it tells me to be cautious, what is wise action. If I want to have dignity in myself, I want to have a livelihood that I can participate in, even whom I want to have respect for, do it in this way. and respect those boundaries and those who exclude. But it is possible, I think, to extend those same things beyond the kind of boundaries we set up. I guess what I'm saying is that things leave on because we experience the trauma. It isn't a trauma that's in the past. It's a trauma we experience every day. And that there are ways that the societies and other things reinforce those things. If we're going to get beyond them, we're going to have to create the avenues and the mechanisms for doing that. and realizing that what we do with one another is create peace daily, or we don't create it daily. That it's not something that is a state that we achieve and then that's the end of it. We just live in that state. It's something that we create daily in how we interact with one another, where we look, how we feel when we see things, how do we react and respond to one another. In many kind of subtle and myriad ways, we create the peace we live in and we do it daily. Most people, I think, do want to live in peace. What they mean by that is usually their opponents go away. And that's why I think it's critically important to start with disagreement and how can we disagree safely as the foundation for any peaceful relationship in the future.
Ceejay Hayes:
Right. To speak to your point, Alan, I think generational trauma exists. The history of particular permutations of identities lives on both in the memory, in the lived experience, but also in the circumstances that people of intersecting identities live in. So if you think about race-based inequities, that is a continuation of the disenfranchisement that was enabled through slavery as a labor practice. And it's so interesting because you hear people talk like right-wing talking heads saying, well, when do we get to stop talking about slavery? When do we get to stop talking about race? And for me, it's when we start to talk about it, when we acknowledge that these systems are historical, but also contemporary, and they inform how we move through the space. It informs our ability to live. It informs our social mobility.
Alan Jagolinzer:
It informs everything.
Ceejay Hayes:
If we're thinking about a particular end goal, it would be to not have to talk about race because we started to talk about it and we had meaningful conversations around it and we produced solutions where that no longer informs the way that I am able to live in a society. It may still inform my culture. It still may inform my social relationship, but it doesn't negatively impact my ability to live, period.
Alan Jagolinzer:
I guess my question was relating to whether the younger generation is more open to these kinds of dialogues, relatively speaking.
Byron Bland:
That question, I think it depends. In some cases, the young haven't experienced the trauma of war. I mean, in that sense, they're not good things because they don't understand what it could be, how this place was like before we had some come. In other ways, they're interested in different things than perpetuating the conflict. So it's a mixed bag. They're going to be the future. So it's important to work with them and to instill in them the tools to live together with disagreement and peace. But it's not an automatic that that's a fertile ground.
Ceejay Hayes:
I agree. I think that's a very important point. It's not an automatic that young people are willing or prepared to have these groundbreaking conversations. We're still informed by people who are older than us. Our histories are still informed by people who have come before us. And so I think to look to only young people to be the generation that breaks these hyper-polarized social relationships almost tries to ignore the work that older generations still have to do. They also have to participate in breaking these polarized laws that we have with each other. It's not just one generation's work to do it, and we keep kicking the can down the road. It's a total community kind of effort, you know?
Ceejay Hayes:
We've talked about historical trauma. We've talked about social inequities, identity-based inequities. But I want to talk about power, thinking about power as the ability to make or influence decision-making. What is the relationship between power, trust, mistrust, distrust? Talk to us about how power plays into trust and peacebuilding.
Byron Bland:
Power is an essential part of every relationship, and there's no way that I know that you can remove it as a factor. And there are positive and negative ways it is implemented. The positive way is evident, particularly in the current Gaza war, which is, to whom could Israelis negotiate? I mean, one of the ways that I can prevent a negotiation from happening is making sure that I have no one who has the power to make an agreement or implement an agreement or has the legitimacy to do so. And so when I'm talking in negotiation with you, I need you to be strong in your community, not weak, because I need you to deliver things that I need. If my goal is to make you weak, I make it impossible for you to deliver any of the things that I require you to. You have to look at, as you move forward, how do I build power in those to whom I oppose and disagree? because I need them in order to be able to move beyond the current stalemate. I think there are ways in which power is used negatively, and it is largely to disregard your concerns. I have power over you. I don't need to deal with you. It's oftentimes put as, am I having power over or am I creating power with? And I think as far as those images go, that's a useful one. Do we empower one another to pursue the life that we want to live? And that's going to involve conflict and disagreements and disappointments and all that stuff. But we're able to pursue them. You have to take that kind of power seriously. And how does the peace process develop the ability of people to choose peace? But if I have someone who can't, who has no agency at all, they can't choose peace or war.
Ceejay Hayes:
Just talk about your work in Northern Ireland and Israel-Palestine and how polarization sort of emerged in that.
Byron Bland:
Our work in Northern Ireland was talking with people who were doers. This came out of actually Kurt Lewin's work on how to denazify Germany, that it was easier to take someone who was going to do something and change the direction of that than it was to take someone who wasn't a doer and turn them into a leader. And so what we began to do was trying to identify those who were doing important stuff. And through conversation with one another, did that help them do their work better? And so we used to just say, what do you do? We talk with people. And at the end of that conversation, if there's need to have another conversation because it was useful, we have another conversation. And that's largely what we did was try to work with, equip, and inform ourselves about how do we empower each other as peace builders in the process. What we didn't try to do was to do mediation. We didn't try to make policy reclamation because, quite frankly, you could take anyone off a street in Belfast or Jerusalem and they know more about that situation than I'm ever going to know about it. So how do I talk with them about what they know in ways that help them pursue their goals and dreams and aspirations better? That was the work we basically did. And that's why we developed the kind of notion of the four-question framework, because we thought that it was both the themes upon which future promises could be made to one another, And also it was an analytical framework that I could talk to people in their situations about. So that when I would sit down with someone in their office and listen to what they were doing and trying to do, I would click off in my head, how much does this have to do with a vision of a shared future? How much does it have to do with the question of trustworthiness? How much does that have to do with being able to accept losses so you can make the concessions you need? And how much does that have to do with the injustices that have to be rectified if we're going to move forward? And how do we rectify them? That gives me a framework for thinking about how I want to move into the future and create the relationships where there will be disagreement. I don't want to try to reduce necessarily the disagreement. I want to find a way to live with that disagreement. And that will involve some muddling through. You know, I don't know, but let's try this and see where we are tomorrow. Before we quit, I want to add one thing. That had to do with compromise, and I said you don't compromise with someone who is engaged in cruel and humiliating activity. But there is a distinction, and I think in the literature oftentimes gets conflated. I count the acts that you do as concessions. that what I want in a negotiating thing from you is a concession. Compromise itself is a change in orientation because it's co-promise. Compromise is co-promise. It comes out of that sense of a co-promising to one another. And what it ultimately involves is recognizing the legitimacy of your goals and interests. and being willing to take second best. So that I think when you say that they have to compromise with one another, what it really means is I have to change my mindset. I have to be able to see that what you're articulating as your interest and your goals are legitimate, interesting goals for you. and I need to take them into account. And being able to take them into account requires me to accept something less than is my first choice. I mentioned earlier Abishai Margoli, and in one of his books on compromise and rotten compromises, he says, and it's really by my terminology, he's talking about concessions, but he said, don't tell me your first choices, tell me your second choices. Because that tells me more about you than your first choices. These are just aspirations. Maybe you'll get them, maybe you won't. Probably you won't. But what you're willing to compromise, to make concessions about, tells me what you value, what is really critical when things need to get traded off. So when I hear you talk about the concessions you're willing to make, that tells me more about who you are than knowing what your dreams and goals and aspirations are. Because in many ways, those dreams and goals and aspirations are the same. It just has to be that I see you as a threat to those dreams and goals and aspirations. That's what enemy relationships entail. And if we're going to have compromise, it means altering that perception that you are a threat to my goals and aspirations. Maybe that's not the case, given my goals and dreams and aspirations. But if I'm going to live peacefully with you, that's the way I have to go.
Ceejay Hayes:
What about when someone's goals are violent? This is a very sensitive issue, thinking about the current conflict in Israel and Gaza. There is the stated goal of eliminating Hamas, and then the tactics that are being used by the Israeli state, and the casualties among the civilian population are extremely high. And so there are goals that are being presented by the Israeli state, but means that are in readily violent and causing an incredible loss of civilian life. Where do you compromise with that? Because to me, this is where accountability comes in. I can't even engage in the conversation unless you know that what you just did was an act of violence. even within the context of the kidnappings that Hamas did, we're beyond a tit-for-tat at this point. But also, there is a violence that speaks to a lack of humanity. This would never happen if there's a shared sense of humanity. So how do you deal with that when there is a power, because Israel has a certain control over the Gazan territory, there is violence, and there's not a lot of support from the international community. How do you deal with compromise in a scenario like this?
Byron Bland:
I never met a person in Northern Ireland or in Israel-Palestine who wasn't for peace. I mean, it was their own version of peace. And it quite often meant the exclusion of the other side, the elimination of the other side. But I never met anyone who said, I'm not for peace, I'm for violence. Everyone that I ever met was for peace in their own conception of what that meant. The problem is how they conceive peace. which was the elimination of the other side, which is the enemy framework that goes into this. And so what I have to take is that sentiment of wanting peace and see if I can alter what it means. How do you create inclusive senses of peace with one another? I think that there are legitimate goals, and I don't think that it matters that Netanyahu was instrumental in creating Hamas as a goal to disenfranchise the PA. That in some ways doesn't matter because the responsibility to protect your citizens is foremost. And it may require the elimination of Hamas. What that means is far from clear. And how it can be done is far, far from clear. What I'm clear about is that it can't be done the way that the war is currently being conducted. any legitimacy of any war is that it has an outcome, which is legitimate. And I don't know what that is. My concern is not so much that you can live with either Hamas or the settlers, for that matter, who want the same thing Hamas want, which is one state from the river to the sea. I don't know how you can bring necessarily those two goals into existence. And I don't know how you achieve it, given the current state what a peace would look like is far, far clear for me. And so I think without a clear notion of what it means, and it really means demobilizing Hamas's governing ideology, in which it is the elimination of Israel, and vice versa, where Israel is the elimination of the Palestinian people. Is there a possibility of creating an alternative to that? And that is the struggle. That's the intellectual and real grassroots struggle that's involved there. And you don't want to do a military tactic, which can only achieve military goals, to get in the way of those political goals of creating an outcome which approximates peace, or does peace if you're talking about disagreeing. So we're going to disagree, but that's going to be a safe disagreement rather than an existential threat. I think that that's incredibly hard and difficult, but I think the seeds now have to be laid. There's going to be no peace in that area of the world unless we promote the dignity of human beings. We safeguard livelihoods and we encourage respectful relationships. And so I think in many ways you start there and say, out of those activities, how does a vision of a shared future emerge? For peace builders, that's the challenge. And it's a big one. I'm not naive about that. I think that you have to make those the central goals, that we have to be about fostering dignity and safeguarding livelihoods and encouraging respect. And that's the only way we're going to enter into something that is a peaceful relationship in the future.
Ceejay Hayes:
My final question to you will be for the listener, and maybe they're listening from the US, maybe they're listening in Northern Ireland, perhaps they're listening in Brazil. They're living in a context that just feels highly divisive, where people are in tension with one another within their national or even more regional context. What is a realistic, positive, peace-oriented goal that we can look towards when thinking about depolarization?
Byron Bland:
And go back to those three things, Ceejay, because I think that we tend to think of peace as a state, as a condition. You have to have thriving lives. You have to have the ability for people to pursue their goals and aspirations and take care of things that are important. Those are the kind of situational or material dimensions of peace. But key to it all is the relational dimension. And so in the relational dimension, peace is created or destroyed every day. And how I encounter people, how I walk with people, how I talk with them, how I look at them when I walk down the street, all of those kinds of things create the relational context in which peace has to take place. What I would urge people is to keep those things in mind. How do I foster the dignity of those whom I am very suspicious of? How do I safeguard their livelihoods? Because I recognize if their livelihoods are not safeguarded, nothing is possible. And how do I treat them with respect? Respect doesn't mean that I agree with them. What it means is that I respect their lived experience. I don't try to tell them their lived experience is wrong. what their opinions and what the conclusions they draw from that. I may not agree with, I may disagree with fundamentally, but the fact that it's their experience and I have to deal with that experience is key to showing them respect. And I think that when people engage in those kinds of themes and values with one another, that you create a climate in which compromise is possible. I can see that your dreams and goals and aspirations and interests are legitimate and treat them that way. And I'm willing to make concessions in order for that to happen. I'm willing to take second best because I think that's better than nothing. It begins in things that we tend to discount. Those daily relationships at the grassroots inform what goes on in the media, how politicians talk to one another, all of the things that create a climate of distrust, when they could create simply a climate of mistrust. And I am curious about that. And I have to realize that actually the solution to my problem may lie in you, that you may be what I need in order to get my dreams and goals and aspirations. You and all the disagreements we may have become essential to my achieving what I want to achieve in life. That's what I would say to people living in any context, whether it's peaceful or whether it's not.
Byron Bland, thank you so much.
Byron Bland:
It's been fun talking to you, Ceejay.
Ceejay Hayes:
Byron shared a lot with us in this conversation. But what I want everyone to take away from this interview is the distinction between a vision for a shared future and a shared vision of the future. The former sets coexistence and respect for differences as the primary target of our social relations. The latter has the potential to leave us in a zero-sum competition for ideological dominance. Thanks again to Byron Bland for talking with us today, and to Dr. Alan Jagolinzer for co-hosting. This podcast is edited by Jac Boothe of Neon Siren Studios. Many thanks to her. And thanks to you, the listener, for giving us just a bit of your time. If you enjoyed this episode of CounterPol, share with your friends and leave us a review. Until next time.