It was a pleasure to be back at USIP yesterday after a two-year hiatus for the launch of Facilitating Dialogue: USIP’s Work in Conflict Zones. This is a book of case studies I edited with David Smock. Here are my speaking notes for the occasion, which I more or less used:
These two years have been devoted mainly to teaching post-war reconstruction—using USIP’s own Guiding Principles to Stabilization and Reconstruction, still the best text for the purpose—and writing about the areas in which America’s civilian instruments of foreign policy need strengthening.
One of those areas is facilitating dialogue, the subject of this slim volume that represents for me an enormous amount of intense work by a lot of people and an important departure for USIP as an institution.
When I arrived at USIP in 1998, there was a director of the grants program—his name was David Smock—anxious to try to apply in conflict zones what the Institute thought it had learned in the previous 10 years or so.
That sounded like a good idea to me, so I tried to carry it forward, first in the Balkans with only modest success and later in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Before I knew what had happened, ten years had gone by and other colleagues had picked up the refrain and were facilitating dialogue in Nepal, Colombia, Israel/Palestine and elsewhere.
USIP, in its own argot, had become not just a think tank but also a do tank.
But what was it doing, and why was it important?
Our Kosovo experience illustrates some of the answers: it was getting people not so much to talk to each other—people rarely have difficulty speaking—but rather to listen to each other.
This is much harder.
My Albanian friends in Kosovo had no trouble telling me about the Serbs who had kicked them out the government, industries, health system and schools.
My Serb friends had no trouble telling me about the havoc wrecked by the Kosovo Liberation Army. But neither had any ability or desire to hear what the others were saying.
This is not surprising. People in violent conflict dehumanize the other and lose the ability to listen to what it is saying, even as they raise their own voices to stentorian levels.
The situation is made doubly difficult if the transition after conflict involves not only peacebuilding but also democratization.
Dictatorships do not allow normal communication. They may be nominally non-ethnic or non-sectarian, as Milosevic’s at times claimed to be, but in practice most institutionalize the privileges of relatively small groups and limit meaningful communication to those.
This was certainly the situation we found in Kosovo even before the war, when in 1998 my colleagues and I embarked on a training program intended to help disempowered Kosovo Albanians manage the conflict with Serbs nonviolently.
We found something similar with Serbs after the war: now they had been disempowered and had limited ability to get the Albanians to pay attention.
Getting these groups to listen to each other became our objective.
We were largely successful: they even eventually developed a joint plan for building peace in Kosovo, outlined in what was called the Airlie Declaration.
But the process was brought to an abrupt and premature end by the rioting in March 2004 that resulted in serious damage to Serb communities and a further exodus of Serbs from south of the Ibar river.
That however was not enough to re-open funding for dialogue, and the years since then have largely seen what might be termed a dialogue of the deaf: both sides stating their positions clearly and effectively, and neither side listening much to what the other had to say.
If Hal Saunders were here—as David and I would have liked—he would note that we failed to sustain the dialogue for a sufficient period. He would be correct.
I simply don’t know of conflict situations in which too much money has been spent getting people to listen to each other, begin to trust each other, and build a common future together by solving real problems in the lives of the groups they represent.
I hope USIP will continue these efforts and redeem the real value inherent in a dialogue in which people listen and really hear.
Here is Voice of America’s report report on the event.