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Creating a Big Circle for a Difficult Discussion

Jayne Seminare Docherty

I recently attended the First Annual International Conference of the Association for Conflict Resolution (ARC). I was fortunate to spend the weekend with colleagues who have dedicated years, even decades, to developing, refining, using, and promoting the acceptance of alternative, nonviolent methods for responding to conflict in families, schools, neighborhoods, organizations, churches and other religious communities' in short, wherever conflict occurs.

Naturally, the events of September 11 and the follow-up responses from the United States and other nations were very much on our minds. The conference organizers convened two separate three-hour sessions to discuss the current crisis. In each session, two of our bravest colleagues agreed to facilitate a discussion of this difficult topic for a room of 50 to 60 persons, all trained in facilitation and conflict resolution - and, I might add, all perfectly willing to make process suggestions from the floor. These sessions were a bit like Òherding cats' - trying to get 50 to 60 process experts to agree on a process is no easy task.

The participants did not limit their disagreements to issues of process. We were, in fact, coming from extraordinarily different places in our responses to the September 11 attacks, the subsequent actions of the United States, the appropriate response from the conflict resolution community, and the long-term implications of this crisis for our work and for our lives.

• Some individuals were ready to sign up with the nearest recruiting officer and head to Afghanistan — and they were fully supportive of our bombing campaign.

• Others were already actively organizing a peace movement response.

• Many had started working in their local communities on anti-bias work and outreach to their Muslim neighbors. This group included individuals supportive of the war on terrorism as well as those opposed to it, which points to the complexity of individual views and attitudes in this situation.

• Most were still sorting out the nature of the events and identifying useful, appropriate, or helpful responses. In this, they were often confused about where their talents and skills as conflict resolution practitioners fit into the current situation.

Fortunately, our profession has taught us the importance of listening to diverse voices around any conflict—and we were able to put our values into practice during our time together. We just listened to one another without judgment or argument, and in that listening process, three themes resonated with the group.

One colleague - arguing against splitting the group into a trauma-healing group and an action-planning group - said: "We don't need to split our hearts and our heads. We need to use our hearts to draw our circle bigger so that we can embrace all of the peoples involved in this crisis and our heads to figure out what to do in that circle."

A second member of the group said: "This whole event has just completely knocked me off center. I don't fully know what I believe anymore. I don't know how to act in response to this situation. And, I don't know whether the conflict resolution tools I have relied on for 20 years have any relevance in this case."

A third said: "I feel like we have been given a wake-up call. We can either ignore it and go back to sleep, or we can take on the largest challenge we will ever face."

I am going to take these themes in reverse order as a way of framing this article - about the causes of September 11 and our response to it.

The Wake-Up Call

To say that September 11 was a wake-up call, is also to say that we have been asleep - we have somehow missed or failed to recognize profoundly important events and/or changes in our world. In some way, September 11 has directed our attention to those events or changes. We certainly are not clear about what we need to do in response to the wake-up call. Let me share a few snippets from my own "waking-up" since September 11 and from things I heard at the ACR conference.

• The "global system" is real; we live in a world that is profoundly different from the world, as it existed even 20 or 30 years ago.

You know all the protesters in Seattle, Milan, and Washington? They are not just making noise and they are not just trying to re-live the 1960's. I knew this intellectually, even though my own response to the problems created by the globalizing system did not include street protests. But, I really recognized it at a gut level when I looked at a map of the countries that suffered casualties in the World Trade Center. This map, along with a list of the countries that lost people in the September 11 attack, was posted on the U.S. State Department web site.

Working on the hypothesis that any country that did not lose someone in the Trade Center may be excluded in some fashion from the global economy, the map is truly shocking. Only five countries on the African continent suffered casualties on September 11. The Central Asian countries, including Afghanistan, are absent from the list of victims, as well as Iraq, Syria, and Libya and most of the Islamic Middle East.

In short, we were attacked by individuals from countries that have little stake in the world economic system or countries where the elites, but not the masses, are integrated into the global system. When our African friends tell us that they are not part of the global economy, they are speaking truth and not just using hyperbole to get our attention. It is no accident that earlier terrorist attacks on the United States occurred in Africa and in Yemen. If we really wake up to the reality of the global system, then we must grapple with and address the economic, social, cultural, and political inequities of that system. For in those inequities lie some of the root causes of September 11.

• The United States is not separate from the rest of the world. We cannot withdraw from the community of nations, however much some of our political leaders would like to pursue separatist or isolationist policies.

In the months prior to September 11, President Bush withdrew from the Kyoto accord on global warming, removed the U.S. delegation from the World Conference on Racism, and indicated a willingness to set aside a long-standing arms control treaty with the Russians. Each of these multi-lateral efforts has strengths and weaknesses that can be debated. What was striking about the U.S. withdrawal from these efforts, was that in each case the reason for backing out or not participating was couched in the pursuit of U.S. interests, which it was argued cannot and should not be subject to global considerations.

Even our friends chastised us for these decisions and for this "go it alone" approach. In the years prior to September 11, the United States failed to pay its dues to the United Nations - a problem that is being corrected since September 11. We also have a decades long record of exempting ourselves from prosecution in various international courts. This, of course, weakened our ability to turn to international justice systems for assistance in responding to the attacks of September 11.

The famous sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset talks of "American exceptionalism" - the belief that America is different from all other countries and therefore not subject to the same rules of behavior or norms of conduct that apply to other nations. Last week, one of the international CTP students told me how surprised he was at the United States' failure to turn to the United Nations as a venue for addressing the crisis created by September 11. In his country, the U.N. would have been the first institution to which the leaders would have turned for assistance. Only now, living here during these events, did he fully understand the depth of the American sense of self-reliance and exceptionalism.

• One of the wake-up calls on September 11 was caused by the death of American exceptionalism. We have not fully recognized the implications of this death, but the loss is real and profound.

We have now experienced in a deeply personal way the type of violence that has become commonplace in all too many parts of the world. How will the death of American exceptionalism impact our daily lives, our attitudes, our behaviors, and our expectations?

I was struck by the difficulty individuals are having grasping this idea while sitting on the plane coming home from Toronto. Our flight was late taking off and it took an hour-and-a-half longer than scheduled because the military had closed down a vast expanse of air space over Washington. In the midst of this, a man in the row behind mine asked his neighbor, "How long do you think it will be before things are back to normal?" To which his companion - reading my own mind, I think - replied, "What do you mean by normal? We will probably never approach flying the same way, again."

Indeed, there are many, many things about our lives that will change as we integrate the experience of September 11 into our collective psyche, our daily routines, and our institutions. This points to the fact that in crisis, we also have opportunities to remake systems. The global system may be real and the United States may not be able to escape membership in that system, but it is not carved in stone. In some ways, it is the very fragility or vulnerability of the system that has shocked us. We are just starting to recognize that we live in an "emerging" system and we all have a role to play in deciding the shape of that system in the post-September 11 world. No wonder we feel "knocked off center."

"Knocked off Center"

When experienced conflict resolution practitioners talked about being "knocked off center" by September 11, they meant a number of different things.

• "Being centered" is a term used by many mediators to describe the state of calm and dispassion that they attempt to achieve during a mediation session.

Many of the professional mediators at ACR were shocked by the waves of fury and passion that overtook them on September 11 and in the ensuing weeks. Their rage is leading them to question their professional identities. Was their professed belief in calm, careful problem solving - their claim that conflicts can be turned into problems to be solved - their argument that conflicts are opportunities for transforming personal lives and interpersonal relationships - just so much bunk? Are they hypocrites who see nonviolence and problem solving as tools for use with other persons, but not for incidents involving themselves, their loved ones, or their country? Some of you may be experiencing a similar sense of being unbalanced, particularly if you were raised in a Mennonite or other pacifist tradition. No matter how deeply you have integrated this identity, the shock of such a violent attack on U.S. soil against U.S. civilians may be causing you to question your beliefs.

• "Being centered" also implies that we understand how the world works and that there is a predictability to our reality.

On September 11, we all lost our sense that the world was a predictable place. Since September 11 we don't know what to expect. That unpredictability is, by the way, part of the experience of terror. Terrorists work in ways that deliberately keep their victims "off balance" and under stress. This profound sense of unpredictability has always been part of the experience of war for civilians. We are just not accustomed to having our wars come home to us in this manner. The "hot" battles of the so-called "Cold" War were fought in other peoples' countries, usually using other peoples' soldiers as our proxy warriors.

The full-scale wars fought with our own troops - Korea and Vietnam - were not victories, but at least the violence did not show up in our daily lives on the home front. Our one big post-Cold War confrontation - the Persian Gulf War - came to us via CNN and it looked more like a Nintendo game than a deadly, violent confrontation. It certainly did not lead to massive destruction in the United States, and for most Americans the region and all of its problems faded into the background once the media moved its attention to President Clinton's scandalous sex life and other pressing matters.

Creating a Big Circle for a Difficult Discussion

It is easy - under these circumstances - to draw narrower and narrower circles. If we do that, we talk only with those persons we know share our views, we define our enemies to include those persons on the home front who disagree with us, and we push the enemy/other into the category of non-human or sub-human entity. If we draw a large circle when thinking about the causes of our current crisis, we will extend the time horizon for our analysis and we will make sure that we subject all parties - including our own country and our traditional allies - to an even-handed analysis and scrutiny.

I want us to consider how we can modify our thinking in order to create a larger circle for dialogue, analysis, policy-making, and articulating our individual responses to September 11. At the national level of policymaking we are trapping ourselves in a very small circle as we plan responses. We seem to be limiting our thinking to a war-system in which the parties become mirror images of each other. This narrowing of the circle is apparent in the media, too, as persons who do not agree with the war-response are demonized. I am suggesting that we would do well to "use our hearts to draw our circle bigger and our heads to figure out how to talk with one another in that circle."

This is an excerpt from the keynote address for the first post-September 11th teach-in at Eastern Mennonite University on September 15, 2001. To read the complete version of this article, see www.emu.edu/ctp/bse-articles.html.