On Peacebuilding

June 8, 2021 timothywstanley@me.com

But very often peacebuilding initiatives were anonymous and unseen. In 1983, John Lampen, an English Quaker, moved to Derry in Northern Ireland. A year later, he was joined by his wife, Diana, and their children. The Lampens were inspired by the work of another Quaker, Will Warren, who had lived in Derry for many years and had quietly befriended both sides in the conflict, including various members of the rival paramilitaries. Warren once said that his role as peacebuilder had been ‘to listen to people on both sides … and maybe, one day, to help them to listen to one another’. Listening was the central element of Quaker peacebuilding... Peacebuilders are often searching for metaphors to understand the mysterious process they’re engaged in. Addams spoke of ‘peaceweaving’, and in their admiring essay about her, the political scientists Patricia M Shields and Joseph Soeters in 2015 wrote of why it’s an apt metaphor: ‘individual, often fragile, strings are connected through the process of weaving, which does not homogenise the combined, often colourful, strings but lets them work together despite their differences.’ Diana Lampen calls peacebuilding a spider’s web: there are delicate links in all directions with, at the centre, not a spider but peace itself... If it’s true that peacebuilding requires not esoteric learning but sacrifice, sensitivity and artistry, it might be that we’re closer than expected to what Mac Ginty in 2014 called ‘the elixir’ of peacebuilding: ‘local ownership’. Not in the sense that locals accept what’s cooked up for them, but that they actually create their own recipes for peace.

Tobias Jones, “Peacebuilding Is an Artform Crafted by Divided Peoples,” - aeon.co/essays/peacebuilding-is-an-artform-crafted-by-divided-peoples