A Recipe for Cooling Down American Politics with Peacebuilder Dr. John Paul Lederach
About This Episode
In a world increasingly fractured, whispers of civil unrest grow louder. Dr. John Paul Lederach, a veteran peacebuilder with decades of experience in global conflict zones, offers a stark yet hopeful message: the antidote to escalating tensions lies not in grand pronouncements but in the quiet power of human connection. This week on Mission Forward, Lederach shares insights from his new book, Pocket Guide for Facing Down a Civil War, a timely and urgent call to action for a nation teetering on the edge.
Lederach's work isn't about predicting the future; it's about recognizing the patterns of the past. He draws parallels between the volatile political climate in the US and the conflicts he's witnessed around the world, highlighting the insidious nature of dehumanization and the urgent need for rehumanization. He argues that we must move beyond "listening with our eyes," judging individuals based on their affiliations, and instead engage in deep, radical listening that acknowledges the shared humanity beneath the surface of disagreement.
Lederach introduces the concept of "watching our pockets," a metaphor for cultivating local, grassroots movements for peace. He argues that lasting change emerges not from top-down decrees but from the interconnected web of relationships within our communities. He challenges listeners to consider: who do we know? How can we connect with those just outside our comfort zones? How can we build alliances around shared values and goals?
The conversation isn't about finding easy answers or quick fixes. It's about cultivating the courage to start, the willingness to listen deeply, and the perseverance to stay engaged, even when the path forward seems uncertain. Lederach’s message is a potent reminder that the future of our democracy rests not in the hands of politicians or pundits, but in our own capacity for empathy, connection, and the unwavering belief in the possibility of a more peaceful future. In a world where division seems inevitable, Lederach offers a powerful alternative: the possibility of building peace, one conversation, one relationship, one pocket at a time.
Don’t forget, you can download Pocket Guide for Facing Down a Civil War free on his site, or pick it up on Amazon right here.
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Speaker 1:
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Carrie Fox:
Hey all, it's Carrie, and I am really excited about what we will be sharing with you for the next several weeks on this podcast. We recently hosted our 10th annual Mission Forward Live event in partnership with The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and the speakers were just plain incredible. We talked about democracy, community building, bridging divides, communicating through volatility, making sense of DEI legislation. Whew, so much, and every session was rich, practical and full of wisdom. So today, we are sharing one of those conversations with you.
Today's conversation is with Dr. John Paul Lederach, international peace builder, and author of the new book, Pocket Guide for Facing Down a Civil War. We're going to break that down today. We're going to learn a little more about it from him. What I want y'all to know though is he made this book free for readers on his website. We will put that link down there to make sure that everyone would have access to it, and to address the many questions he has received from people concerned about political violence and the threat of civil war in the US. John Paul offers a set of valuable lessons in his book drawn from his global peace building experiences, and he's going to connect some dots for us today to each of the conversations we have had over the course of this day. I hope you enjoy this conversation and I look forward to seeing you on the other end.
John Paul Lederach, welcome.
Dr. John Paul Lederach:
Thank you. Great to be here with you, Carrie.
Carrie Fox:
I'm so glad you're here. We've got a lot we want to cover, and part of that will be reading actually a small excerpt from your book. But first I must ask, the moment that I met you, someone said, "Oh, he's a legendary peace builder." And from that moment I thought, one, what a cool title. Two, how does one become a legendary peace builder?
Dr. John Paul Lederach:
I have no idea, I'm not sure where that got applied. It may just be from dedication to long decades of work, more than four and a half now. And writing books, I suppose is part of it. But I think storytelling and taking time to really commit to communities that are facing a lot of difficulty where I've had opportunity to be both inspired and to learn from their life and innovations. I don't know to speak to the word legendary.
Carrie Fox:
I half joke with that opening question, but you really are so full of wisdom and experience, and you have gathered probably just a very small amount of it in this incredible book. I'd love you to perhaps share a little bit from your favorite section, and then we're going to talk about it.
Dr. John Paul Lederach:
So I was thinking, Carrie, how to do this. I chose a few concluding paragraphs from Chapter 9, which is titled Leading From the Wake. And the core dynamic that I'm trying to describe is the symbiotic relationship between highly visible public leaders and their followers, especially first followers, and that when violence gets unleashed in particular, people often have great difficulty reeling it back in so you feel like you're constantly responding from things that you have been a part of unleashing, but are not able to bring back. Each chapter has a second section which is aimed at ordinary people in local settings from around places that I've worked who innovated extraordinary ways of responding to these situations.
And this particular section that I'm going to read references a place that I worked for nearly 15 years during and after the Civil War in Nepal, and in particular with communities facing large scale land, water, and forest conflicts that became quite violent and working often with leadership in those local levels. One of our key people was Balluji Chowdhury, and he was an extraordinary person and he came from a background of having been a bonded laborer that was released during the war period and his community had to find a place to live. Where they chose to live encroached upon land, the people that were protecting a forest area. These were often conflicts that became very difficult. And as we proceeded, Balluji brought his deepest concern for the work he was doing in the conflicts, which was the question who am I? Because he was feeling enormous pressure about being pushed to choose his group of primary identity, or the group that he was engaged with trying to help transform these conflicts. And we came to call his question Balluji's Dilemma.
I'm going to start the reading with the sentence that begins, "This was the gist of Balluji's Dilemma: How do I lead when my relational fabric is fraying?
The unexpected practice this wider movement found as they responded to volatile natural resource conflicts was that quality of their presence mattered more than having a perfect solution or controlling people or process. What made a difference was what people experienced, and how they felt through the movement members' commitment to be alongside, to listen and encourage.
Quality of presence may seem an odd descriptor, but the landscape of toxic polarization is always defined more by feeling than fact. To the point: when we sense reactivity aimed our way, we feel anxious and drawn to protect ourselves. We often react more forcefully as a measure of self-preservation. When we experience blame, we feel judged. When we feel judged, we become defensive.
When we experience these dynamics in combination - arrogance, reactivity, blame, judging, and defensiveness - particularly when posed as superiority, we feel belittled. We shut down. We move away. We defend. We protect. Or we react with greater counterforce.
In all instances, we retreat to safety. Our primary group becomes the safe house, and the world out there populated with those who are different becomes the danger zone.
Learning to embrace Balluji's Dilemma suggests a different pathway: how to stay true to personal conviction while creating leadership that respects difference and opens toward collective understanding and action.
Try practicing and offering three gifts down this pathway. The gift of clarity: when facing tensions of deep difference, share your best understanding of your views and proposals without judgment or retreat. The gift of curiosity: interact with others' experience and ideas rather than reacting quickly or judging, particularly when you feel confronted. The gift of perseverance: find ways to stay in touch. Keep circling back. After all, humanizing always needs a human touch."
Carrie Fox:
Every section of this book is beautiful, and it gives so much for the reader to hold onto. I wrote down as you were saying it, feeling versus fact. And I wonder how much folks in the audience were thinking as they were listening to you. I can relate to that, I know what you mean. So I imagine as you were speaking, there were a lot of people shaking their head yes. So this book resonates on a lot of levels, John Paul, you bring these international stories, national, local to us here in the US.
You told me that you wrote this book and you say it actually in the opening because two emails showed up in your inbox. One was, do you think we're being pulled into a civil war in the US? And one was, what are the international parallels to what we're experiencing here in the US? And as you say in the opening, both questions beg for comparison and prediction, neither of which is easy and rarely appropriate. I appreciate that so much, comparison and prediction, neither of which is easy and rarely appropriate. So here you are providing another solution, right? A wider lens, really framework in the form of this book. I want you to tell us a little more why you wrote this, and why you felt it was so important to get it out before this election.
Dr. John Paul Lederach:
Yeah. The comparative curiosity that we have is always wanting to know what other people did in similar circumstances, but we usually preface that by saying our place is unique, or it's not going to happen here, or it's going to be different. It's all true. What I really wanted to be able to do was to not predict a civil war and its parameters, but to ask the question, what over these four and a half decades have I seen repeat over and again that are the dynamics and patterns that tend to lead toward this really poisonous toxicity, but also down the pathway of violence? And what have people in everyday settings done to push back on that? This whole notion of facing down that they've turned and faced it and found ways to work back and away from it. Even though in their circumstances where I'm working, they not only have that polarization that's gone wicked, they have the layer that violence got unleashed and often across generations.
So these are not easy places, and what I felt compelled to do was to try to describe in each chapter a dynamic or two that I found prevalent and significant, but then a story of how in a particular location people began to shift that dynamic, and to make it available prior during election was a very obvious piece to me. I've been afforded such extraordinary opportunity and exposure to such extraordinary people that their stories, this notion that the stories that may matter most are not always the ones that are reaching to the public eye. How do we bring this forward that as one of my mentors said, Kenneth Boulding, if it exists, it's possible. So here it is, folks. This stuff actually happened and in extraordinary ways that made a real difference where people lived.
I wanted to bring in that the basic notion that I think we have to start where we live. And that's really what I found where a lot of people are at that we can't sit and wait for a miracle solution from a higher level of greater authority or from outside. It really is this deep wisdom that exists where we have relationships and how do we engage those, that's probably the real lesson that comes from it. We do have on Amazon availability in about two weeks or maybe less an actual hard copy. A lot of people want to feel it, so it will have that portion coming, but on my website, you can certainly download it for free.
Carrie Fox:
In the last session we heard Jen Brandel and Brian talk about the importance of listening, deep listening, in some ways a radical listening to humanize one another, particularly when we feel there are divides or miscommunications or volatility in the way. You talk about humanizing too, but you talk about re-humanizing our adversaries with dignity and honesty. So re-humanizing our adversaries with dignity and honesty. Given the polarization that we know is present, how have you seen this re-humanizing of adversaries work? Tell me one of those stories.
Dr. John Paul Lederach:
Sure. Well, in the book I talk about the people located in Colombia in a number of different circumstances. Colombia is one of the places I've worked since the late-1980s, so it gives you an idea of the breadth of time that I think this kind of dedication takes. It's a real commitment. It's the longest standing open armed conflict in our hemisphere. There's major peace agreements, but still not fully completed yet so we're still at a 60-year mark. And people in local communities that have suffered the decades and waves of violence are often the ones that have some of the most inspiring stories of this notion. One of those I describe as the Improbable Dialogue Group located in one of the departments that had decades of violence. Their approach was that it was so easy to get caught in all of the national narrative, but to lose sight of the things that were needed for where they actually lived.
So how might they engage across their differences? The idea of an improbable dialogue is it's not likely unless there is some small step of intention to reach beyond your preferred bubble. Their story I think is, because I've sat with them, I visited them 20 years ago and 20 years later come back and am able to sit with people now from the worst of the conflict, displacement in the millions, to the period where these people of highly unusual diversity are talking and engaging. It's loud, it was direct. They didn't disagree, but they could sit and eat meals and they held to it. So what do we call this thing when we have periods of time where we know dehumanization went to its worst expression?
We have it in the dictionary the word dehumanization. I challenge any of you to find in any dictionary how you work your way back from what is rehumanization if the context that we're in has been that level of deep dehumanizing behavior and experience and harm. So rehumanization was simply capturing a note, to catch the eye if you will, that this requires intentionality. This requires a commitment in the simplest of terms to see a person first and to listen into their lived experience rather than assuming I know who they are, or that I know what they think or they believe. To actually have the pause that I would like for them to give me. That is to hear who I am and what I have lived. Now that kind of process I think has elements that begin to humanize the face of conflict.
And what it requires is not only this ability, so I sometimes break down the word respect. So when I say honesty and respect, I don't think people want inauthentic conversations. They want authenticity, but they also want the patience to sit with hearing what it is that I, and that takes a commitment to relationship over time and respect in that regard is that we, so spicere in Latin is to watch or to look. Respicere, come back to another of these re-words, mean that I stop and look again.
And I think that's actually what honesty and respect means. You want it to be honest, but you want pause sufficient that you take a second look. So we have to get beyond this idea of listening with our eyes where I look first to see who you're associated with to determine whether I can believe anything you're saying, to relooking and finding that there's actually a human being there. That human being has lived things, and that listening into that lived experience and especially living into the lived experience of the wider community they're a part of is deeply significant for understanding how people make sense of the world, and how we come together as a community that is made up of human beings and not talking voices that we can just write off.
Carrie Fox:
As you're speaking, I was visualizing a pendulum. If you can go in one direction to dehumanize, then you have the momentum to go in the other direction to rehumanize. I think that's really what so much of your book is about is it's never too late. You're not ever too far on one side to come back and you say the first step, however, to get there is to have the courage to start. When you've seen this happen, you've seen someone take that first step, you've seen a community take the first step, what does it look like? Where does it start?
Dr. John Paul Lederach:
Yeah. Most of the places that I've worked, I have this sense that when people feel that there's really a deep polarization, particularly here at home in the US, the idea that we have in mind is that I somehow have to make the leap to the other mountain peak to go to the far extreme of the worst example, and that I just can't imagine talking to that person, that I have in some ways constructed either by media or other forms that's there. Most of the people that I've watched engaged in this have two or three key things that they do. One, rarely do they do it alone. It's always been in smaller groups. Two, they start by reaching just slightly beyond where they're at, to neighbors, to others. There's so many ways that we are connected in our plurality that we don't take account of when we get divided into binaries.
I tell stories of the women of Wajir. Mothers who just said enough's enough. And their concern is how am I going to get to the market? How's the market going to be safe? Their starting points are what's local, what's accessible, and what are the relationships that are already available to me? It's the risk of imagination of the first step, which is often closer to home. And I think the key to this is imagining that it's not about a one-time conversation, it's not about tourism.
Carrie Fox:
Right.
Dr. John Paul Lederach:
That you go and visit and come back and that's it. This is actually about that notion of perseverance that you hold to it, you hold to these relationships. I think, to cite those women in northern Kenya near the Somali-Kenyan border, the women of Wajir, they always just use a very simple phrase, "We sat together to see what we knew," and I think it is maybe the greatest piece of advice that is there. Sit together to see what you know, but see if you can include one step beyond the normal people that sit and talk with each other.
Carrie Fox:
And that is such great advice. One step beyond, to your earlier point, not thinking you have to go to the farthest extreme and bring those two pieces together, but one step at a time. And what then happens? You talk in the book about the power of peace zones, and I'm wondering if these two pieces are connected, but that made me think of some work that we do with a group called Welcoming America and they have something called Certified Welcoming Cities where you can go through a process, become a Certified Welcoming City, and signal to the world that we are a place where you will belong. And we know the power in them having done that, and how that is city by city, community by community changing how communities and residents are working together. For you, when you talk about these peace zones, right? Whether that's listening in a community, or being part of an organization, or even if it's in your own neighborhood book club, why are peace zones so important to addressing toxic polarization, and this violence that we know is increasing?
Dr. John Paul Lederach:
The two places that I had direct experience with this, one was Columbia with a group of campesinos that declared a peace zone, and the other was in Mindanao in the southern part of the Philippines where the conflict was primarily across Muslim, Christian Catholic in particular divides. In both instances, while a peace zone could be what we call a say a smoke-free zone, a gun-free zone, those are the parameters at the level of the content. It's not so much looking for what they did with how they set it up that we should be watching, we should be watching how they engaged to get to that thing together. What they did quite often was over and again watching the patterns that they wanted changed, they kept their eyes on the question, what do we want to see changed? Not what's the immediate solution or whatever.
And then the second question that would come with that is always, who do we know? Who do we know that will be connected? Because if this change is to happen, who will have to be involved? The actual process of developing the declaration or putting up, in Columbia's case, they put up these little wood signposts. They're hand painted and it says, "You're welcome here. Please leave your guns at the edge of town," so they declared a whole area. Now to get there, their notion of change was, well, we're going to have to go talk to the people that are carrying the guns, and we're going to have to find a way between us and who we know to gain access, but also influence. Now how do we do that? So they're imagining the change that has to happen by way of creating a strategy for how you're going to pursue that change, which becomes very interesting because too often I think we lock down on getting someone to agree to our already proposed solution.
Here, what they're after is they're keeping their eyes on the quality of change that they want to see happen. And they understood that it was relationally based, and it was going to require them to move into unlikely conversations, and unlikely alliances if they wanted the change to endure. And the Muslim, Catholic women, it was often driven by something as simple as we want this road to this school for our children to stay open, no guns here. And then you would have people move around, okay, this is the change we're after. How are we going to get the people that we need involved to make sure this change happens? That dynamic kicks in something really interesting, which is rather than reacting and criticizing, they're proposing and engaging, and they're building an alliance around something that they feel they can both engage and persuade.
Carrie Fox:
John Paul, you have put yourself in some of the harshest political environments in the world. Listening to you with such a peaceful tone as share, I know that work was not easy. None of that work was easy, but it seems like there is a willingness, really, truly a willingness. And so when I was reading you a book, there was another piece that really stuck with me. And it was this idea of a willingness to listen deeply, a willingness to connect with someone one step beyond where you are, and a willingness or perhaps a desire to watch your pockets. This phrase was so interesting to me, talk to us more about the watch your pockets.
Dr. John Paul Lederach:
Yeah. So when I started writing, I just realized how often I came back to the metaphor of pockets. Pockets being local without, we have this whole series of books like the pocket guides for bird watching or whatever. I thought, well, this is actually a Pocket Guide, but the metaphor I'm after is that my experience, and obviously this is a very complex arena of work, but my experience has been that enduring change in places where there's been a lot of toxicity and open violence has had to build a web of relationships that help those changes endure. Civil wars do not miraculously just happen top down. More often in my experience, they happen because there are people who have pocket imagination about violence or things they are opposed to, and they often function just out of sight. But they become very powerful where they control locally and they become very powerful in the connective tissue that they create between groups.
So what I'm after with watch your pockets is these buildings for me is pocket imagination in the direction of the greater common good and the wellbeing of all of our communities. And that requires us to do, I think watch your pockets really means start local, pay attention, build relationships that are different and unusual. Go one step at a time, but never stop reaching to the next level, right? And know that what matters over time is the quality of the connective tissue you have with unlikely sets of people if you are to hold back the tyranny of those few, in my experience, that really believe that violence is the only remaining option. We have to find ways to build that kind of capacity, but it starts by watching your pockets and connecting pocket to pocket.
So it's really, I think the experience that I've afforded me is that it is a strategy that quality of our relationships is what's really going to make a difference, where we are able to force those, and where we can see doing that where we live connected to other locations is what makes the possibility of retaining those things that are very destructive from ever happening. I somewhat conclude the book by saying the best way to stop a civil war is to end it before it happens. What can we do to actually begin to build that social fabric that has this ability to hold back the forces that we'll regret beyond comprehension if they are unleashed?
Carrie Fox:
And that feels like the theme of this entire day, right? That it is in our hands. We talked with Joe Goldman earlier today, and Crystal Hayling and I brought up this quote from Vincent Harding. He lived his life through this question of is America possible? And at the end of his life, he said, "Yes, but only as we make it possible." And I'm thinking about you and your work as everything you're saying is really if for those who think it is impossible to bridge divides, all you need to do is start. All you need to do is prove what is possible. We're coming to the end already, so I'm going to give you the last word. As you think about the message that you want people to take away from this book, what is that? How would you sum that up?
Dr. John Paul Lederach:
That it is within our hands and within our relationships in our communities where we really make a difference for the things that have to happen. The primary two products of really toxic polarization and that pathway that leads into violence is paralysis and replication. The system lives to replicate itself, it lives off making more polarization happen. And what I think we have within our hands is the ability very directly to make a difference on mitigating the very things that try to tear us apart. It's not easy, because it can be painful, but it's far harder to work our way back once that next level gets unleashed.
So how do we move in ways that really permit us to have this imagination that we make a difference where we live? That's the message that I've found over. And again, that you can have the best of peace agreements, but if you don't have the people engaged where they live, those things come apart. I think at the very core, and this is really, I think the core nexus where democracy and peace building meet is the ability to create the relationships that hold to the basic premise that we can do politics without violence amidst great difference.
Carrie Fox:
I strongly advise those who are listening to make sure you download the Pocket Guide, read it and consider how you might have conversations about it with your community. Because really just as you were talking earlier, John Paul, about the we don't have to go to extremes, it also doesn't have to be in our actions. In the step I take, it doesn't have to be the most extreme step to bring community together, but every day, something to work towards that common ground one step beyond where we are really, as you're saying, can prevent a future civil war.
Dr. John Paul Lederach:
Absolutely.
Carrie Fox:
Well, John Paul, thank you for your time.
Dr. John Paul Lederach:
Thank you.
Carrie Fox:
I'm so appreciative of you and of your work. As we go to the very last question today, I'm going to have you all think about what you just learned from Dr. John Paul Lederach. We just finished a conversation on forming common ground and the power of improbable dialogue. So I'm going to ask you, how might you practice the lessons that John Paul shared with us today?
And that brings us to the end of another episode of Mission Forward. If you like what you heard today, I hope you'll stop right now and give this show a five star rating wherever you are listening to this podcast. Maybe even forward it to a friend who you think would enjoy today's conversation. And of course, check out the show notes for all of the links referenced in today's show. Mission Forward is produced with the support and wisdom of Pete Wright and the TruStory production team, as well as the wonderful Sadie Lockhart of Mission Partners. You can learn more about our work over at missionforward.us and of course, reach out to me anytime at carrie@mission.partners. Thanks for tuning in today, friend, and I'll see you next time.
