During the 2019-20 academic year, as the commemorates its 25th anniversary, a series of guest authors will share reflections about CJP’s personal impact. We want to hear your thoughts, too!

Thousands of people have intersected with CJP over the years, and each of you has contributed to the work of making the world more just and more peaceful. Join us for our anniversary celebration June 5-7, 2020. Visit the anniversary website for more details.

Read reflections by��Phoebe Kilby,��Mohammad Abu-Nimer,��Maryam Sheikh, Sanjay Pulipaka, and Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits.

Ruth Zimmerman and Howard Zehr served as co-directors from 2002-07. Both brought significant experience in other roles with the organization before that time. Here they collectively share their paths to CJP, their partnering leadership and significant work of their tenure.

In the early 1990s, Ruth had returned from eight years in the Philippines and was searching for a job. One of the positions she applied for was administrative secretary at ��ݮ����’s newly-forming Conflict Analysis and Transformation Program (later shortened to Conflict Transformation Program, or CTP). Though Ruth thought her experience and degree positioned her for something more challenging, then-director Professor Vernon Jantzi convinced her that this program would expand and provide good career advancement possibilities.  As is often the case, his vision was prophetic.

Ruth accepted the offer. Her first day on the job included the task of going through the complete filing system for the new program, all within one cardboard box. The second task was to buy office furniture. But her role soon did become more challenging, and in a few years, she became associate director while Vernon was director.

Howard had been director of the Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Office for Criminal Justice since the late 1970s. From that base, he developed restorative justice materials and assisted communities in establishing such programs. By the mid-1990s, he had concluded that he had probably done what he could do for the field. Then Ray Gingerich, professor of sociology at EMU, began urging Howard not to take any other jobs without considering CTP. Both Ray and Vernon felt that conflict transformation needed the restorative justice component. 

Howard first taught an RJ course in a weekend format. In 1996, he joined the faculty. Although he had administrative experience, he had no intentions of ever administrating again. Obviously he failed to keep that commitment, and he also was proven wrong about his involvement in restorative justice: the center and its students proved a base and catalyst for significant expansion of restorative justice. 

In the late 1990s, while Vernon was on sabbatical, Howard served as interim director with Ruth continuing as associate director. The duo worked together well, but Howard felt that Ruth deserved recognition for the key role she was playing. When Vernon later stepped away from his leadership position, Howard reluctantly agreed to take on a part-time director role for a transitional period, but only on the condition that he and Ruth serve as co-directors. 

This was a time of many unknowns within the center, causing some tension amongst various parties. External advice was that a co-directorship is a problematic structure with many possibilities for conflict, and often that is true. However, Howard and Ruth had built up a relationship of trust and respect in the interim year and were convinced the unusual structure would work. Howard focused primarily on academic affairs while continuing his teaching responsibilities while Ruth managed staff, programs and budget.

Ruth:  “A key element I always appreciated in working with Howard, even through some tough stuff, was his ready question:  ‘Are we having fun yet?’ We could always find things to laugh about. This was such a critical glue for the team since many students were coming from dire conflict situations which could create a heaviness in the atmosphere.”

Howard: “Ruth had a proven record as a full-time administrator and had played a key role in keeping the center going and growing. I thought that this contribution and role had to be recognized structurally. We dealt with some heavy stuff during this time, but I appreciated Ruth’s sense of humor and relied heavily on her competence and knowledge.”

With a departmental team of more than 20 employees and 80 or more students, all with rich life experience and different perspectives and personalities, there were bound to be conflicts — even within a peacebuilding program. And indeed there were during these years. There were also many challenges involving budgets and relationships within the EMU structure. As a community, we didn’t always practice what we preached.

On one occasion, Ruth returned from a wilderness bike trip during which she had to ride through a terrifying gauntlet of eight rattlesnakes. She reflected on her return that each of the snakes seemed to be a metaphor for one of the challenges we were facing. One year we reworked “Old MacDonald Had A Farm” to name some of our challenges and frustrations and sang it at the staff/faculty Christmas party. Fortunately that text has been lost.

A significant milestone during these years was the beginning of the program’s relationship to the Fulbright Program. Thanks to Ruth’s initiative and guidance, CJP became the primary venue for Fulbright scholars from South Asia and the Middle East who wanted to study conflict transformation. This resulted in highly diverse groups of students from many countries, religions and professions. They brought tremendous richness and legitimacy to CJP and when they returned to their home countries, built networks and programs that continue to this day.

A number of curriculum developments occurred during these years, including the clarification of concentrations and the establishment of an annual “curriculum camp” that brought faculty together to work on curriculum issues and strengthen relationships. The Practice Institute was formally established and provided with its own director. Several new endowments supported faculty research and student scholarships. We also worked hard to clarify and streamline decision-making processes within the program. During these years, Janelle Myers-Benner moved from student assistant to staff. She is now the longest-employed CJP staff and it would be difficult to overstate the value of the administrative management she has brought to the program.

During this time, we also led a process to rename the program from the Conflict Transformation Program to the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Restorative justice was playing a growing role in the program, and the scope of peacebuilding was expanding to include such fields as trauma healing and organizational development. The program needed a name that was more inclusive than conflict transformation.

We are gratified to see where CJP is today.  Succeeding directors have brought new gifts to the program. Competent staff and hundreds of “students” (John Paul Lederach used to call them “colleagues masquerading as students”) have contributed more than can be spelled out here.  We are grateful to have played a part in this story.

 ***

Ruth left CJP to join Mennonite Central Committee as a regional area representative, giving leadership for programs in India, Nepal and Afghanistan. Following those three years, she joined World Vision as a senior program manager and has had responsibility for both Asian and African development programs.

Howard is mostly retired but still employed “very part-time” with the , a program of CJP that began in 2012 and carries on Howard’s emphasis on connecting practitioners in the field to resources, networks and opportunities.

Organizers, including CJP founding director John Paul��Lederach, sociology professor Vernon Jantzi, and �ᾱ���쾱������Assefa, a mediator in conflicts around the world, invited friends and colleagues to talk and think about the cutting edges of practice and theory in international peace work. Some uncertainty surrounded the launch of CJP itself, Jantzi recalls, and the organizers of the Frontiers conference didn’t have any particular plans to make it an annual event.

And they surely didn’t imagine that 20 years later it would be thriving, would have brought 2,800 people from 121 countries to EMU’s campus and would have directly inspired the creation of at least 10 other short-term peacebuilding institutes in Africa, Asia, the South Pacific and North America. Nor could Lederach, Jantzi and Assefa have imagined that they would remain involved to varying degrees ever since, though Assefa is the only one has taught every year at the summer institute.

“There was so much energy generated,” Jantzi recalls, of the first conference. “People were so eager to share their experiences.”

Participants found that simply being together at a week-long peacebuilding conference was tremendously beneficial and inspiring for their work, and the response was enthusiastic. During the following academic year, CJP received its accreditation, had three students in the master’s program and admitted a dozen more to begin in the fall of 1995, and had hired its first full-time administrative staff member, Ruth Zimmerman. Things were heading in a good direction, and CJP organized a second Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conference in the summer of 1995.

Conference becomes “SPI”

For its third year, CJP gave its one-week peacebuilding conference a new name: the Summer Peacebuilding Institute, or SPI. Word was spreading, interest was growing, and SPI was about to begin growing quickly in size, scope and length. By 2002, SPI attracted around 150 participants from about 50 countries and offered 20 classes over a two-month period.

One of the major early emphases at SPI – and CJP more generally – was grounding the academic curriculum and classroom instruction in practical, on-the-ground application of peacebuilding and conflict resolution. Early in SPI’s history, outside funders helped bring participants from different sides of several major conflicts around the world, including groups of Catholics and Protestants from Northern Ireland and members of the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups from Rwanda and Burundi.

This created a rich and challenging environment at SPI, adding a heavy dose of real-life experience from difficult, violent conflicts – sometimes involving opposing sides of the same conflict – to complement the theory-based aspects of the curriculum.

“In the classroom, that was pretty powerful,” says Tim Ruebke, who attended four years of SPI before earning his master’s degree from CJP in 1999.

Rich experiences outside classroom

Many report that the most powerful moments at SPI, though, occurred during informal, social times away from the classroom. Ruebke recalls an evening gathering at a home in Harrisonburg where participants from Northern Ireland shared stories, songs and dancing with each other and the rest of their classmates.

While the daily sessions focus on the cerebral, “head” aspects of peacebuilding, these informal, social times in the evenings get at its emotional “heart.” This aspect of SPI, Ruebke says, mirrors the reality of many real-life peace negotiations, where the hard work of compromise, connection and understanding between parties often occurs in relaxed, social settings before being finalized at the formal negotiating table.

“A lot of stuff that happens here is informal and relational,” says Jantzi. “We think it’s very significant.”

And as SPI participants often discover, the emotional aspects of peacebuilding aren’t always happy times of singing and dancing. One of the early SPI sessions included visitors from the former Soviet republic of Georgia as well as Abkhazia, a disputed region within Georgia over which a civil war was fought in the 1990s. One evening, an SPI professor had planned a discussion about this conflict and began by displaying a map of the region.

Ruebke was in the audience, and remembers that one of the parties was upset in some way by what was (or perhaps, what wasn’t) portrayed on the map. This immediately and badly derailed the session, and by the time things had been patched up and discussion about the conflict was able to proceed, the importance of the “felt” aspect of peacebuilding had been brought home to Ruebke in a memorable way.

“Even though we were a peacebuilding program, people brought their stuff with them,” remembers Ruth Zimmerman, who says that these sorts of conflicts would periodically flare up between participants. “We had a great learning ground for using some of those [conflict resolution] skill sets over the years.”

At the very beginning, the Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conferences and SPI were simply opportunities for professional development and learning. Before long, however, participants and graduate students in CJP began lobbying for an academic credit component to SPI. Though hesitant to accept the constraints of a pre-planned curriculum, CJP added a credit component to provide students with more flexibility in earning degrees through the program.

Some core courses have been offered year after year, including ones dealing with conflict analysis, restorative justice and trauma healing, and others that focus on practical peacebuilding skills like negotiation and reconciliation. Yet SPI stays true to its roots by exploring the field’s frontiers and updating its course offerings to reflect emerging themes in peacebuilding. Examples of new courses in 2014 include ones on media and societal transformation, playback theater, trauma-sensitive peacebuilding, mindfulness, and architecture as a peacebuilding tool.

Things ran on the skinniest of shoestring budgets in the very first years of SPI, when CJP professors opened their homes to participants after the day’s sessions had ended, while their spouses pitched in to help with meals. Volunteers filled many support roles. This contributed to the organic, intimate atmosphere that remains an important aspect of SPI to this day. But it was an exhausting and, in the long run, unsustainable way to run the event that itself led to conflicts between overworked staff members.

“It was so much work,” recalls Zimmerman, who filled leadership roles at CJP from 1995 to 2007. “I used to put in 70-hour weeks.”

Huge logistics behind SPI

In addition to planning courses and lining up faculty to teach them, coordinating the many moving parts of the growing SPI program presented huge logistical challenges. Once, a participant booked a flight to the Dallas, Texas, airport rather than Washington, D.C.’s Dulles Airport. Another one hopped in a taxi and directed the driver to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 185 miles north of Harrisonburg, Virginia.

In 1998, just after she became one of CJP’s earliest master’s program graduates, Pat Hostetter Martin (also a participant in the very first Frontiers in International Peacemaking conference) joined SPI to help relieve the growing crisis of stress and exhaustion the workload was placing on other staff. The following year, Martin became SPI’s co-director with Patricia Spaulding, and then sole director from 2004 until 2008.

In 2000, William Goldberg – a 2001 master’s program graduate of CJP – joined the SPI staff as the transportation coordinator. He later served as an associate director, co-director and, as of 2013, the director of SPI, which now has two full-time staff members and employs about 10 temporary staff each summer. (Other SPI leaders: Gloria Rhodes in the ’90s, Sue Williams, 2008-’11; Valerie Helbert, 2011-’13.)

As the first Jewish program administrator at EMU, Goldberg embodies one of the ways that SPI has affected EMU as a whole by bringing such wide cultural and religious diversity to campus. From the very first Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conferences, CJP leaders wanted faculty to reflect the religious and cultural diversity of the participants – a desire at odds with EMU’s requirement that all faculty profess a Christian faith. After some discussion, CJP was able to negotiate exceptions to EMU’s hiring practices and hire non-Christian faculty members during the summer, which Jantzi points to as an example of the strong support SPI has generally enjoyed from university administrators since its beginning.

EMU’s hospitable community

Support from the university extended well beyond the administration, remembers Jantzi. Cafeteria staff embraced the opportunity, rather than resented the hassle, of serving participants with a variety of religious and cultural dietary preferences, while the physical plant staff went to great lengths to ensure everyone stayed comfortable during their time on campus. Together, the welcoming atmosphere the entire university created at SPI for visitors from around the world became an important part of its success.

As employees and departments outside of SPI pitched in to help it succeed, SPI also tried to build closer ties to the broader university community by making events like the opening ceremonies and the periodic SPI luncheons open to anyone on campus and in the surrounding community. And when these general open invitations didn’t attract large audiences, Martin found greater success when she started targeting specific people and departments with invitations and paying for their lunches.

SPI staff have also made similar efforts to share the diversity present on campus each summer with the broader community in and around Harrisonburg. As SPI’s community relations coordinator for about a decade, Margaret Foth worked to connect participants with families, churches and civic groups in the area. She helped form a particularly strong relationship with the Rotary Club of Rockingham County, which hosts a speaker from SPI each year and has helped underwrite an SPI trip to Washington D.C. A close relationship also developed between SPI and Park View Mennonite Church, just down the road from EMU, which has welcomed numerous international visitors in Sunday School classes and as participants in worship services.

“We wanted [participants] to know that it was an area that was welcoming and hospitable,” says Foth. “They weren’t just coming for an academic session. They were coming for relationships in a welcoming community.”

From 2000 to 2010, vanloads of SPI participants made connections farther from campus when they attended a peacebuilding conference held each summer by a group of churches in Knoxville, Tennessee, 360 miles southwest of Harrisonburg. (The minister who organized this conference, Jim Foster, is a graduate of Eastern Mennonite Seminary.) By staying with host families, the visitors enjoyed a more immersive experience in American culture; Foth says she could always count on enthusiastic reviews the following Monday, after participants returned to campus.

One year, a Vietnamese-American lawyer from California made the 12-hour round trip to Knoxville, and ended up staying in the home of a Mennonite pastor who, decades earlier, had fought in the Vietnam War. After they stayed up one night talking about their experience of that conflict, the lawyer returned to SPI and told Foth it had been a moment of great healing.

“I can still see him running across campus to give me a hug and say it was the best thing to have happened to him,” she recalls.

��

Akin to heaven on earth?

In 2014, a total of 184 people from 36 countries attended SPI – about the size that SPI has been for the past five years, Goldberg says. As its third decade begins, SPI is as strong and as thriving as ever – planning for 2015 began before the books had even been closed on this year’s session.

Those who have been involved with SPI in some way over the past 20 years treasure the many memories and friendships they’ve formed along the way.

“I think it’s one of the best things that’s happened for EMU,” says Jantzi. “It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve been involved with here …. It’s just a really, really energizing time.”

One year, Jantzi and an Iranian seminary student who came to SPI struck up an intriguing, weeks-long conversation about whether converting other people to their respective religions could be done in a nonviolent, non-coercive way. This man later became a high-ranking diplomat who, years later, returned to the United States as part of an Iranian delegation to the United Nations. He contacted Jantzi and invited himself back to Harrisonburg to give a guest lecture in one of Jantzi’s sociology classes – an encouraging indication, Jantzi says, of the high regard this former SPI participant still had for EMU.

Goldberg says he’s often inspired by the great lengths that people will go to so they can attend SPI. In 2014, a group of Syrian participants traveled at least 12 hours each way, through difficult and unsafe conditions, to Lebanon to get their visas to travel to the United States. Then they did it again to catch their flights – an illustration, he says, of “the need that people have for this training.”

And he’s similarly inspired by the eagerness with which people return to very difficult circumstances in their homes to put that training and learning into practice.

“No matter how difficult the conflict someone comes from, they want to go back and make it better with the new skills they’ve learned here,” Goldberg says.

More generally, Martin, as well as others interviewed for this story, says one of the most important enduring memories of SPI is “the rich diversity of the whole thing. Oftentimes, that came out so well in the opening ceremonies. That just humbled you.

“You want heaven to be like this,” she says.

— Andrew Jenner

U.S. forces in Iraq recovered the body of kidnapped Christian Peacemaker Teams activist Tom Fox, CPT confirmed on Mar. 10.

Tom Fox (seated right) participates in a Christian Peacemaker summer camp in an undated photo. Fox was absent from footage of hostages being held in Iraq that was broadcast by Al-Jazeera on Tuesday.
AP Photo / Christian Peacemaker Teams Iraq, File

Fox, a Quaker from Clearbrook, Va., was found by Iraqi police with his hands bound and with gunshot wounds to the head and chest the evening of Mar. 9, according to the Associated Press. When police saw the body was that of a Westerner, U.S. military authorities were called to the scene, reports said.

Fox had studied one semester in EMU’s graduate program before going to Iraq as a CPT peace worker. He was kidnapped in Baghdad Nov. 26 along with fellow CPTers Norman Kember, 74, a Briton, and Canadians James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32. The four were seized at gunpoint by a group calling itself the Swords of Righteousness Brigade and have been shown in videos released by the group, which has demanded the release of all detainees in U.S. and Iraqi prisons.

The most recent video, a silent 25-second clip that aired on Aljazeera Mar. 7, showed all of the hostages except Fox.

Memorial Service Planned

A memorial service to reflect Fox’s life and work will be held 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Mar. 15, in Lehman Auditorium.

The service will include hymns, scripture reading, visuals, candlelighting and reflections by persons who knew Fox, with an emphasis both on “the meaning of Tom’s life and mission as a Christian peacemaker and remembering his three fellow CPTers and others still being held captive” in Iraq.

The service is open to everyone.

Professors and Staff Respond

, associate professor of conflict studies in EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacemaking, had Fox in her “strategic nonviolence” course at EMU.

“May we all hold every human being in Iraq in our prayers as the trauma, anger, fear and sadness rages on and on,” Dr. Schirch said in response to Fox’s death. “And may we all find a way to renew our own personal efforts to transform those energies into something more positive.

“Let us remember Tom for the bravery and hopefulness that came with his determination to be in Iraq to monitor human rights and provide a different kind of American presence there – one that sought to be in solidarity with the suffering,” Schirch added.

EMU President Loren Swartzentruber, in Florida during EMU’s spring break for development contacts, issued a statement to the campus community:

“Tom’s death, while serving with Christian Peacemaker Teams, reminds us of the tragic deaths of people of all nationalities through senseless violence around the world. I agree completely with a statement from Carol Rose, co-director of Christian Peacemaker Teams, quoted in the news – ‘In response to Tom’s passing, we ask that everyone set aside inclinations to vilify or demonize others, no matter what they have done.'”

“Please pray for Tom’s family, co-workers, friends and for CJP faculty member Lisa Schirch and others on our campus who knew him personally,” the president said.

‘Break the Cycle’

, co-director of EMU

Jacques Koko of Benin