Bishop Andudu Adam Elnail MA ‘18, a Sudanese Episcopal bishop in exile, advocated for his people at the U.S. State Department in Washington D.C. this summer. His graduation from CJP more than a year ago has freed his time to fully concentrate on his role as bishop of the Diocese of Kadugli of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan. He works from the United States and a liaison office in Juba, South Sudan, to pastor his dispersed congregation, many of whom are in refugee camps in six African countries.

The people of the Nuba Mountains, along with��areas of Abyei, Blue Nile and Darfur, are caught between the governments of North and South Sudan and suffer from raids, bombing and starvation. More than 50,000 refugees live in the United States. To minister to them, Andudu has traveled to 35 states.

Before he completed his degree, he developed a powerful and promising model to help the Sudanese refugee community to learn more about trauma and resilience and restorative justice. With the help of co-instructors such as Kajungu Maturi MA ’18, of Tanzania, Andudu organized and facilitated a series of educational workshops in diaspora communities in Dallas, Texas; Richmond, Virginia; and Denver, Colorado.

Andudu hopes to work with CJP to host more workshops and to encourage Sudanese and south Sudanese community leaders to gain more training at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute. “This is the right place for Sudanese and south Sudanese,” he said. “This is a place where we can heal.”

The same blessing might be said of his own work. “You are like an apostle moving in the world,” said Professor��Carl Stauffer. “You model deep commitment to your family and the needs of your church and your nation. Your work is valuable to the Sudanese and South Sudanese community and to the Anglican Church. We are honored to accompany you in this work, because you are helping us all.”

IN EARLY FEBRUARY 2018, 20 scholars from five leading Iraqi universities and a representative from Iraq’s Ministry of Education gathered in Beirut, Lebanon, for a five-day training on conflict analysis. The diverse group – which included both men and women representing Sunni, Shia and Assyrian Christian faiths – would lay the foundation for their eventual development of a peace education curriculum for Iraqi university students.

“They were passionate in jointly exploring systemic dynamics of conflicts in Iraq. This was a first for most, given the divides in recent decades,” said Catherine Barnes, a CJP professor who has taught and facilitated peacebuilding processes in more than 30 countries.

The training was part of a multi-phase, multi-year peacebuilding project with youth and academics in Iraq that has involved several CJP faculty and alumni. The $1.3-million initiative, funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), was jointly implemented by CJP, Kufa University and two NGOs, the Iraqi Al-Amal Association and the Imam Al-Khoei Foundation.

SUPPORTING PROJECTS IN IRAQ

The project’s second phase with youth concluded in April 2018, having provided five total trainings since beginning in fall 2017. Seventy-five youth, selected in a competitive application process, were supported in the creation and implementation of interfaith peace projects in communities across Iraq.

The academic trainings involved 46 scholars and educators, with the goal of creating a common peacebuilding curriculum to be taught in five Iraqi universities.

As key stakeholders in Iraqi social fabric, youth and academics are “seen as instrumental in strengthening social cohesion and promoting civil society initiatives and dialogue between various ethnic and religious groups,” according to the project grant.

“We estimate that the trainings and youth peace projects touched hundreds of lives and will have exponential benefits to the region in the future,” said Daryl Byler, CJP’s executive director. “Both the young people and the academics are empowered to continue their work, and to adapt their learnings in meaningful and sustainable ways.”

LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR PEACE EDUCATION IN IRAQ

The academic trainings support the promotion of a peace education framework for reconciliation.

Participants included professors of the humanities, political science and law from universities of Anbar, Baghdad, Karbala, Kufa and Tikrit.

“An initial goal of the project was to help equip educators to teach the subject of peacebuilding and conflict resolution in their university classrooms and to support them to serve as resources for the development of peace education in Iraq,” said Alma Abdul-Hadi Jadallah, a consultant and professor who regularly teaches at CJP’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute.

Participants showed determination to initiate change and valued an approach that was respectful of cultural traditions��and knowledge, she added.

Jadallah, who is also president and managing director of the Fairfax, Virginia-based firm Kommon Denominator, has been involved in all phases of the project since it began in October 2016. She has conducted six youth workshops and four workshops for academics.

CONFLICT: ‘AN INTRINSIC HUMAN PHENOMENON’

Barnes’ agenda for the recent workshop included theories and models of conflict analysis, conflict perceptions and relationship lenses, conflicts as systems, and political economy. Participants collaboratively constructed a 100-year timeline of Iraq, leading to an illuminating dialogue on underlying issues, patterns and turning points in their shared history. They also jointly analyzed current conflict “drivers” and the political economy system in Iraq. A final day highlighted the psychosocial dimensions of conflict, including discussions of dignity, trauma and the cycle of violence.

“One important conceptual foundation that we discussed was that conflict is an intrinsic human phenomena that crosses scale barriers, and needs a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to understand and work with it,” Barnes said. “That’s why it was really beneficial to have humanities professors in the room with political science professors, and to use interactive exercises and dialogical discussions, instead of a lecture model, to build participants’ analytic skills regarding an understanding of conflict.”

Aala Ali MA ‘14, UNDP development officer, was one of the “visionaries” of this project, according to Byler. Contributors included Myriam Aziz MA ‘17, of Lebanon; Cynthia Nassif MA ‘14, of Lebanon; and Najla El Mangoush MA ‘15 of Libya (Nassif and El Mangoush are doctoral students at George Mason University); Ahmed Tarik MA ‘16, of Iraq; and Professor Carl Stauffer MA ‘02. Professor Jayne Docherty was also involved in early curriculum development.

NEW PUBLICATIONS

In 2018, look for a new anthology, Listening to the Movement: Essays on New Growth and New Challenges in Restorative Justice (Wipf and Stock, forthcoming), edited by Zehr Institute co-director Carl Stauffer and Ted Lewis, with the Center for Restorative Justice & Peacemaking at the University of Minnesota. The book collects diverse voices of RJ practitioners around the themes of developments, applications and current barriers to integrity.

“Pick up this book to explore the idea that restorative justice can no longer be confined to the realm of programs that serve clients,” says Stauffer. “Rather, it is becoming a social movement that promises significant social transformation on many societal levels, connecting systemic change with frameworks for individual and relational heart-change. Chief among those unfolding changes are matters of race relations and community empowerment.”

The book stems from a three-phase grant-funded project that included a facilitated consultation in 2015 of RJ leaders who grappled with future scenarios of where the field may be headed, as well as a larger conference in 2016, “Restorative Justice in Motion: Building a Movement.”

Find a copy of the Restorative Justice Listening Project Report, published in fall 2017, to hear what more than 130 RJ practitioners are saying about the state of the field. Listening sessions were hosted in communities in northern California, Minnesota, The Navajo Nation, Baltimore/Washington D.C./Virginia, and British Columbia in Canada. Report co-authors include lead listening session facilitator Sonya Shah with the Ahimsa Collective; Sarah King MA ‘17, victim assistance and restorative justice unit at the Minnesota Department of Corrections; and the Zehr Institute’s Carl Stauffer.

NEW CO-DIRECTOR

This summer, Professor Johonna Turner joined Professor Carl Stauffer as a co-director of the Zehr Institute, founded six years ago. Professor Howard Zehr will be emeritus director and advisor.

At EMU, Turner continues as assistant professor of restorative justice and peacebuilding, teaching undergraduate and graduate students. She and Stauffer will lead a strategic planning process in the fall to reassess the institute’s vision and mission. Additionally, Turner will facilitate a multi-year initiative called ByLD, an acronym for Black Youth Leadership Development, which includes creative writing workshops in six cities across the United States, an anthology of RJ-themed writings, and youth trainings to promote and build a network of youth RJ practitioners.

FIRST ONLINE CLASS

Among the 20 participants in the Zehr Institute’s first online course on law enforcement and restorative justice was Pam Cytrynbaum, a veteran RJ practitioner and investigative journalist, formerly the executive director of the Chicago Innocence Center. She is now in a new role as restorative justice coordinator for the James B. Moran Center for Youth Advocacy in Evanston, Illinois. The Moran Center is working to create a collaborative restorative justice hub and exploring the development of a restorative justice community court for Chicago’s North Shore, similar to the pioneering RJ community court that opened last year across the city in North Lawndale.

A longtime fan of Howard Zehr and the institute, Cytrynbaum was drawn to the course because of co-facilitator Vanessa Westley, a lieutenant with the Chicago Police Department. “Vanessa Westley is renowned and revered in the Chicago RJ community because of her incredibly rare position as a veteran law enforcement officer and a deeply committed leader of restorative practices,” Cytrynbaum said. “I appreciated how she made the philosophy of RJ a practical, do-able experience, which has helped me tremendously in focusing on what I could do, how I should begin, what my obstacles would be and how to engage the community in a collaborative way.”

Cytrynbaum would like to pursue graduate studies at EMU, but for now, courses and webinars are convenient professional development and networking opportunities. The spring course drew participants from two countries, eight states, and Washington D.C., representing invested advocates – lawyers, police, community organizers, teachers and a judge.

“I got a ton of practical information from speakers and participants,” she said. “Law enforcement representatives especially offered hugely helpful advice on how to engage with local police to begin restorative conversations; how to work within the law enforcement hierarchy; and how important it is to allow the work to grow organically. I also learned how to engage the whole community and how crucial it is to work��with��and not��for��community members and stakeholders.

For more information on upcoming courses and webinars, visit

In spring 2018, a restorative justice process was used in a groundbreaking felony case in North Carolina.

YoungJi Jang was involved in facilitated dialogue for the case as part of her practicum placement at the Restorative Justice Clinic (RJC) at Campbell Law School in Raleigh. [Jang graduated in May 2018.]

Jang said the case prompted “tears of happiness” and hugs, including for the offender from Judge Elaine O’Neal, who said following the case, “What does justice look like? Each of the people in this room might have different idea about what it looks like. However, this morning we know what it feels like.”

In March 2017, a bullet fired by James Scott Berish struck Deisy, a 10-year-old girl sleeping in a lower apartment in Durham. Berish initially fled the scene, but when he learned of the injury, Berish – the father of a two-year-old daughter – turned himself in to police.

The prosecuting attorney assigned to the case had attended an RJC restorative justice training, and realized this case was suited to the process, said RJC director Jon Powell.

“Restorative justice is a theory of justice that recognizes that crime and wrongdoing does not only violate laws of the state but that it damages people, relationships and communities,” Powell told news reporters. “If crime creates harm, justice ought to create healing and that’s what we witnessed in this case.”

At a meeting during the week before the sentencing hearing, Berish apologized to his victim and was offered forgiveness. He had learned that she loved art, and so brought art supplies for her.

Berish could have faced over 10 years in prison for the shooting and possession of a stolen gun. Now, however, as part of the plea deal resulting from the year-long restorative justice process, he is to pay restitution to cover the costs of counseling, lost work time, and a new bed for the victim’s family. He will also speak at gun safety events, provide another child victim of gun violence with art supplies, never again own a weapon, and be on probation for up to two years, according to news reports.

Assistant district attorney Kendra Montgomery-Blinn told media that the process was part of a “sea change coming.”

“What I see in Mr. Berish is a man taking full responsibility, a man who made a mistake and owns it,” she said. “What I see in Deisy and her family is a family who was wounded physically and emotionally, a family who asked for healing, a family who got answers to their questions and a family who found peace and forgiveness.”

These three have never met – Marian and James Payne, residing in Richmond, Virginia, and Mulanda Jimmy Juma, residing in Johannesburg, South Africa – but all began a journey toward peacebuilding a quarter of a century ago.

The trails they’ve taken have intersected at multiple junctures, without their knowing it.

The Paynes are retired Pennsylvania educators, now in their early 80s, who chose in 1993 to be the founding donors of what is today the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) at ��ݮ����, their undergraduate alma mater.

Juma, a native of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was a 20-year-old university student in his home country when CJP held its first peacebuilding workshop in Harrisonburg, Virginia, during the summer of 1994.

The Paynes had been persuaded of the importance of an EMU-based conflict transformation program as a result, in part, of meetings at EMU with sociology professor Vernon Jantzi and with mediation experts Ron Kraybill and John Paul Lederach, who had both previously led Mennonite Conciliation Service. (Kraybill visited Virginia periodically while earning a doctorate of religion at the University of Capetown in South Africa in the mid-1990s.)

At age 20, Juma had already survived multiple bouts of warfare in the Great Lakes region of Africa. His father was an educated man, respected in their village – which made him and his family the target of whichever set of armed combatants were sweeping through. Juma recalls hiding at age 4 under a rock with his 6-year-old sister as they tried not to breathe, listening to soldiers calling them “insects” and hunting to shoot them. His father was imprisoned and tortured nearly to death. A sister was raped and never able to function normally again. Juma became a refugee and eventually fled his country, arriving in South Africa in 1999.

Connecting with API

Juma began corresponding with Carl Stauffer, a 1984 social work graduate of EMU, who lived in South Africa for 16 years and was MCC’s regional peace adviser for the southern Africa region from 2000 to 2009. In 2002, Stauffer arranged for MCC to give Juma a scholarship to attend the six-week training program of the Africa Peacebuilding Institute (API) in Zambia. This was also the year that Stauffer completed his master’s degree in conflict transformation at CJP and returned to teach at API. It was the third year that API was operational.

API’s training materials and teaching techniques, then and now, strongly resemble those assembled in MCC’s Mediation and Facilitation Training Manual, first published in 1989 under Lederach’s co-editorship, as well as those used to this day in CJP’s courses.

(Jantzi first developed CJP’s curriculum, partly in consultation with James Payne. In addition to being a major donor to CJP, Payne was a long-time education professor, with expertise in curriculum development.)

Common roots

Befitting their common roots, both API and CJP employ experiential-style instruction, where students do not sit hour after hour listening to lectures, but instead do role plays, storytelling, artwork and other exercises designed to elicit responses. The idea is for students to internalize the lessons and adapt them to their own situations. Lederach popularized this approach, dubbing it “elicitive” and “reflective.”

Another indicator of common roots is the term “conflict transformation,” rather than “conflict” paired with the word “resolution,” “management” or “analysis.” Lederach coined and popularized “conflict transformation,” for reasons explained in chapter 1 of his Little Book of Conflict Transformation (2003).*

Juma became an API trainer while resuming collegiate studies interrupted by wars in the Congo. In 2009, when Stauffer completed his doctorate in South Africa and returned to Virginia to join the CJP faculty, Juma succeeded him as MCC’s regional peace coordinator for southern Africa for three years.

Today, Juma holds a PhD in politics, human rights and sustainability from Italy’s Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and is the coordinator of peace studies and senior lecturer at St. Augustine College in Johannesburg, South Africa, where API now holds its summer training sessions. He is also API’s executive director.

In the summer of 2015, Juma will set foot on EMU’s campus for the first time, arriving to co-teach an SPI course with Stauffer, “Justice in Transition: Restorative and Indigenous Applications in Post-war Contexts.”

Juma and the Paynes will be in proximity to each other at last – 25 years after they all began their separate, but oddly overlapping, life journeys.

Around the world, thanks to the Paynes

Until then, the main connecting thread between Juma and the Paynes is me, the outgoing editor of Peacebuilder. I was able to interview Juma in South Africa on December 5, 2014, while on an around-the-world journalism expedition funded by the Paynes.

With their usual farsightedness, Marian and James Payne conceived of the idea of reporting on SPI-type institutes globally. It took four writers and nine photographers to cover 12 peacebuilding initiatives on four continents and several islands during the closing months of 2014. The Paynes saw this as an excellent way of documenting the impact of SPI at its 20th anniversary year.

I see this mammoth project as testimony to the Paynes themselves. Likely none of this would have happened if they had not stepped forward 20 years ago with a promise to cover any shortfalls experienced by the conflict transformation program in its inaugural year at EMU. They have been devoted, generous supporters of CJP ever since.

Our journalistic explorations yielded this remarkable finding: Thousands who claim EMU as their alma mater not only share the same educational DNA, they often collaborate with EMU-linked partners around the world, feeling kinship with (and deriving support from) those who speak the same language of peacebuilding and who hold the same aspirations for a peaceful world based on justice for all. In small and large ways – from improved family relationships to war-ending dialogues – they’re building a better world.

��

* John Paul Lederach wrote that using the term “conflict transformation” implies not focusing simplistically on the resolution of a specific set of problems. Instead one’s vision is wider and longer term – to build “healthy relationships and communities, locally and globally.” It is also understood that conflict is normal in human relationships and a motor of change.

Weeks of xenophobic attacks in spring 2015 on migrants living in South Africa deeply affected Mulanda Jimmy Juma, though he was not threatened personally. Not this time.^[1]

Juma is a migrant to South Africa from elsewhere on the continent, like many of those attacked in the Johannesburg township of Alexandra and in Durban in March and April. In the 1990s, Juma had fled thousands of miles from his violence-torn home country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to arrive in South Africa.

But this time, as a trained and experienced peacebuilder, Juma knew some methods to address the violence rather than to simply flee from it.

First, after the attacks began, Juma phoned the prime minister of the Zulu kingdom, whom Juma calls “Inyosi,” and asked him to urge the Zulu king to publicly call for an end to the attacks on foreigners. Juma had been a guest at the king’s recent wedding. Moreover, Juma was friends with Inyosi, who had participated in the 2014 session of the Africa Peacebuilding Institute alongside Juma. Being an advisor to the king, Inyosi acted upon Juma’s phone call.

Second, Juma headed to the violence-affected areas of Johannesburg to “get first-hand information and see what was going on.” He then wrote a widely disseminated opinion piece where he called for a country-wide education campaign on how South Africans have benefited from their ties to other Africans. He also called for South Africa to lead the way in addressing factors underlying huge refugee populations across the continent and the victimization of refugees.

A month after the attacks had subsided, Juma held a day-long training workshop on “practical responses to xenophobia” at St. Augustine College in Johannesburg. Juma came with his own successful response nine years earlier to xenophobia in Lusaka, Zambia.

In that year (2006), after increasingly vicious actions against migrant refugees in Lusaka, Juma and two others associated with the Dag HammarskjÖld Peace Centre at the Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation reached out to Zambians living alongside refugees and persuaded some of them to sit with representative refugees to “talk about issues affecting the community as a whole,” said Juma.

The Zambians spoke of feeling displaced and disrespected by those who had moved in. “They’re boastful, they don’t respect our culture, they’re crooks, they bring disease,” were some of the comments Juma and his co-facilitators heard.

From the refugees, they heard that Zambians “behave like whites and are not welcoming, treating us like crooks.”

The peace facilitators led the two groups to listen to each other’s stories and then, eventually, to do some activities together, such as making and sharing peanut butter. The effort was hugely successful – destructive conflicts subsided in that community. The group grew from 10 people to 20. In the group were some “ring leaders,” who went and shared what they had learned and experienced with their followers. “In an African context, when you are able to convince the leaders and when those leaders speak, people listen,” said Juma.

Peace Clubs

One Zambian, a participant in the original group, was a schoolteacher who took the idea of facilitated storytelling and shared activities into his high school, where the initiative was called the “Peace Club.”

Peace clubs have now spread to 40 schools in Lusaka and adjacent Livingstone Province and are in schools in other countries, including South Africa, South Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya, Mozambique, Botswana and Uganda. “In our experience, the peace club children grow to become the leaders in their schools,” Juma said. Funding from Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) has permitted the clubs to develop a curriculum, train adult mentors, and promote themselves.

At the 2014 session of the Africa Peacebuilding Institute (API), three peace club mentors – Issa Sadi of Zambia, Zamani Ndlovu of Zimbabwe, and Joan Alty, who works for MCC in South Africa – led a popular five-day module on how to set up and run peace clubs, including how to attract a broad spectrum of students and address bullying. It was the fourth consecutive year that API offered this module, preparing a total of 102 people to be trainers in their own contexts.

The 2015 session of API (its 15th consecutive year) is expected to attract nearly 50 participants representing nearly 20 nationalities (mostly from Africa) for intensive educational modules on seven topics, including “Introduction to Conflict Transformation,” taught explicitly from an African perspective, and “Trauma Awareness, Healing and Reconciliation,” offering skills that can be applied immediately.

Juma has led API since 2011. When Juma first attended API in 2002 (after meeting Carl Stauffer, MA ’02, then a MCC worker who led API), most of its facilitators were still coming from North America, usually from EMU. Founded in 2000 by Stauffer and other MCC workers from the U.S. and Canada, API was initially held annually at the Mindola Ecumenical Foundation��in Kitwe, a city in northern Zambia that is not readily accessible for travelers from other countries. Zambia also required “study visas” that added to participants’ costs. As the leadership of API gradually shifted to experienced peacebuilders from various parts of Africa, they began to ponder where to locate API to make it more sustainable.

“We wanted to ensure API’s future stability, ideally housed in an institution that would ‘own’ it,” said Juma. “We needed access to conference rooms, housing and catering [food].” The organizers also hoped to attract some participants who could pay for their own studies, instead of almost all participants being subsidized by MCC, limiting API’s potential size and reach.

Shifting to Johannesburg

South Africa’s relatively stable economy, inspiring history of overturning the apartheid regime, and extensive airline, train and bus services – plus the strong interest of St. Augustine College in Johannesburg to host API – all factored into API’s move from Kitwe to Johannesburg in 2013. The cost of API remained modest in 2014 – $400 (U.S.) for five days of training, all meals and six nights’ accommodation.

“API is really a no-brainer for us,” said Nicholas Rowe, St. Augustine’s academic dean and acting president, who taught at API when it was in Zambia in 2006 and 2007. “API is the perfect fit for St. Augustine.” As a Catholic-founded college (the only one in South Africa), its mission is to promote “ethical leadership, dignity of the human person and the common good.”

At St. Augustine, Rowe and Juma started a BA (honors) program in peace studies in 2014-15, with view of adding degree programs in peace studies that will eventually go through the doctoral level. Rowe said they hope to retain the practice-based ethos of API.

API has close links with a number of other peacebuilding institutes in Africa. The Great Lakes Peacebuilding Institute in Burundi was started in 2004 by alumni of API, as was the Reconcile Peace Institute in South Sudan in 2009.^[2] Juma shaped the curricula for both institutes.

Violence against migrants

Looking at the South African context in the spring of 2015, overt violence erupted in areas where unemployment is particularly high (up to 80% unemployed or underemployed, according to some statisticians) and street-crime is rampant. As Juma knows from experience, it doesn’t take much for frustrated people (particularly male young adults) to seek scapegoats, especially if someone in a leadership position gives them an excuse to do so. On March 20, the Zulu monarch in South Africa, Goodwill Zwelithini, criticized foreign workers, using these words, according to Al Jazeera: “Let us pop our head lice,” he said. “We must remove ticks and place them outside in the sun. We ask foreign nationals to pack their belongings and be sent back.”

Zwelithini later said his words were taken out of context and mistranslated, but within days South Africans in impoverished communities were attacking stores and street stands owned by those they perceived as foreigners, accusing them of taking jobs away from South Africans and engaging in criminal activities.

Sandra Ngwanya, a chicken seller from Zimbabwe living in Alexandra, said her neighbors told her (as reported on the Pan-African News Wire): ‘’We are going to go door to door, taking your stuff and beating you. So we want you to go back to your country.’’ Though she was married to a South African miner, away on a job site outside Johannesburg, and had lived in South Africa since 2006, she fled with thousands of others to one of a half-dozen camps run by a disaster-response NGO.

This violence echoed a similar period in 2008, when anti-immigrant riots in South Africa took the lives of about 60 people. In both situations, church and government leaders pleaded for restraint and tolerance.

Lessons to be drawn

Pondering the reasons for the violence, Juma pointed to structural problems in South Africa. “The big gap between the rich and the poor doesn’t really allow South Africa to heal from the past. Poverty is one of the major sources of violence in this country. The concept of reconciliation needs to be stretched to cover the empowerment of the weak and the poor, especially with improved education.”

Juma’s pastor – who is also an API advisor and an alumnus of SPI 2010 – is Simon Lerefolo, whose “His People Church” has grown from 25 people a decade ago to 3,000 people in his mixed-race, mixed-income congregation in Johannesburg.

Lerefolo, Juma and Stauffer all firmly believe and teach that if personal relationships are formed, if people from all walks of life come to view each other as brothers and sisters under God – or at least as something other than enemies – they will naturally turn their attention to mutually solving destructive structural issues. This is API’s underlying philosophy.

These men point to the long, mostly unknown history of quiet meetings that helped end the apartheid regime.^[3] The famous talks are those involving Nelson Mandela in his final year as a prisoner in 1989-90. But, actually, church and other civil society organizations had been facilitating meetings since the early 1980s between representatives of Mandela’s African National Congress (labeled by the United States and Britain as a terrorist group in those days) and leading Afrikaners (including those in the white-supremacy ruling party, the National Party). These meetings were often held outside of South Africa. By the count of one historian, there were 167 meetings held in foreign venues from 1983 to 2000.^[4]

H.W. van der Merwe, an Afrikaner raised in the Dutch Reformed Church who became a Quaker as an adult, is an excellent example of someone in civil society who worked assiduously, largely behind-the-scenes, to end apartheid. In 1968, he founded what became known as The Centre for Conflict Resolution at the University of Cape Town.^[5] By the 1980s, van der Merwe was traveling regularly to Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Sweden and England to meet in-exile African National Congress (ANC) leaders to assess their openness to talking with those opposing them.

In 1984, for example, van der Merwe began meeting with members of the ANC executive committee in Lusaka, Zambia, leading to meetings between them and Afrikaner newspaper editors, according to his memoir, Peacemaking in South Africa: A Life in Conflict Resolution. Van der Merwe also met Mandela in prison that year, four years before secret talks began between Mandela and representatives of the ruling regime.

“Well over 1,200 diverse South Africans…went on an outward mission to enter dialogue with the ANC in exile in a search to overcome the escalating conflict inside South Africa,” wrote Michael Savage in his online chronology of the meetings.^[6]

These “diverse South Africans” included business people, students and academics from universities, lawyers, women’s and writers’ groups, soccer and rugby associations, and charitable foundations.

In those meetings on foreign soil, South Africans of all shades came to know each other as humans – seeking to put aside differences, fears and bitterness in order to find ways to make peace with each other. In some cases, they engaged in a kind of dress rehearsal for the future formal negotiations.

Inside the country, “church leaders quietly facilitated retreat gatherings for the three years of national peace talks [1991-94], bringing together public leaders from all political parties,” said Carl Stauffer. “These interactions were strictly for the purposes of personal storytelling and relationship-building across all political divides.

“Kept out of the glaring lights of the media, many of us believe these behind-the-scenes encounters had a powerful staying effect in keeping the otherwise divisive peace negotiations from splintering into civil war,” he added.

Now that API is in South Africa, Juma hopes to gather these lessons into a practical pedagogy that can be applied more widely. In essence, API is trying to live out Nelson Mandela’s well-known saying, “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”

Juma’s journey to peacebuilding

Mulanda Jimmy Juma knows what it’s like to be attacked, to hide and to flee, as have hundreds of thousands of fellow migrants in the face of possible death across Africa.

Juma’s father, Juma Lubambo M’smbya III, was a respected, enlightened chief of a Congolese village within a region that was a colony of Belgium until independence in 1960. The region then became part of the “République du Congo,” renamed “Zaire” (1971 to 1997), and now named the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

For generations – long, long before Juma’s birth in 1973 – armed militias, rebels and soldiers of various stripes have swept through his family’s home region on the eastern border of Congo near Burundi. Sometimes these troops belonged to whatever entity was functioning as a government at the time, usually a dictatorship. Oftentimes, the militias and rebels were proxies of neighboring countries – Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Angola – seeking to control Congo’s rich resources.

Juma recalls three brushes with genocide at the hands of one of these armed groups in his home country.

His first was when he was 4 years old, walking with his 6-year-old sister to visit an uncle in a neighboring village. “We reached a place where rebels used to kill people, and we saw government soldiers coming on a big military vehicle.

“When the vehicle stopped, we ran toward the lake and hid under a rock. They came looking for us. They walked all over the rocks calling us ‘insects’ in Lingala and saying, ‘If we see them, we’ll kill them.’

“We were hunched over with our arms crossed, and we tried to stop breathing. They looked for almost an hour, but there were many rocks.

“We heard their vehicle going away, but we waited and waited and waited almost another hour, until it was getting dark. Then we ran back home.

“As children, it was really tough. There were many other smaller events when the rebels came and we’d go hide in the bush and they would take our chickens and cattle. Whether rebels or government soldiers, they took whatever they wanted. That’s the kind of environment we grew up in.”

The violence rendered Juma unable to start school until age 9, and then he did so as a child sponsored by a U.S. nonprofit, International Compassion.

In 1996, when Juma was a university student doing a development internship in a small town, he was coming out of his aunt’s house on a Sunday when he saw armed men on foot. (Later Juma realized these were Tutsi rebels backed by Burundi and Rwanda on a quest to overthrow the Mobutu regime.)

“They started shooting randomly. I ran behind the house into the coffee trees, toward the lake. I found two uncles and one of my brothers and was going away with them, when I met a child I knew. His siblings were already killed. I picked him up and took him with me to where my uncles were hiding.

“When it was dark, we got into a small boat to cross to the other side of the lake. There were about 15 of us, two uncles, my brother, wives, kids. It was windy and we nearly drowned. We had to throw a lot of things into the water.”

Juma was not entirely successful at avoiding the rebels. Two of them found him and pointed their guns, ready to shoot. One screamed, “Who are you?”

Juma, who had the tall, slim appearance of a Tutsi, replied: “I’m the son of the chief of I’amba-Makobola Village.”

The rebels lowered their guns and said, “We know your family.”

Meanwhile (though Juma didn’t know this until later), both the government forces and rebels were decimating his home village – bombing, shooting, burning houses, and killing children by drowning them in rivers, cutting them, and disposing of them in toilets. Juma’s father and mother hid and survived, as did three of his brothers and two of his sisters. His youngest brother, age 6, was caught in the village and killed.

Two years after this, his elderly father was arrested – on charges of having a gun hidden in his toilet (it was planted, as explained later) – and was imprisoned and subjected to prolonged torture, along with other traditional chiefs. One of Juma’s sisters was raped, which caused her husband to reject her and their two children. She’s never since functioned normally.

Sponsored by MCC

This is the background to Juma’s desperate 2,500-mile journey in 1998 from the eastern border of the Congo south to Zambia. Going further, he arrived in South Africa in 1999 at age 26 and applied for refugee status. “I didn’t know where my father and mother were,” he said. “I was told by some people, ‘Your father was killed.’ I lived with that thought for almost four years.”

By 2000, Juma had landed IT work with a Catholic diocese and had helped the diocese develop a program for assisting a refugee community in Durban. That work led him to cross paths with MCC representative Suzanne Lind, who offered to help Juma study peace. Juma began writing to Carl Stauffer, then MCC’s regional peace advisor for southern Africa. Stauffer replied, “Yes, we will give you a scholarship to go to Zambia and you can join API in 2002.”

In those days, API’s trainings lasted two months, which meant Juma needed to stop working with the Catholic diocese in order to do the API trainings. It also meant he needed to ride in an airplane for the first time. After much prayer, Juma decided to accept the MCC scholarship to API.

The API trainings led to work with the Great Lakes Peacebuilding Institute in Burundi (which led to meeting the woman he would marry) and to this wonderful discovery: his father had survived the torture (though it had claimed the lives of other chiefs) and was living again with his mother in their home village.

In 2004, Juma had another miraculous experience: a cousin invited him to meet the soldier who had planted the gun in the toilet to frame his father. “He was from my tribe, but he was acting as a kind of spy when he did this. He apologized for what he did. He said he was misled.”

Juma forgave him. He could not do otherwise, after all the trainings and teachings he had done on reconciliation and on reintegrating ex-soldiers into their home communities.

“Our culture has resources that we don’t value enough. We have love and support from our family members and from the community in general. Despite all the bad things that have happened, there is always something positive that remains. People capitalize on the little that remains. That is how they cope. There is usually hope within them. They say, ‘I have to live because tomorrow will come, and it will be better.’”

��

Footnotes

1. Dr. Mulanda Jimmy Juma coordinates the Peace Studies Programme at St. Augustine College in Johannesburg, South Africa, and directs the Africa Peacebuilding Institute, an SPI-like initiative based at St. Augustine and funded by Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). Juma holds a PhD in politics, human rights and sustainability from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy and a master of commerce in peace studies and conflict resolution from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Previously, he coor- dinated the Dag Hammarskjöld Centre for Peace, Good Governance and Human Rights in Zambia. He also worked for MCC as its regional peace advisor for southern Africa from 2009 through 2012. In this last role, he followed Dr. Carl Stauffer, currently on the faculty of CJP and co-director��of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice, who was MCC’s regional peace advisor from 2000 to 2009. Juma and Stauffer are co-teaching “Justice in Transition: Restorative and Indigenous Applications in Post-war Contexts”��at SPI 2015.
2. These institutes receive funding from MCC, as well as from other faith-based��organizations. These institutes, plus the Nairobi Peace Institute (also��a beneficiary of MCC support), often use the same instructors rotationally.��CJP faculty who have taught or consulted at more than one peacebuilding��center in Africa are Barry Hart, Vernon Jantzi, Lisa Schirch and Carl��Stauffer. CJP alumni who have taught at more than one include: Babu��Ayindo of Kenya, MA ’98; Alfiado Zunguza of Mozambique, MA ’99;��Fidele Lumeya of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, MA ’00; Krista��Rigalo, MA ’00, of the United States; Gopar Tapkida of Nigeria, MA ’01;��Emmanuel Bombande of Ghana, MA ’02; and John Katunga Murhula of��Kenya, MA ’05. Two SPI alumni work with Reconcile, which is under the��New Sudan Council of Churches: Milcah Lalam and Dele Emmanuel.
3. Other factors that contributed to ending apartheid included international boycotts of South Africa that worsened its economy, and threats and fears of worsening internal violence leading to a nationwide bloodbath.
4. From .
5. Ron Kraybill, a founding faculty member of CJP, was the director of training at the Centre for Conflict Resolution from 1989 to 1995 (called the Centre for Intergroup Studies until 1991) in a supportive role to H.W. van der Merwe until the latter stepped down as executive director in 1992, fully��retiring in 1994.
6. See footnote #4.

Instead of returning for EMU’s “homecoming” celebration – always held over one weekend each October – degree-holding alumni of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) often show up for its annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI).

And those SPI alumni who aren’t aiming to earn a degree? Some of them just keep coming back year after year – almost as an educational vacation – or they send their colleagues and friends to SPI.

Of the 2,800 SPI participants over the last 19 years, more than one in five have been repeat participants, taking courses during a second year or even multiple years of SPI. In that number must be counted almost all of CJP’s 398 master’s degree alumni, plus 91 graduate certificate holders. Some of their MA classmates are now SPI instructors, plus many of their professors have taught at SPI year after year.

Detouring six hours to reconnect

Among the first drop-bys to SPI 2014 were Florina Benoit and Ashok Gladston of India, both 2004 MA grads from CJP and now PhD-holders. They made a six-hour round-trip detour from a family-related stop in Baltimore, Maryland, to say “hello” to folks at SPI.

Gladston was last at EMU in June 2011 when he gave a heart-wrenching talk at EMU centering on women from a minority group in southern India who were being violently victimized by mobs from the surrounding majority group.

The two, both former Fulbright Scholars married to each other, happened to arrive on May 7 when Doreen Ruto of Kenya, a 2006 MA graduate, was the featured SPI “Frontier Luncheon” speaker, along with her colleague (and son) Richy Bikko, a 2011 BA graduate who majored in justice, peace and conflict studies.

Over that day, Gladston and Benoit interacted with a dozen professors, staffers and alumni whom they recalled from their studies at CJP 10 years ago.

When the day turned to evening and their borrowed car was found to have a non-working headlight, they lingered for activities very familiar to them –��a community “potluck” meal, followed by a cultural program led by SPI participants, and informal dancing. (They huddled with this writer for much of that time answering questions about their work in India – but more on that later.)

They then accepted the impromptu invitation of Margaret Foth, a retiree who has been a long-time liaison with CJP alumni, and slept in a guest room at the Foths’ home, adjacent to EMU.

��“It was like we recalled from our time as graduate students,” says Benoit. “We felt like we were visiting our second home.”

In 2013, Gladstone and Benoit had been scheduled to teach an SPI course on the logistics of humanitarian aid – more specifically, on how such aid intersects with peacebuilding practices, including the “do no harm” principle – but, unfortunately, that year the number of people seeking such training was insufficient to hold the course.

Always more to learn

A third former Fulbright Scholar, Shoqi Abas Al-Maktary, MA ’07, took a break from his job as country director in Yemen for Search for Common Ground and spent May 15-23 taking the SPI course “Designing Peacebuilding Programs – From Conflict Assessment to Planning. ”

“I don’t think anyone in this field can afford to stop being a student,” says Al-Maktary, who holds a second master’s degree in security management from Middlesex University in the United Kingdom. “There is always more to know, more to explore with others in the field. And SPI – with its intensive courses – is a great place to do this.”

Thomas DeWolf of the United States just finished attending his fourth SPI in six years, with the course “Media for Societal Transformation.” He first came in 2008 where he explored Coming to the Table (explained in next paragraph). He returned for a restorative justice course in 2009, and then in 2012, received a scholarship to take “Healing the Wounds of History: Peacebuilding through Transformative Theater.”

DeWolf’s connection to SPI began with CJP’s sponsorship of Coming to the Table, an organization focused on addressing the enduring impact of the slavery era in the United States. DeWolf has played a leading role in this organization, which held its annual conference at EMU this year, over a weekend between two sessions of SPI.

Seven times at SPI

A 76-year-old clinical psychologist from Argentina, Lilian Burlando, has an astonishing record of attendance at SPI, having attended about a third of all the years SPI has been held. From her home at the southern-most tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego, Burlando has attended SPI seven times: in 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. Often with her, also taking classes, have been members of her family of five children and 19 grandchildren. One of her daughters, Maria Karina Echazu, for instance, is a prosecuting attorney in Argentina who took a restorative justice course in 2007 and a practice course in 2011.

Burlando calls SPI “a refreshing experience,” citing interesting course topics, excellent professors and the sense of community. “To me,” she says, “SPI has been a fountain of intellectual and spiritual enrichment.”

Almost all the teachers at SPI – even those like Johonna McCants, who holds a PhD from the University of Maryland – have also been students at SPI at some point. McCants explains how she found her way to SPI:

In 2009, while finishing my doctoral dissertation, I began searching online for practical training in the issues I was writing about. I discovered CJP and SPI and quickly fell in love. I was attracted by the integration of theory and practice, the variety of courses, the diversity of participants, backgrounds of the instructors, and that the program was housed at a Christian university. I participated in Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) at SPI just a few weeks after receiving my PhD. The STAR experience, which was phenomenal, kept me coming back for more.

McCants brought along a first-timer to SPI 2014, Julian Turner. These two, who first met as teenagers, would be married in a month. But first Turner, who works at an infectious disease clinic in Washington D.C., soaked up the wisdom of Hizkias Assefa in “Forgiveness and Reconciliation,” while McCants co-taught with Carl Stauffer “Restorative Justice: The Promise, the Challenge.”

Loves the diverse people

From her base as a high school teacher in a public school in Washington D.C. – and with experience as an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland – McCants says she is struck by the egalitarian learning community formed by SPI, where the instructors and participants respect and learn from each other.

Her favorite part about SPI?

Definitely, the people! I enjoy learning from people from different parts of the United States and countries all over the world, hearing their stories and developing new relationships. I also like reuniting and reconnecting with people I’ve met during previous times at SPI.

Discovering SPI on the internet, as McCants did, is not typical. More often, SPI participants are encouraged to attend by previous participants.

Libby Hoffman, president and founder of the Catalyst for Peace foundation, for example, attended SPI in 1996 and took another CJP course in 2000. This year she dispatched two rising leaders of Fambul Tok – an organization doing amazing work of promoting post-war reconciliation throughout Sierra Leone – to take two successive courses at SPI. Micheala Ashwood and Emmanuel Mansaray both took “Leading Healthy Organizations,” in addition to “Analysis – Understanding Conflict” and “Psychosocial Trauma,”
respectively.

Ten CJP master’s degree alumni had teaching roles at SPI 2014: Dr. Sam Gbaydee Doe, MA ’98; Dr. Barb Toews, �� MA ’00; Dr. Carl Stauffer, MA ’02; Elaine Zook Barge, MA ’03; Roxy Allen Kioko, MA ’07 (PhD candidate);��Paulette Moore, MA ’09 (PhD candidate); Jacqueline Roebuck Sakho, MA ’09 (PhD candidate); Caroline Borden, MA ’12; Soula Pefkaros, MA ’10 (PhD candidate); and Danielle Taylor, MA ’13. < — Bonnie Price Lofton

Decades ago, when international conflicts tended to be between neighboring countries, the United Nations’ approach to peacekeeping was primarily focused on observation and reporting. The blue-helmeted peacekeepers would sit peering through telescopes, trying to make sure people on either side of the border behaved.

Since the end of the Cold War, however, wars between sovereign states have increasingly been replaced by conflict within nations, often with meddling from proxy players. In the absence of functioning state institutions, UN peacekeeping missions have taken an increasingly hands-on role in these countries, expanding the scopes of their missions to include development, peacebuilding and state-building efforts, often in partnership with other organizations and agencies. Since the early 1990s in particular, peacebuilding and development have assumed greater importance throughout the UN system, beyond military-style peacekeeping activities.

As a police planning advisor with the UN Office to the African Union, Kamal Uddin Tipu, MA ’04, represents one facet of the new, broader approach to peacebuilding being employed by the United Nations everywhere, but especially in Africa, where the majority of its multidimensional peacekeeping missions are. Working closely with the , Tipu helps the organization plan the policing components of its peacekeeping missions across Africa. While Tipu provides the AU with his expertise as a police officer, he has colleagues who address more than a dozen related areas, including elections monitoring, military and civilian logistics, medicine, mediation, mine action and other structures necessary for sustainable peace after violent conflict has ended in a country.

“You have to go into all these areas to resolve conflict,” says Tipu, a deputy inspector general of police in Pakistan now deputized to the UN.

Police in support of stable governance

In South Sudan, which gained independence in 2011 after decades of civil war within Sudan, Fred Yiga, MA ’06, is also working to establish a functioning police force in a country almost devoid of state institutions when it became independent.

“The greatest casualties in South Sudan’s conflict were the institutions of governance,” says Yiga, an assistant inspector general of police in Uganda now serving as the UN police commissioner for the . “Their frameworks and the whole notion of governance culture must be started from scratch.”

And so Yiga has begun doing just that, establishing police officer screening and payroll policies, conducting a needs assessment to guide planning for training and funding priorities, and developing policing models and programs such as police-community relations committees.

“There is a lot of hope that we are on the right track with police development in South Sudan,” continues Yiga, who anticipates the country having a well-trained and professionalized police force with influence in the wider region within five years. “We will definitely succeed!”

Developing a transitional justice process

Though it has not fallen into full-blown civil war like so many other African nations, Guinea has nonetheless been plagued by repeated violent conflicts over the past several decades. In southeastern Guinea, where Francois Traore, MA ’11, has worked as a human rights national program officer for the , the roots of these conflicts were the usual suspects like land disputes between farmers and livestock herders, or unequal access to natural resource revenues. Often, these conflicts have been exacerbated by ethnic and religious differences between the opposing parties.

Drawing on the “holistic approach” of ‘s and his study of restorative justice, Traore worked to develop a transitional justice process in this region of Guinea based on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission model pioneered in South Africa. (Former CJP professor Ron Kraybill was involved in South Africa’s truth-and-reconciliation program at its conceptual stage, as was current professor and CJP alumnus , who lived and did peace work in South Africa from 1994 until he came to teach at CJP in 2010.)

In addition to the cultural, religious and economic aspects of these conflicts, generational divides within these communities have eroded their traditional conflict resolution methods. In the past, Traore said, elders from opposing sides used an animal sacrifice, shared a meal, and performed oath-taking rituals to resolve or prevent conflicts. Younger people in these communities, however, view such practices as outdated and irrelevant to modern life and problems – adding another layer of complexity to the violence in the region.

“Understanding these dynamics and linking them to the conflicts they generate requires a strong peacebuilding theory,” says Traore, who left the UNHCHR in 2012 for a position with the USAID Mission in Guinea and Sierra Leone. The multi-disciplinary nature of his studies at CJP, he says, has allowed him to play a leadership role in developing a transitional justice component to a nationwide reconciliation process planned for the near future.

Community-based early warning systems

Just across the border in Liberia, Nat Walker, MA ’10, is leading the development of an early warning and early response (EWER) network to respond to conflicts in communities across the country. This first entailed establishing community-based EWER networks, linking local peace committees with a network of responders that includes civil society groups, UN agencies and Liberian government agencies.

Now, Walker is setting up “rapid response centers” in the cities of Gbarnga, Zwedru and Harper. These centers figure into a larger, countrywide peacebuilding and reconciliation program supported by the and the Liberian government.

“Linking the current EWER initiative with the bigger, UN-supported justice and security framework in the country is critical to maintaining peace and security in Liberia, especially as the UN mission draws down its military strength,” he says.

Walker is a long-term consultant on the project with , an American NGO which is working in partnership with the Liberian Peacebuilding Office, the UN Peacebuilding Fund, and other governmental and NGO partners. The community-level conflict monitoring and response systems, Walker says, play an important role in Liberia, where state security institutions are weak or absent entirely.

Walker says his experience at the , combining “critical peacebuilding theories” and “sound practice-based education,” have given him a grasp of conflict-sensitive development and organizational development skills, enabling him lead the conceptualization and development of EWER networks in Liberia.

Once conflicts or potential conflicts are identified and reported by EWER personnel, Walker says, response activities include formulation of policy recommendations, advocacy campaigns led by civil society organizations, and community-level mediation and dialogue led by members of the community. Incidents and the responses are later analyzed to improve the community’s ability to address future conflicts.

“[This means] local conflicts are dealt with before they escalate to disrupt community and national peace,” says Walker.

EWER is by no means unique to Liberia. Working for , Gopar Tapkida, MA ’11, nurtured into existence a similar system in Nigeria, the Emergency Preparedness and Response Team, supported by 10 organizations, encompassing Muslims, Catholics, Evangelicals, women’s groups, the Red Cross, UNICEF and others committed to promoting nonviolence and peacebuilding. Team members covering 175 states use text messages to confer with each other about possible threats and rumors of attacks.

Need to build peace from bottom up

In Darfur, Sudan, Moussa Ntambara, MA ’02, spent two years, through the summer of 2013, as a manager with the . He oversaw around $10 million annually in funding provided to other UN agencies and NGOs working on grassroots peacebuilding projects in all five states of Darfur, where inter- and intra-community conflicts arose over issues such as access to natural resources.

Ntambara supervised teams of specialists and monitors who oversaw work in the field and provided technical assistance, project quality review, and feedback on project implementation. “My major role, as it relates to my education in peacebuilding, consisted in the development of engagement for peace strategies, identification of entry points, key actors and factors identification, peacebuilding methodologies and guidance on approaches,” says Ntambara, who now works in Bamako, Mali, as head of child protection for .

Abou Ag Ahiyoya, MA ’12, a former chief superintendent of police in Bamako, Mali, was one of the leaders of the civilian police force dispatched to the Darfur area of Sudan by the African Union from 2005 to 2007. For a while, Ahiyoya was the acting chief of police operations under the African Union, serving a vast refugee population and supervising almost 1,000 officers from about 25 African countries. Toward the end of his tour of duty��in Darfur, he worked as a member of��the transition team preparing for the UN’s African Mission in Darfur.

In Darfur, Ahiyoya dealt with killings, rapes, and other crimes on a daily basis. He saw children growing up without families, and tens of thousands without real homes. “I witnessed the consequences of war – I don’t want this to happen to any community or country,” he recalled in a 2011 interview at .

By 2008, Ahiyoya was deputy director of the national police academy in Mali and the director of the UN’s training program for police and peacekeepers within the Ecole de maintien de la paix in Mali. He also was a consultant and facilitator at the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in Canada.

When Ahiyoya was earning his as a Fulbright Scholar during 2010-12, his heart was heavy with the knowledge that his country was spiraling into bloody chaos, without the international community seeming to care. As he feared then, the situation has worsened over the last several years.

Belated intervention by the military of France on Jan. 11, 2013, did not bring peace to Mali. As of fall 2013, there was a UN-supported “stabilization mission” comprising more than 10,000 military personnel and 1,440 police, plus staff providing humanitarian assistance, but they are trying to operate in a dangerous, volatile situation.

“The AQMI [Saharan fighters inspired by al-Qaeda] are recruiting lots of our youths because they don’t have jobs,” Ahiyoya told in an . “We need to address the causes of terrorism and solve problems from the bottom up.”

UN is cumbersome��but irreplaceable

Sometimes the UN system is criticized for being a large, confusing bureaucracy that is hard for those outside of its structures to understand. As an example, the DCPSF (the UN program Ntambara worked for in Darfur, beneath the UNDP’s umbrella) partners with numerous other agencies and organizations, including UNAMID in Darfur, itself a specific collaboration between the United Nations and the African Union, which is known as UNOAU, where Kamal Udin Tipu serves as a police planning advisor.

As confusing as the system may seem, Tipu says the United Nations nevertheless has “been very active in keeping peace” around the world, and is refining, improving and strengthening its approach to peacebuilding by addressing the root causes of conflict rather than simply intervening in violent conflict. And, he says, consider the alternative: “If there’s no UN, what else do we have?”

• Zehr is “distinguished professor” of restorative justice, a pioneer in international restorative justice field; author, co-author or editor of about 22 books pertaining to restorative justice
• Zehr’s bestselling Little Book of Restorative Justice (over 110,000 sold) was cited as a reference in Handbook on Restorative Justice Programmes, published in 2006 by UN Office on Drugs and Crime following UN conferences in 2000, 2002 and 2005.
• Former CJP director Vernon Jantzi served on Working Party of Restorative Justice, a major resource at UN Congresses on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in 2000 and 2005. WPRJ drafted basic principles on restorative justice adopted by UN Economic and Social Council.
• ��Jantzi, professor emeritus of sociology, now works for Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR).

Carl Stauffer, PhD��

• ��Assistant professor of justice studies and co-director of EMU’s Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice
• As regional peace adviser in Southern Africa for Mennonite Central Committee, 2000-09, Stauffer was associated with peace accords, community-police forums, truth and reconciliation initiatives, and local community development structures, often interacting with UN agencies involved with post-conflict stability.
• The UN Secretary General’s 2004 Report on The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-conflict Societies defines transitional justice as “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation.”
• ��Stauffer elaborated on this theme in his “Restorative Interventions for Postwar Nations,” a chapter published in Restorative Justice Today – Practical Applications (Sage Publications, 2012).

Barry Hart, PhD��

• ��Professor of trauma, identity and conflict studies, former CJP academic dean
• Has conducted workshops on psychosocial trauma recovery and reconciliation in Northern Ireland, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Burundi and among Rwandan refugees in Tanzania.
• Lived and worked for years in Balkans, launching trauma and conflict transformation programs for schools, communities, religious leaders.
• Collaborated with UNICEF personnel in Liberia to create the Kukatonen (We Are One) Peace Theatre, along with a manual of the same title, centered on these themes: understanding conflict, active listening, conflict resolution, reconciliation and trauma healing.
• Developed a training manual Za Damire I Nemire (For Peace and Not for Peace: Opening the Door to Nonviolence) for UNICEF while in Croatia.
• Collaborated with UN humanitarian and relief agencies when working in Liberia, Tanzania and the Balkans.

��Lisa Schirch, PhD��

• Research professor
• Director of human security at the Alliance for Peacebuilding
• Senior advisor to “People Building Peace” conference held at UN headquarters in 2005, encompassing about 1,000 civil society peacebuilding delegates from 119 countries.
• Evaluator for the UN Peacebuilding Support Office to advise on grantmaking to support women in peacebuilding in 2011.
• Facilitated UNDP meeting in Fiji between military, government and civil society groups.
• Consultant to UNDP in 2012 to develop strategy for UNDP to fit into new UN Peacebuilding Architecture
• “The UN is central to the success of peacebuilding in many countries. UNDP has an opportunity to provide the link between short-term humanitarian response in the midst of a crisis and longer term support for building the foundations of peace. UNDP is also one of the few institutions that is positioned to bring together civil society, governments, international NGOs and donors to work together to support strategic peacebuilding.”

��Ron Kraybill, PhD��

• ��Founding faculty member of CJP (’76 graduate of sister college, Goshen), current Senior Advisor on Peacebuilding and Development United Nations, assigned by UNDP to Philippines, previously assigned to Lesotho
• ��Supports peace process in Mindanao.
• Worked behind scenes, 2009-13, to nurture peaceful elections in Lesotho.
• Supported process led by Lesotho heads of churches, working with gridlocked parliament to negotiate electoral agreement among political parties to pursue free and fair elections.
• Effort yielded Lesotho’s first free, fair and peaceful election since independence in 1966.
• Facilitated visit to Lesotho of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who oversaw signing of political pledge that committed parties to respect laws and accept outcome of election.
• “Mediation, facilitation and process design lie at the heart of almost all that I do; I strengthen human capacities to respond constructively to conflict.”

David Brubaker, MBA, PhD��

• ��Associate professor of organizational studies, co-author of The Little Book of Healthy Organizations.��
• Hired by UNICEF-Mozambique for peace education and conflict resolution trainings immediately after peace accord signed in 1992.
• On joint project of Mennonite Central Committee and World Council of Churches, interacted with UNHCR staff at Benako refugee camp in Tanzania in 1994.
• ��Applauds UN for work on human development, women’s rights, indigenous rights, and awareness of environmental perils. But adds: “The UN’s basic structure hasn’t changed since it was founded 68 years ago. Healthy organizations need to undergo a structural review process every three to five years to ensure that their structure is still meeting their mission and objectives.”
• “My main issue is with the UN Security Council, where the veto power of the five permanent members often blocks meaningful international action, as seen in the cases of Israel and Syria.”

Catherine Barnes, PhD��

• Associate professor of strategic peacebuilding and public policy
• Has been engaged with UN since the early 1990s, when helped conduct trainings in conflict analysis and resolution for diplomats and staff.
• Regularly involved in policy dialogue in the UN on peace processes, especially how to increase public participation for inclusive and comprehensive settlements and effective use of sanctions, incentives and conditionality.
• Served as advisor during 2002-05 to Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict and participated in UN discussions on roles of civil society in preventing armed conflict and building peace.
• ��Helped design and facilitate 2005 conference on this theme at UN headquarters in NYC, which involved about 1,000 people from civil society, governments and IGOs from around the world, including CJP alumni, faculty, staff, and partners.

Paulette Moore, MA ’09��

• Associate professor of the practice of media arts and peacebuilding
• As MA student, did practicum with Community Development Gender Equality and Children, an agency within UNHCR. There created a blog – itbeginswithme.wordpress.com – launched on International Women’s Day in March 2009.
• Next, as UNHCR consultant, worked on films in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, along with a blog, in collaboration with a young woman filmmaker in that camp named Kate Ofwano, who is now in film school in Geneva.
• Moore recalls leaving career in corporate media to become more invested in community. “I didn’t want to keep being the kind of person who would helicopter in somewhere, do something, and helicopter back out,” as she thought UN personnel often did.
• ��Experience at UNHCR made her aware of a third way: “To partner with people who I really, really trust. Big organizations and community-based work aren’t necessarily exclusive.”

Amy Knorr, MA ’ 09��

• ��CJP practice coordinator
• Worked and lived in Haiti for 7.5 years total
• Worked with UNDP “disarmament, demobilization and reintegration”program 2006-07, on team to reintegrate gang members into society, often using stipends, vocational training, and cash to start small businesses.
• Didn’t work – community members were fearful; program heightened conflict rather than transformed it – i.e., it was not “conflict sensitive.”
• UN workers were required to wear bullet-proof vests and helmets, circulating with armed escorts when in dangerous urban areas. “This sent an uncomfortable message – were the UN workers’ lives more important than the Haitians’?’’
• With the UNDP at that time, “relationship-building and trust weren’t really there. There were civil society groups in existence in the communities where this project was working. But the UNDP didn’t work directly with these groups. They created new ones that conformed to the vision they’d dreamed up for the project – without the input of local groups that knew what things were really like.”
• The UNDP had $14 million to spend in this Haitian case: “The UN has a huge potential to reach many stakeholders, but attention must be given to conflict analysis.”

Ali Gohar, MA ’02

• Founding director Just Peace Initiatives (JPI) in Pakistan
• Was commissioner, 1987-2001, on UNHCR-funded project for 258 Afghan refugee camps, concentrating on community development, peacebuilding, drug use and HIV/AIDS, the plight of street children.
• Has partnered with UNDP, UNICEF, UNHCR and UNFPA to address humanitarian situations – when much of Pakistan was affected by devastating flooding; when 50 primary schools in Bajur Tribal Agency needed clean water and sanitation facilities; when four areas were assisted in restoring their livelihoods, building community-based infrastructure, and improving their governance.
• With UNICEF funding, JPI now working on two unprecedented projects on social cohesion and resilience in three areas – SWAT, DIR, and Bajur.
• With UNFPA funding, JPI addressing gender-based violence cases through alternative dispute resolution in camps housing large numbers of host-community and internally displaced peoples.

Manas Ghanem, MA’06��

• ��Project Development Officer, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), now based in London, England
• Native of Syria employed by UNHCR, 2006-11, delivering direct support to refugees and displaced peoples due to violent conflict in such countries as Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen.
• “My work now [beginning in 2012] is more of coordination of private sector fundraising in support of various operations around the world, because most of the operations are underfunded, and refugees and displaced are in dire need of every support, even if little.”
• “UNHCR is present in every conflict area to help, with dedicated and passionate staff.”
• “The agency does not have a political mandate to influence political peacemaking. But I see it as one of the most effective peacemakers on the ground, with its efforts to reduce the suffering and to call the international community to show compassion and participate in sharing the burden of helping.”
• “Often when I am in the middle of something problematic, I find myself recalling CJP classes or a discussion with a CJP professor regarding organizations, theory, human rights, practices in conflict transformation, mediation and restorative justice.”
• “Most importantly, I remember STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience) – I try to always find ways to take care of myself and to recall that self-care is important, if I am to help others.”

Amy Rebecca Marsico, MA ’09

• Manager of NYC-based stage productions; conflict and peacebuilding consultant
• Presented arts-based approaches to peacebuilding to UN Interagency Framework Team for Preventive Action
• Did practicum for her MA at UNHCR in the Community Development, Gender Equality and Children section.
• Promoted AGDM (age, gender and diversity mainstreaming), whereby refugee women, men, boys and girls contribute to the design and implementation of programs, identify own protection risks, and participate in finding sustainable solutions.
• Helped develop the Heightened Risk Identification Tool, a field tool used to identify refugees at risk.
• “To be part of work that was engaging in long-term change processes – seeing refugees as active partners instead of passively waiting for a handout – was incredibly meaningful.”

Barry Hart, PhD, professor of trauma, identity and conflict studies, pointed to recent neuroscience suggesting that humans have an innate desire to bond and empathize with one another. Framed in different terms, pervasive physical and structural violence is at odds with our own biology, and therefore��will someday, somehow, come to an end. “You feel that in your bones,” says Hart. “That gives you not only hope, but strength and patience to go forward.”

Though often used interchangeably, hope and optimism represent different concepts, says David Brubaker, PhD, associate professor of organizational studies. Optimism, or lack thereof, is short-term, pragmatic and based on specific facts. Hope, though, looks above and beyond specific facts; it is rooted in an idea often referenced by Martin Luther King, Jr. – that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

The distinction is an important one for peacebuilders working in challenging environments that don’t justify an expectation that things are soon to get better.

“Optimism is often not warranted in our work with intractable conflict, but hope is something that has to be sustained,” Brubaker says.

At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the reality of despair and disillusionment that often accompanies peacebuilding work.

“We do the field of peacebuilding a disservice if we only cast our work within a utopian future vision,” says Carl Stauffer, PhD, assistant professor of development and justice studies.

There are no quick fixes in “deeply complex, nuanced and layered” conflicts like those faced by alumni in the Middle East, he continues, although that should not be mistaken for ineffectiveness. Doctors are still valuable, Stauffer notes, despite the fact they have yet to eliminate disease. While he also finds hope in the idea that seemingly impossible conflicts will be resolved – the end of apartheid in South Africa being one example – he says that peacebuilders should not be afraid to acknowledge and discuss “discouragement or despondency among practitioners in a tough place like the Middle East.”

Better networking among CJP and its alumni working in challenging environments was identified both by alumni interviewed for Peacebuilder and CJP faculty as one way to address the discouragement they sometimes face. In its new strategic plan completed in the spring of 2012, CJP sets forth developing new programs to strengthen alumni networking for this very reason.

To Jayne Docherty, PhD, professor of leadership and public policy, the shifting dynamics of conflict in the Middle East and the combination of hope and despair these elicit from alumni, also present CJP with an opportunity to evaluate its own role in peacebuilding.

“When the world changes around them, peacebuilders need to hold hope, practice humility and revise their practices,” she says. “What are we at CJP and in the U.S. peace community doing differently in response to the new realities in the Middle East? Have we examined our premises and our assumptions? Or, are we still promoting old practices [like] dialogue or taking the side of the oppressed? What can we learn from our graduates?” — AKJ