The news coming out of Burkina Faso worried Emmanuel Bombande, MA ’02, in late October 2014 as he boarded a flight for Europe. For months, the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP) – led by Bombande as executive director for 11 years – had been warning that Burkina Faso sat teetering at the edge of chaos. Would the country’s long-serving president try to cling to power by amending the constitution? Or would he respect the term limits placed on his presidency and step down?

The previous March, a WANEP policy brief had warned of a political crisis leading up to a 2015 presidential election:

The current political context in Burkina Faso is a cause for concern to WANEP and other [civil society organizations] in the region and beyond. Tensions around constitutional amendments and transitions, political intolerance, identity-based politics as well as a lack of institutions for managing grievances [are] evident in the run-up to the elections.

As the months went by, the political situation continued to deteriorate. Moderate voices began to say outrageous things. WANEP staff in the country began to fear for their safety. As Bombande traveled to Bruges, Belgium, for a meeting at the United Nations University, his heart remained behind in Africa, where tensions in Burkina Faso were heading toward explosive. He was constantly checking the news.

As the meeting in Belgium began in the morning, Bombande’s Twitter feed began to confirm his fears. A crowd had gathered at the parliament building in the capital, Ouagadougou. By the first coffee break, the situation had worsened: parliament was in flames and the military appeared to have seized power. “The whole country was on the brink of total disaster,” he recalls.

The crisis in Burkina Faso was following a depressingly familiar script. President Blaise Compaoré had first come to power through a military coup in 1987. Four years later, he won election as the country’s president. Compaoré went on to serve four terms as president, despite a constitutional amendment in 2000 setting a two-term limit. He circumvented this with a friendly ruling that the term limit could not be applied retroactively.

Even by that generous interpretation of the rules, though, Compaoré would not have been eligible to run again for president in 2015 – unless the constitution were to be amended again. That’s exactly what Compaoré tried to do, and that was the matter being debated in parliament when the mob set fire to the building, as Bombande followed along in horror on Twitter. The following day, Compaoré resigned his office and fled the country, leaving an officer from his presidential guard in apparent control.

The regional implications were also troubling to Bombande. With violent extremism spreading throughout the Sahel – Mali, northern Nigeria, Chad, Niger – another collapsed state would have afforded extremism with another power vacuum to fill.

Theory to practice

From the WANEP policy brief:

A period of instability could prove disastrous for other countries in the region…, already enmeshed in various levels of insecurity…. Burkina Faso’s political instability could provide more grounds for widespread insurgencies and rapid deterioration of human security in the region.… The huge presence of unemployed youths and small arms proliferation in a region with a history of civil wars provide a fertile recruiting ground for extremists.

This sort of policy brief lies at the heart of one of WANEP’s core missions in West Africa: the coordination of an early warning and response network for conflict. The network is an early example of the ways WANEP co-founders Bombande and Sam Gbaydee Doe, MA ’98, worked to translate peacebuilding theory into on-the-ground results in a part of the world ravaged time and again by brutal wars.

“Both of us who played a leading role in the founding of WANEP also found ourselves at EMU precisely because of its practice orientation,” recalls Bombande. “One of the things we have repeated and repeated is that at EMU it was not just knowledge and theory, it was its practice orientation.

“EMU allowed us to rapidly bridge the gap between theory and practice, and that is what we wanted in West Africa.”

In the theoretical sense, an early warning and response network is a set of processes and mechanisms by which people, organizations and governments can anticipate, identify and quickly respond to small conflicts before they escalate into bigger ones. As put into practice by WANEP, the structure is built on people across the region trained to monitor conditions and issues affecting them and their neighbors.

There are now more than 260 of these monitors spread throughout the region (eight of them in Burkina Faso). They read the local papers, listen to the radio, follow the gossip at the market, and chat with their neighbors. Many of these monitors also maintain their own sub-networks of monitors who represent the entire community – men and women, young and old, members of whatever different ethnic and religious groups are present.

WANEP runs this early warning network in partnership with ECOWAS, an intergovernmental organization made up of 15 West African nations. The network (formally called ECOWARN) is run out of the ECOWAS Commission headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria, where WANEP’s liaison office to ECOWAS is located.^[1]

Spotting nascent problems

Using a detailed, web-based reporting template, the network’s monitors regularly report on points of friction within their communities. Suppose an argument over politics turns ugly in the market. The monitor in the area would send a report up the chain to the WANEP national office, which then passes all reports it receives to the liaison office and the ECOWARN situation room in Nigeria. Collectively, patterns can emerge and nascent problems can be identified before they turn into big and very unpleasant surprises.

“The whole system is built on people who are active participants,” says Bombande. “Every day we’re monitoring each country…. What we can begin to see, graphically, are things like rising political tensions.”

The result: documents like the policy brief on Burkina Faso that warned of a deteriorating political situation seven months before the crisis came to a head.

That policy brief alone wasn’t enough to avert violent conflict altogether. Tens of thousands of protesters battled police in the streets of Ouagadougou, parliament was set on fire, a dozen people were reported killed, and a military officer briefly appointed himself the head of state. But the response, informed by the early warning system, was both quick and focused.

“Because of the prior work that had been done – with all the analysis, the early warning, the policy brief and the advocacy – what was significantly different in this situation was that [the response] did not take even hours. It did not take a full day. The entire region knew exactly what needed to be done,” recalls Bombande, who returned from Belgium several days later and plunged into the response effort.

Comparatively peaceful transition

Leaders from the United Nations, ECOWAS and civil society organizations, with WANEP playing an important role, were soon in Burkina Faso working to ensure that an interim civilian government could form and agree on a clear path to open elections in the near future. All too often in the past, Bombande says, people and institutions responding to crises in Africa have tended to “trip over one another.” In this case, however, the coordinated response at various levels, he continues, “brought an enormous pressure to bear on the military.”

And it worked – by mid-November, the former Burkinabé ambassador to the United Nations was sworn in as the country’s transitional president. Full elections had been scheduled for October 2015. After two tense weeks, Bombande began to relax. The system bent, but it didn’t break. Violence broke out, but it was quickly contained.

“We could have been talking about thousands of deaths,” says Bombande. “And we could have been talking about chaos on a regional scale.

“Burkina Faso is simply inspirational. People now know that they can change [their government]…. I think this is a very good sign and that the early warning network has made a very significant difference.”^[2]

History of WANEP and WAPI

In 1998, after becoming one of the first students to earn a master’s degree from EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Sam Gbaydee Doe “left EMU fired up to translate a dream into a reality,” he told Peacebuilder in 2010.

“I dreamed of a regional movement of civil society that would collaborate with regional intergovernmental bodies to restore not just stability in Africa but democratic freedom and prosperity,” said Doe, who is from Liberia.

Back in West Africa, he connected with Bombande, who had recently been working on mediation of tribal conflicts in his native Ghana (and who went on to earn a master’s degree from CJP in 2002). Together, the two men founded the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding, or WANEP, in late 1998. The group’s first operating funds came from a $200,000 grant from the now-closed Winston Foundation for International Peace.

One of the earliest programs of WANEP was aimed at women. In 1999, WANEP set up the Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET). Doe had met a fellow Liberian, Leymah Gbowee, in whom he saw leadership potential in the face of a war that had decimated their country for more than a decade. As a result, WANEP hired Gbowee as its WIPNET representative in Liberia.

“Her courage and leadership in mobilizing women as a WIPNET staffer earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011,” says Bombande, adding that the documentary “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” features extensive video footage of WIPNET borrowed from WANEP. (Gbowee joined Doe and Bombande in earning a master’s degree from CJP in 2007.)

By 2000, WANEP had an annual budget of $1.2 million and 300 member groups from 14 West African countries.

“The profound thing was the speed at which ordinary people mobilized for peace,” Doe told Peacebuilder.

As interest in the new initiative grew quickly, however, the region’s peacebuilding needs became apparent.

“We immediately discovered that there was a huge void in West Africa when you talked about knowledge, skills, capacity in conflict prevention and peacebuilding,” recalls Bombande.

To begin filling that void, Doe and Bombande organized a series of practical peacebuilding skills trainings in the region – including larger events in both English- and French-speaking West Africa. Among the leaders were colleagues of Doe’s and Bombande’s from CJP, including professor Barry Hart and founding director John Paul Lederach.

These trainings led, in 2002, to WANEP hosting the first official session of the West Africa Peacebuilding Institute (WAPI). Modeled after SPI, WAPI offered classes over a several-week period on a variety of conflict prevention and peacebuilding topics. One of the teachers at the first WAPI was CJP research professor Lisa Schirch, who spent eight months in Ghana working with WANEP and developing the first training manual for its women’s group, WIPNET. (Current SPI director Bill Goldberg, who is married to Schirch, also worked with WANEP during that period.) CJP graduates Austin Onouha (from Nigeria), John Katunga Murhula (Kenya), and Gopar Tapkida (Nigeria) have all taught at WANEP.

Since starting WAPI, “we have not looked back,” Bombande says. “Every year, there were new challenges that confronted us that required [us to] constantly develop different courses to suit the different threats that were very present in the region.”

To date, more than 450 people have studied at WAPI – many of whom remain active participants in WANEP’s regional early warning network or other peacebuilding programs. WAPI has been held each year since 2002, with the exception of 2014, when the Ebola epidemic in West Africa prompted WANEP to postpone it until March 2015.

Doe was WANEP’s first executive director, and served in that role until 2004, when he left to work for the United Nations. He now works for the United Nations Development Programme in New York City. Bombande became WANEP’s second executive director.

WANEP today

In addition to coordinating ECOWARN and running the summer institute, WANEP supports over 500 member organizations in 15 countries, through its network of national offices in each country. It has an annual budget of $2 million (U.S.) and 22 employees at its headquarters in Ghana, plus 45 in its national-level offices.

When “funding sources dried up in the informal spaces,” says Bombande – including the seed money provided by Mennonite Central Committee and grants from foundations – WANEP began to garner funding from European governments, including that of Austria, Sweden and Denmark.

Governments want to be sure that they’re investing in a durable institution, one that uses certain mechanisms and procedures, says Bombande: “Governments want to look at your institutional systems much more closely than your programs.” This means that WANEP now needs staffers with the administrative skills necessary to run the institution in a manner that satisfies its backers and to issue the necessary reports, in addition to staffers with the skills to launch grassroots initiatives, as Doe and Bombande had when they began WANEP 16 years ago.

“I think it is time for a new generation to take it to the next level,” Bombande told Peacebuilder in late 2014. Within months, he had handed the reins of WANEP to Chukwuemeka Eze, who had been with the organization almost from the beginning and who proved himself capable of increasingly responsible roles. And Bombande moved temporarily to being a fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, joining for a while his old CJP mentor, John Paul Lederach.

A few years ago, Bombande was feeling optimistic about the direction of West Africa: major advances in democratic governance were evident, and no civil wars had erupted since 2006, though there was post-election violence in Côte d’Ivoire in 2010-11.

Now, however, he feels sobered by the rise of extremism. He cites the Boko Haram movement in Nigeria (“a political scheme that has gone totally wrong”) and seeing formerly moderate people in Burkina Faso doing extreme things – “people who you never would have expected to go out on the street and to be yelling and saying outrageous things, including not caring for their own lives.”

Yet Bombande thinks this wave of extremism should motivate peacebuilders rather than discourage them. It just means that peacebuilders need to work smarter and harder, connecting with each other for support: “The worst thing we can do is think for a minute that we are not making an impact. We have been making an impact, and what we need to do is to constantly re-think, reenergize ourselves, re-motivate ourselves, in terms of what more we must do that will respond to these global challenges.”

Lessons from 16 years

Bombande was interviewed by a Peacebuilder reporter during an October 2014 visit as part of an ECOWAS delegation to the United States to confer with the Office of the UN’s

Under-Secretary General for the Prevention of Genocide. As Bombande pondered the distance he had traveled from dreaming of a peacebuilding organization in West Africa to representing that well-established organization in top-level meetings around the world, he offered these reflections:

With the United Nations Security Council “split down the middle,” peacebuilders cannot depend on the UN – or “on the global architecture” – to solve global crises, or even to prevent them. Instead peacebuilders must take the initiative to do this work themselves at the local, national and regional levels, interlinking with the experiences of other peacebuilders around the world and garnering international support whenever possible. But the day-to-day commitment and drive must be drawn from one’s own locality. “We [peacebuilders around the globe] must motivate each other.”

Providing for everyone’s “human security” is a standard that needs to be met by political leaders everywhere, rather than cultivating their own political base on narrow racial, ethnic or religious lines, which is a prescription for future violent conflict.

Women are gradually assuming their rightful leadership roles in peacebuilding. WANEP’s second-in-charge is now a woman, program director Levina Addae-Mensah. Bombande recalls recently watching another confident, skillful woman, Edwige Mensah, running a WANEP training session in Dakar, Senegal, and thinking that she hardly resembled the shy young woman who had ventured into a WANEP office 10 years previously.

The understanding of what it takes to rebuild a country after it has been torn by war must change. Too many governments and large international organizations think it is sufficient to support the holding of democratic elections and the training of police and military to “keep the peace,” as was done in Liberia. But peace in Liberia and elsewhere can only be sustained if poverty and injustices are addressed, education built up, and healthcare provided. In short, underlying socio-economic structural issues must be addressed, with international support.

WANEP maintains a database of what WAPI-trained people have done and are doing to make a difference on the local level. The bravery of WAPI people has been inspiring – many have walked between lines of confrontation to defuse tensions. As an indicator of the risk, one WAPI trainee was killed trying to persuade a renegade general in Côte d’Ivoire to surrender to a UN compound. But also in Côte d’Ivoire, WAPI people crossed hardened, military-patrolled neighborhood lines, separating Muslim and Christian districts, to record conciliatory messages from Muslim leaders and play the recordings to Christian leaders and vice versa. This eased the feeling of “never trust these people because you simply cannot have peace with them.”

When Bombande looks back at the last 16 years of WANEP, he feels proud: “Can you imagine the situation if we did not do what we’ve been doing in peacebuilding?”

Bombande says patience and persistence are necessary. “I would encourage all of us, particularly the younger ones going through the CJP community, to look at it in this perspective – to never doubt for one minute how their contribution is, to the larger extent, what is transforming our global community, rather than depending on the global architecture, which in itself currently is a challenge.”

Footnotes

1. WANEP first signed a Memorandum of Understanding with ECOWAS to be the “implementing partner” of the early warning network in 2004, and just recently renewed it for another five-year
2. As the presidential election in Burkina Faso approaches on 11, 2015, there is still the potential for conflict.

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

Who would come from half-way around the world to enroll in a program at ��ݮ���� that was so new, no college catalog listed it? Sam Gbaydee Doe did. From Liberia.

Initially, the plump squirrels running around campus dismayed him: They could be food for very hungry people in his war-torn homeland. He himself would have welcomed eating a scrap from a squirrel not long before.

Today [November 2010] Doe is a “development and reconciliation advisor” with the United Nations Development Programme in Sri Lanka, thanks in part to his master’s degree in conflict transformation from EMU.

Herein we explore the lives and reflections of the first group of students to complete EMU’s Conflict Transformation Program (CTP), now called graduate studies in conflict transformation under the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). In this series of articles, the acronyms “CTP” and “CJP” will appear somewhat interchangeably, depending on the interviewee and the years referenced.

CJP’s first MA students

CJP’s first non-credit students, 40 of them, enrolled in the 1994 Frontiers of International Peacebuilding, the earliest version of the Summer Peacebuilding Institute.

The first for-credit students were two US-born Mennonites: Jonathan Bartsch, raised in Pennsylvania, and Jim Hershberger, raised in Kansas. In the fall of 1994, both men began graduate classes, hoping that their MA in conflict transformation program would be accredited by the time they finished. (The program became accredited in the fall of 1996; the men graduated the following spring.) The first courses taken by Bartsch and Hershberger were done mainly as a combination of independent study and one-on-one sessions with the founding director of CJP, John Paul Lederach, and sociologist Vernon Jantzi, author of CJP’s first curriculum.

CJP’s first MA students came with extensive experience beyond the United States. Bartsch had studied at the University of Cairo and Birzeit University near Ramallah in Palestine and could speak Arabic. Hershberger had lived for eight years in Nicaragua as a Mennonite Central Committee volunteer and could speak Spanish.

In January of 1995, they were joined by [student whose name has been redacted for security purposes.]

Ron Kraybill, who helped shape the new program while finishing his PhD in religion in South Africa, also came aboard that January as CJP’s first professor hired exclusively for the program. Hizkias Assefa, an internationally renowned mediator based in Kenya, taught each summer from the beginning.

By the summer and fall of 1995, word had spread, mostly via circles frequented by Lederach, Jantzi and Kraybill. The program grew exponentially, enabling EMU to hire Howard Zehr to teach restorative justice in 1996, soon followed by the hiring of two more faculty members, Lisa Schirch and Nancy Good.

Bartsch, Hershberger, and the third student were joined in the fall of 1995 by 12 more students, including four women. By the fall of 2000, six years after CJP first opened its doors, 37 people had earned master’s degrees or graduate certificates and more than 900 had attended its Summer Peacebuilding Institute.

CJP’s first several dozen graduate students now have had 10 to 13 years to gauge the impact of their studies on their lives and work. For the fall/winter 2010-11, Peacebuilder staff sought to contact each of the 37 to collect their reflections. We succeeded in locating 36 of them, 21 men and 15 women.

Without exception, the 36 felt positive about what they “got” from CJP. Many spoke about how their studies influenced their interpersonal relationships, including those within their immediate family. Those who came directly from conflict-ridden situations also spoke about the need for respite, for recharging their inner batteries.

Gilberto Peréz Jr., who completed a graduate certificate in 1999, recalls the ever-present physical violence in south Texas, where he grew up. Even in his family, it was no surprise when he hit his sister. Today, he and his wife Denise, a 1992 EMU alumna who majored in Spanish and elementary education, “work hard at having a non-violent household.” They use such techniques as paraphrasing what someone has said and reframing things.

Says Pérez: “My [12-year-old] daughter will stand there and tell her [younger] brother, ‘I’m mad at you.’ That’s not what I would have done when I was her age – I would have belted him.”

Babu Ayindo, MA ’98, says when he was growing up in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, he experienced violence every day of his life. He feels he carries the potential for violence within him, as he thinks most of us do. He and his wife Miriam have taught their children that reacting violently is a short-term act with long-term repercussions. Babu explains:

Momentarily it gives you a good feeling. You’re annoyed, so you kick a chair, or you punch the wall or punch someone. You project on someone else, someone you can easily blame. But if you take your time and reflect on it then you realize that it’s not the best way out. It’s an easy way out, it feels good, but you also live with the trauma you are inflicting on others. You also become a traumatized person.

Sandra Dunsmore began courses at EMU while living in El Salvador, where her early Quaker-sponsored peace work involved (in part) listening to people linked to death squads. “I needed some space to think through what I had been involved in, to reflect in a guided way. I hadn’t done a particularly good job of taking care of myself. I couldn’t continue as I had been living.”

On the professional level, 33 of the 36 respondents (92%) mentioned specific ways they have carried their CJP studies into their work as non-profit administrators, mediators, trainers, social service workers, teachers, and other roles.

Jim Bernat, who studied at CJP while working as a mental health specialist in a region 90 minutes from Harrisonburg, says his graduate education helped him “refocus his being, thinking and practice around the principles of justice and nonviolence.”

Bernat is in his 25th year of working for the same government-supported community services board as he did in his CJP days, though he is now an administrator. From his CJP-influenced perspective, Bernat sees justice as “not just what one sees in a court of law, but as an everyday matter: How do we treat our employees here? Do our clients feel valued, and our staff too? How am I contributing to our sense of community?”

In fact, the most enduring trait acquired at CJP, said a majority of the respondents, is viewing the world through distinctive lens. This has proved to be personally transformative.

Daagya Dick, MA ’00, who fostered a network of peacebuilders in Central America from 2000 to 2003, said CJP taught her about shifting “from destructive dynamics to positive dynamics.” She said she gained an “understanding of how people work and what human needs are and how to respond to those needs in a way that people can be positively engaged.” She liked the way the program encouraged “balance and wholeness in life in order to be an effective peacemaker.”

Dick, who now teaches Spanish in a public high school in Kansas, added: “You can call on these skills anywhere you work.”

Christine Poulson, MA ’98, used similar words: “What I learned at CTP would be useful to anybody doing anything. It gave me a better

understanding of the world and of myself. I became a more reflective person. I am better at prioritizing what is really important to me.”

Experiences from 33 countries

That first group of 21 men and 15 women brought rich experience to CTP. They were diverse in almost every respect – age, nationality, ethnicity, and motivation for coming to the then-new program. They were not diverse in religion, however. Most of them were Mennonite-style Christians – eight arrived directly from service with Mennonite Central Committee – though there were also Catholics and mainstream Protestants. One student was exploring Native American religions. But there were no practicing Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or Jews. These arrived in later years.

In addition to the United States, the 36 students had lived in 33 places: Angola, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Britain, Burundi, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Karen territory (officially part of Burma/Myanmar), Kenya, Liberia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nagaland (officially part of India), Nicaragua, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Palestine, Peru, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Vietnam.

About 60% of these graduate students had survived civil wars or other society-wide violence.

Sam Gbaydee Doe of Liberia, one of the 12 students entering CJP in its second year, told this story in When You Are the Peacebuilder, a spiral-bound book published by CJP in 2001:

In December of 1989, I was only two semesters away from achieving my dream [to finish a degree in economics and accounting and become a banker] when the Liberian civil war began. By May of 1990, the rebels had captured every part of the country except the executive mansion where the president was hiding.

By July, 1990, we had gone without food for nearly three months and were hiding under beds and between concrete corners most of the day. One day there was a temporary cease-fire and I decided to take a walk, just to flex my muscles. While walking around this slum community, I came across a young boy, lying under the eaves of a public school. I remember his face like it was yesterday. He was just skin and bones.

I stood over him for quite a while. His mouth was open. Flies were feeding on his saliva. In a surreal moment, I raced to a nearby community to find something edible. I found some popcorn being sold for fifty cents. I bought some and dashed back to this child. I stooped over him, slipped a few pieces of the popcorn into his mouth, and waited anxiously to see him chew the popcorn and regain his strength. ‘Chew your popcorn, you innocent child,’ I said to myself, ‘God has answered your prayer.’

About ten minutes passed by but his little mouth remained frozen. It must have been half an hour later when, with a last rush of energy, he opened his eyes wide and looked at me. Our eyes locked. He shook his head, and closed his eyes. After several minutes, his movements slowed and eventually stopped. The child had given up the ghost. I began to cry profusely. I asked myself, “How many children like you are dying right now throughout this country? How many have been swallowed in the madness of adults?’

I made a pledge to that boy: I would work for peace so that children could live… I have never turned my back on the promise I made to that nameless and faceless child.

From one success to another

Doe went on to earn his master’s and doctoral degrees in the field of peace, co-found what is now the largest peace organization in Africa (WANEP), join the staff of the United Nations, and spend several years in Sri Lanka, helping that country emerge from 30 years of civil war. In the long term, he sees himself working in Africa once again.

Periodically, Doe teaches at EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI). He will teach “conflict-sensitive development” at SPI 2011. He will also attend EMU’s graduation ceremony in the late spring, proudly watching as his daughter, Samfee Doe, receives her bachelor’s degree.

— Bonnie Price Lofton, MA ’04 (conflict transformation)

Editor and writer of Peacebuilder

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Fourteen years ago, Sam Gbaydee Doe came to CTP from his native land of Liberia, where about 10% of the population had died, or would die, in one of Africa’s bloodiest civil wars, from 1989 to 1996, followed by a shorter war, from 1999 to 2003.

Liberian warlords used child soldiers to commit atrocities – rape and murder people of all ages and genders, including members of the children’s own families. Liberia’s civil war claimed lives from nearly every Liberian family, displaced most from their homes, and reduced the country’s economy to rubble. The strife also spread to Liberia’s neighbors, contributing to the destabilization of all of West Africa.

Sam needed a place to recover personally from the trauma he had experienced, as well as a place to explore ways to prevent such barbarity from occurring again. Encouraged by Barry Hart (a future CJP professor) – whom Sam met while both were doing conflict transformation and trauma awareness workshops in Liberia – and financially assisted by the Mennonite Board of Missions, Sam came to EMU in May of 1996.

In October 1998, at the end of his MA studies, Sam teamed up with a later graduate of CTP, Emmanuel Bombande (MA ’02) to launch the West African Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP). Sam became its first executive director.

“I left EMU fired up to translate a dream into a reality,” Sam said in a September 2010 interview. “I dreamed of a regional movement of civil society that would collaborate with regional intergovernmental bodies to restore not just stability in Africa but democratic freedom and prosperity. I dreamed of establishing an early-warning system throughout civil society that would head off violent conflict. Those dreams became reality in just five years. The profound thing was the speed at which ordinary people mobilized for peace.”

As an example, WANEP provided support to a Liberian social worker Leymah Gbowee, who organized the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. This grassroots women’s organization was instrumental in ending Liberia’s war in 2003 and facilitating the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female president of an African nation. (Leymah is a 2007 MA grad.)

With seed money of $90,000 from the Winston Foundation, WANEP grew in two years from grouping 13 organizational representatives from six countries to 300 member groups from 14 countries. By 2000, WANEP’s annual budget was $1.2 million. By 2004, its budget had doubled. Sam incredulously asks himself: “How did we get from no organization in 1998 to being the largest peacebuilding organization in Africa in 2004, with 22 staff members [at its headquarters in Accra, Ghana] and offices in 14 other countries?” WANEP now runs its own version of SPI, the West African Peacebuilding Institute.

Few people or organizations make headline news for civil wars prevented, numbers of child soldiers quietly rehabilitated and reintegrated into society, or elections held without major violence. Yet WANEP and its partner organizations deserve much credit for their contributions to the growing stability of the majority of the countries in West Africa.

In 2004 Sam began working toward a doctorate in peace studies at the University of Bradford in England. The next year, he went to work for the United Nations as a consultant to its Liberia Mission, followed by a one-year stint with the UN Development Programme Pacific Regional Office in Fiji.

Since 2007 Sam has worked for the UN in Sri Lanka. He completed his doctorate in the spring of 2010. “After my intense work in West Africa, I felt I needed another opportunity to retreat, reflect, and reengage,” he explains.

His doctorate dissertation was on “indigenizing post-war state reconstruction,” a topic that links building peace to building a stable, democratic state. As an advisor and analyst in a country emerging from 30 years of civil war, Sam oversees trainings on conflict-sensitive development, dialogue and reconciliation, and other topics in Sri Lanka. Sam is the 2002 recipient of EMU’s annual Distinguished Service Award.

The post-EMU paths followed by CJP’s 36 earliest graduates are as diverse as the 10 countries in which they are currently living.  Yet several themes tended to recur in the interviews, regardless of the nationality, gender, or vocation of the speaker.

Theme No. 1: Peacebuilding begins with oneself and one’s close personal relationships.

Twenty-one of the 36 graduates (58%) specifically mentioned personal sacrifices or career changes they had made to enable their children to be raised in a healthy home environment with attentive caregiving. Four of the alumni are in couples where the husband is devoting, or did devote, years to being the full-time parent. Three of the female alumni are full-time parents now, and two couples are job-sharing or otherwise evenly splitting child-rearing responsibilities. One at-home parent explained, “I want my children to be part of the solution, not part of the problem, when they grow up.”

Theme No. 2: Peacebuilding needs to be extended beyond self, home and immediate community into the transformation of entire systems that perpetuate widespread injustices and thus foment violent conflict.

“In becoming a parent I have become increasingly aware of the world that we are leaving to future generations,” wrote Jeff Heie in an e-mail to the editor of Peacebuilder. “Our current economic system assigns very little value to prevention and the ‘common good’… I have come to view many forms of conflict as rooted in issues of lifestyle. When Western cultures demand a certain level of comfort and wealth, they sow the seeds of conflict.”

Theme No. 3: Wrestling with transforming systems and structures in the absence of clarity on what would be better and how to get there.

In February 2009, at the Global Baptist Peace Conference in Rome, Aküm Longchari of Nagaland (in northeast India) asked those present, representing 59 countries, to consider how they use nonviolent campaigns around the world: Are they merely addressing the outcomes of a violent society, but not addressing the structures that create it?

In a 1999 paper written with fellow alumnus Babu Ayindo of Kenya, Longchari elaborated:

In almost every part of the world, greed and insecurity have led to astronomic consumerism and domination. What we have now is a culture of lies and death primarily guided by fear and profit. Humanity has turned anti-life. We are now evolving a culture that does not have humans and life at its center… Things will get better when more third and fourth world and indigenous people overcome the [Western] definitions of culture that suffocate their capacity to transform their world according to their needs, as their ancestors did.

Build Relationships, But Then?

Upon graduating from CJP (called “CTP” in their era), most of the 36 alumni felt they had been well prepared to develop the interpersonal relationships necessary for reaching out to parties in conflict and bringing them into dialogue with each other. They felt they had learned to listen respectfully, regardless of the nature of the speaker, and to converse in a diplomatic, culturally sensitive manner. They also had learned to be aware of the array of factors that play into a conflict, including who are the stakeholders and what might be their motivations.

In other words, these alumni often spoke of emerging from CTP with a new lens through which to view themselves and the world, of being sensitized to how others view life. They also emerged with analytical tools to help them know “where to start” in their efforts to sow seeds of peace.

Nobody interviewed expressed regret at gaining these insights and skills. Almost all spoke of the ways they had benefited from learning them.

Nevertheless, about a third of the interviewees expressed a desire, as Ayindo and Longchari voiced in their paper, “to search for new paradigms of governance and systems… with the inherent capacity to meet the aspirations of peoples.”

CTP did not contribute to this search, at least not in their era of study. “The one area that I wish would have been stronger at CTP was a critical analysis of how economic systems and relationships perpetuate conflict,” said Jeff Heie. “The military-industrial complex is an example that we all know about. An economy that relies so heavily on the economic activity generated by arms sales and military spending has a vested interest in keeping violent conflict alive.” Heie and other alumni expressed frustration at addressing the effects or symptoms of cycles of destruction, rather than breaking the cycles.

On the local level, for instance, Jim Bernat has worked for a community services board in a semi-rural area of Virginia long enough to notice that some of the clients coming into his treatment system are the sons and daughters of clients treated for mental health or substance abuse problems many years ago. “Our system is clearly broken, when the kids arrive at our doors as harmed as their parents were,” said Bernat.

In El Salvador, Sandra Dunsmore said she ended up doing “damage control” in her role as a facilitator of dialogue for the stakeholders involved in winding down the war in El Salvador in the mid-1990s, rather than hearing the stakeholders address the social and economic issues underlying the war – issues that fester to this day in El Salvador.

Need to Understand Power

“I used to think that if your arguments are good enough, people will listen to you,” Dunsmore said. “Often that isn’t true, especially when there are very powerful interests at play.” Back in her day at CTP, Dunsmore added, “We talked very little in class about power dynamics.”

Upon returning to West Africa after graduating, Sam Gbaydee Doe kept seeing something that he did not know how to stop, even with his rapidly growing network of peace organizations: certain African power-players went about winning a place in the post-conflict power structure by intentionally doing horrific things. Doe observed: “One of the best ways to get recognition, to get a seat at the negotiation table, is to cut off the limbs of babies and children.”

Eventually Doe developed a hunger to move beyond scenarios of dealing with sickly violent characters to figuring out “how we can make the state work for ordinary people.” In 2005, he entered a doctoral program in Britain to study the history and mechanisms of statebuilding, intending to apply his findings to Africa.

No interviewee suggested that demonstrating in the streets, in the manner of the French Revolution or even of Mahatma Gandhi, was an effective way of transforming the “system.”

“We can’t just protest,” said Dunsmore. “We must come up with proposals for things that will work in the real world. We need to understand the deep, complex phenomenon underlying our global problems.”

From her professor’s perch in Ohio, Laura Brenneman agreed: “Oppression is definitely structuralized, but [in the US] folks are mostly comfortable and don’t want that pointed out.”

Yet even those folks who aren’t complacent, who are willing to acknowledge “structuralized oppression,” are handicapped by their lack of a socio-economic “paradigm” to work towards. As
Dunsmore puts it, “We’re flying blind. We can’t see around the corner.”

The Impact of Money

A final consideration in this discussion is money. None of the 36 alumni featured in this Peacebuilder have deep wells of money at their disposal. Many depend on grant-based funding that provides for short-term interventions or other types of work focused on specific problems.

Yet “sustainable peacebuilding takes years, decades, generations,” says Jan Jenner, director of CJP’s Practice and Training Institute.

A major source of grant money for CJP in its formative years was the Hewlett Foundation, according to CJP’s leaders in the 1990s. After a decade, however, Hewlett shifted its priorities to environmental and development issues, withdrawing funding from CJP and other peace organizations it had been supporting.

In hindsight, Hewlett does deserve recognition for hanging with CJP for 10 years – many foundations shift their funding priorities much more quickly than that. Ironically, however, Hewlett shifted its funding just as CJP had started to develop a track record, as exemplified by the work of our first 36 graduates.

One can dream of the long-term impact Hewlett might have engendered if it had maintained its support, perhaps providing CJP with the resources to explore the structural issues troubling so many of our alumni today.

As matters now stand, many of our graduates spend considerable time writing grant applications for short-term funding. If successful, they subsequently must prepare detailed reports to meet the typically rigid requirements of their funders. Rather than being accountable to the people they are trying to serve, they must tailor their work to the funders’ current interests, which may be “natural resource conflicts” this year, HIV/AIDS next year, and “human security” the year after. Few of our alumni are willing to speak on the record on this matter, because of fear of losing all funding possibilities.

An African dependent on grant money said: “The whole peacebuilding field is becoming monopolized by USAID, which exists to advance the foreign policy of the United States. I have seen funding of a particular project suddenly cut off, not because the work we were doing wasn’t good and effective for the people at the grassroots, but because Washington DC saw no benefit for Americans in what we were doing.”

Another spoke of a $5 million USAID grant supposedly earmarked for peacebuilding work in Africa that was siphoned off by US contractors and other “experts” en route to Africa, resulting in only $175,000 actually being available for work by Africans for Africans.

These views are the stuff of uncomfortable conversations. But they are exchanges that need to be held, according to Jenner, formerly a CJP student and now an administrator. She says more resources need to be put into “longer term, harder work, [including] having hard, disagreeable conversations about problems, confronting power, and building peace that is sustainable.”

How to do this “longer term, harder work” may be CJP’s biggest challenge over the next 10 to 15 years.

— Bonnie Price Lofton

Photos courtesy EMU/CJP archives



1. More impact than they foresaw

In the booklet When You Are the Peacebuilder, published just nine years ago [2001], the three authors – then all fresh graduates from CJP – wrote: “Most of us – including the authors – will never be famous. We’ll not work at the UN, or appear on television, or be written about in history books.” Actually, one of the three authors (Sam Gdaydee Doe) now works for the UN, and all of them have found themselves in media reports in reference to their work or views on building peace. If you Google their names – Babu Ayindo and Janice Jenner were the other two authors – you will see they have had a far greater impact on the world than they anticipated back in 2001. They have been research-based analysts, trainers, strategists, communicators, and developers of new peace-related programs. They have directly influenced tens of thousands and indirectly influenced countless more. In a generation or two, they may even be in history books.

2. Space to regenerate

About half of this group of early alumni came to CJP because they were hovering at the edge of “burn-out.” They needed time and space to regain their resiliency. They had experienced war-inflicted trauma, the violent deaths of loved ones, or were exhausted from struggling to address terrible wrongs over many years. In their interviews, all of those who faced burn-out said CJP recharged their batteries, though one spoke of the ongoing effects of the genocide-type trauma he survived. In short, CJP served as a resource for hope and regeneration for this group.

3. Good people, trying hard

Every person in this group of alumni appears to be as well motivated as he or she was a decade or so ago. But certain members of the group have gone through divorces, bungled paying jobs, and found themselves at odds with other peacebuilders. In other words, being a trained peacebuilder is no guarantee of success in transforming all situations of conflict. Yet, by and large, when any of them meets another CJP-trained person in the world, there is an immediate sense of kinship. They nod when hearing the term “EMU mafia,” coined by Babu Ayindo in reference to the CJP-trained people he often meets in trainings, research, and social action processes around the world. This “mafia” consists of overwhelmingly well-intentioned people who are doing their best to, first, do no harm and, second, if possible, have a positive impact, while learning from the mistakes they have made along the way.

4. North-South differences

Alumni whose work is focused upon the Southern Hemisphere are most likely to spontaneously voice concerns about socio-economic structures or systems that they believe are fundamentally unfair and that fuel violent conflict. In a paper they wrote in 1999 and revised in 2004, alums Akum Lonchari and Babu Ayindo made this trenchant comment: “It is time third world people asked themselves rather seriously whether people who live in squalor, who are oppressed by national and global forces, and who are struggling for a little freedom are in urgent need of prejudice reduction workshops, communication skills, and peace manuals.” By contrast, alumni working in the developed parts of the Northern Hemisphere are more likely to express interest in personal transformation and interpersonal relationship-building as ends in themselves, rather than as building blocks for systemic change. There are, of course, exceptions to this general observation, as exemplified by Laura Brenneman in the US and Jeff Heie in the UK.

5. Thirst for doctorates

The founders of CJP did not intend for the MA in conflict transformation program to be a stepping stone for students who wished to subsequently earn a doctorate. On the contrary, they envisioned a unique graduate program – one that would prepare “reflective practitioners” for real-world work, rather producing graduates oriented toward academic teaching and research, as was being done at another Virginia institution, George Mason University, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and elsewhere. Yet the last decade has shown that even people heavily involved in practice often hunger to acquire the highest degree offered. Some CJP grads want to teach at the university level. Some feel that having a doctorate gives them more credibility, regardless of their field of work. A few want the additional time in a university setting to think, research and analyze. Of the 36 alums in our group, eight (22%) have entered doctoral programs, and three have completed this degree.

— Bonnie Price Lofton

Photo courtesy EMU/CJP archives