Drawing upon theory from conflict transformation, expressive arts, and trauma and resilience studies, participants will explore in the 5-day course: How do we cultivate possibility by developing new patterns? Can we live in both safety and vulnerability? How do we reckon with cycles and open to non-dualistic existence? How do we spark our own creativity and resilience engaging body, mind and spirit?

Activities (all optional) will include spoken word and drawing, breathing exercises, walking, stretching, dancing and playing games. We will emphasize the ethos of “low skill, high sensitivity” as we engage in play and arts-based exploration, “investigating new ways of moving, breathing, and engaging” (see Van der Kolk, below). Of course, high-skill folks are also welcome, but there is no requirement that participants have pre-conceived notions of themselves as “artists” to join the course.

A central theoretical underpinning to this course emerges from Bessel Van der Kolk’s introduction to Peter Levine’s latest book, Trauma and Memory (2015):

‘Negative judgment of oneself or others causes minds and bodies to tense up, which renders learning impossible. In order to recover, people need to feel free to explore and learn new ways to move. Only then can nervous systems reorganize themselves and new patterns be formed. This can only be done by investigating new ways of moving, breathing, and engaging, and cannot be accomplished by prescribing specific actions geared at “fixing.”’ (pages xv-xvi)

Instructors Katia Ornelas and Katie Mansfield are eager to engage with you in a week of playful, transformative and restorative practices, drawing on the full resources of body and mind. Katia is an attorney and artist who studied restorative justice during her MA at the CJP and is currently working on violence prevention programs in her native Mexico. Katie is Director of the STAR program and working toward a PhD in Expressive Arts and Conflict Transformation. Click for an interview with them about the course and their experiences.

Following the SPI 2015 course in Strategies for Trauma-Informed Organizations, Barry and Mikhala embarked on a process to apply the course content and learning to our own educational environment. Together, they developed the following definition to represent “our working understanding of a trauma-informed organization.”

According to their definition, a trauma-informed organization: Read more…

• has staff that has received training in trauma and that knows how to identify signs of trauma. Staff incorporates a trauma-informed framework into their interactions with clients, meaning that they understand that people have stories and deserve to be treated with compassion and respect;
• creates structures so that staff can practice meaningful self-care;
• opens space for members of the organization, institution or business to speak about stress;
• fosters a sincerely relational environment where everyone’s dignity is respected;
• provides resources for getting help for those that need it.

Participants in their 2016 can look forward to exploring their own organizations with a trauma-informed lens and deepening exposure to how various organizations are working towards integrating trauma awareness into their work.

What does this mean for SPI? SPI is a container for naturally challenging process of transformational learning about chronic violence and injustices. In an increasingly trauma-informed environment, designated listeners and instructors will be tuned in to ways to follow up to participants encountering traumatic response to material. Part of trauma-informing SPI means addressing systemic violence and injustice within which we are operating; as an institution where the vast majority of faculty and staff is white, we have a lot of work to do.

1. Bridge Builders– January, 1996 – headquartered in London, serving churches throughout the United Kingdom.
2. JustaPaz – Fall of 1996 – headquartered in Maputo, Mozambique, mainly serving that country, yet also hosting participants from other Portuguese-speaking countries.
3. West Africa Peacebuilding Institute (WAPI) under the West African Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP) – 1998 – headquartered in Accra, Ghana, with staff working in 15 countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, The Gambia and Togo.
4. Henry Martyn Institute’s (HMI) Peacebuilder Training Program – 1999-2000 – headquartered in Hyderabad, India, but serving all of India, with a special focus on ethnic minority regions in the far northeast of India.
5. Africa Peacebuilding Institute (API) – 2000 – headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa (originally in Kitwe, Zambia), serving the whole continent, but particularly southern and eastern Africa.
6. Mindanao Peacebuilding Institute (MPI) – 2000 – headquartered in Davao, Philippines, attracting participants widely, but especially serving southeast Asia.
7. The Peacebuilding and Development Institute at American University – summer of 2001 (closed after 2013 summer session by university administrators) – Washington D.C.
8. Just Peace Initiatives – 2005 – headquartered in Peshawar, Pakistan, serving all of Pakistan, with a particular focus on the northwest region where violent conflicts have a regional impact extending into Afghanistan.
9. The Peace Academy in Sarajevo – 2007 – based in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzogovina (has not offered intensive trainings since 2012, but hopes are for resumption in 2016), serving post-Yugoslavia populations emerging from violent conflict.
10. Pacific Centre for Peacebuilding – 2007 – headquartered in Suva, Fiji, but with wide focus on all South Pacific islands.
11. Northeast Asia Regional Peacebuilding – 2008 – headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, but with summer peacebuilding sessions that rotate among South Korea, Japan, China and Mongolia. A sister group, the Korea Peacebuilding Institute, emerged in 2012.
12. Canadian School For Peacebuilding – 2009 – in Winnipeg, Canada, attracting participants widely, but especially serving western

Most of these training centers call to mind SPI in its early years – attracting practitioners in the field who hunger for more training and not necessarily credit toward a graduate degree. By conservative estimate, the centers collectively train more than 2,000 people annually in mediation, restorative justice, trauma healing, healthy organizational leadership, and other approaches to conflict transformation. And, of course, these trainees spread peacebuilding techniques to others. (We’ll explore the impacts of each of the centers in their individual stories.)

All 12 of the training centers have adopted materials and educational approaches that are reminiscent and evocative of SPI, the oldest peacebuilding institute of its kind – which makes sense, given the regular exchanges of instructors, who typically have long-standing connections to SPI’s umbrella institution, the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP).

Of the 26 instructors teaching at SPI 2015, for example, 18 have taught at one of the other dozen peacebuilding centers listed above and 13 are alumni of CJP.^[2]

Reflecting with pleasure on the emergence of SPI-inspired peacebuilding centers around the world since the 1990s, CJP founding director John Paul Lederach says that CJP and SPI can act as “incubators,” birthing ever-better peacebuilding theory and practices.

While many of the other centers are working in situations where they must be highly sensitive to their immediate context and thus focused close to the ground, Lederach believes CJP can serve as a “place of safety” and as a “convener” of conversations necessary for cross-fertilization, learning and growth.

CJP can also walk alongside those who are just starting out, he says, helping them to connect to the worldwide network of practitioners and to learn from their predecessors committed to building justice and peace.

Caveats in crediting CJP

Tracing the proliferation of peacebuilding training centers around the world to their origins is a bit like trying to determine which spring, stream or river contributed which molecules of water to the bay of an ocean.

The hunger for peace amid violent conflict, the desire to learn peacebuilding skills, and the efforts of peacemakers from every walk of life and tradition – these know no boundaries. They extend across all religions.

Yet our focus in this Peacebuilder is necessarily narrow, mainly limited to how the Mennonite “peace church” tradition has given rise to practices and terminology that are transforming conflict around the world. That’s not to say that other traditions have not made major contributions, or that Mennonites have acted on their own (far from it, as you’ll see in these pages).

But when the world seems bleak and hopelessness begs at one’s door, it helps to stop and reflect on how much has been accomplished by Mennonite initiatives in the last 20 years, relying mainly on dedicated people rather than other resources.

A brief history of CJP

The journey to founding CJP began in the 1980s, when two men from staunch Mennonite families, Lederach and Ron Kraybill, became successively the first two leaders of Mennonite

Conciliation Service. In 1985, Kraybill organized the service’s first summer training institute for 20 Mennonite attendees. Kraybill’s first hand-outs on how to mediate were printed on cheap blue paper and distributed in a manila folder.

By 1988, his handouts had gradually been enlarged into a spiral-bound manual, with additions from Lederach, David Brubaker (now a CJP faculty member), Jim Stutzman, Carolyn Schrock-Shenk and others. (Brubaker gets the credit for deciding that 40 pages of handouts would work better in a loose-leaf binder.) Contributors to the manuals were all leading trainings on their own, sometimes in conjunction with the Lombard Peace Mennonite Center near Chicago, which had been established by Richard Blackburn in 1984 to address congregational conflict.

In 1989, Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) published the first edition of what is now in its 5th edition, updated in 2008 under the title Conflict Transformation and Restorative Justice Manual: Foundations and Skills for Mediation and Facilitation. (The 2000 edition was titled Mediation and Facilitation Training Manual: Foundations and Skills for Constructive Conflict Transformation.)

In the early 1990s, Kraybill and Lederach began talking about the need to systematically address conflict – particularly the need to prepare others for working in the field – rather than continue the Lone Ranger approach.

Meanwhile at EMU, other field-experienced academics were having similar thoughts. Early in 1990, Joseph Lapp, then president of EMU, received a letter from Richard (“Rick”) Yoder, professor of business and economics. Yoder was on leave from EMU at the time and working in Kenya with the Kenya Rural Enterprise Program.

His letter started by citing the need for Eastern Mennonite College (the “university” title did not come into use until 1994) to have a unique identity, one that would fill a serious gap in the world. “I think that EMC ought to be known as that peace college in Virginia,” wrote Yoder. He told this story to illustrate the need for Mennonite colleges to think seriously about offering peace studies:

I spent a couple days in rural Kenya with a U.S. congressional staffer from the House Foreign Affairs Committee and asked her questions as to how the U.S. is responding to all these, largely non-violent, political and economic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Her response was, ‘We really don’t know what to do; we don’t have the people or the tools to help us think in different paradigms!’ How sad, I thought; what do the Mennonites have to offer?^[3]

In mid-1994, Kraybill and Lederach joined Hizkias Assefa, an Ethiopian scholar-peace practitioner based in Kenya, and Vernon Jantzi to teach conflict transformation skills to 40 participants at EMU’s “Frontiers of International Peacebuilding” workshop. The event was successful enough to be repeated in 1995, the same year that EMU admitted its first full class of master’s degree students in conflict transformation within a program directed by Lederach.

Soon after, in 1996, CJP deepened its justice focus by recruiting to its faculty Howard Zehr, an expert in restorative justice.

By 1996, the Frontiers workshop had evolved into a series of intensive classes under a name that has endured to this day – the Summer Peacebuilding Institute, or simply SPI.

In those early years, the Frontiers in International Peacebuilding conferences and SPI were simply opportunities for professional development and learning. But participants and graduate students in CJP began lobbying for SPI to offer the option of taking a course for academic credit. Today, not-for-credit trainees and graduate students share classes at SPI, though the latter must do more out-of-classroom coursework to earn their credits.

In 2014, SPI enrolled a total of 184 people from 36 countries. Over the years, SPI has attracted 2,800 people from 121 countries to EMU’s campus.

Upon his departure to the University of Notre Dame in 1999, Lederach was followed as director by Jantzi, then jointly Howard Zehr and Ruth Zimmerman, then Lynn Roth, and now J. Daryl Byler – all of whom came with extensive international experience in conflict zones.

For a more thorough look at the history and functioning of SPI, see the summer 2014 Peacebuilder.^[4]

Footnotes

1. One caveat to this list of 12: Reasonable definitional arguments could be made for taking a few off this list and adding a number of other initiatives around the world. For example, the Nairobi Peace Initiative-Africa (NPI-Africa) was founded in 1984 by Harold and Annetta Miller, both early ‘60s grads of EMU who were working with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). NPI has an annual peacebuilding institute that has tapped CJP-trained alumni, such as John Katunga Murhula, MA ’05. The Great Lakes Peacebuilding Institute, founded in 2004 with seed money from MCC, serves Francophone peace practitioners with month-long trainings each October. Fidele Lumeya, MA ’00, and Krista Rigalo, MA ’00, have taught there, as has Mulanda Jimmy Juma, formerly MCC’s regional peace coordinator for southern Africa, who is teaching at SPI 2015.
2. Other examples of cross-fertilization: (1) Kenyan Babu Ayindo, MA ’98, has taught at SPI repeatedly and at SPI-like peacebuilding initiatives in seven other locations. (2) Sriprakash Mayasandra, a native of India who is MCC’s Asia Peace Coordinator, attended SPI in 2011 and 2013. He served on HMI’s governing board from 2008 to 2014 and has been a guiding hand for other peacebuilding initiatives, notably MPI, NARPI, and the Caux Scholars Program, Asia Plateau.
3. The Rick Yoder story was extracted from a history of CJP published in the 2005 inaugural issue of Peacebuilder, pages 3-7.
4. All back articles and issues of Peacebuilder are accessible online at .

The spring/summer 2014 issue of Peacebuilder focused on EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute at its 20th anniversary year. With the proliferation of peacebuilding institutes and workshops in Africa and elsewhere, is SPI still needed? In separate interviews, two Africans – one from Kenya and the other from Mozambique – answered “yes.”

In 1996, Babu Ayindo traveled from Kenya to be among the earliest students pursuing a master’s degree in conflict transformation at EMU. He had always been a “doer” and credits EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (within which SPI is nested) for valuing that.

“CJP has done a good job of identifying those practitioners who ordinarily would not have the time, patience or typical academic qualifications to enter an academic program,” he says, “It’s given them a great opportunity to study in the field and get credentials.”

Babu’s major take-away from CJP? “Meeting instructors and professors who believed in me and my interest in the role of storytelling, dramatization, and other arts in peacebuilding. Howard [Zehr], Ron [Kraybill], Vernon [Jantzi], Lisa [Schirch] and John Paul [Lederach] were very supportive – they believed in me. This is such an important thing – to be believed in, and to be given the room to make mistakes and to learn for yourself.”

Babu was impressed that though his professors were Mennonite-style Christians, “they respected those of us with different beliefs, including the spirituality of indigenous peoples.”

Babu was raised Roman Catholic, but like many Africans his religiousness is deeply rooted in his indigenous connections to his ancestors and the natural world. “In moments of crisis, I draw from that.”

He earned his MA in conflict transformation in 1998 and today, 17 years later, is pursuing a PhD in the field at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Babu is one of the most sought-after teachers of peacebuilding in the world. He has returned to teach at SPI repeatedly and at SPI-like peacebuilding initiatives in seven other locations: Washington D.C.; Fiji; Mindolo, Zambia; Nairobi, Kenya; Winnipeg, Canada; Davao, Philippines; and Caux, Switzerland. He is scheduled to teach at the Northeast Asia Regional Peacebuilding Institute in Mongolia in August 2015.

In Babu’s view, the basic courses taught at most of these institutions are not substantively different from those at CJP. But each institution needs a strategic vision for its own area of the world, he says. Those in the Global South need to work more at decolonization, including decolonizing the meaning of peace and justice and tapping their own indigenous paradigms for peace. In the Global North, CJP should focus on shifting the United States toward a more just, peaceful path, Babu says.

Methodist Bishop Dinis Matsolo of Mozambique agrees with that view. He credits Mennonites for spreading the theology of peace into churches around the world. Yet he asks, “Are Mennonites doing enough about U.S. policies, when I see the U.S. disregard the UN, start wars, and manufacture and use weapons widely?”

Nevertheless, Matsolo greatly values his month-long sojourn at SPI in 2005: “To taste the heavenly banquet of studying with people from all the different countries – even those who were almost at war with each other – inspired me to think it is possible to solve the world’s problems. We lived together and shared with each other and learned from each other.”

Matsolo has done coursework at two other peacebuilding institutes – one in his own country and the other in Zambia but he feels SPI represented the ultimate experience. “SPI is like a fire at which embers get started and re-heated if they start to go out from being isolated. Once you’ve been at SPI, you can go out and start your own fires.”

In the years I spent earning my master’s degree in conflict transformation in the early 2000s, the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) class I took with Mohammed Abu-Nimer remains a touchstone for me.

The course title was something like “Understanding the Cross-Cultural Aspects of Conflict Transformation.” I don’t remember the names of my required readings, nor do I recall the papers I wrote to earn my three credit hours.

Instead, what I distinctly recall are the conflicts that occurred among the students in the room and how Mohammed – SPI professors are always addressed by their first names – handled them. I can picture my classmates in my mind, seated around a circle of tables in what was normally a light-filled studio for artists. There were 20 of us (evenly males and females) from 12 countries. We looked to be early 20s to late 50s.

Seven of us were some stripe of Christianity, five were Muslim, and one was Buddhist – judging by references made to faith-based values and experiences in class discussions. The remaining seven made no mention of their beliefs. As the week wore on, it became clear that some came from settings of severe persecution promulgated in the name of certain religions.

Our appearances were highly mixed, from an Indian woman in a silk sari to an American man in a T-shirt and Bermuda shorts. There was a Middle Eastern woman fully covered in a hijab and jibab – i.e., covered head to toe except for her face – who was sharing a dormitory room with a woman in our class from the same nation. The latter tended to appear in tight clothes that revealed most of her legs and much of her chest. Their distance from each other as roommates was visceral.

One man had issues pertaining to his impending divorce; a woman had issues pertaining to her engagement to be married. A prison official spoke of a grandchild serving time in prison. A middle-aged woman from Asia was sorely missing her young adult children back home and wishing they were with her, while a twenty-something woman from another part of Asia was dreading her return home, where she would be expected to abide by her parents’ wishes in every way.

The question of terrorism arose frequently. Why were radical Muslims targeting innocent Americans in New York City? Why was the U.S. military bombing Muslim civilians overseas?

By Day 4 of the seven allocated for our class, our group felt electric with tension to me. One of the Middle Eastern roommates was openly hostile. Wearing a perpetual half smile, Mohammed was usually on his feet, moving within our circle of tables like a dancing bear considering whether to attack or retreat in the face of threats. Finally he gave a short talk that seemed to be prompted by the behavior of someone from his background (Palestinian-Muslim), but that applied to many of us at that point in the week. This is the gist of what he said:

I’m in this profession, teaching this course, because I believe that it is possible for people holding different beliefs, living in different ways, to learn to live without harming each other, perhaps even cooperating with each other. But this requires that we listen to each other and treat each other with respect. This is what I teach. I hope nobody signed up for this class with a mistaken understanding that I will tolerate disrespect and harm inflicted on others. Now, can we all agree that we will proceed with what we are learning together about each other and about conflict, despite our cross-cultural, cross-religion and cross-gender differences?

The atmosphere in the class shifted. New friendships developed over the next few days, even between the two Middle Eastern women, who chose to remain roommates after all. And I knew I had studied under a maestro of conflict transformation.

��

In the summer of 1994, about 40 peace and development workers gathered on the campus of ��ݮ���� for a one-week seminar called “Frontiers in International Peacebuilding.” It was the first official event held by what is now known as the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, or CJP, which was then so fledgling it had yet to be fully accredited.*

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

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

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

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

Conference becomes “SPI”

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

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

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

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

Rich experiences outside classroom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huge logistics behind SPI

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

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

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

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

EMU’s hospitable community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

��

Akin to heaven on earth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Andrew Jenner

When volunteers were solicited, nobody immediately stepped forward. It was a tough request: tell a painful personal story before an audience of maybe 40, many of them strangers to each other, and watch seven people trained in playback theater re-tell it through an impromptu performance.

Yet Muhammad Afdillah – a visiting scholar with EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding –��chose this moment, just a week before he returned to his home in Indonesia, to begin to heal himself. He recounted a story involving physical and psychological injury.

Then he watched as Inside Out, EMU’s resident playback theater troupe, improvised a tense narrative of violence, friendship, loss, physical and emotional scarring, and finally, hope of reconciliation. Afdillah wasn’t the only watcher who had wet eyes by the end.

It may have helped that other storytellers had shared before – some with halting speech and others interspersing laughter with words – of surviving cancer, of stitching a wedding dress for a beloved stepdaughter, of making friends and enduring goodbyes.

It may have helped that he knew some of the actors – all EMU students, faculty or graduates –��and even some of the audience, most of whom were participating in SPI 2014, often in the Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience (STAR) training.

“That might have helped,” Afdillah said later. “But it was for me. It was the right time. I was trembling, but my heart was telling me this.”

Though Inside Out has “played back” stories from a variety of audiences, including sexual abuse survivors and college students recently returned from cross-cultural experiences, the May 21, 2014, event was the first time the troupe hosted a storytelling session for this particular group.

Playback theater helps its participants understand and reflect upon their experiences, says theater professor Heidi Winters Vogel, who co-founded Inside Out in 2011 with Roger Foster, MA ’12. “That simple act of sharing stories and seeing them played back, seeing it out there, allows processing. It is harder to work for healing when it’s all in your head. In addition, there’s a tremendous connection between people in the audience who see that story and have a similar experience to share.”

Making those connections is the role of an actor called the conductor, who facilitates the storytelling of a volunteer audience member, gathers more information through questions, and then helps to “shape” the story before turning it over to the actors with the invitation, “Let’s watch.”

��“This is applied theater,” Vogel said, “not theater for entertainment. It’s theater for social justice and understanding. A lot of people don’t understand playback theater until they attend a storytelling session. When they see it, they realize the possibilities.”

Afdillah had no idea of its life-changing potential when he was invited by a fellow SPI participant to attend the performance. “I don’t really like theater,” he said with a laugh later.

A faculty member at Universitas Islam Negeri (UIN) Sunan Ampel in Indonesia, Afdillah researches and lectures on socio-religious conflict and politics. He collects data, supervises graduate students, collaborates with other peacebuilders and policy-makers, and admits that, like many others in his field, he rarely takes the time for himself.

For the last six months on campus, during spring semester classes and courses at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute, Afdillah began to “meditate and think about my life,” he said. “In my work, I tell people to deal with their trauma, to let it go. But I have my own trauma, my own problems. At the end, watching the story was almost the same as what I experienced, the tragedy. I feel the pain. I don’t know how this story ends, but this is starting to be ready for an ending.”

Program director Jayne Docherty says SPI is committed to the growing use and exploration of applied theater tools like playback theater to situations of conflict, violence and trauma. Classes in playback theater have been offered at several sessions of SPI.
— Lauren Jefferson

In more than 20 years of participating in interfaith dialogue, guest lecturer Dr. Mohammad Shomali has travelled widely. He is the director of international affairs at Jami’at al-Zahra, a Shi’a Islam seminary for women, as well as director of the International Institute for Islamic Studies (IIIS). He resides in Qom, Iran.

“I feel at home in many places in the world,” Shomali said, “but ��ݮ���� is one of those places where I really feel at home.”

Peace and peacebuilding, along with interfaith dialogue, is one of the core Quranic principles, Shomali says. This was one reason why nine female seminarians from Jami’at al-Zahra studied at SPI this summer, escorted by Shomali and his wife, Mahnaz Heidarpour, who also teaches at the seminary. In prior years, SPI has hosted a total of 10 students from Iran, but never a group of this size all at once.

Interactions with SPI students from around the world provide a practical complement to required seminary coursework in comparative peace studies, Shomali said. “Theoretical knowledge can come through books, but when the students eat and talk together and go to churches, this is different. They learn about the way people think, live, behave, and plan. This is very valuable.”

The Iranian women praised the interactive style of teaching at SPI, where lengthy lectures are rare and role-playing is common.

“We do lots of exercises, many projects, in this class,” said Sabereh Ahmadi Movaghar, referring to “Leadership for Healthy Organizations” taught as a seven-day intensive by David Brubaker, PhD, and Roxann “Roxy” Allen Kioko ’04, MA ’07. She also took “Faith-based Peacebuilding,” taught by Roy Hange, a Mennonite scholar and pastor.

Movaghar’s home institution, Jamiat al-Zahra, is the world’s largest Islamic seminary for women, with 5,000 Iranian students, 1,000 international students and 10,000 enrolled in distance learning. The nine students at SPI are all linked to the postgraduate section of the seminary’s international department.

“These women are excellent, diligent students,” said J. Daryl Byler, executive director of EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. “They are devoutly religious as well as delightful – with great personalities, warm laughs, and deep insights. The friendships being built are priceless.”

Shomali told an EMU reporter that he hoped for better relations between the people of Iran and people of the United States and noted��similarities between Quranic and Christian teachings about the importance of peace. “God says about the Quran in the Quran itself that God guides with the Quran those who seek His pleasure to the ways of peace (5:15).” There are “lots of things we can learn from each other,” he added. Iranians are rational people and “when you are rational, you tend to dialogue with people of other faiths and other cultures.”

Shomali welcomed more exchanges of Americans and Iranians from a variety of fields, including artists and professionals.��He said that to reduce mutual misperceptions and encourage peace,��“Nothing can replace face-to-face encounters. Our first Imam, Imam Ali, is quoted as saying: ‘People become hostile towards what they don’t know.’”
— Lauren Jefferson and Bonnie Price Lofton

Angela R. Dickey spent 25 years promoting the policies of the United States while working for the U.S. Department of State in Washington DC and in a number of countries from Canada to Vietnam. Now, the former diplomat hopes that her studies at EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) will mark the beginning of a new career promoting policies of peace around the world.

Dickey, who retired from the foreign service at age 56, believes that the best years of her career are ahead. While serving her last assignment before retirement at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington D.C., she attended a session of Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) led by EMU staffers Elaine Zook Barge and Vernon Jantzi. The training immediately resonated with her – she had witnessed the lasting impact of traumatic wars and natural disasters on individuals and communities.

Dickey next found her way to STAR’s home base at EMU and enrolled in two of SPI’s four sessions in 2014, with plans to take two more SPI courses in 2015. “I put my toe in and liked it. Now I am fully submerging myself in the EMU experience,” she says. She intends to earn a graduate certificate in conflict transformation while working to become a fully qualified STAR trainer.

An experienced diplomat who has been stationed in Canada, Mauritania, Yemen, Laos, and Vietnam, Dickey also studied in France and Tunisia. She has first-hand work experience in a number of other countries across the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Dickey looks forward to taking her classroom experience and applying it in the field. Later this summer she will be landing for the third time in Uganda, where she will work with African Union (AU) peacekeepers who are heading for Somalia.

“The [AU] peacekeepers are in a very difficult position because they have weapons, but their mandate is to protect civilians,” she told EMU News Service. “I don’t know weapons, but I do know how to work with people and how to help others deal with people.”

Dickey will focus on helping the AU peacekeepers to interact sensitively with the local populations by providing contextual information, including the historical and socioeconomic roots of the Somali conflict. She will also help them to understand United Nations standards for the protection of civilians. She said her work will be informed by the lens of dialogue and community-building gained during her time at SPI.

“The EMU method is something that helps you to be at peace with yourself so that you can model that to other people,” she said. “A lot of people have two responses to conflict: rush into it or avoid it. But there are other, more productive ways to deal with it. I want to be one of the people who engages with and deals with conflict in a collaborative way.”

In the future, Dickey sees herself returning regularly to Harrisonburg, Virginia, for EMU courses and conferences. “As a mature adult, I have found something new and exciting to engage me. I am hoping to take more classes and come back to train. I get a really good feeling when I come here. I know it’s the right place when I feel it in my gut.” ��— David Yoder

After teaching at EMU during the regular terms and at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) for a number of years, this past September I began a PhD program at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, where my general area of study is Social Construction. This summer I will be teaching again at SPI, facilitating as well as a training session for .

My social constructionist perspective impacts the way I frame multi-party conflict because in my estimation there is not one “reality” that we are helping people to see, but rather the process of multiparty mediation and consensus-building is to create a shared meaning and an agreement about how to collaborate and “perform the meaning” that is made.

STAR workshops combine aspects of psychosocial trauma, restorative Justice, conflict transformation, community peacebuilding, and spirituality toward the development of healthy individuals, communities, and societies. In STAR it is interesting to consider that all of those fields, even spirituality, can be thought of as metaphorical frames in a process of assisting individuals and communities in establishing positive peace. Negative peace is simply the absence of war; whereas Galtung and others describe ‘positive peace’ as a circumstance in which structural violence and the impediments to a high quality of life are also removed at the interpersonal, intrapersonal, societal, and global/environmental level.

Scholarship…

The focus of my PhD research, advised by John Winslade, will look for models of engagement that shift relations of power embedded in discourse concerning race in the US. The hope is that the principles identified will be applicable to other circumstances of multigenerational trauma and disparity. I am particularly interested in this topic because this is where I see many dialogue models (including some at the CJP) fall short by failing to consider (identify/unveil) the relations of power embedded in the cross-group engagement. I am considering methods for applying narrative mediation to individual and group healing and also in establishing systems and institutional arrangements that are founded in a discourse where power is equitably accessed.

Because my research is all about understanding discourse, I am surprised every day by the ways that our unspoken assumptions about situations and about each other limit the possibilities for loving and peaceful relationships. I am also motivated by the fact that sometimes just making these assumptions more visible changes how people relate to their present and future relationships.

…put into practice

For instance, in Atlanta and throughout the Southeast, I am actively involved in mediations at the systemic and policy level that impact community structures. Recently I’ve served as mediator to the Atlanta Public School Board and I’m now working with other school boards throughout the state to create methods of deliberation that minimize the operational stagnation resulting from values-based divisions. Basically, I am teaching people how to play nice and get work done even when they don’t have shared values.

I am also part of a team from the University of Georgia that will mediate the division of local tax revenues in several jurisdictions around the state. This may sound boring until we realize that the division of tax revenues determines the service levels for public safety, social services, educational improvements, and arts in each jurisdiction. These are equity and quality of life mediations hidden in tax code language!!