#SafeSpacePolitics

I haven’t written a blog past for a couple of weeks because I’ve been busy getting ready for a trip to Rondine and because I’ve been working with the copy editor’s suggestions for my peacebuilding textbook. Having just sent the updated version of my manuscript back to my publisher and finished my preparation for the trip to Rondine this evening—I’ll be writing on that next week after we get back–it’s time to get back to the ideas that came our of the conference I wrote about last time.

That said, I’ve also been working through the next steps we should take after the conference I wrote about last time. After a long talk with Patricia Shafer of NewGen Peacebuilders and reading Leslie Crutchfield’s How Change Happens, one of those steps began to fall into place. We aren’t ready to launch anything yet. However, at least one possibility is falling into place.

The activists and scholars we gathered three weeks ago reached a number of conclusions:

People around the United States are already doing terrific work on the divisions facing our country, whether they use the term peacebuilding or not
Much of that work is scattered and limited to individual communities or segments of the population
Our is to bring those initiatives together, help them each expand, and turn them into a more effective force in changing public policy

Because of Patricia’s interest in young people between the ages of 14 and 24, we focused on high school (her expertise) and college (my experience) students. By the end of an hour on the phone, we ended up with ideas that we could implement beginning in the next few months.

As we talked, I also realized these same ideas could be adapted for use with the other constituencies we talked about at our conference—teachers, librarians, social service workers, coaches, members of the clergy, and more.

New Kind of Movement. A peacebuilding movement or movements will have to be constructive. Rather than focusing on the anger so many of us feel, it has to be base don what we hope to accomplish and how we can improve the health of our overall social, political, and economic systems. Minimizing the naming and shaming. Emphasizing the positive vision and the steps that could help get us there.

#SafeSpacePolitics. Many of the people I work with have specific policy goals in mind. Before working on them, however, it makes sense to shift the tone of the debate in this country. As Arthur Brooks and others have argued, we should disagree. The challenge is to disagree in ways that allow us to work together and not drive ourselves farther apart. So, Patricia has me thinking in terms of hashtags like #safespacepolitics or #peacefulpolitics. Hashtags, of course, don’t produce change on their own. We will have to take steps to make our political life safe and peaceful.

The Next Generation. Everyone at our conference agreed on the need to build support among young people. Today’s high school and college students are like the rest of us. They are increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo. However, unlike many of us older people, they are more open to trying new ideas and strategies. The next generation’s movements won’t be like mine. To see why, check out the remarkable work Greta Thunberg and her team have done with Fridays for Future in Europe and, to a lesser degree, here in the United States.

From Civics to Civility and Back to Civics. We also sense that there has been a decline in civics education and that teachers who do try to talk about citizen engagement in their classrooms often feel like they are “walking on eggshells.” Perhaps the time has come to incorporate civility (or #safespacepolitics) as an integral part of civics education so that we can then go back to having the kinds of classroom discussions that were typical of my youth. In other words, helping young people hold civil and constructive conversations on tough topics now seems to be a prerequisite for civics education, not its outcome.

Local initiatives. Almost everyone who attended our workshop came with stories about things they were involved in personally or they knew about in their local communities. In other words, our job for now is not to create the building blocks of a movement. Some of them already exist.

Our role. Therefore, our initial challenge is to identify places where:

Young people (and others) have already started doing something
Intense conflict is likely
Work with people in those communities to develop pilot projects that add to and/or reinforce peacebuilding and conflict resolution skills in what they are currently doing. That could include providing manuals, websites, and other published material that young people could use in training themselves.
Bring those that want to into larger networks of individuals and organizations doing work on the same or similar subject
Help turn that network into a viable political force beyond the local level
Mostly, we need to understand that these are not our movements, they are and must continue to be led by young people themselves. As John Paul Lederach and others put it, our job is to accompany them and provide advice when and where they ask for it. My experience is that today’s young people are more likely to ask for the help of older people that my generation of protesters were in the 1960s!

20 for 2020. Patricia raised the idea of “20 for 2020” with Gretchen and me. Could we have at least twenty of those prototypes up and running by the end of this year so that they could have a visible impact at least in their local communities during next year’s presidential election campaign? Given what is already taking place and the contacts we already have, that should be doable.

Obviously, these ideas are in embryonic form—at best.

I plan to be thinking about them on our long flights to Italy via Istanbul. More importantly, I’m anxious to hear what you think.

More soon.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.