Starting with an internet meme my sister sent me, I explore the ways we can use the coronavirus epidemic to speed up the shift in the way we think from "me" first to "we" first. And, like the spread of the virus itself, maybe do at an exponential rate of growth.
Identity issues have long been at the heart of both fields I work in--peacebuilding and comparative politics. Although I'll limit myself to peacebuilding here, the ways we define who "we" are go a long way toward causing so many of the problems we face in the world today but also point us toward ways we can solve those problems.
Peacebuilders’ interest in social psych has a long history. During the Cold War, we learned a lot about concepts like the image of the enemy. After it, we had to deal with qualitatively different kinds of conflicts that revolved around race, religion, ethnicity, language, gender, and other “identity” issues. We made huge progress during the 1990s as we developed analytical tools and embarked on programs that attempted to bring people on all sides of these emotionally charged issues together.
