The Path of Most Resistance

Sitting on the white plastic lawn chairs, a light breeze blowing over the crowd and the half-moon hanging above, the crimson satin fabric and long green headresses flowed back and forth across the stage. A troupe from Ramallah traveled to Dheisheh last evening, with an entourage of folkloric dancers, musicians, and mesmerizing pieces of traditional Palestinian physical culture. It was a stunning display of Middle Eastern art with the enchanting music, whirling vibrant colors, and lauding crowd. A truly intercultural experience that I wish I could have shared with you.

Earlier in the day I traveled to Jerusalem for a meeting at the Ambassador Hotel. Although I was there in my personal capacity, I was able to sit with the director of Search for Common Ground in the region (a former Canadian diplomat), an SIT alumni, and the founders of an NGO in Canada - the Peace it Together Project. The NGO brings groups of Israelis, Palestinians and Canadians together on a Vancouver island to work on dialogue and conflict resolution skills, and to facilitate their learning about and eventual mutual creation of short movies that have to be relevant to the conflict in some way. Through the media training and in coming together to create a final production, the founders hope to ease tensions and forge relationships across the divided communities.

Such work may not seem particularly sexy to most Americans, most of whom have come to percieve the high-level political peace processes as the only legitimate means of inter-state conciliation. It doesn't help either that those peace processes and agreements more often than not fail abissmally, for a variety of reasons. And then the average person is left with a feeling of disdain for diplomacy and a more deeply entrenched perception that war is inevitable, a part of human nature, and there is nothing we can do about it. Such is the idea that I am spending a lot of time and energy to dispel.

Out of 35 peace accords between and within countries from the end of the Cold War to 2005, 34 failed. The reasons for this are quite complex of course, but I believe such a trend unvequivocally reveals that diplomacy alone (or military intervention for that matter) do little to avert the cycles of violence in the end. But there has been a sea change in the international conflict arena in the last 20 years that has sought to address that unfortunate status quo inclination, though most people operating 'within the box' know little to nothing about it.

What has been previously coined as 'Second Track' diplomacy (First Track being the government to government method) has now become a more widely accepted and promulgated approach towards peacebuilding. I say "previously coined" because the term has now expanded into a 'Multi-Track' model, meaning that peace-making is facilitated not only by diplomats and international lawyers, but also regular civilians as well (although I have found that there are quite profound things about them!). Such is the approach of building bridges between conflicting communities through media and sports (such as between China and the US in the 70's by using, of all things, ping pong) and forging relationships that work to attend to some of the underlying causes of conflict, or at least initiate a process that may eventually lead to addressing the core issues at stake.

Myself and literally hundreds of thousands of regular citizens from around the world, trying to live unconventially in a presently conventional political theatre, are the ombudspersons of the peacebuilding process, the cultural ambassadors on an increasingly globalized planet. The work may not be sexy to the normal person, but it is nonetheless provocative, sustainable, and deeply life-changing.