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Professor, U.N. Advisor Talks Conflict Resolution In A Polarized World

Elaine Thompson
/
AP
A protester waves a U.S. flag as another holds a sign that reads "Let Them In" during a march and rally to oppose President Donald Trump's executive order barring people from certain Muslim nations from entering the United States in January in Seattle.

 

Professor George Lopez has devoted his career to resolving conflicts. He is an expert on international sanctions and has worked to develop strategies to deal with Iraq and North Korea. Lopez serves as the Hesburgh Professor of Peace Studies Emeritus at the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

Professor Lopez recently sat down to talk with All Things Considered Host Bill Buchner about his work. Below is a transcript of their conversation.  

 

 

From your experience, do human beings really want peace? Is there something ingrained in us that we’d just like to settle disputes violently?

I don’t know if it’s ingrained, but it’s certainly learned. And for some, the experience of violence may have been so intense at formative periods of their life, it appears to be ingrained. But we do believe that people can be trained and can have opportunities open to them that create different pathways. And it’s very important for those of us who’ve been fortunate not to necessarily be traumatized by past violence, to be able to bridge to those who have been. Peace is defined very differently by one’s situation of violence. There’s a peace that… “Oh, it’s a good thing the bombing has stopped.” That brings us peace. There’s a peace that guarantees that the bombing will stop for all time and we can get on with economic development. And then there’s a peace in which there’s no shooting, no one’s disappearing us in the dead of night, no one’s bombing us, but we get 20 percent of the wages that everybody else gets, and why is that? Is that our religion, our race, our ethnicity? The latter is what we call the “just peace,” and how you create peace with justice. So, in some respects, there are peace stepping stones that we wanna have clarity on because just stopping the shooting isn’t enough.

There is certainly a lot of reporting these days focused on how the country is deeply divided, rich against poor, Democrats against Republicans, people who sit during the national anthem, those who stand. And I think maybe next week, we’ll be fighting over the merits of vanilla ice cream vs. chocolate. How have we arrived at a point like this?

Well, we’re a society that has a beautiful multi-character to it, whether that’s ethnically, religiously, now just even in terms of age structure. We’re still in many respects a rural, urban culture in ways that I think the last election showed us the demographics of. We’ve arrived at it because maybe that’s what the United States was meant to be, a heterogeneous community. What we’ve lost is the ability to find ways socially, politically, religiously to embrace the heterogeneity and make it a strength.

 

You contrasted things in your question, and it made me think of the old Dr. Seuss book Sneetches. We might not fight over ice cream, but embedded in Sneetches is the dilemma of the other. And in my field, we say, “We can train people for conflict resolution and conflict transformation. Because we begin with the premise that conflict is natural to human beings, but it doesn’t necessarily need to lead to violence or destruction.”

 

So how do you create constructive conflict and work with it as a human being? Because we’ve all done that since we were socialized in families. We do it in communities. It’s been made a strength before, but it seems in the last 10-20 years, in fact, people have tried to out-muscle each other, either with verbiage or with tools or with guns. And the constructive dynamic of conflict hasn’t been at the forefront. And I think that’s what needs to happen. The political and media and educational sectors that we are all in play a role because we’re the people who help polarize as opposed to make the bridges. And the making of the bridges and the roll up your sleeves and do the hard work of conflict dialogue is where we need to go.

You have helped to set up peace programs in colleges and universities around the world. Right now you’re in the midst of a tour around the country talking about how we can avoid being overwhelmed by what seems like a world plagued by violence and find a path to building peace. Today, you’re making a stop here at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. What do you hope to accomplish on this tour.

Well, thanks. I’d like to see an audience engage with me on what are the violence problems that most bother them and to see initially what their views are of frustration, anxiety, a sense of helplessness. And then show some paths that have worked elsewhere for people to make the connections that like to connect. You know, the advantage of being at a university and dealing with primarily younger people is they already have a kind of transnational sense about them, particularly through the world of social media and various other things. And we want to extend that good perspective on a lack of boundaries to what either their occupational or their avocational interests might be to help with the coming of peace.

 

We learn that unfortunately violence has been so terrible, whether inner-city America or in places like Syria, Congo, Colombia, which now has a peace process going, that creates opportunity for people to go, that it’s really a combination of insiders and outsiders that bind together in a series of tasks that helps to create peace building. At the local level, maybe it’s people who are quite involved with refugee communities who’ve come, or refugee families who’ve come from some of these terrible situations of violence. And they don’t have to step out of the United States to be peace builders but can do so in their local communities. And that’s the root of participation we want to sketch for people and help them make the bridges.

Let’s turn to international concerns: President Donald Trump has decided to decertify the Iran nuclear deal. How does this decision change the landscape if our goal is to create a more secure and peaceful world?

At the risk of sounding partisan, because that’s not the way I mean it, this I fear will prove to be one of the most disastrous foreign policy decisions one can make. Now, on the one hand we have some people saying, “Well he’s just kicked the can on the road to Congress and they’re gonna make…” But there are three or four dimensions that are critical.

 

The first is, can any future nation trust the United States when they make a deal? To have the president who’s supposed to understand the art of making a deal, to understand if you’re gonna do away with a deal, you better have a replacement that meets the needs of your foe as well as meets your own needs, but instead to just dump it in the garbage can is costly at every level for every future negotiation we have from trade deals to security deals. And I think he’s been remarkably immature and short-sighted about that.

 

Secondly, the model that the Iran process exemplified: multiple nations, in a sense, aligned around a table against an aspiring nuclear power is the model most likely to work with North Korea, even though North Korea is already a nuclear power. If you have any hope to make sure that Kim Jong Un sees the prospect of negotiating with the United States as useful, you just obliterated the model that would be the path to that.

Professor George Lopez from the University of Notre Dame, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you so much.

Bill began his radio journey on Long Island, followed by stops in Schenectady, Bridgeport, Boston and New York City. He’s glad to be back on the air in Fairfield County, where he has lived with his wife and two sons for more than 20 years.
Ann is an editor and senior content producer with WSHU, including the founding producer of the weekly talk show, The Full Story.