Building an Understanding for Peace[1]
Anthony J. Nocella, II and Eli Moore
Quaker Folk Journal

Now what we have here is failure to communicate.
– Captain, in the film, Cool Hand Luke

The heart of peacemaking will never change, the core principle is love the enemy and consequently one will not have an enemy. Of course one will have a conflict, but not an enemy. This is the core of conflict resolution/transformation, which strives to distinguish the parties in the conflict from their positions and focus instead on their interests and the issues at stake. This in turn allows us to work out each other’s differences with minimal destruction. Obviously this does not always work, and we sometimes have to restrain the conflicting parties so that the violence does not escalate. Thus we see the importance of peacekeeping. The violence will continue until parties begin to forgive and take responsibility and be accountable for their actions, which is a key goal of peacebuilding.

The predominant form of justice in the West is based on adversarial processes and punitive sentencing. Pursuing justice within this framework encourages participants to close communication channels and focus their actions on offense and defense. This model places retribution over restoration, and thus perpetuates victimization.  Rather than transforming criminals and healing victims, this regressive increase in punishment is far from being correctional or rehabilitative. A case that truly puts into question how the West deals with conflict is the recent execution of the co-founder of the well-known Los Angeles Crips, Stanley Tookie Williams. He was convicted of a number of murders, then in prison turned his life around and dedicated himself to articulating the pitfalls of gangs and violence. He published a number of children books, for which he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature.[2] For this remarkable personal transformation Williams was not honored in California, but rather was put to death. This sounded the message that even when an individual strives to restore the harm they have caused, they are rejected and punished.  It is important to recognize that this treatment is typically biased; it would be unprecedented that a white or wealthy person who made such a remarkable transformation would be unforgivable.

The United States could greatly benefit by learning from Canada and New Zealand’s integration of restorative justice programs, which have reduced repeat offenses and increased victims’ satisfaction. Restorative justice, a set of principles practiced in many indigenous cultures and articulated by peace churches like the Mennonites, Quakers, and Brethren, strives to bring the victim and offender together in dialogue focused on accountability, healing, forgiving, respecting, and mutual understanding. This is an alternative to a retributive state (court) process that focuses on doling out punishment, which victimizes the offender and re-victimizes the victim. In restorative justice, the victim and offender and in some cases their families and friends decide how to restore to the victim and community their wholeness and security, and to provide closure. This process does not separate but unifies and mobilizes the community.

One of the faults within the peace movement is an arrogance of believing we have the Truth and we alone are doing what is just and right, i.e., we are the “good guys,” while everyone else is the “enemy.” Only if this socially constructed binary was that simple, but it is not. Of course some activists and practitioners strive to challenge themselves on getting out of this rut, but over and over again they are told not to trust, respect, and work with people of ‘the other side.’ Thus, whom are we left with? Ourselves and the people we agree with. It is here we see the serious predicament of the peace movement.

Social privilege facilitates this sense of moral high-ground because it allows us to ignore the more vulnerable position of people less-privileged. For example, some activists see getting voluntarily arrested as the supreme form of non-violent resistance, forgetting how risky it is if you are on a tight budget and could loose your job, or if you are transgender or an immigrant or otherwise more likely to be brutalized by the police and jails. A similar sense of righteousness sometimes blocks us from communicating with people intimately involved in war. When Vietnam veterans arrived home many were shamed and marginalized rather than engaged in a process of accountability and forgiveness.  Without support to transcend shame, restorative action is rare. When Vietnam veterans and soldiers’ families and friends embraced the goal of ending a war, the movement saw a turning point.

We cannot be merely eager to speak, we must be ready to listen to the people whom are taking actions we oppose.  Ultimately, we need a revolutionary shift in the way we perceive and engage social and political conflicts. A question at the heart of this process is: Can we  bring about a just and peaceful planet without destroying and then rebuilding, but by solely building up each other in a transformative manner?

Building an Understanding for Peace
Anthony J. Nocella, II and Eli Moore
The Canadian Journal of Police & Security Service
 

Now what we have here is failure to communicate.
– Captain, in the film, Cool Hand Luke 

The heart of peacemaking will never change, the core principle is love the enemy and consequently one will not have an enemy. Of course one will have a conflict, but not an enemy. This is the core of conflict resolution, which strives to distinguish the parties in the conflict from their positions and focus instead on their interests and the issues at stake. This in turn allows us to work out each other’s differences with minimal destruction. Obviously this does not always work, and we sometimes have to restrain the conflicting parties so that the violence does not escalate. Thus we see the importance of peacekeeping, which is the central theme of this issue (policing social and/or political conflict). The violence will continue until parties begin to forgive and take responsibility or be accountable for their actions, which is a key goal of peacebuilding.

The predominant form of justice in the West is based on adversarial processes and punitive sentencing. Pursuing justice within this framework encourages participants to close communication channels and focus their actions on offense and defense. This model places retribution over restoration, and thus perpetuates victimization.  Rather than transforming criminals and healing victims, this regressive increase in punishment is far from being correctional or rehabilitative. A case that truly puts into question how the West deals with conflict is the recent execution of the co-founder of the well-known gang the Crips, Stanley Tookie Williams. He was convicted of a number of murders, then in prison turned his life around and dedicated himself to articulating the pitfalls of gangs and violence. He published a number of children books, for which he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature.[1] For this remarkable personal transformation Williams was not honored in California, but rather was put to death. This sounded the message that even when an individual strives to restore the harm they have caused, they are rejected and punished.

The United States could greatly benefit in learning from Canada’s integration of Restorative Justice programs, which have reduced repeat offenses and increased victims’ satisfaction. Restorative Justice, a set of principles practiced in many indigenous cultures and articulated by peace churches like the Mennonites, Quakers, and Brethren, strives to bring the victim and offender together in dialogue focused on accountability, healing, forgives, respect, and understanding. This is an alternative to the state (courts) deciding what the punishment will be, often victimizing the offender and re-victimizing the victim. In Restorative Justice, the victim, with the participation of the offender, decides how to restore to the victim and community (or victim’s family/friends in the case of a murder) their wholeness and security, and to provide closure. This system does not separate, but unifies and empowers the community. 

These principles of constructively managing violent conflicts were the essence of organizing the 2004 Central New York Regional Peace Studies Consortium at Syracuse University. We assisted in organizing the conference with about 12 other graduate students, faculty, and staff from the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (PARC) at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. The conference’s theme was “The Role of Multiculturalism in Peacekeeping, Peacemaking and Peacebuilding,” and the accomplishment of this conference was in bringing extremely diverse opinions together in discussing how to create peace.

One of the faults of the peace movement is the arrogance of believing they have the Truth and they alone are doing what is just and right. Most peace and social justice conferences you might attend will have (to no surprise) like-minded people attending.  Yet, in this environment, participants are only ‘preaching to the choir,’ convincing the already convinced. Of course some activists and practitioners strive to challenge themselves on getting out of this rut, but over and over again they are told not to trust, respect, and work with people of ‘the other side’. Thus, whom are we left with? Ourselves and the people we agree with. It is here we see the serious predicament of the peace movement. So, rather than protesting the police, the military, and the government, we chose to invite them to this conference. We decided to risk our creditability by working with the “enemy” and to engage them in a dialogue dealing with the overall theme of peace, and the specific topic of multiculturalism. We came up with this idea because of the ongoing dialogues at the Maxwell School concerned with national security, a theme that dominates the discourse in many parts of the school. We decided that rather than being left out of the discussion on counter-terrorism strategies and policies, we would enter it and actively engage. We did just that. One of the first reactions to our conference agenda was from leftists who did not trust our agenda and thought we were compromising or “bowing to the powers that be.” Yet we insisted on having a critical and diverse spectrum of political views. We invited as keynote speaker Donald Mitchell, a well-respected radical scholar, and we invited a number of peace organizations to set up tables to promote their work. We invited nontraditionally affiliated peace groups such as religious and counseling centers, public safety, ROTC, and Institute for National Security and Counter-Terrorism to set up tables. Our strategy was to facilitate encounters between each of the classically opposed sides attending the event.

The conference consisted of three sessions continuing throughout the day, resulting in more than 50 presentations, a lunch, and over 110 attendees from over 15 countries and five continents. It was a success. What was so valuable about this conference was the synergy throughout the day; there was time for socializing, networking, and challenging each other’s positions. Nothing was rushed; what was important was dialogue, not dialogue with people we knew, but with people we did not know. There were military officers, counterterrorist experts, peace activists, academics, and students. We did something few conferences do or aim to do. We brought very different and conflicting people together, and at the end of the day we learned much more than if it had been attended solely by likeminded people, where the conference would have focused only on one step in the peace process – peacemaking, peacebuilding, or peacekeeping. More than a year later people have approached us to voice appreciation for the conference. What made the event memorable was the courage of officials, scholars, and activists to enter potentially unfriendly environment and transcend the typical boundaries of separation. 

When we were invited to guest edit this issue we thought it might be difficult to bring together (similar to the conference) diverse positions on policing and building peace. In the end we have done just that, with the key help of editor Jeffrey Pfeifer. We celebrate CJPSS as a forum in which all sides of the debate on security and terrorism can rationally and constructively discuss how to manage social change in a just manner. Let this be a space, for instance, where we can talk about COINTELPRO without denying it, and openly analyze the real root causes for the “war on terrorism.” As academics and practitioners we must come together no matter what side of the political coin we fall on, and debate these ideas rather than silencing them.

This issue is filled with five diverse perspectives on a number of important concerns on the topic of policing social and/or political conflicts.

First, David Last and James Finan outline criteria for choosing new regimes in countries under occupation in, Choosing the New Guard: A Model for Assessing Replacement Political Personnel. The authors identify principles to be applied uniformly in judging potential political leaders.  Their principles cover political, social, economic, historic, and personal attributes of leadership candidates.

Secondly, a critical ingredient in developing democracy in a country is allowing dissent. But, how much dissent should be allowed before chaos takes over? How should police handle protestors and should corporations have special protection by police? These and other questions are addressed in, Policing Space: Social Control and the Global Justice Movement by Luis Fernandez. Fernandez, an activist-academic beginning from a place of scholarship takes to the streets and observes conflicts from the Battle of Seattle to the more recent international demonstration against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Cancun, Mexico in 2003. He finds that law enforcement has become more repressive in defending corporate interests with greater numbers of officers, higher and stronger barricades, and more violent means of arresting protesters, constraining freedom of speech and assembly.

Thirdly, in the article, Police Training Assistance: The Right Kind of Help, by Douglas Coates and David Last, we begin to see the importance of how police, specifically Canadian police, aid in peacekeeping operations. The article advises concrete policy and procedural changes in policing a society “…as a means to build more stable regional neighbourhoods.” Their critique of policing begins with addressing the culture of domination in the British Empire in the 19^th century. They also draw on recent work by Canadian police and military forces in South and Central American that work in a collaborative and joint effort with local authorities. The article stresses that police forces need to step back from a centralized and authoritarian position, and begin to provide greater assistance and cultural sensitivity. The authors stress educational training of local police as a process within a larger process of facilitating democracy.

In the article, The Politics of Post-Conflict Policing, Timothy Donais also identifies opportunities for better situating police operations in peacebuilding processes. He notes the legacy of politicized policing common in conflict zones, and the crucial role of post-conflict policing in establishing public safety and generating a new social contract between state and citizen. However, Donais finds that, “the reluctance to engage more fully in the politics of security provision has been a serious impediment to the success of international police reform efforts in post-conflict societies.” Citing recent cases, the author proposes an international Peacebuilding Commission that would bolster the efficacy of post-conflict policing and peacebuilding missions in general.

Finally, we close with again stressing the importance of the pedagogy and the specific trainings themselves. Does tapping the Diasporas for Recruits Provide an Advantage in Policing? The Experience of the Canadian Trained Haitians (CTH) by Roy Thomas, examines cultural awareness in training national police. Thomas supports Hofstede’s definition of culture, which is “… the mental programming of patterns of thinking, feeling and potential acting which everyone in a particular society learns.” Hence, to avoid culture is to avoid many of the deep-seated conflicts in a community. Consequently, Thomas stresses that any national police reform aided by other countries requires cultural change and awareness of that change.

These articles, while important separately, together develop a much-needed discourse on the topic of policing for the sake of developing peace and stability in communities. As these authors point out, policing is the nexus between society and the state where safety and public order are negotiated. Policing communities demands a sophisticated balance between imposing order and restraining repression. Security training, coordination, and management cut to the heart of democracy, and it is this fundamental question that the following articles engage.

We hope you enjoy the articles and find the significance in them. We again thank everyone at the journal, especially the editor Jeffrey Pfeifer, who has truly been a joy to work with.

----

Anthony J. Nocella, II is a third year Social Science Ph.D. student at the Maxwell School, at Syracuse University, where he teaches nonviolent courses and is working on his dissertation about political repression in the U.S. He has published more than two-dozen articles in magazines/journals, has published three books on the topics of terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and revolutionary movements. Nocella has spoken around N. America at universities and community centers and can be reached at http://student.maxwell.syr.edu/ajnocell/.

Eli Moore is completing dual Masters degrees in International Relations and Geography at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. His prior work involved community mediation and international development.  His current research looks at local development projects in Colombia as case studies of sustainable development and conflict transformation. He can be reached at ebmoor01@maxwell.syr.edu.