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[thorny issues]
A COMPLEX FORMULA Milburn Line navigates the intricacies of peace by Kelly Knufken eace. The word sounds simple, but don’t let that fool you. “I think peace is actually really complicated. I think it’s a hardcore subject,” says Milburn Line, who took the helm of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice in August. “Peace gets written off as, ‘Flower Power, Birkenstocks, we should all just get along,’ and it is much more complex than that. It requires a much more studied approach and a much more political approach.” Line is up to the task, having
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spent more than 15 years “on the ground,” working for peace and justice on human rights projects at the local level in a number of hot spots around the world. Most recently, he directed a $37 million human rights program in Colombia funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. He also worked on the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s and has spent years in Guatemala, including a stint as director of a USAID-funded human rights and reconciliation program. All of that work — especially
getting to know people trapped in conflict — has helped him forge his ideas about the best way to achieve the complicated balance of peace and justice. “It’s not just a simple vision of coexistence; it’s a forged and locally owned, consensus-building process for coexistence. And that’s much more complicated and hard to achieve.” The way he sees it, now is the time to explore the intricacies of peace. “As a species, we have spent a tremendous amount of our time dedi-