From San Salvador to South Africa, Reaching Conflict by Sharing Experiences

Asquith, C. (2014). From San Salvador to South Africa, Reaching Conflict by Sharing Experiences: An Interview with Tim Phillips. Solutions 5(6): 16-18. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/from-san-salvador-to-south-africa-reaching-conflict-by-sharing-experiences-an-interview-with-tim-phillips/

Idea Lab Interview

From San Salvador to South Africa, Reaching Conflict by Sharing Experiences: An Interview with Tim Phillips Interviewed by Christina Asquith

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or 20 years, Tim Phillips has worked on the front lines of peace negotiations, helping the South Africans adopt a transitional justice program after apartheid and then sharing that experience to negotiate an end to “the troubles” in Northern Ireland, sectarian strife in Bosnia, and guerrilla warfare in El Salvador. Currently, his team works on conflict resolution in South America and the Middle East and has a new book, Beyond Conflict, which looks at lessons learned from 20 years of peace-making.

His new TED Talk can be seen online at http://tedxboston.org/speaker/phillips.

Your new book, Beyond Conflict, draws lessons from your 20 years of experience in conflict resolution. What’s the central argument you’re making, and how is it different from what others already know about resolving conflict?

Well the book is about the notion of shared experience—that people can learn from the experiences of others.

Too often people think every country is unique, every experience people have is so distinct that there isn’t a capacity to learn from others who have been through similar situations.

There is also the phenomenon of people who live under conflict or dictatorship becoming so traumatized or feeling so victimized that they adopt a certain outlook; an attitude that no one has suffered the way they have, that nobody can understand the depths of disparity/fear that they go through. However, the reality is that these experiences are universal. From

this, our approach at Beyond Conflict is very much based on the notion that people can learn from the experience of others. It does take time to conquer, to penetrate the defense layer that people have recognized the existence of the shared experience.

That I would say sums up the core to our approach.

Your first success was in Czechoslovakia, in the events surrounding the Velvet Revolution. How did you convince the parties to come together and discuss their shared experiences?

It wasn’t specifically Czechoslovakia; we started working in Eastern Europe as a region. There we focused on the notion that as this transition to democracy was unfolding throughout the former communist countries, there was a wave of what I would call self-described experts flying in from Western Europe and US. Their conversations encompassed “how to write a constitution, how to build a market economy, etc.”—important stuff.

During all this, I was thinking, well, that’s all important but what is fundamentally necessary is for these countries and for these new leaders to deal with their past. How to you deal with a legacy of repression, the legacy of human rights violations, possible future collaborators, or all this new state security funds that were starting to pop up? It struck me, and I often joke it was because I am the youngest of a large family and I have a problem with authority,

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Elizabeth Herman

Tim Phillips is the Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of Beyond Conflict.

that it would be helpful to hear from people who had braved similar paths. In 1991 there were far fewer examples than exist today. There was Spain after Franco, the process in Argentina and Chile, or deNazification in Germany. The thought was if we could bring in leaders from those countries that had struggled with the same challenges and sit them down with leaders of these postcommunist countries, there would be good opportunities for success.

Idea Lab Interview

Pietro Izzo

A mural in Belfast City Centre depicts the ongoing peace process and challenges facing Northern Ireland sixteen years after the Good Friday Agreement brought a political end to the Troubles.

The first step in any process is to recognize that people have a sacred value.

Good chemistry between parties is vital. How do you go about selecting which leaders you would like to bring to the table?

Quite frankly, we can’t, nor do we choose who comes into the room from the country we are working in.

What we do is when evaluating the country, we try to understand what is the issue we are addressing. So in South Africa in 1994, it became evident that the South Africans would have to start dealing with the legacy of apartheid. In that context, our work was about dealing with the past. We thought it would be very useful for these leaders to have options, to look at what happened

in Latin America and look at what happened in Eastern Europe in the former Soviet Union. So in that case we ended up finding those leaders who we thought were articulate, had very powerful stories to tell. Stories of specifics like the Chileans and their successes with truth commissions or thematic advice on how to deal with international collaborators, people who were in death squads, the gambit really. We really just knew people who were good and thought that they would resonate.

In some conflicts, compromising on territory constitutes sacrificing identity often based in sacred values. How do

you approach mediating a conflict in which any party giving ground would be seen as abandoning these values?

The first step in any process is to recognize that people have a sacred value. Too often people try to describe someone else’s narrative. The first thing in this process is to say people should be allowed to own what is sacred to them, and it needs to be recognized and honored. This being said, you may not share it, but you have to recognize it. When it comes to land—that is a difficult issue. When we worked in Northern Ireland, a lot of Catholics who supported the republican side wanted the UK physically out and the property to go back to the Republic of Ireland. To mend this obstacle, Ireland began a narrative of shared sovereignty. The lesson had to be understood that you could own what was sacred to you: your culture, your language, your schooling, your identity, but you lived on the same land. The goal was to go beyond past initial and primal barriers.

Roelf Meyer, one of the six subjects of your book, credits the growing empathetic understanding between South Africans as one of four elements that drove change, the others being forms of international pressure. Do you see your methodology as one piece of the puzzle, and how do you approach bringing the other pieces together?

The part about international sanctions is really outside the realm of our work.

What we do is expand the imagination. That’s what I think it is that we do: expand the imagination to understand that if you are in this intractable situation that you can actually change for the better but you can’t do it on your own. That’s where we come in. I think a key understanding that Roelf had was the need to build trust. Roelf

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Idea Lab Interview understands that we need to get people to the point where they comprehend that taking a risk is worth it because it has been done before and been worth it. Showing folks this really gives them the space to be successful.

Does resolving conflict require several different approaches? What other approaches are effective, and where does the shared experience approach fit in?

The very nature of shared experience is that we aren’t coming in with the ‘only answer’ or some secret formula.

The idea is to be able to bring in different examples of ways to view conflict resolution. By our very definition it’s inherent to bring others to the table.

But we are very selective towards those that are connected to real human experience. Examples of this [are] the enlightened descent methodology, the principles of Roelf, and there is a lot of work that has to be done on different levels (from grassroots to lead political figures).

Do you think there is an optimal time within a conflict for your approach?

There is without [a] doubt windows of opportunity during the peace process, but I don’t think it’s a one-time window of opportunity. Look at Israel– Palestine: most people would look at it as intractable, but there will be a time when both parties say, “enough is enough,” and there is the time to do something. Somebody once said to me opportunity will never pause, will never wait, but it will be back again.

How have world leaders responded to your methods? What’s been the biggest challenge in getting leaders on board?

The leaders of countries who have been through transformation are often the easiest to recruit. These leaders

Allan Leonard

Roelf Meyer played a significant role in the negotiations that brought an end to apartheid in South Africa, where he became familiar with Beyond Conflict. He is now one of six subjects featured in the organization’s recent book, Beyond Conflict. Here, he speaks at the Rotary International-INCORE Peace Conference in Northern Ireland in 2013.

often claim they have a moral responsibility to share their experience.

The biggest challenge we often have is going into a country that is in the midst of conflict, coming out of a dictatorship, or struggling with change.

Because of the intensity of that environment, it’s difficult to get people to open up. These countries are often so saturated with international mediators that it is often hard to convey that we aren’t there to mediate. We are there to share experience. It takes time, but I think over the last 20 years we have developed enough creditability that people can really see who we are.

You’ve been involved in conflict resolution in a wide range of regions over the last twenty years. What was the spark for this neuroscience initiative?

From the very beginning, I often say that it has been in the DNA of our organization that there is shared

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human experience. We just didn’t know the biology behind it. About five years ago, I was teaching a class with my colleague Ina on the human dimension of conflict. In one class, a retired neuroscientist sat in and after he came up to me and said in a very wonderful way “we are not rational beings with emotions at our core and speaking scientifically we are emotional beings who can only think rationally when we feel that our identities are understood and valued by others.” That so struck me that there began the neuroscience initiative. Soon after that, we linked up with our partners at MIT to convince them and others that this emerging research can be translated to the world around us. We recognize that neuroscience is still at an early stage, but we see this as a tool: a tool to really allow us to shift paradigms in the future to how we think about conflict.