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what are the four questions that lead to peaceful relationships? It may be

important to begin with how the need for those questions arose we had been

working with the community dialogue executive and participants in community

dialogue for about three or four years at that point and they expressed to us a

frustration that as they dealt with the questions of what do you want why do you

want it and what can you live with given that other disagree they felt like they

were just going around in a circle that they'd begin a discussion and then they

changed it to something else and then they change it to something else and

then they change it to something else and then they would go have another

discussion and the same kind of revolving topics would begin without

much progress so they felt like there was a need to how do you give some

direction but keep dialogue open and we at that point began to deal with so what

kind of questions could you ask or discuss that would give some direction

to kind of creating the kind of relationships you wanted to have and

from that we identified four themes that had to do with the vision of the future

that you had the importance of trust or building trust and what are trustworthy

relationships how do you deal with the loss that any agreement is going to

impose or any arrangement of living together is going to impose on people

and then the buzz-saw question of how do you deal with those need to be just and

fair and so we began to look at those kinds of questions and tried to

formulate them in a way that would be a set or framework which would be the

themes around which peaceful relationships could be built the first

and more important one is obviously the question of a shared future we sometimes

even call it the peace question and in a vision a vision of a shared future you

have to be articulating a future with the other side when they hear it the in

light of your goals and dreams and aspirations feel that if that future

came about I could live with it it might not be what I want and it would

certainly not be everything that I wanted but if it came about it's

something I could tolerate I could bear I could live with I wouldn't use

violence to overturn it and vice versa am I going to hear from your future

that if that I have a place in that I could live with and then let and that

creates a domain of mutually bearable futures which the parties can then begin

to share we call that a vision of a shared future and I want to contrast it

with a shared vision of the future if you were to begin with a shared using

you're beginning with agreement that we agree about what the future could be and

that ultimately is the goal and the outcome of a political process but the

beginning and foundation of that is not agreement its disagreement and how do we

live with that disagreement and I'm articulating a future that my

opponent my other side could live with they have a place in it that they could

thrive and I'm articulating that in such a way that we can engage one another

that's the beginning point for that kind of dialogue in relationship let me say

two things about that one is that it sets up a domain in which

you can do politics and secondly it sets up a domain in which trust can develop

oftentimes people tell us I need trust in order to develop a vision of the

shared future but it's actually the opposite I need a vision of a shared

future in order to have trust in someone because I know they're

articulating the future that I have a place in it is interesting in that

regard to look at the work of Nelson Mandela

then in particularly as he went around of South Africa people heard him

articulate time and time again that there is a place for the white South

African in this the Afrikaner in the future that we want to have as south as

now as a post-apartheid South Africa he never missed an opportunity to

welcome and talk about that place and as a result when people would look at and

ask the question what does peace look like in South Africa they point to

Mandela it looks like Mandela and if it looks

like Mandela I can live with it it won't be everything that I want but I can live

with that and find enough place in it in order to exist and thrive as a person as

a community as a family and so I think that's critically important unless you

get that dealt with whatever happens afterwards won't stand it won't sustain

itself because as soon as I find out it is leaning in the direction of a future

that I can't bear with whatever I've agreed to I'll overturn about that the

second question has to do with trustworthiness I mean you have now

saying we're going to do certain things for the past 30 or 40 years you've been

shooting at me so why should I believe you I mean what what has changed that

caused me now with something different has happened and so how do I the word

indeed can I create myself as a trustworthy partner in leading to a

shared future about it there's interesting several pitfalls along the

way one is that many people look in agreement or some kind of arrangement as

a contract you've said you do stuff do it other people look at it as a process

that we've begun that you need to modify along the way and so you get into

conflicts about that as one party says no it's a contract just do it and the

other party says no we're beginning a process of relationship building that we

need to assess and see how we need to change it as relationships go along the

problem arises is when one party views it as a contract and one party sees it as as a

process that happens in Northern Ireland where the Good Friday Agreement was sold

to the unionist loyalist community as the stabilization of politics in

Northern Ireland it was sold to the Republican national community as the

beginning of a social process of political and social transformation as both

sides acted in their understanding of the agreement they seemed that their

actions seemed to violate it from the perspective of the other side a second

one has to do with getting stuck halfway so there is no way to move from a

beginning to an endpoint in one step that you have to take steps along the

way and in the process it's those steps that are going to advantage one side over

another you can think of it as the classic example of I have a gun to your

head you have a gun to my head and we both agree we want to take the guns down

my idea about how to do it is you take your gun down first and then I'll take

my gun down and then you have the opposite thing because we both worry

that once I take my gun down you'll decide that's a good place to pause

until I get more so you have to have the commitment by one another through word

indeed to follow through even if the first even if the step you just took

advantages me over you and then the last one is really an important one that

arises more and more and it has to do with making agreements that mask

disagreements and a classic example of that is a ceasefire so if you

take the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah Israel made it because they

thought it would lead to their advantage over Hezbollah that Hezbollah would become

less powerful Hezbollah did it because they thought they would become more powerful

both those things can't happen simultaneously and so a ceasefire

in many ways is an agreement we make based on a different assessment about

how the future is going to unfold that's the same thing that happens in almost

all agreements that you agree about some things and then suppress differences and

deal with them later but those differences come back and so it's

important to realize that we oftentimes make agreements because we disagree

we're able to make it because we disagree about how things will unfold so

we have to deal with whether they unfold in one direction or another and also

within the framework of a shared agreement about it the third and fourth

question arise from a kind of situation that very few people recognize every

negotiated agreement imposes losses and injustices on the parties from their

agreement otherwise it wouldn't be a negotiated agreement one side would have

won and imposed all the losses on the other side so every side feels that it

must not impose unacceptable losses on me and

it must be fair from my perspective and yet never a negotiated agreement lives

up to that standard because by definition it can't it is in a

compromise in a negotiated agreement the third question has to do with losses so

how can I accept the losses that that agreement is going to impose on me so that

I can make the sessions concessions that it requires now one of the important

things is that that that we talk with particularly in in the

israeli-palestinian conflict in the in the early 2000s when there was the

beginning in the midst of the Second Intifada we got a number of peace plans

one of them was the Geneva Accords and it was 50-60 pages long and it was and

there were seven pages on refugee resettlement about the things and and

people would read it and they would say there are four or five hundred ways I

could read this I know the other side is going to read it where it is most
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advantageous for them I'm gonna read it where it's most advantageous for me and we're

gonna wonder where the agreement is so we felt that it was really important to

be specific about the losses that an agreement was going to impose and

particularly the kind of ways in which I would I'm willing to accept those losses

for living together in peace to be very explicit about that that runs counter to

much of the kind of theory of negotiation which talks about the

importance of logrolling where you take losses and wins and roll them together
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and you buy the package what we found was that people would accept the

benefits pocket those and then try to negotiate away the

losses and so it would lead to really kind of more disagreement than

agreement about the things but it's important for both sides to recognize

that I'm going to have to accept losses and that's difficult for politicians to

negotiate because they always tell their side we

didn't give up anything we got what we wanted I was strong we didn't do

anything well when the other side hears that

and knows that they did make concessions and it was important they then begin to

distrust the parties so we feel that it's important to find a way to be

explicit about embracing those losses that a working together agreement is

going to impose on us the last question which is really a

buzz-saw which is we all feel that for any agreement or any kind of arrangement

to have any legitimacy it must be minimally just and yet we disagree about

what justice entails and so particularly in conflict in in in we think of

conflict as getting that to which I'm entitled when we're in some kind of

community relationship it means the kind of fair balance of reciprocity this

for that in some kind of balanced way but when we're in conflict we think it

means I am I I am entitled to that you need to give it to me that's what

justice entails and of course what stands in the way are usually the goals

and aspirations of the other side which become the embodiment of of injustice

that presents a real problem because where justice is necessary the pursuit

of justice is a barrier to reaching an agreement and so how do you deal with

that mix of stuff and I think South Africa is an illustration of that there

wasn't any way they were going to make an agreement which which established

justice in South Africa it wasn't possible I mean the economic structures

and arrangements weren't going to allow that I can't imagine what agreement they

would come up with which would produce a just outcome from both sides' arrangement

and so what they did was begin a process where they would lead to greater and

greater justices what we might call rectifying injustices and so they had

now a political process where they actually at one point designated what

were the critical things as their political process would need to address

and what were the things that they could give up they could

negotiate about and I think that's the framework for beginning to deal with

this of how do we work together to alleviate the most egregious

injustices that agreement that any agreement or arrangement's going to

impose on the parties I worked many years at Stanford not one day did I

think it was just I thought it was bearable I thought it was worth it I

thought it was worthwhile I didn't think it was just and yet I managed to live

with it pretty pretty easily about that and so the question really comes down to

that are you better off in peace than you were in conflict and you have to

make the answer to that yes all else that you do you have to make the

answer to that yes much of the breakup of the Oslo process was that when you

asked Israelis and Palestinians were you better off in conflict than you were in

peace the answer was no and because of that it broke down so the critical

importance of working together to make that answer yes is critically

important

Byron I'm wondering and I'm sure many folks in our audience are wondering what

do you do if you don't know what to do oh man that's interesting because that's

the situation we've been in the last couple of years here and so my

colleagues and I as we have looked at how do you try to put together the

political relationships that have been polarized in the United States how do

you fix politics here we have returned back to what we learned in our process

and years of working with Israelis and Palestinians and the folks of Northern

Ireland and being in dialogue with folks from South Africa what did we learn that

would be useful here and of course the importance of the shared future stands

out that that's really actually what makes politics work in everywhere is

that we have some vision that allows us to engage and to lose politically and

yet still get a future that we can bear and when that breaks down so does

politics and so we've begun to ask how do you create that interestingly we

discovered that it's a bit harder than we imagined that we had said to parties

in the places we have been build a future of build a vision of a shared

future and then things will flow from that and without realizing that

sometimes that's a very difficult thing to do or at least how difficult it is we

weren't exactly sure what a vision of a shared future would look like in the

United States particularly between the coasts where they are globalized

they are fluent they're doing well and the heartlands which have been left

behind in that globalization process and so how do we begin to build those

relationships and bound together we had to struggle with that one of the

things we thought was well maybe if we reverse where we've always talked in the

past about how you have a vision of a shared future and it drives the other

questions forward maybe we need to look at the other questions and say what does

it tell us about elements that we need in order to create a vision of a shared

future and as we did that we

came to the importance of three things one are the need to foster dignity two

the need to safeguard livelihoods and three the need to encourage respect and

let me say a little bit about each one of those often times we say we need we

need a just we need justice we need a society but as the philosopher Avishai

Margalit says that maybe that's a little bit beyond what we know and can

do we don't have the resources to to reach that but we do have the resources

to create a society that doesn't humiliate people and so how can we begin

with that question of how do we create a society which doesn't humiliate the

dignity of people and from that we began to feel the need to to foster the

dignity that it becomes the object of projects our goal is to foster

dignity in each person particularly as they go about their lives with their

families as they create things with their work and their life projects how

does that give dignity and to people that they can embrace and live out in

their lives and the importance of that was absolutely critical in building a

shared future the second one about safeguarding livelihoods comes from our

work with policing so oftentimes policing adopts a security framework and

a security framework sees a threat and it defeats the threat so security

becomes the outcome of defeating threats that threaten that security or

well-being safeguarding doesn't change that completely and there's maybe no

bright line between the two but instead it's focused on how do we maintain the

integrity of that which is important to us so rather than focusing on the

feeding threats which we do have to deal with but how do we focus instead on what

does it take to maintain the integrity of those things that are important to us

and particularly how do we maintain the integrity of people whose lives have

been livelihoods and families have been threatened by the changes that globalization

has imposed on our society lastly is the need to encourage respect and of course

it's not entirely clear what respect is but it is honoring we think in many ways

the humanity of everyone and particularly their lived experience so I

may not agree with you about stuff I may differ with you with proposals you offer

the policies you recommend I may disagree with all of that kind of stuff

but I need to respect and understand the integrity of your experiences out of

which those proposals come I don't have to agree with you but I do have to honor

and think of the authenticity of those experiences that have led to that

and we think the beginning of encouraging respect begins exactly with

that insight of what is how do I listen to and honor those experiences that gave

rise to your views about it and that begins the kind of process of

exchange in which we honor each other's humanities even if we disagree about how

to respond out of that humanity Byron thank you so so much

this has been incredibly insightful and I think everybody could use a lot a bit

of this wisdom that you've shared with us today thank you very much