No more epic sagas
We need ways for people to build consensus on complex problems and solutions.
The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded more than 100 times to more than 130 recipients. Not everyone can be a Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King Jr. or a Jean Henry Dunant (also, thankfully, not everyone is a Frank B. Kellogg or, worse, a Henry Kissinger). The prize has been awarded to many organizations and institutions over the years, including the ICRC thrice. Increasingly, it is being awarded to groups of people collaborating for a common objective, like the National Dialogue Quartet in Tunisia or women peacebuilders in Liberia and Yemen. Not that anyone cares what I think about who should get the Nobel Prize, but I think this is a good trend - the Prize is increasingly being awarded to groups of people and the collaborations they promote. Peace is built by many, everyday. This is one, important way we’re moving away from promoting an epic saga of peace.
Like action hero movies, epic sagas of peace are these fictional accounts of peacebuilding in which one or two strong men (let’s be honest, usually white men) climb above insurmountable odds, beyond petty squabbles that plague the rest of us mere mortals, past fumbling bureaucracies and pushed through (their) vision of peace that was otherwise unattainable. The implication is often that these noble beasts could’ve chosen war (were entitled to?) but instead chose (often unilaterally) a more peaceful path and we should be thankful for the peace that was chosen for us. Sure it is cinematic, but it seems rather Sisyphean doesn’t it?
There are many problems with the epic saga model - it is ego driven (are people negotiating for the right reason?), often sexist and racist and it often perpetuates patronizing and patrimonial systems that were what got us into conflict in the first place. I guess my main problem with the epic saga model is the principal-agent problem. By promoting someone to a position of authority to negotiate the peace that affects everyone, they often get separated from the very people they are supposed to be representing. As a result the peace process often gets tempered by realpolitik. For example, the peace that Kellogg or Kissinger delivered is the best peace that could be achieved allowing for US interests, not the best peace that could be achieved as we’d expect from the world’s Peace Prize.* Not to mention Kissinger’s war crimes (oops, I mentioned it).
In the past, we’ve sent diplomats to Geneva or New York to learn protocols and negotiate peace on our behalf. We now have many lower level talks (and secret talks), moving from “track 1” diplomacy to track 1.5, 2 and some even go so far as to say there are eight tracks of diplomacy. And peacebuilding doesn’t even really have to be formalized, increasingly, local peacebuilders, peace committees and peace groups have succeeded where professional diplomats and peace agreements have failed. Women made peace in Liberia by blockading doors, withholding sex, threatening nudity and rightly got the Nobel prize for it. Greta Thunberg rattled the cages by sitting on the steps of her school. Everyday peace indicators is a way for people to measure what they really mean by abstract concepts like peace and security – rather than have it defined for them, people define what peace will look like for themselves, so that they know when they make progress.
The epic saga isn’t unique to the problem of making peace. It is founded on the hero and the chief (men). I think we perpetuate the fallacy when we choose champions to promote their agendas (rather than the other way around, see below). We then are given false choices between the agenda of our champion or their champion. Our two party system in the US forces false choices every four years when we attach leaders to fixed platforms. We can perpetuate the fallacy in business if a board identifies “who” before they identify “what” for CEO succession. Any false choice (most famously, you’re with us or with the terrorists) is a pretty good warning sign we’ve skipped past negotiating outcomes and have jumped right into picking sides.
Note that I’m not against champions. Champions are important. Somebody needs to care enough for a cause to be willing to put the work in. But the champions need to serve the cause, not the other way around. We should be wary of solutions that require us to 1) win an election to 2) lobby a politician to 3) control a government to 4) negotiate a plan to 5) solve a problem for us, when we can instead build a common understanding of a problem and a shared solution. My position is not going be popular, because many people have invested in (and gotten very good at) working the systems we’ve built for conflict management, including our political systems. They will call this unrealistic or pollyanna or kumbaya peace, but they are just lazy. It takes work to build consensus, so that many own the solution, whether it is peacebuilding, public good provision, governance, strategic direction for a company or choosing a destination for your family for vacation. Once we have a shared solution, find politicians and other champions that can deliver that solution.
Increasingly, in the world, people are seeing the glimmer of possibility of what it looks like when all of us get involved in solving problems. It is not impossible for many people to work together on complex problems. Platforms like Wikipedia and StackExchange are examples of how incentives can be aligned for groups to collectively invest in a public good and own their solution. Everyday people find solutions to build the most difficult peace. We can find solutions together and we don’t have to wait around to be saved.
*Addendum (edit 10 Sept 2021): A reader asked if I meant to close the door on building peace with the Kelloggs or Kissingers of the world with this phrasing. Absolutely not, I’m committed to building peace and finding solutions with anyone that wants to explore solution space together. It is a little late to have a dialogue with Kellogg, but one of the most generous (and Nobel prize-worthy) things Henry Kissinger could do today would be to have a real conversation about opportunities that were missed because of the realism that was invoked in finding the solutions he found (and settled for) at the time. Likewise, we’re missing an opportunity to learn from the experience of Aung San Suu Kyi by treating her as international pariah, rather than continuing a dialogue that has been lost.
