As a practitioner engaged with peace processes around the world for the past four decades, I am asked with increasing frequency an unsettling question: Are we headed toward civil war here in these United States?
Such a question isn’t preposterous. In other places I have worked, deliberate toxic polarization — exclusion, political control and the dehumanizing of adversaries — has contributed to repeating cycles of armed conflict. Once unleashed, wars become very hard to end.
We are not exempt.
The divisions in our country are not new. But in recent years, we have witnessed a significant fraying of our social fabric. Public officials and their families have come under assault, as have civil servants and even ordinary people. Indeed, a May survey found that nearly half of Americans think a civil war in our country is either likely or very likely.
But not all the news is bad. Research published in late July confirms an important finding: Across partisan divides, Americans greatly overestimate the willingness of their adversaries to use violence. That means we have a rare opportunity to de-escalate.
Local leaders in dozens of war-torn countries have shown how to do it.
• Refuse to belittle others.
• Stay curious about their lives.
• Speak about your own deeply held convictions without blame, retreat or demonization.
I especially recall a meeting in 2019 in Valledupar, in northern Colombia, that defied logic, given 50 years of armed conflict in that country.
People from all sides of the political, ethnic and cultural divides — every one of them personally impacted by violence — sat around a table. Two of them had family members who had been extradited and imprisoned in the United States: one the son of a prominent paramilitary leader and, on the opposite side, the brother of a FARC guerrilla commander.
Yet there they were together, talking and listening. Learning. Eating. Even laughing. They rarely agreed; in fact, they argued with passion. But they kept on talking to pursue a shared conviction: Despite their deep differences, the violence had to stop.
They called their ongoing conversation the “Improbable Dialogues.”
For me, who had worked with victims in this same region at the height of violence 20 years earlier, the gathering left an indelible impression.
But Colombia is not the only place I have seen this kind of courage. I saw it in the cross-community work over decades in Northern Ireland, and in the remarkable work of the “women of Wajir” in the border areas of Kenya and Somalia, who brought about the end of widespread warfare between clan-based militias.
It can work here, too.
With our current divides, many people feel forced into choosing sides.
