Future of Conflict #17: Healing Resistance (Part III)

This week I read the third and final part of Kazu Haga’s Healing Resistance.

This is the first time I broke a book into three weeks. It wasn’t a particularly long book, but I felt the need to spread it out because:

• The material is dense and I wanted to slow down to understand better,
• I think my emails have recently had “too much” substance in them to be easily digested, and
• I’m finding it challenging to find as much time to read as I had a few months ago.

I’m open to feedback on the advantages and disadvantages to this approach!

There’s not a lot that’s fundamentally different about Part III. Kazu articulates how a nonviolent social movement must come together and shows how the six essential elements work together.

I go into detail in the quotes post, but for here I’ll just give the 6 elements and then share some reflections.

The Six Steps of Nonviolence

1. Information Gathering
2. Education
3. Personal Commitment
4. Negotiation
5. Direct Action (Not always necessary!)
6. Reconciliation (The ultimate goal)

The key takeaways should be familiar to you by now.

Nonviolent movements take a long of time and need us to have “the long view” baked in from the start. In order to be effective, we must see things from the other party’s perspective. We need extensive training and internal mindset work in order to be successful.

Ivan Marovic, one of the cofounders of the nonviolent student-led revolution that brought down the dictator Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia told me that the leaders planned, researched, strategized, and trained for a full year before launching. A full year!

If you’ve seen images of children being attacked with fire hoses in the American South, that was during the Birmingham campaign, one of the Civil Rights movement’s most successful campaigns. The leaders of that campaign planned for a full six months before jumping in with full force.

The seventy-eight leaders of Gandhi’s army lived in an ashram together to do the work of strategizing and spiritual preparation for 15 years before embarking on the salt march.

The part we see images of — that often brings tears to my eyes — took a lot of boring meetings.

Direct Action is also frequently offered to us as a way we can get involved in addressing injustice that’s far away from where we live (like boycotts of South Africa during apartheid and Israeli settlements now).

But it turns out that Direct Action is often unnecessary, and only useful in two situations:

The first is to “dramatize” an issue, to educate the public about an injustice that may not be widely known. As long as the public remains ignorant of an injustice, it is impossible to have a conversation about it.

The second reason to use direct action is to give ourselves leverage in the negotiation … In a nonviolent negotiation, only equals can negotiate. As long as there are unequal power dynamics at the table, we can never have a real, genuine negotiation. Direct action can be used to create leverage—to balance the power dynamics so we can negotiate on equal terms. If a government official or corporate leader refuses to engage in negotiations in good faith, then one thousand people sitting outside of their office may change their mind.

Thus, Direct Action must always be preceded by having a clear goal in mind, and by failed attempts at negotiation. The point is to incentivize the other party to negotiate.

The primary risk of Direct Action is that it injures the relationship. This is where the training comes in. The Direct Action has to be contextualized in a clear desire for reconciliation.

In Kingian Nonviolence, a conflict is not over until there has been reconciliation.

We’ve heard variations on this message for every scale of conflict. At the root it’s about community building and it takes a lot of time. What’s different here is that the express goal is always reconciliation. And every tactic and strategy is judged with reconciliation in mind.

There might have to be actions that involve power, because there cannot be true reconciliation if there is a power imbalance.

Think about this the next time you’re asked to boycott something.

What is the goal? What is the strategy? What is the role of the boycott in the negotiation? Is there even a negotiation? Is there a goal for reconciliation?

Reconciliation is a spiritual thing. Another lens into this comes from Native American elders Kazu spent time with:

In 2017 I had the privilege to travel to Standing Rock as part of a delegation from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship to stand in solidarity with the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people who were fighting for their sovereignty.

The elders there taught us something that I will never forget.

As groups headed out of the camp to go to a direct action, they would remind us that we were not simply going to a protest but to a ceremony. They encouraged us to conduct ourselves as if we were going to a sacred ritual.

The purpose of direct action is often to disturb and disrupt complacency and negative peace, which can be done in ways that are constructive, that honor relationships and the dignity of all people.

Direct actions may surface conflict, they may be uncomfortable, and they may temporarily hurt relationships, but we can still resist in a way that ultimately brings us closer to healing.

It’s all about the Relationship!

I’ll close this series on Healing Resistance with two stories from the book. One is a story of true reconciliation (after murder) and the other gives us some context to have hope for our future as a species.

True reconciliation:

Chris is another one of our incarcerated trainers. Almost twenty years ago, his best friend was murdered. Chris is currently serving time for a retaliation murder he committed.

In 2013, he was transferred to a new prison where he found out that the man who actually stabbed and killed his best friend was serving time at the same prison, on the same yard. We’ll call that man “Tony.”

“For the first several weeks, I was completely stressed out,” Chris shared. “I wanted to take revenge and felt that if I didn’t do something my peers would look down on me. At the same time, if I did take revenge, I knew it would affect my family because I would probably never go home.”

For the next few years, Chris avoided Tony at all costs. He was filled with anger and hatred, but he knew that if he ever wanted a chance to go home, he had to keep his distance. It was his attempt at keeping the peace.

When he started to learn about Kingian Nonviolence, he realized how his anger was affecting him and how avoiding Tony was only creating negative peace. He says that nonviolence “helped me accept my friend’s death and move toward forgiving the person who took his life. I learned about the importance of reconciliation.”

So, what did he do? Something only the courage of nonviolence could drive him to do. He reached out to Tony.

“Now, I’m able to sit and talk to him about our purpose in life—about the type of men we want to be when we go home.” Chris told me this story after a workshop one day. He wanted to tell me because Tony was in the workshop that day. Chris had invited him.

It’s said that you know that true reconciliation has happened when the two sides of a conflict are closer to each other than they were before the conflict started. True reconciliation is about even more than repairing relationships back to its original state. It’s about growth, strengthening relationships, and moving forward stronger than we were before. It’s about moving us all toward Beloved Community.

Yeah, sitting down with the person who murdered your best friend and talking about what kind of men you’d like to be.

And some additional hope (for me):

I once saw a documentary about the people of Meghalaya, a state in northeastern India. One of the rainiest places on earth, the rivers in the forests flood each monsoon season. Hundreds of years ago, the people who live in these forests created an ingenious way to cross these rivers year-round. They wove together the roots of rubber trees when they were still saplings, young enough to be malleable. They would weave them together into living bridges that span from one side of the river to the other. The challenge was that they had to wait for growth to happen. They had to wait for the roots to grow from one side of the riverbank to the other and become strong enough to support the weight of the people crossing them. This could take years, even generations.

In one scene, an old man was teaching his young niece how to tend to these bridges. He explained to her that he may never walk on this bridge, but her children and her children’s children will walk on this bridge, just as he has walked on the bridges built by his ancestors.

This has become a powerful analogy for how I look at the work of social change and the work of building Beloved Community. It is the work of generations, not election cycles, grant periods, or five-year strategic plans.

We don’t need to be weighed down with the expectation of single-handedly changing everything, because we are not alone. We have the wisdom of our ancestors and the lives yet to be lived by our descendants.

Our work is simply to learn from our elders, tend to our portion of the bridge, and pass on the knowledge to the next generation. Our work is to bridge our ancestors with our descendants, meet intergenerational trauma with intergenerational wisdom, and heal the trauma and transform it into the resiliency that we will pass onto our children so that they can cross wider and wider divides.

Maybe we’ll never get there. Maybe we’ll never fully evolve away from violence. But it’s still the direction I want to walk in. And who knows, with the wisdom of our ancestors and the lives yet to be lived by our descendants, maybe someday our children’s children will reach the other side of that river.

Thanks Kazu.
I do believe!
We shall overcome.
Someday.