For human rights and constitutional law attorney Diego Dall ’Agnol Maia, attending the 2019 Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) alongside more than 50 of his fellow Brazilian restorative justice (RJ) practitioners and advocates was transformative.

“We don’t need to be lawyers, prosecutors, judges or social workers here,” he said. “We just need to be humans and talk about our experience, to change the world and make peace.”

Maia helped organize the group of 54, the largest of any one nationality to attend SPI at one time. It included people who are judges, RJ promoters, officials of the judiciary, lawyers, university professors and municipal guards. Dozens more were on a waiting list.

The Brazilian judicial system has shown growing interest in RJ, said SPI director Bill Goldberg MA ‘01, and for years 91����Ƶ’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding has been developing a relationship with people there. Director Emeritus of the Zehr Institute Howard Zehr and circle processes trainer Kay Pranis have each traveled there to provide training. Brazilians have also come to 91����Ƶ for SPI in previous years, and 25 came to campus in 2017 for a weeklong series of RJ lectures and training.

Most participants this year took courses on Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) and victim-offender conferencing.

The SPI courses, Maia said, provided tools that will broaden how RJ is used in Brazil, where current guidelines proposed by the national council of judges focus on the use of circle processes.

“Here at 91����Ƶ, we are learning that RJ is not what the law says, but what the community and people feel about the justice,” he said. “It has given me a new lens, and prepared me and other people in the group to talk more about restorative justice, and be ready in our spirits to go back to Brazil and talk about how these theories and practices are important to the community and not only to judges, prosecutors and lawyers.”

TRAUMA-INFORMED JUSTICE

RJ, which is grounded in repairing the harm of crime in processes that engage individuals and other community members, is well served by trauma training, said second-time SPI participant Mayara Carvalho. She has practiced RJ in the Brazil juvenile justice system, schools and university settings, and she earned her PhD researching restorative practices in communities. She is also laying the groundwork for an RJ center.

Carvalho incorporated the STAR training she received at last year’s SPI into her work with a young boy in Brazil who had been convicted of murder and drug dealing, but who had also suffered poor health and bullying.

“When I put trauma and resilience together on the table, we could see him as a person,” she said – and “he started to think about himself as a person, not as a victim or as an offender.”

In addition to her book Justiça Restaurativa na Comunidade, about using RJ in communities, Carvalho has written a guide titled “Programa NÓS – Belo Horizonte” for using restorative practices in schools. Brazilian schools, she said, are often “a kind of door to criminalization” because of how they respond to students with problematic behavior.

“We’re trying to develop nonviolent communication, restorative practices and circle processes inside schools,” she said, “to work on conflicts in a better way.”

CHANGING THE CONVERSATION

The SPI experience has shaped the Brazilian conversation about RJ, said Maia, and prompted the group to think about “what we’re doing in Brazil and what needs to be changed to do better, to expand this restorative understanding, and then to [bring] this powerful tool to the community for transformation.”

It’s not only about law, he said: It’s also about a social theory of justice.

“In Brazil we just see what the law says, and apply this in cases,” he said. “Now, we are starting to think, ‘Is this justice, to resolve the case only by law? Or is justice to give people the chance to heal their trauma?’”

Tentative plans are for another group of 25-50 to attend SPI 2020, with the current group returning the following year to take STAR II and an RJ course that has a dual focus of RJ in education and RJ in the legal system, Goldberg said.

A CIVIL RIGHTS ATTORNEY AND A RACE RELATIONS EXPERT SHARE NEW PERSPECTIVES

Race relations expert Daryl Davis and attorney Ari Wilkenfeld brought diverse perspectives on civil rights to Horizons of Change luncheons during SPI 2018.

Davis has spent decades in dialogue with members of white supremacist groups, including the Klu Klux Klan, and convinced many to rethink these affiliations. He is the author of Klan-destine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan (New Horizon Press, 1998) due for reprint in the next year. He has also been the subject of a 2016 documentary Accidental Courtesy and has been featured by The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR and CNN.

Wilkenfeld has spent his professional life in the combative, confrontational world of litigation. In a corner of his Washington, D.C. office at the law firm of Wilkenfeld, Herendeen & Atkinson, he keeps a collection of baseball bats, one for each case he has won in court. At SPI, Wilkenfeld visited Professor Carolyn Stauffer’s “Sexual Harms: Changing the Narrative” class and later spoke at a luncheon.

Those interactions exposed “the world that I live in,” which stigmatizes the possibilities, process and potential of collaborative conflict resolution, he said in a phone interview a few days later. “I’ve studied truth and reconciliation as it was conducted in South Africa, and taught negotiation and diplomacy in college and law school, but never had the opportunity to have my manner of doing my job challenged by a group of people who have different ideas about conflict resolution, and not just different ideas but carefully studied and well-thoughtout ideas.”

Many SPI participants – and not just those attending this year’s first-time course offering on sexual harms – bring a nuanced understanding of gender-related violence, said Bill Goldberg MA ‘01, SPI director.

“Increased gender-based violence and inequalities are common symptoms of fragile states, which is why global attention is much more attuned to this issue,” Goldberg said. “The United States delayed development of its required action plan related to UNCR 1325 for 11 years, which says something about how little our political leadership cares about this issue. The grass-roots efforts of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements reflect on issues of global importance.”

During his talk, his word choice was respectfully challenged by listeners. Later, Wilkenfeld said that he’s been mulling over the different perspectives he heard.

“It would be better if, instead of beating each other up in court, we could all sit down and talk things out, figure out how much harm is done and do so in a way that is designed to heal everybody, even the alleged perpetrator,” he said. “People in my profession should all be thinking about that possibility. But our culture doesn’t value that kind of resourceful thinking about conflict resolution. Our culture values wins and losses.”

Rosemarie Bello Truland, a lawyer who teaches sociology at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey, found inspiration at the 2017 Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) in the restorative justice and community organizing class.

She saw a man who had served 25 years in prison sitting next to a retired police commander, “both having come to recognize the importance of acceptance of responsibility on the part of a ‘perpetrator’ and of forgiveness on the part of the ‘victim’ and the community.”

“The people I met have solidified my commitment to action,” Truland said. “In the end, I did not want to leave this campus and this community. The experience brought me such peace and such connection and restored my faith in the power of love, forgiveness and reconciliation.”

Truland plans to integrate restorative justice into the gender studies courses she teaches, to design introductory programs for criminal justice students, and to network with a classmate who works with victims of domestic violence.

Livia Griffith, a director of information technology at nearby James Madison University (JMU), came to the same SPI course after a deeply scarring experience with the U.S. criminal justice system. Five days later, with “renewed hope for transformation of a broken system,” she plans to volunteer with JMU’s Office of Student Accountability and Restorative Practices (directed by Josh Bacon GC ’11). This fall, she also began taking classes towards a graduate certificate in restorative justice at 91����Ƶ with the goal of “building a community of like-minded individuals to transform the criminal justice system in my community.”

The skills taught for 22 years at SPI have always been relevant to people in the United States, says SPI director Bill Goldberg MA ’01, but now they have a renewed significance in the serious challenges the country faces.

“We have 22 years of experience helping people work for justice, peace and good governance in places where governing systems are not working well and where people are in conflict,” Goldberg said. “If we want a world that is built on peace with justice, we need to work effectively, without the expectation of government support, at the community, local and regional levels in every country, including our own.”

New offerings at SPI in 2017 included four courses that directly addressed how to manage and transform divisive rhetoric and communication; how to bring polarized communities together and organize for change; and how to recognize and analyze systems of oppression.

These courses attracted 54 students (out of 175) from around the United States, as well as global peacebuilders seeking to make progress on similar issues.

Griffith says the presence of so many motivated individuals, all seeking positive change and bringing their own experiences and knowledge, primed her own “restoration.”

That’s what Goldberg hopes to hear in the coming months from U.S. peacebuilders who attended SPI and now continue to work at transformation of their relationships, communities and organizations.

“We intend to bring this same focus to next year’s SPI, with courses that provide long-term solutions and new skills for anyone across the political spectrum who is motivated to political and social action,” he said. “Let us know what you’d like to learn more about.”

Life in Beirut can be an endless, grinding stress, and to compensate, Rami Shamma (SPI ’08) used to find himself constantly fidgeting with things and shaking his leg. Soon after his arrival on 91����Ƶ’s campus, though, he noticed a change.

“The atmosphere that is present in Harrisonburg, and in particular at 91����Ƶ, is one of the safest environments I’ve ever seen in my entire life, in terms of security and in terms of feeling comfortable,” he says. “I felt that there was no stress, and I noticed that my leg wasn’t shaking anymore.”

Shamma says he was amazed and inspired by the way participants at his session of the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) got along so well despite all the differences between them. Attending SPI, Shamma adds, dramatically improved the way he has interacted with people at home ever since.

Fadi Rabieh, MA ’08, spent a significantly longer time at 91����Ƶ while going through the two-year master’s program but came away with a similar impression of the atmosphere there – calling it, quite simply, the most peaceful place he’s ever experienced.

His time there, he says, had a profound impact on his worldview, and the relationships he developed were very strong.

“It’s literally like another home. It’s like a family,” Rabieh says.

SPI co-director Bill Goldberg, MA ’01, often hears from participants who are reluctant to leave Harrisonburg, where, in addition to intensive academic study, they have opportunity for respite and are able to recharge themselves away from their often-stressful careers and lives at home.

“There has always been a very conscious attempt to make people feel relaxed,” Goldberg says.

Beginning with meeting arrivals at airports, he, co-director Valerie Helbert, MA ’08, and the rest of the SPI staff try to ensure participants’ arrivals go smoothly. Welcoming events on the first day of each session are intended to create a sense of connection among everyone. Throughout SPI, coffee breaks and two-hour lunches each day are also structured to encourage social interaction. Other activities planned to create a restful, nurturing environment include hikes, yoga, zumba, trips to different places of worship, and interfaith discussions led by the SPI chaplain.

That spiritual aspect of SPI was one of the characteristics Emil El Dik (SPI ’99 & ’00) appreciated most about the experience.

“The atmosphere at SPI is really very warm and helpful. It’s very spiritual. You don’t just learn from the professors. The whole context is rich,” says El Dik, a trainer in peacebuilding, conflict transformation and mediation in Amman, Jordan.

With so many participants coming from a multitude of backgrounds and perspectives, El Dik says the gentle environment that exists at SPI allows classes to transcend cold methodology. Students, he continues, feel encouraged to be authentic and creative – all of which are important for successful peacebuilding and conflict resolution.

“It’s not just about knowledge, theories. It’s about transforming people,” he says. “Everyone there was touched by what we studied. We were transformed.”  — AKJ

SPI 2013 will be held May 6-June 14, 2013. Courses will be announced in late October on the SPI website, www.edu.edu/spi.