In late May, 2014, 35 people from 11 countries gathered on campus to discuss their ongoing work with 91����Ƶ’s Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program.

It was the first in a new series of practitioner-focused consultations and conferences that will be held each year during the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI).

“We wanted to gather the folks who have been using STAR around the world to get their feedback on who’s using it, what’s working, and why, and make adjustments as needed,” said
J. Daryl Byler, executive director of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). “We’re trying to set up a process of learning from our alumni and to update our curriculum based on what they’re learning as they put these things into practice.”

The event also helped to strengthen the network of alumni from around the world who have been trained in STAR since it was first offered in 2001.

Doing so will benefit both the university and STAR practitioners, as CJP plans to use this alumni network to implement upcoming contract work, Byler said.

One example is a USAID contract with CJP to provide STAR training to 150 staff in Juba, South Sudan. Five STAR alumni will carry out that training, along with two 91����Ƶ professors.

Byler said CJP plans to begin three-year cycles of on-campus events around several practice areas, beginning with a consultation and followed by a practitioner conference and a writing and research conference in subsequent years.

In 2015, CJP will host a STAR conference as well as restorative justice consultation, beginning a similar three-year cycle for that field. Discussions are ongoing about other potential focus areas for these events in the future.

In addition to helping CJP to improve its academic curriculum and bolster alumni networks, Byler said the conferences and consultations will encourage more writing and research in these areas where CJP has special expertise.

Holding these new events in conjunction with SPI also will add to the learning environment there, as many participants in the consultations and conferences are expected to also enroll in SPI classes, Byler said. He credited CJP program director Jayne Docherty with the vision to launch the new series of events. — Andrew Jenner

Washington, D.C.

Before Sandra Dunsmore became a CTP student, she worked for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in El Salvador. During the last two years of El Salvador’s war, from 1990 to 1992, she met with, listened to, and encouraged the leaders of labor, peasant and business organizations to enter into a process of dialogue about the future of their country.

After the war ended, Sandra acted as executive secretary to the Economic and Social Forum, a mechanism established by the 1992 Peace Accords. “Although the forum never addressed deep-rooted economic and social issues, as envisioned by many of us at its beginning, I continued despite its limitations because I wanted the government, business and popular leaders involved to experience the potential of multi-sector negotiation,” she told Peacebuilder.

“Those were intense and hard years. I never admitted to AFSC the psychological toll that my work was taking.”

While still in El Salvador, Sandra was able take Ron Kraybill’s “disciplines to sustain the peacebuilder” course via email correspondence. “The course was hugely important for me. Ron played an important role in helping me process my experiences and regain energy for future peacebuilding work.”

During the 13 years since finishing her graduate studies, however, it is the teachings of John Paul Lederach that have proved to be the most enduring aspect of her 91����Ƶ experience. “His approach to conflict transformation has informed everything that I have done professionally.”

Sandra, who is a native of Winnipeg, Canada, spent a total of 13 years in Central America. In addition to the AFSC, she worked for the Organization of American States where she headed up the team that developed their first peacebuilding program, and consulted for the United Nations Development Programme and for USAID. She returned to Canada to be president of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, which trains thousands of people annually for peace operations globally.

As Latin America director for Open Society Foundations, Sandra leads a team of eight in Washington DC and three consultants in Latin America to determine how to disperse the Open Society’s grant money in Latin America.

As befits the vision of Open Society’s founder, George Soros, the Latin America program is focused on support for democratic governance – notably citizen security, access to information, transparency and accountability, human rights and improved public policies (including changes in US foreign policy relative to Latin America).

The post-91����Ƶ paths followed by CJP’s 36 earliest graduates are as diverse as the 10 countries in which they are currently living.  Yet several themes tended to recur in the interviews, regardless of the nationality, gender, or vocation of the speaker.

Theme No. 1: Peacebuilding begins with oneself and one’s close personal relationships.

Twenty-one of the 36 graduates (58%) specifically mentioned personal sacrifices or career changes they had made to enable their children to be raised in a healthy home environment with attentive caregiving. Four of the alumni are in couples where the husband is devoting, or did devote, years to being the full-time parent. Three of the female alumni are full-time parents now, and two couples are job-sharing or otherwise evenly splitting child-rearing responsibilities. One at-home parent explained, “I want my children to be part of the solution, not part of the problem, when they grow up.”

Theme No. 2: Peacebuilding needs to be extended beyond self, home and immediate community into the transformation of entire systems that perpetuate widespread injustices and thus foment violent conflict.

“In becoming a parent I have become increasingly aware of the world that we are leaving to future generations,” wrote Jeff Heie in an e-mail to the editor of Peacebuilder. “Our current economic system assigns very little value to prevention and the ‘common good’… I have come to view many forms of conflict as rooted in issues of lifestyle. When Western cultures demand a certain level of comfort and wealth, they sow the seeds of conflict.”

Theme No. 3: Wrestling with transforming systems and structures in the absence of clarity on what would be better and how to get there.

In February 2009, at the Global Baptist Peace Conference in Rome, Aküm Longchari of Nagaland (in northeast India) asked those present, representing 59 countries, to consider how they use nonviolent campaigns around the world: Are they merely addressing the outcomes of a violent society, but not addressing the structures that create it?

In a 1999 paper written with fellow alumnus Babu Ayindo of Kenya, Longchari elaborated:

In almost every part of the world, greed and insecurity have led to astronomic consumerism and domination. What we have now is a culture of lies and death primarily guided by fear and profit. Humanity has turned anti-life. We are now evolving a culture that does not have humans and life at its center… Things will get better when more third and fourth world and indigenous people overcome the [Western] definitions of culture that suffocate their capacity to transform their world according to their needs, as their ancestors did.

Build Relationships, But Then?

Upon graduating from CJP (called “CTP” in their era), most of the 36 alumni felt they had been well prepared to develop the interpersonal relationships necessary for reaching out to parties in conflict and bringing them into dialogue with each other. They felt they had learned to listen respectfully, regardless of the nature of the speaker, and to converse in a diplomatic, culturally sensitive manner. They also had learned to be aware of the array of factors that play into a conflict, including who are the stakeholders and what might be their motivations.

In other words, these alumni often spoke of emerging from CTP with a new lens through which to view themselves and the world, of being sensitized to how others view life. They also emerged with analytical tools to help them know “where to start” in their efforts to sow seeds of peace.

Nobody interviewed expressed regret at gaining these insights and skills. Almost all spoke of the ways they had benefited from learning them.

Nevertheless, about a third of the interviewees expressed a desire, as Ayindo and Longchari voiced in their paper, “to search for new paradigms of governance and systems… with the inherent capacity to meet the aspirations of peoples.”

CTP did not contribute to this search, at least not in their era of study. “The one area that I wish would have been stronger at CTP was a critical analysis of how economic systems and relationships perpetuate conflict,” said Jeff Heie. “The military-industrial complex is an example that we all know about. An economy that relies so heavily on the economic activity generated by arms sales and military spending has a vested interest in keeping violent conflict alive.” Heie and other alumni expressed frustration at addressing the effects or symptoms of cycles of destruction, rather than breaking the cycles.

On the local level, for instance, Jim Bernat has worked for a community services board in a semi-rural area of Virginia long enough to notice that some of the clients coming into his treatment system are the sons and daughters of clients treated for mental health or substance abuse problems many years ago. “Our system is clearly broken, when the kids arrive at our doors as harmed as their parents were,” said Bernat.

In El Salvador, Sandra Dunsmore said she ended up doing “damage control” in her role as a facilitator of dialogue for the stakeholders involved in winding down the war in El Salvador in the mid-1990s, rather than hearing the stakeholders address the social and economic issues underlying the war – issues that fester to this day in El Salvador.

Need to Understand Power

“I used to think that if your arguments are good enough, people will listen to you,” Dunsmore said. “Often that isn’t true, especially when there are very powerful interests at play.” Back in her day at CTP, Dunsmore added, “We talked very little in class about power dynamics.”

Upon returning to West Africa after graduating, Sam Gbaydee Doe kept seeing something that he did not know how to stop, even with his rapidly growing network of peace organizations: certain African power-players went about winning a place in the post-conflict power structure by intentionally doing horrific things. Doe observed: “One of the best ways to get recognition, to get a seat at the negotiation table, is to cut off the limbs of babies and children.”

Eventually Doe developed a hunger to move beyond scenarios of dealing with sickly violent characters to figuring out “how we can make the state work for ordinary people.” In 2005, he entered a doctoral program in Britain to study the history and mechanisms of statebuilding, intending to apply his findings to Africa.

No interviewee suggested that demonstrating in the streets, in the manner of the French Revolution or even of Mahatma Gandhi, was an effective way of transforming the “system.”

“We can’t just protest,” said Dunsmore. “We must come up with proposals for things that will work in the real world. We need to understand the deep, complex phenomenon underlying our global problems.”

From her professor’s perch in Ohio, Laura Brenneman agreed: “Oppression is definitely structuralized, but [in the US] folks are mostly comfortable and don’t want that pointed out.”

Yet even those folks who aren’t complacent, who are willing to acknowledge “structuralized oppression,” are handicapped by their lack of a socio-economic “paradigm” to work towards. As
Dunsmore puts it, “We’re flying blind. We can’t see around the corner.”

The Impact of Money

A final consideration in this discussion is money. None of the 36 alumni featured in this Peacebuilder have deep wells of money at their disposal. Many depend on grant-based funding that provides for short-term interventions or other types of work focused on specific problems.

Yet “sustainable peacebuilding takes years, decades, generations,” says Jan Jenner, director of CJP’s Practice and Training Institute.

A major source of grant money for CJP in its formative years was the Hewlett Foundation, according to CJP’s leaders in the 1990s. After a decade, however, Hewlett shifted its priorities to environmental and development issues, withdrawing funding from CJP and other peace organizations it had been supporting.

In hindsight, Hewlett does deserve recognition for hanging with CJP for 10 years – many foundations shift their funding priorities much more quickly than that. Ironically, however, Hewlett shifted its funding just as CJP had started to develop a track record, as exemplified by the work of our first 36 graduates.

One can dream of the long-term impact Hewlett might have engendered if it had maintained its support, perhaps providing CJP with the resources to explore the structural issues troubling so many of our alumni today.

As matters now stand, many of our graduates spend considerable time writing grant applications for short-term funding. If successful, they subsequently must prepare detailed reports to meet the typically rigid requirements of their funders. Rather than being accountable to the people they are trying to serve, they must tailor their work to the funders’ current interests, which may be “natural resource conflicts” this year, HIV/AIDS next year, and “human security” the year after. Few of our alumni are willing to speak on the record on this matter, because of fear of losing all funding possibilities.

An African dependent on grant money said: “The whole peacebuilding field is becoming monopolized by USAID, which exists to advance the foreign policy of the United States. I have seen funding of a particular project suddenly cut off, not because the work we were doing wasn’t good and effective for the people at the grassroots, but because Washington DC saw no benefit for Americans in what we were doing.”

Another spoke of a $5 million USAID grant supposedly earmarked for peacebuilding work in Africa that was siphoned off by US contractors and other “experts” en route to Africa, resulting in only $175,000 actually being available for work by Africans for Africans.

These views are the stuff of uncomfortable conversations. But they are exchanges that need to be held, according to Jenner, formerly a CJP student and now an administrator. She says more resources need to be put into “longer term, harder work, [including] having hard, disagreeable conversations about problems, confronting power, and building peace that is sustainable.”

How to do this “longer term, harder work” may be CJP’s biggest challenge over the next 10 to 15 years.

— Bonnie Price Lofton

Photos courtesy 91����Ƶ/CJP archives



I came as an associate with the KonTerra Group. My role included coaching the retreat planning committee prior to the retreat itself and then leading a workshop on teambuilding and an exercise on developing a vision statement during the retreat. At the conclusion, I joined the retreat planning committee and the ASMED management team to “debrief” and identify future possibilities for organizational development and teambuilding.

I felt privileged to get a glimpse into the impressive economic development work being done by ASMED. This is an organization that has grown from two staff people in Kabul in late 2006 to more than 75 staffers in Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-sharif, Jalalabad and Kandahar. While there have been growing pains, the degree of shared vision among the staff and their apparent organizational effectiveness are remarkable.

ASMED has assisted aspiring exporters of Afghan products to present their goods – carpets, marble, wool and cashmere, dried fruits and nuts, food processing, gemstones, and handicrafts – at trade fairs in such locations as Tajikistan and India. In addition, the Sabawoon Poultry Feed Mill in Jalalabad, started in 2008 with the help of a grant from USAID, is producing quality feed in demand by chicken farmers. Previously such feed had to be imported. The lists the following results for ASMED’s work in the last three years:

• Provided 550 business skills training sessions throughout the country.
• Created about 25,000 full-time equivalent jobs since late 2006.
• Supported 6,370 Afghan businesses and facilitated access to
• Established more than 120 (including 27 women-run) business associations and supported more than 230 associations with grants for equipment, capacity building, and improving member services.
• Provided 137 small grants totaling $3.45 million for market development, value chain improvement, and association capacity building.
• Established an internship program benefiting 1,025 university students, a quarter being women. Approximately 75 percent of the graduated interns received full-time employment offers from their host companies.
• Offered 521 professional mentorship opportunities, linking young entrepreneurs with business executives.
• Facilitated the sale of more than $30 million of Afghan small- and medium-enterprise products at national and international trade shows.

To maintain and improve upon this remarkable record, ASMED and USAID recognize that ASMED must transition from leadership by non-Afghan experts to leadership by capable Afghans who have been given the time, training and support to develop into exceptional leaders. Fortunately, I could already see that such Afghan leaders are emerging in the organization – several played leading roles in the retreat.

Clearly, a week-long visit to a deeply complex country like Afghanistan means that any impressions are at best provisional. However, I left Kabul with a deep admiration for the ASMED staff with whom I interacted and a greater sense of hope for the future of Afghanistan. The commitment of Afghan staff to work for a better future for their country, at the risk of serving with a U.S.-linked organization during a time of war, was particularly impressive.

David R. Brubaker, associate professor of organizational studies at , has expertise in supporting healthy organizations, leadership, group conflict and change processes. He has trained or consulted with over 100 non-profit or governmental organizations in the United States, Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe.