Newsletter #82 — February 12, 2023

Colleague Activities

Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.

• Effective Problem-Solving Efforts
  Mediators Beyond Borders International — MBBI builds local skills for peace and promotes mediation worldwide. Their approach emphasizes inclusivity and cultural competency. Their multi-disciplinary practitioners uncover and address the many contexts of conflict, including the impact of trauma on communities.
• Effective Problem-Solving Efforts
  National Association for Community Mediation — A member organization, and a hub for advancing the work of community mediators, aggregating their wisdom and amplifying their voice. Their goal is for community mediation to lead to community mobilization.
• Escalation Limiting Projects
  International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism — An action based, interdisciplinary, research center working on psychosocial, cultural, political, economic, ideological, and technological topics impacting global peace and security.
• Big Picture Thinking Projects
  The Karuna Center for Peacebuilding — The Karuna Center bridges deep divides to transform violent conflict to foster reconciliation, interrupt cycles of violence, and strengthen community resilience. They also lead initiatives to bridge damaging social and political divides, and to train local leaders in conflict mitigation techniques during outbreaks of communal violence. 
• Effective Communication Strategies
  Listen First Project — Listen First Project leads the collaborative movement to heal America by building relationships and bridging divides. They enhance the impact, visibility and voice of the interpersonal bridge building field by aggregating, aligning, and amplifying the efforts of 500 #ListenFirst Coalition partners into large scale, collective campaigns and strategies.
• Escalation Limiting Projects
  Parallel Networks — A nonprofit organization dedicated to combating polarization, hate and extremism in the United States and contributing to prevention and countering violent extremism efforts elsewhere. Founded by a former Al-Qaeda member and the NYPD officer who arrested him.
• Escalation Limiting Projects
  The Alternatives To Violence Project-USA — To build an international movement of creative conflict resolution built on affirmation, respect for all, community, cooperation and trust. AVP-USA is an association of community, school and prison-based groups offering experiential workshops in personal growth, community development and creative conflict management.
• Escalation Limiting Projects
  Cure Violence Global — CVG helps communities to implement violence prevention programs that are effective in significantly reducing violence by using a rational, data-driven, evidence-based and smart approach to crime.

Beyond Intractability in Context

From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better.

• Interstate War
  Year Two of the Ukraine War Is Going to Get Scary — From the onset, it was clear that the Ukrainians, the Russians, and the West would almost anything to avoid losing. We are getting closer to the point where we find out what "almost anything" means.
• Social Complexity
  Three Cheers For Gradualism -- The case for incremental change in a radical age. — For a time in which many people believe that radical social and political changes are the only way in which we can address our problems, a persuasive argument for a slower and more careful approach.
• Social Complexity
  Blankets, Food Banks, and Shuttered Pubs: Brexit Has Delivered a Broken Britain — An update on the increasingly sad plight of Great Britain three years after Brexit's implementation. And, a cautionary tale for those considering sudden and radical social and political changes.
• Left / Right Conflict
  How Much Longer Can ‘Vote Blue No Matter Who!’ Last? — A review of what political scientists see as the likely efficacy of the Democratic political strategy of emphasizing racial differences (and assuming near monolithic support from nonwhites).
• Education
  In the Age of A.I., Major in Being Human — Sound advice for young people thinking about how to fit into a world in which artificial intelligence technologies are going to do things that we used to think only highly educated people could do.
• Large-Scale Violence
  Go See What Happened to My City, Then You’ll Know How I Am — From Syria (before the earthquake) a heart wrenching story about the kind of dystopia that authoritarianism and civil war can produce (and another argument for fixing our politics).
• Effective Problem-Solving Efforts
  ‘Bad Apples’ or Systemic Issues? — A look at a continuum between two very different ways of responding to outrageous and indefensible acts and reflections on how our politics affects our response.
• Effective Problem-Solving Efforts
  Banning noncompete clauses would be an economic game changer — Noncompete clauses, especially for low and middle income workers, represent a kind of modern day indentured servitude. Hopeful news about efforts to ban the practice.
• Reliable Problem Assessments
  What Economics (and Sociology) ought to be — This thoughtful essay reminds us of what the social sciences could learn if they would put aside political advocacy and objectively study our problems.
• Constructive Communication
  Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust — A report on a major new inquiry into the mainstream media's trustworthiness crisis and a disturbing argument that the solution is to abandon objectivity and the telling of both sides of a story.
• Countering Misinformation
  How to Destroy (What’s Left of) the Mainstream Media’s Credibility — A critical response to ongoing calls for media to abandon the quest for objectivity in favor of solidarity with progressive worldviews.
• Education
  The Approaching Disintegration of Academia — Reflections on what the abandonment of objectivity would mean for academia (and society's ability to solve problems where solutions depend on true, not politically convenient, understanding).
• Cancel Culture
  Inclusive or Alienating? The Language Wars Go On — A thoughtful argument that widespread efforts to enforce increasingly aggressive changes in the use of language are making things worse rather than better.
• Conflict Profiteers
  The Anti-Gun Violence Hustle — For those who might think that spending money on a social problem means that we are getting closer to a solution, a reminder that the "industrial complex" effect applies to much more than the military.
• COVID-19
  An Even Deadlier Pandemic Could Soon Be Here — The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how very far we are from being able to sensibly and effectively respond to such crises. We simply have to do better and this article explains why we have to hurry.

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