Peace Negotiator Explains How to Stop Violent Conflicts Before They Escalate

David Wood [00:00:00] If you look at the science around how you build peace, we know that you've got to help people overcome group identification. So when people start to think in groups and they start to judge others based on their group identity, then you're in a bad situation because that allows for group judgements and group punishments. Hi, I'm Dan Crow, a small business owner living in central Illinois, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:32] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we speak with Professor David Wood, who is a peace negotiator that has traveled to some of the hottest regions in the world, including Libya and Yemen. We sit down to talk about what does it take to get a militia leader to sit down and come to some sort of peaceful resolution. What is going on with the international organizations and who is staffing them up and what sort of impact does that have on the peace process? And we even talk about what's going on in the United States is the conflict that is growing between left and right or urban and rural going to result in potentially a violent outcome. This is a fascinating conversation with a person that represents a world that I am deeply enmeshed in that of negotiations and trying to mediate through conflict. So I hope you really enjoy this. I'm sure many of you will find things in here that you can apply to your regular lives. Before we get to the interview, I still taking a few last signups for Legacy Interviews. This is when you hire me to sit down with a loved one for an hour or an hour and a half to share family stories, to record those family values and the histories that we always wanna do with grandma or dad, or even just sit down for our own children. But we never seem to have the time. And so what I do is hop on Zoom, or if you're in the St. Louis region, you can come to one of our offices and we sit down and do this interview to try and capture those things so that you have them to pass along into the future.

Vance Crowe [00:02:08] People have told me that this is one of their most treasured gifts that they've ever given, that it's something that if, if there was a fire in their house, they would run in to get it to save it because it's so valuable to them. So if you're interested in finding a very unique gift for a loved one, you can go to store dot Articulate Ventures and hire me to do a legacy interview with one of your loved ones. We will only have a certain amount that we can get done before Christmas, so hurry up and sign up today to make sure that we can get yours in as a gift. Alright, without further ado, we're gonna head to the interview with Professor David Wood. Professor David Wood, welcome to the podcast.

David Wood [00:02:50] Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Vance Crowe [00:02:52] So you come highly recommended from one of my mentors and close friends, Dr. Jang Wong, who said, if you wanna talk to somebody that understands real world peace negotiations on the ground, what, how do you actually make peace possible with different groups of worrying people? Then you should talk with David. And so here we are. You're a very busy man. Where are you right now? And talk a little bit about what you do day to day.

David Wood [00:03:19] So I've just got into London. I'm here for a week, and then I'll move on to Doha and I'll do a circle of the Middle East. So I'll spend a bit of time in Jordan and a bit of time in Lebanon, a bit of time in Yemen and so on. So it's an opportunity just to keep my understanding up to date for different conflict dynamics and support those actors who are, who are working through conflict day to day. It's difficult to describe, but I think what's interesting about the work that I do, it's like this golden thread between those people who live on the ground in conflict and how they manage the challenges that that poses all the way up to their national authorities and how they kind of develop visions for the future, how they, they strategize for overcoming conflict all the way to the international community and how they plan for delivering aid into these difficult conflict arenas. So it's a, it's a nice kind of diverse cross section of the human, the kind of the national political and the international aid world.

Vance Crowe [00:04:14] I'm quite interested in all this, like long time listeners will know that I worked at the World Bank and for a long time I was definitely interested in doing the international organization thing. And then I got in there and realized it is not what you think it's going to be when, when you get there. So you're kind of in between these two worlds for somebody that has no connection, right? They're, they're farming in Nebraska right now. How would you describe the world of international organizations and how they impact things like peace talks in Yemen?

David Wood [00:04:48] I mean, that's such a different question. Difficult question because the world of international development is, is very highly contested. There. There's this, the idea that we provide neutral aid, this, this good aid into places of fragility where there's violence or where there's underdevelopment. However, aid always has a political resonance. And so most international aid actors are political in nature and they develop their aid programming based upon their political position. Just a basic example of that, in Syria at the moment, there's a conversation around whether we should be, be building cities, damage by war, whether we should be supporting agricultural development is a critical thing within Syria. And there are those who say, no, we can't do that because to do that would recognize the Damascus victory and hence the, the aid that's going to Syria is very much constrained by humanitarian mandate or profile. So the idea is we only deliver on the basic needs of people rather than trying to help them help themselves. You know, that that classic di difference between do you catch fish for someone or do you help someone to learn how to catch catch fish? So humanitarianism as you provide the fish development work, is you're, you're teaching people how to catch the fish themselves.

Vance Crowe [00:06:02] So when you're going to a place like Yemen, I mean for most people, including myself, that is the edge of the world, right? That's a place that is locked in a different time altogether. How does somebody even become a person that can travel to Yemen, let alone do anything in that culture?

David Wood [00:06:22] It's, it's difficult, I suppose it's hard for me to describe it now because there's been a process of really kind of developing my reputation, my networks, the ability to kind of negotiate these kind of conflict dynamics. And that takes time. And honestly, I just got lucky when I was younger. So I just by chance, I was, I managed to work for a good organization in Southeast Europe and the caucuses. And then I was in Georgia during the 2008 war over, over, so Azea as so the Republic of Georgia rather than obviously Georgia and the United States. And then, then in 2011, I started a peacebuilding organization, which was literally me and Iraq Sack going into Libya after the Arab Spring trying to help community leaders to overcome communal violence. And I just got really lucky, you know, looking back, I shouldn't have done it. It's dangerous. It was a silly thing to do, but having that experience is then a kind of a spring forward for doing it repeated times.

Vance Crowe [00:07:20] I mean, this sounds insane. What, what do you mean you took a rucksack and you went into Libya? Like what, what draws a person to go do something like that?

David Wood [00:07:27] Well, if you look at, say, the a what, what we call the Arab Spring, the set of uprisings in the Middle East from 2011 onwards, they, they were really a revolution for the world. Th this was a big opportunity to overcome authoritarian regimes to put democracy at the heart of the mid Middle Eastern governance. And it was really a make or break moment for the world, really. And so if you, you care about the world at that point, you say, I wanna be involved, I wanna make a difference at this point. And I just had enough experience of working on peace building to be able to throw myself in. And it was a question of meeting with some libyans over overseas, them talking to their authority representatives to get me visas, me getting on the ground, talking to the kind of militia leaders, talking to the armed group leaders, to the, the new government revolutionaries and community leaders and them just trusting me. And that then provided a opportunity to, to work with a set of these leaders over four or five years.

Vance Crowe [00:08:31] And so what do you do when you start working with militia leaders and people that were, I mean, they're prepared to kill other people in, in their pursuit of justice or freedom or whatever their perspective is. What are you doing to bring them to the table and get them to do anything at all?

David Wood [00:08:47] Yeah, but it's interesting you say that, that when you think about a militia leader, you are, you are automatically thinking about someone who's willing to kill for their, the, the hopes of their dreams, the future. But I believe that every person also wants to be seen as a good person. They want their legacy to endure. They have real hopes, genuine hopes for their families, for their, their communities, for the nations that they're part of. And it's about kind of tapping into that, that that desire to be part of the goods change, to be part of the positive world, to be seen, to be part of that, which I think all of us want to be, we all want to be good no matter how much we say we don't care about how people think about us. We all want to be seen to be good, I think. So that's kind of like one of the kind of the key entry points, I think just to connect with people on a human level to ask them what they're trying to achieve and then to to work with them to, to try and get there.

Vance Crowe [00:09:41] And so when you're working with them, what do, what do you do? You bring 'em together and say, we're gonna have you talk with your mortal enemy or like, how, how does this work?

David Wood [00:09:49] Yeah, well this is where you come back to the kind of the development side. So I think what we know from peace building work, as we call it, or dialogue work or conflict prevention work, that talk for talk's sake is just not useful. People have to feel that there's going to be a positive result at the end of it. They need to feel that their time is well spent within that. Also, because everyone has this kind of political capital, if you're a community leader, you need to deliver something for your community and you only have so much time to do that. And your ability to be a leader depends on how you use your time. Think of it like, you know, a local elected representative in the US they need to deliver for their community if they're gonna get reelected. So it's around having a very clear offer for them and that's where the development side comes in. So some of the great successes I've been part of or assisted have been, for example, when international aid agencies have said, look, we will give you a certain amount of money to redevelop your area if you can deal with some of the conflict. So suddenly they've got an incentive, they've got a practical thing that's there, you know, that's, that they can hold onto that they can kind of rally around. So I think it's about having that practical thing. And then the rest of it is basically change management. You know, you're talking with people who are leaders of, of their own organizations around resetting their strategies around getting the people behind them to agree with them and being just more effective in, in delivering on their goals.

Vance Crowe [00:11:19] There's a whole bunch of directions we can go with this. One of them of that that strikes me is are you just an independent actor here? How is it that you get tapped in and that you get to participate with the international organizations to be the representative there?

David Wood [00:11:37] Well, I mean there, there's a kind of a nuance there. So I suppose previously I was the head of an organization, so I was the director of an international peace building organization. So I also had this kind of the support mechanism of the organization. You then have funding from donors. So we had a lot of funding from the Swiss government. Also some funding from the US government for example, especially in a places like Libya. And that provides you with credibility as well. At the moment. It's interesting 'cause about three or four years ago I moved my work under this academic umbrella. So I've Seton Hall University where you went and studied this fantastic little creative school on, on the east coast. And then the rationale becomes that I'm a professor and, and for some reason people trust professors. I'm not sure why, but that kind of gives you this, this enigma of an entry point. But I'm still working with the, the same, the same funders, the same donors in the international community. And again, that's a reputation. It's like any field that you work in, when you have a good reputation, when people trust you, that takes you forward, I think.

Vance Crowe [00:12:40] So let's talk about what's going on in the world today. There's a big difference between what the person on the ground like you sees versus what, you know, the casual reader of social media or the occasional newspaper or magazine. So what's going on in the parts of the world that you're visiting that normal people just wouldn't see or know anything about?

David Wood [00:13:00] I mean you, you're talking about I suppose the complexity of being human. You know, there's so many parts of that, you know, the, the feelings of trauma, kind of the hopes, the humor. I think this, this is actually a key point. What often gets lost, I think certainly in a European audience, an American audience, just how funny people are people are when they go through conflict. You know, you have all these defense mechanisms and people just have a lot of humor. So I can tell a lot of dark stories about pupil survival, which you know, often we don't see, but you know, these guys are incredibly funny. So I think the humor, the creativity, you have to be very creative to learn to live in places of conflict. How do you work out how to get your daily needs met? How do you work out who to talk to, how to avoid getting shot? This is a kind of a creative processes of, of survival. So we, we miss a lot of that human story, I think. And then I, I suppose from, from my perspective, what we, we don't see is just the, the negative influence of international aid or international actors within these settings. Because what you're talking about really is a long time development process. So there's a organization called the Organization for Economic Cooperation develop who looked at revolutions and wars around the world and they did a basic analysis that every time you have a revolution or a war, you need about 30 to 40 years for it to stabilize to it, to normalize you need a couple of generations of people getting used to simple things like a government, a government that is less corrupt or getting used to democratic processes.

David Wood [00:14:41] We can't just turn the switch on. And that's what we try and do. And we often do it very badly. I mean, one of the reasons in my own humble opinion that Afghanistan has turned into such a alma was the way that we delivered aid was reinforced corruption processes that actually meant we were never going to have a successful outcome in a place like, like Afghanistan. Because then the Taliban have just this massive message of the international actors are reinforcing corruption, we're against corruption. And they won a lot of the, the public through that kind of profiling.

Vance Crowe [00:15:15] Yeah. And that's exactly how they came to power to begin with. I had the good fortune. Yeah, probably the biggest part of my graduate school was who I lived with and I lived with this guy from Afghanistan, he was a Fulbright's scholar and he pointed out the reason the Taliban welcomed were welcomed in by the villagers to begin with is that the government that was there was so corrupt. They, there were no judges they could go to, there was no, and people will not stand to not have justice. They will either go to a strong man and and give that strong man the power or they will turn into their own mob justice, but people won't feel like they can't corruption corrodes all the way down. And, and absolutely, I agree with you and, and it's funny because, you know, the telling of what was going on in Afghanistan was, you know, we're on the side of the good guys, we're putting the good guys in power. But from afar it's nearly impossible to know who, who you're handing money over to

David Wood [00:16:09] Abso That's correct. Completely correct. And I think, you know, for most people who work in international aid, they really do want to be on the side of the angels. They do want to do good. So there is very, very rare that you have mal intent that someone is purposefully trying for things to go wrong. So it's just a question of misjudgments about how long these things take, about what's important. You know, we, we were saying because of our own important ideas, for example, about women's rights, that's what we need to push on now as someone from England who now works on the US I believe that's correct, that is right. We need women's rights inequality in a place like Afghanistan. However the priority was anti-corruption. Do the basics right, then we'll get to that later down the line. So it is really tough when we want to do well, to know the balance between our own ideas of what's right, our own morality and what's gonna work within the places where we're, we're looking to do. Right. And that's, that's just a tough, tough call I think over time.

Vance Crowe [00:17:09] Yeah, and I would say that there's a selection pressure for where the big schools are that allow people to get into some of these international organizations right there along the eastern coast of the United States. They're in d different parts of Europe. And that creates the, the type of person that ends up getting into the international organization is already been surrounded by a certain set of ideas and a certain way of thinking about problems such that they don't even know that there is another way to think about it. Because everywhere they turn, every person they talk to agrees with this type of thinking. So I agree with you, it's definitely the majority of the vast preponderance of it is not, not mal intent, it's just only one way of looking at things to the extent that you almost believe there is no other way to see things.

David Wood [00:17:56] Yeah, absolutely. It's very interesting you were saying that because before I moved to to C Hall, I actually went on a couple of motorcycle adventures across the United States. So I, I drove from Miami across the Los Angeles and acro or across the south and then I drove back through the middle. And I love the rural areas, the so-called rural areas, they're still developed by international standards, but you know, going through kind of a Utah or a Georgia, these are or a Tennessee, these are fantastic places. And actually when I was thinking about moving to the US I was looking at universities in those kind of states, but it would just be so disconnected from the international system, which is based around the New York, kind of Washington area, a little bit of Boston, a little bit of Los Angeles, but that's really too far away from, from Europe. So that's all kind of looking towards the Asia side. So yeah, you, you do have that real geographic divide and opportunities I think within the US to become part of kind of the international development world. That's definitely the case, which is a shame because you have expertise. This is a bit of a sidetrack and I'll come back to your point in a moment, but I remember about five or no about 10 years ago, I was talking with one of the old, old hands of international humanitarian response. So he was there in the seventies and eighties responding to kind of the wave of, of natural disasters within kind of within the, with the African area, all the famines and so on. And what he said is when we started, you know, the humanitarian world as it exists at the moment, it was people with skills we brought in doctors, farmers, construction workers.

David Wood [00:19:39] We needed to have those skills to be able to provide support and assistance to people within these contexts. Whereas now we get a lot of graduates. So we have a lot of people that don't have practical skills but have been taught how to write and think, which is in a academic style, which is also very important. But that's actually, we we're kind of being starved of those practical skills a little bit, if you see what I mean.

Vance Crowe [00:20:05] Oh, I saw this in the Peace Corps hardcore, like when my dad was in the Peace Corps, you really had to prove you had some physical skills in order to be able Absolutely. To get in there. And now the Peace Corps is really designed or oriented around were you the top of your class? Were you a good student? Did, did you participate in these civic activities? You're not getting bonus points for I showed cattle or I knew how to do a bunch of fixing of electrical plants.

David Wood [00:20:30] Yeah, yeah, no you're right, you're right that that's right. And and for, for the, my specific corner of the world of international development, which is this peace building conflict management world. What you really need above everything else is interpersonal skills and the ability to be compassionate, to empathize, to walk with and talk with those people who you probably don't agree with. And that's very, very rare. So again, what I see coming into my world is a lot of people who are good analysts, they get the theory, but they might not get the people. And that's, that's a, that's gonna be a struggle going forward if we continue in that di direction. So I'm hoping for a bit of a revolution back to the practical skill sets. But then the challenge is how you integrate that because we have, you know, a very developed in the US and and Europe, very developed university system which do, do suck in a lot of these very capable, competent intellectuals but aren't perhaps tapping into those who have the practical skills to go with it.

Vance Crowe [00:21:28] Yeah. And there's a whole thing about like who, who gets into these schools and what do you have to do to get into the schools? And I think I have thought because I wasn't aware of how the agricultural system in the United States works, but basically every single state has their own ag school and then within those ag schools they basically have their own little world. And I have long thought, if I were going to be moving my graduate program in a direction, I would go try and use the ag schools as the feeder schools to my diplomacy program if you at all could, because those kids are just so much different than than what you get out of just, just your private schools, like where I came from.

David Wood [00:22:08] Yeah, that's, that's really interesting because that also meets the need. 'cause if you think about it, someone like me, I've never done agriculture, you know, I'm from a city boy, I'm from London. I've, as, as I was joking you with before, I thought that, you know, hamburgers came from the supermarket. I didn't realize they were attached to an animal till I was about 18 or 19. So I have no idea of the process, but you're putting me into a position in mostly underdeveloped countries. 'cause the places where the conflict happens are usually underdeveloped. And I'm often mediating between farmers or I'm mediating around agricultural crop cycles and I dunno what I'm doing. So I know the, the people skills, but I dunno the kind of practice, a really good example is after the 2008 conflict over South Azea in Georgia, the, the Russians and the South Aetnes established what they call the administrative boundary line, which was the line of control basically between the Georgian government and the, the Russians and the South Ians. Now this, this actually those split across agricultural farmlands. And so, and a big question was around, around maintenance of the irrigation system to allow for proper crop cycle management. See, I'm using words I don't understand already.

Vance Crowe [00:23:21] You're on, you're doing fine. Yeah.

David Wood [00:23:22] Okay, good. And so my role there was to go and facilitate agreements between the community groups on each side and then with the Russian peacekeepers as they called them around allowing for Georgians to travel across the administrative boundary line at the right time to do the right kind of work to kind of renovate. So, you know, to to have someone with agricultural skills at that point would've been fantastic. But, and that's also an example, if you remember we were talking about focus on the practical. So we were really focusing on the practical stuff rather than the big, where do you see your country in 30 years time stuff. And then if you look at the biggest humanitarian catastrophe in the world at the moment, which is Yemen, 25 million people need food aid every day. Now, this is huge. We've been providing food, humanitarian food aid now for five years and we are still going through these peaks and troughs of famine because humanitarian food, humanitarian aid doesn't solve the problem. So we need to do good agricultural projects in these places. And again, bringing the skills in to do that with still being savvy around the diplomacy side would be, would be very, very useful.

Vance Crowe [00:24:37] Yeah, I remember. So I have a, a good friend named Brian Mos, and he's a cattle rancher from South Dakota and he's like the slow talking south Dakotan that you would imagine very like just very gentle. Yeah. And he said something one time that was really profound to me. He said, you know, livestock is a universal language. If you know how to speak about livestock, it doesn't really matter. You can get past any language barrier because you yeah, yeah. If you know how to care for animals, you can relate with somebody else. And I don't think that's ever been more apparent to me than during this conversation that you're, you're right because the, the person that understands the challenges of raising animals can communicate with the other one.

David Wood [00:25:19] Yeah, absolutely. And, and that's the case in most conflicts that we face in the modern age, that they're mostly ones based around deprivation under development when there's insufficient products where the costs are too high. So being able to create functioning agricultural systems and markets is where it's at. And that's what's happening in Yemen at the moment. It's not, it's interesting the case, it's not gonna be the case in, in say 50 years. There's some interesting work that demonstrates that by that point, the majority of the world's population will have moved into urban areas. And you'll have to say a Mumbai of, I think it is 40 million people, you know. So at, at that point most of these kind of conflicts are gonna be urban nature, but at the moment they are very kind of rural rurally situated, I think.

Vance Crowe [00:26:04] Well, so you're with the Center for Peace Studies. Why don't you talk a little bit about this, because it's a very interesting, it's an interesting group that you're with.

David Wood [00:26:14] Yeah. And we've brought you on as, as one of our fellows as well, which we're very proud of. So, you know, trying to bring back the kind of the old graduates to become part of the future, which is exciting for us. Yeah. So I suppose the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies is there to do one thing and do it well, which is to bridge this practical experience of mediation on the ground with all the theory and the policy making that goes on within the political circles and within academia, we want the policymaking to be a better fit for the realities of working on conflict on the ground. Because at the moment there is a bit of a disconnect. And that means that we do something which is odd in a university that we actually run mediation processes on the ground. So Professor Jang Wang, who who you know, runs processes between the US and China on dialogue around, for example, preventing military escalation in the South China seas. I run processes across the Middle East and North Africa. So for example, last year I was mediating between the two governments in Libya on a joint national COVID-19 response. And it's about taking those experiences and bringing them back to the policymaking world. So that's what we are really looking to do. And what that does mean as well is really challenging some of these kind of thinking that you were very politely describing as probably east coast dominant, kind of more liberal leaning thinking as perhaps being less useful, less impactful within the external world that we're look, we're looking at.

David Wood [00:27:48] And that can be controversial. So some of the work that we're doing at the moment is very controversial. I I, I mean I can kind of dive into it if you want to. Yeah, man, man, go. Yeah, go hard. I can talk forever. I can talk forever on this. So one of the, for example, one of the big things which is really relevant in America at the moment is how do you remember the past? How do you talk about the past where you might have different ideas of how good the past was? You know, if you are outside of America, for example, what always struck you about America up until say five years ago was how Proud America was of its past. This sense of having a shared understanding from the revolution onwards around the, the S'S state in the place in the world as a beacon for democracy, a beacon for liberal thinking for freedoms, and the pride within that, which seems to have been shaken up over the last five years or so with some people thinking, being less proud in the past, where others being still incredibly proud. So that's a, that's an example of how you deal with the past in places of violent conflict. This is more pressing. So for example, if you have the overthrow of a, of a authoritarian regime like you did in Iraq, the question is how do you deal with the officials from the last regime? Do you imprison them? Do you, do you cut them off from public life? Do you give them the same opportunities as everyone else? So you remember the past in different ways through stories or through kind of legal actions that you take.

David Wood [00:29:19] Whether you pull down a monument or you keep the monument up is about how you deal with the past. And what often happens is that people emphasize the justice part. You know, there's this sense of injustice for the past and there's a desire to have justice for the past in the, in the present moment. And that can lead to a lot of bad decision making. So what we're trying to do at the center, for example, is promote more nuanced thinking about how to deal with the past that balances, for example, justice with other concerns such as making sure that you're not creating polarization in society in the modern moment. Making sure you're not increasing hate in the modern moment, making sure that you are, you are actually gonna have kind of an outcome that's effective for everyone rather than something which really divides. And that goes against a lot of people who are, who are more on the kind of the justice side of the camp.

Vance Crowe [00:30:12] I'm a huge fan of Xang Wang's work, you know, he, he radically changed my life. And I think one of the things that he is so good at doing is breaking down. So recently I've been reading the philosopher Renee Gerard quite a bit. So this philosopher, I don't know, are you familiar with his mimetic theory? No, no.

David Wood [00:30:29] So tell me,

Vance Crowe [00:30:30] So his concept is that human beings, there's so much in the world that we don't know what to want and that it's actually a much better thing, or is a way to be efficient is for the human brain to look around and say, what is it that other people want?

David Wood [00:30:45] And

Vance Crowe [00:30:45] If I want that too, then if I achieve it, then I, you know, get status or I get power or I get the things that I want. And he basically says that all of human interaction comes down to mimetic desire, and this is how mobs get started. And that mobs are really around, like they, they have to have a feeling of being the victim. And once you take on that thing and you say, we are doing righteous good work, then the mob becomes something extra human, right? It becomes beyond just human cognition and you can no longer control it. And so when you're talking about things like a shared history or an understanding of what justice is, this maps exactly to this, this theory, which is saying you have to have more nuance here because as people foam together to become a mob, the, it's just, it becomes this reoccurring thing that just happens. This group thinks that they were unjustly treated, so they go take some horrible action, this horrible action, then make somebody mistreat. And it just goes on and on and on. And I think that what you guys are describing is the only human rational way to remove yourself from this mob mentality that we're so predisposed to.

David Wood [00:31:55] Yeah, very beautifully put. You should come and do a couple of classes with me. No, you're right. And, and to, to quote some more obscure thinkers. I mean, one of the, the people that influenced me when I was young, I studied accidentally Russian and I was in kind of Russia during the second Chein war just by accident. And that's why I got into the world that I'm in at the moment. That was 2000 to 2001. And there's a, a great revolutionary writer called Zain. And he wrote this book called Mu, which is a we, which is a kind of a diary set in the dystopian future once the, the communist socialist party has won. And it was copied a number of times, including by tis huxley in his brave new world. And the, the basic idea that Zain has is that we always move between the energy, the desire to change, and then the entropy, the desire to then fix the rules for so that the others can't break that. So the person who becomes the revolutionaries ultimately gonna be the despot because they're gonna try and fix the new set of rules that then people are gonna break. So for any of the, the Russian speakers out there, there's, there's a fantastic anecdote about Zain when he was caught by the NKVD, which are the precursors of the KGB during the purges by Stalin. So you know, where they got rid of all the kind of the opposition and he was a radical revolutionary and they said, you know, you're against the revolution. And he said, yeah, which is something along the lines of I am the revolution and just stormed out because they were already trying to set the rules and to say who had the right to speak and who didn't.

David Wood [00:33:34] They'd lost the revolutionary moment at that point. So I mean, that's a kind of an anecdote to get kind of background to your, your point that from peace practice internationally we know some very clear things. You know, if you look at the science around how you build peace, we know that you've got to help people overcome group identification. So when people start to think in groups and they start to judge others based on their group identity, then you're in a bad situation because that allows for group judgments and group punishments.

Vance Crowe [00:34:10] This is the formation of the mob. Absolutely. Yeah.

David Wood [00:34:12] Yeah. And that's why the legal system as it exists within the Anglo-Saxon world is so important because it pushed responsibility away from the group to the individual. You are judged as an individual and your parents and your children and your family are not going to suffer the punishment for your crimes. This is an essential ingredient in overcoming the kind of group identification. So, you know, myself and a colleague, we call this transcending the collective. You've gotta allow people to think beyond the collective to see the other person as an individual in their own right. So we know that you've gotta help people think, not in group terms, but in individual terms. You've got to help people think in complex terms. So what often happens within conflict environments is that you get this kind of idea of the angels and the devils. I'm on the side of the good, they're on the side of the evil, therefore it's okay for me to do bad things to that, that person. And so what you then have is this justification for violence and bad actions towards the other because you think they're evil and you're actually just, it's this cognitive dissonance. You're not seeing how evil you are being within that. And there's some fantastic studies, for example, by an American academic based in Cambridge who demonstrates that you can prevent violent extremists by helping them think in more complex terms to move away from this binary good and bad kind of way of looking at the world.

Vance Crowe [00:35:38] I'm totally with you on this, man. This, this goes along with my most recent way of thinking, which changes all the time. But one of them, Renee Gerard, when he's talking about the mob, yeah, he ends up describing some very interesting things, stuff that I had never thought of. He says, you know, the Catholic or not the Christian teaching about Jesus is really in large part trying to dissuade people from joining the mob. And he gives the example of when Jesus comes into Jerusalem for the last time, that's when they were laying palms down in front of him, you know, so that way his, his sandals wouldn't even have to get dirty. That same group of people are the ones that just one week later start calling for his death. And, and the story of Peter when they start saying, Peter, it's you, you know, we know you're with him. He's like, no, I'm not with him. I don't, I don't wanna be a part of, I wasn't with Jesus. And he denies it. All of these Bible stories leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus was about individual culpability and the natural pull towards joining the mob, which I had just never thought of. But that the Christian mythology is really designed around helping people to transcend that. So they could get away from thinking, well if I'm just a part of the group, then I'm not responsible.

David Wood [00:36:54] Yeah, very true. But it's not just Christianity, it's, it's across all religions. So if you look at the development of Islam, for example, and Mohamed, part of his crusade, for one of a better word, was to stop the tribes fighting each other. You know, he was able to transcend the tribal violence within the Arab Peninsula so that people treated each other as each other as as individuals no matter what tribe they came from. So it exists within Bo within Buddhism, it exists within Hinduism, it exists within Judaism. This sense of well being part of the group not being restricted by that group, which is an important kind of difference. And there's, there's a great kind of English academic who used to be a Catholic nun called Karen Armstrong who wrote a book called The History of God that looked at how most religions have come out of these important social change moments. And then she describes how the golden thread between all of them is this idea of compassion, really caring for the other no matter what they've done to you, which we think of as very Christian, but actually cuts across so many different religions. And for me that's the third kind of pillar of learning that we have. You know, you've gotta help people overcome the collective. So they think in individual terms you've gotta help them see things in complex terms and you also have to enable them to care, to have compassion for someone, not so that they ultimately give in because you should, you must have read kind of William Oy is getting to yes, this

Vance Crowe [00:38:24] Classic.

David Wood [00:38:24] Oh yeah. So you always want to keep your, your objective, but if you care about the other, you can also potentially keep the relationship. And if you really try to understand the other, you're gonna get better at your negotiation because you understand what the other's trying to achieve. So compa so compassion helps you basically,

Vance Crowe [00:38:43] I mean, there's no doubt if you can describe for the other person in as high fidelity or higher fidelity than they can why they think what they think and you're not doing it with judgment. You can watch somebody go from being hyper stressed to then being like melted away. And, and it's something my wife and I do all the time, right? Like when, when tensions start getting ratcheted up, I say, okay, let me see if I understand you and then instead, you know, it's very tempting to do it like in a mocking tone. But if you do it in a genuine tone and you say, this is what I think you're saying, this is when conflict goes from being high tension to being like, okay, he does understand what I'm saying. Where's the nuance that we need to met out the difference?

David Wood [00:39:22] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So coming back to your question, what does the day-to-day life look like? So one of the ways that you do that is you, you kind of, you get people to argue from the other position and they hate it to begin with, then they get used to it, then they start to think about what it means for them. You know, what does my argument, their understanding of their position mean for what I should do? Then they start to think about what it means for the other, you know? So it's a very powerful tool, this, this kind of thinking from another person's perspective. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:39:52] Yeah, that's right. That's why college professors are such a a, a powerful force in the world. It turns out if you have somebody write a paper that even if they completely disagree with the conclusions, but you say you have to write 800 words on it. Yeah. If you come back a week later, their position about how they feel about that can change all the way, like more than a standard deviation. So they can go from being like, I abjectly disagree with this to being like, no, I, I kind of see what the point of that is. And those can be used for for good or for for ill, I'm sure, but it's a powerful thing to be able to understand the other.

David Wood [00:40:27] Yeah, no, it is and it is. And that's, I do you like the the singer Nick Cave? Have you ever come across Nick Cave, the Australian?

Vance Crowe [00:40:36] I mean, I'm, I'm familiar of him, but I couldn't tell you any songs.

David Wood [00:40:39] Oh, okay. Well I've got beautiful memories of like seeing Nick Cave in like these old towns in Italy. But anyway, so Nick Cave also writes this fantastic blog where he talks about the importance of avoiding the radical. So he says that within his writing, it's an attempt to be creative and to be creative you have to be open to learning and different possibilities. So the creation itself is openness. So if if you are not open to different perspectives to learning from the other, then your, your ability to create has, has just dissipated. It's gone. If you think about it, bring it back to the agricultural world. Like to be good in agriculture I'm sure involves innovation. To be innovation means that you're constantly sharing ideas and imagining what ifs, what if we did something different? And those who are open to ideas and creativity around dealing with the land or new types of machinery and so on, are going to be better than those who stick to the old principles rigidly. So creativity is just important whatever field you're in.

Vance Crowe [00:41:44] Yeah. And this is so, you know, in my own experience, so I worked for Monsanto, which you know, for a lot of people would be seen as this very dark kind of devilish corporation

David Wood [00:41:53] I've been told.

Vance Crowe [00:41:53] And yeah. And, and so I was a part of this group and one of the things that we learned about in graduate school, in the school of diplomacy was where you sit on at the table determines where you stand on issues. And I used to think, yeah, that's for other people, right? Like who put you at that table changes how you think about the issues. But then I look back on my time at Monsanto and I remember hearing the arguments for why you wouldn't use GMOs or why you wouldn't use pesticides. And the way that I heard those people describing things was always from a, those people are lying, those people are deceived, those people are. And then once I came out of the organization, so now I know a lot more about agriculture, but I'm no longer at the seat because of Monsanto. I don't think that I changed in as much as I just started being able to see people's perspectives that I just hadn't been able to see before. And it wasn't like Monsanto was paying me, Hey, you should think this way or telling me at all. Yeah. It's just, that's what naturally happens and it's really hard to admit to ourselves that all of us are vulnerable to just siphoning down the other side to overly simplistic narratives. And it's really difficult to step away from your tribe and be like, what does that tribe know that I don't know because I would be able to learn and, and take in

David Wood [00:43:19] Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [00:43:19] And bring 'em into my own.

David Wood [00:43:20] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And for me then, so this is the kind of the, the fourth pillar of good peace building. So if you think of the first one, transcender Collective don't, don't see people as, as groups see them as individuals, humanize them. Kind of the, the second one is around compassion, being compassionate. So really caring for the other, I've forgotten one, but I'll come back to me in in a moment. But then this fourth one is around curiosity and really being curious, genuinely curious. And it's like you were saying with your wife, if you're genuinely curious, people know if you're not genuinely curious. And then you can always tell that someone is, is asking a question to get to their end, to get their, to their outcome. And, and like again, in the world of kind of conflict work, we call this the different zones of listening. You know, zone three is when you're thinking about dinner. Zone two is when you're listening to the other person and you're thinking about what it means for you and what you are gonna say. Next zone one is when you're thinking about what the person is saying and then trying to understand what they genuinely mean. So you're focused on them. And we always oscillate between those zones. And the key is to be aware of that and to push ourselves back to zone one. 'cause it's better for us, we're gonna learn more ultimately.

Vance Crowe [00:44:34] Yeah. The, the podcast has been a lesson in this, right? It's hundreds and hundreds of hours of trying to oscillate between like, how am I going to ask the clever question versus like, what is it that this person is actually trying to say? And the, the benefit and probably the curse of a podcast is you can go back and watch and you can say, oh man, I saw like, I was definitely in zone two there. I was definitely trying to, to not listen, but, but just think of what would be creative. So this is changing the subject, but it's something that's really personal to me is I view the conflict within the United States as ratcheting up rather quickly. And I don't, I I think it's a way too simplistic to say it's left versus right or even rural versus urban. But I definitely believe that there is an othering that you can feel going on in the world. When I describe this and compared to your knowledge of of conflict escalation that's gone on around the world, what do you see when you look into the United States?

David Wood [00:45:38] I think you're right. Again, just a slight anecdote, I can't give you the full anecdote because that would be breaking trade secrets, but I and Xang Wang were training a foreign government's ministry of foreign affairs in peace programming. And we were taking into the crisis room and have a, a map of the world and they've graded it in the usual kind of traffic lights, grading schemes about where the crisis is going to happen. The US was up there in a crisis flashpoint now along there with Assyria or a Yemen according to their grading system. It was very interesting to see that. Yeah. So no, I completely agree. I completely agree that you are closer to large scale violent conflict than you believe yourselves to be. And when I say you, I mean generally the, the people in the the US because there has been this process of dehumanizing the other, and I I don't fully understand the edges of how identities are made within the US but it definitely is along the Republican democrat divide. It is along those who feel themselves as more traditional value based and those who feel themselves as a so-called liberal based. And there is definitely a growing divide there. And the that's okay generally because as you, if you'll hopefully remember from your cast conflict is good if it's managed well. 'cause it allows you to explore different ideas and come up with solutions. The critical is about management though. And the challenge for me is that Americans are starting to stop trusting their conflict management institutions.

David Wood [00:47:14] People are stopping trusting the democratic process. And that's on both sides. There are kind of mirroring accusations around malpractice On the other side, people are starting to stop trusting the media and they've probably gone a long, long way past that now. And these are critical institutions within any national constituency for managing differences. And for me the kind of the, the four four pillars are you've gotta have a media that allows you, exposes you to the other and allows for genuine debate. You've gotta have a legal system that people trust to provide justice in a fair manner. You've gotta have a democratic process which people trust and they're willing to abide by the outcomes even if they don't fall in their kind of sense. And you've gotta have a good education process that everyone agrees with. And that's often interesting that people think about education before governance, but education is because the way that we learn together allows us to trust these systems together. So I do think you're at a flashpoint. Yeah, definitely.

Vance Crowe [00:48:23] Yeah, I I mean I think all of your institutions that you pointed out were really good. And actually as you were talking about the media, it reminds me when I was in Kenya just before the riots broke out and they had to clear out all of the Peace Corps volunteers that were there. I remember like thinking that the newspapers were comical, right? It was like hilarious to me just how inflamed every single issue was. And you know, you'd look at the US papers at the time and you'd be like, yeah, they, they have their own points of view but nothing like this. Nothing of like the, you know, the guy that flies down on the ground in the soccer match when he was just barely grazed and like rolling around on the ground. But that seems like what's happening and even if you just perceive it's the other guy that's doing it, they perceive your guy as doing it as well. Yeah. It's just so hard to see it on your own side.

David Wood [00:49:11] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But it's interesting, you can see it, what for you is allowing you to see this, that perhaps other Americans, it's stopping other people from seeing it. What can help other Americans to see that mirroring process of othering as you called it, that perhaps you know, that you are seeing,

Vance Crowe [00:49:31] I'm in an unusual place in that the podcast has allowed me to start a network and the network is filled with very intelligent people that live all over the United States. Even some people in Canada. And it's a little like going to church, not in the sense of religion, but in the fact that people come together. So you have like a book club or you have, we have a debate program called the Circular Firing Squad or we just share ideas in this network. And what you see are people that are wildly different, right? You've got the, the Mormon farmer and the woman with a transsexual son, right? And so these people are having conversations but they're all polite with one another, right? Yeah. The number is small enough, it's, I don't know, 80 people or something like that. So it's way below the Dunbar number. So people are open and honest and you see these different perspectives and you think like, ah, well that's, you know, that's Anna, she's got a perspective. I don't automatically agree with it, but I think that our current culture is set up such that we don't have very many heterogeneous mixtures of people. And COVID probably only exacerbated this by orders of magnitude, right? We don't just have serendipitous collisions with people that view things differently than us that we have to stay polite with because we're gonna see 'em again and again and again.

David Wood [00:50:47] Yeah, that sounds right. I I love the fact that you said even Canada, you know, I think that's right. And again, if, if you wanna put that in academic terms, this is what we were is often referred to as social capital. So the idea that, again, horizontal exchange between people as equals allows focused on a thing which is of joint importance allows for a sharing of of ideas and perspectives and humanization of the other. So the idea of social capital was actually, I think generated by an American academic called Glen Lowry. And it was very much actually interestingly about how persons of color might not be doing so well economically was perhaps 'cause they lacked that interaction with people from different backgrounds that would give them different perspectives and allow them to learn. But their name was taken on by this guy called Robert Putnam, one of the great social scientists within America who wrote a couple of books on social capital and one was called bowling Alone. And the idea of bowling alone, it seemed to chart this diminishing involvement by Americans within group activities that, you know, in the seventies or whenever it was, people would go bowling in groups where you would cut across and you'd meet people with different perspectives. Whereas now people are likely to go bowling alone. So participation in parent teacher associations, participation in your local community circle, all of this has, has, has decreased. And the great hope was that social media would allow that to increase again.

David Wood [00:52:18] But the challenge is that it, social media doesn't work the same way as physical gatherings, you know, so you're able to, to solidify differences on social media 'cause you can actually gather around those people who are the same and you don't need to interact with the other. So yeah, I think you've pointed to a critical thing. It's about increasing the number of organizations, gatherings, interactions that cut across divides. So in the US I'm a member of a couple of motorcycle groups now, obviously not the hardcore people, more the hipsters. And we have people on all sides of the debate genuinely. And in a couple of groups it's too sensitive still. And they say no politics when we ride in some groups it's okay, but you need more of that. You need people coming around, a shared interest with people from different perspectives. Now one of the big worries for me in the US if what you are describing is true. And there is this difference in living within the countryside and urban areas, and you have different focuses on interests then, then how do you bridge that? 'cause that's such a big divide potentially.

Vance Crowe [00:53:27] So I, I don't know. I mean, I think this concept, there's a, there's a guy I had on the podcast named Sam Obu, and he talks about social technology and the very things you were describing, you know, whether it's the PTA or church or the rotary club, we think like, oh, these can al always, these will always be there, right? Like this is a, this is, but what his hypothesis is, somehow humans, as they were innovating, they came up with these social groups that allowed us to come together and allowed us to have this fabric. And it wasn't just split along your racial lines or your ethnic lines or your religious lines. There were other reasons people would gather together. But as people have found, oh, it's a lot more efficient to skip that meeting. It's a lot more easy for me to have my, my dopamine hits of meeting with other people done online. Those things have broken apart and it, Robert's rules of order doesn't make a meeting. Right. Yeah. Like it's, it's only the way to tell you how to facilitate it and without people finding reasons to come together. Yeah. And this like massive accumulation of power in these very small areas, whether it's, you know, the DC New York thing or just larger cities in general. I, I don't know. I, I think we will likely have to invent a new technology that allows us to transcend this because on on the current trajectory, people won't be able to met out their problems over social media, which will cause real conflict in the, in the streets.

David Wood [00:54:53] Yeah. And it, and it's interesting because there seems to be two thought processes amongst the limited exposure that I have to American kind of political thinking between those who are focused on the union and want it to survive and are thinking about the ways of overcoming this divide. And those who are starting to think, well maybe there's a natural split here. Maybe we should, and I hear that you, I I sometimes listen to the Young Turks, which is far on the left, and they say these things. I then listen to Ben Shapiro and he's quite on the right. And I hear the same thing being said there. That this, this is an open question now, which, which is, you know, worrying we, we should be rallying around these shared institutions to work out how to make them work. For, for me, I mean if, if I was kind of brought in to help this thinking within the us I'd be looking to get the political leaders together and say, choose one thing that you're gonna build trust on. And for me it would be the democratic process. Allow people to trust that when their vote is made, that it's been done fairly and that the outcome is fair. That's it. Just focus on that. Nothing else, you know, to really have one success story that everyone is gonna say, this really works for us. Because that's when, you know, people often try and do too much. They try and fix all the problems. Take one thing, do it well move on to the next, the, the next issue.

Vance Crowe [00:56:10] I think in that cha the challenging thing about doing it now is that we haven't had a breakdown that has caused enough pain to bring people to the table. Right there, there is something to the, to the needing people to feel threatened enough

David Wood [00:56:25] Or

Vance Crowe [00:56:25] That that, you know, annihilating the other side won't allow you to actually win. Right? I mean I think that's, if you look at the Northern Ireland situation, like they, they could firmly come to the conclusion that total annihilation of the other side was just not going to happen. But I don't think people in the US believe that right now. I think they genuinely, both sides believe, if I can just amass a larger group of people, we'll be able to conquer the other side. Maybe we'll change the democratic rules. So it's rule by majority, maybe we'll cut off food supplies or we're the ones with the, you know, the weaponry. And so I don't think right now that you do, I mean I'm open to you disagreeing with this. Do you think you could bring a leader to the table? Wouldn't they be risking too much by trying to capitulate before the problems have gotten really bad

David Wood [00:57:12] If advance, that's what a leader is. A leader is someone who sees a problem in advances and is creative with it, who is transformative with it. That's what a leader is. We shouldn't be looking at other things and calling it leadership. That's not leadership. That might be good management at best, but it's not leadership. A leader, a leader deals with the problem by bringing people together, by being curious, by being compassionate. So I think you may have a leadership issue slightly, but yeah, no e everything, you know, everything you, you said is, is kind of, is very true. This, this sense of you need to have a break that's big enough that allows people to realize that something needs to be done. So I've seen a couple of these as you have, so last year, the wave of protests this January, kind of the events on Capitol Hill and how that's being portrayed. These are, these are not insignificant moments. They should be the calling card for good leaders to set the ball in motion to deal with the problem ahead of time. You know, in the world of conflict management, as, as I'm sure you remember, we, we call this the hurting stalemate. So that when the parties recognize that they cannot win unilaterally, that they need the other side and that their contentious approach, their aggressive approach is only hurting both sides, that's when people come to the table. So you need a hurting stalemate. That's part of the theory about good conflict management. And you need people to see there's a hurting stalemate. And then you also need the optimism, the readiness, the sense of a solution can be made as well.

David Wood [00:58:48] So you need both of those, those parts to, to be in place. Yeah. So I, I feel that you are at that point already, you know, this isn't a small divide. These are significant issues that have been manifesting now for two years and you need leadership on this.

Vance Crowe [00:59:03] Oh, that's interesting. I think this from the inside of the water, the water doesn't feel that hot right now. And maybe it is hot. I mean like it definitely feels like it's getting warmer, but it doesn't feel like we are at a point where people are like, oh, I better, I better go meet with the other side. 'cause my side might get wiped out just as easily as we might wipe them out.

David Wood [00:59:24] Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, being in a society and a conflict is much like seeing your son or your daughter grow up when you are with them, you don't see it so much. Whereas if you go away for six months and come back, you see the development. So I had a similar experience going into Lebanon. So I was in Lebanon last, last November where things weren't so bad. I went back again in June or July this year, and there's a full economic crisis now for people living in the context. They'd normalized it, they'd normalized fighting at petrol stations, they'd normalized people not having enough water. And for me, this is like, guys, this is a crisis point, you know,

Vance Crowe [01:00:01] We need to think about this

David Wood [01:00:03] A little bit differently. Yeah. So yes, it, it, it is very much like that You can't, you can't feel the water temperature change when you're in the bath.

Vance Crowe [01:00:12] So let's, let's wrap up by, by hearing, where do you think the center for peace and conflict studies will go over the next year? What do you guys hope to accomplish in the near term? And, and you guys just brought on some fellows. Talk a little bit about that.

David Wood [01:00:26] Well, I suppose the fellows are interesting in that we have some very experienced people working international world. So for example, there's a guy called Andrew Ham who was basically helping to manage the stabilization of facility in Iraq that came in to rebuild the cities damaged by kind of the war during the ISIS period. And he's now a kind of at senior management position in US ip. So we have those kind of backgrounds and then we have people who are more US focused such as yourself. And so for us, I think what we are trying to do is, is also just test the water. Whether we can bring it some learning back into the US it might be a value here. So that's kinda one thing. The second thing though is to more proactively just challenge policymaking internationally, we've had some big failures. We've had Afghanistan, we've had Syria, we've gotta learn from this, you know, we have to learn from the failures, which aren't from mal intent. They're perhaps from, from not doing so well. And for me, just as a kind of a throwaway comment, I mean part of that is the classic mission creep with international aid and international organization, there's been a tendency to try and do everything. And I think we need to get back to being good at what we do. Well, if you're a peace building organization, all you care about is mediating between parties. If you're providing water assistance, all you are worried about is getting, making sure the taps are flowing. Now getting back to the, the core business of, of what it means to work internationally.

Vance Crowe [01:01:57] Well Professor David Wood, I'm sure there'll be some parents that are hoping their kids that were in school, maybe in their ag schools or thinking about reaching out. If somebody wanted to get ahold of you to learn more about what you're doing or send their kids your way to hear about opportunities in this world, how would they do that?

David Wood [01:02:15] Well, I don't have Twitter or any of of social media because it's a a bit difficult for a person in my line of work. But there, there's the email David Wood su.edu. There's a website which I can't remember of, but I'm sure I'll, I'll send it to

Vance Crowe [01:02:29] You. You send it to me, I'll put it in the show notes.

David Wood [01:02:31] Exactly. Yeah. And then I'm happy to talk to anyone. I'm interested. The other reason I moved into academia is I'm really interested in helping people to learn as much as possible. And that's what I really enjoy. So I'm interesting to talk to anyone. And then just in terms of what helps 'em get in, learn a language earlier age, get your son, your daughter to learn a language it's gonna be helpful for, for five, six years down the line. And encourage them to be curious.

Vance Crowe [01:02:59] Well that sounds great. David, thank you so much for coming on. Jang Wang did not disappoint. He was dead on that. You're gonna be a great conversation. I hope we have you on again soon.

David Wood [01:03:08] Love to. Thank you for having me.