The opposite of violence is not peace; it is creativity and imagination—the ability to look beyond the base mentality of ‘you hit me, so I hit you.’ When creativity is introduced, the traditional choices of fight, flight or freeze turn to ‘what else can be done?’
Such is the story of women, in a village in the Congo, who, upon hearing that a band of rebels were sweeping nearby villages, raping, stealing and murdering, cooked up all of the food in their community and went out to meet the rebels before they arrived. The women offered preemptive hospitality—food and a place to rest—with the stipulation that all guns were left outside the village. Creativity gave a positive spin to conflict.
This is the message that Jonathan Rudy, Elizabethtown College’s Peacemaker-in-Residence carries with him after 30 years of learning through mistakes and progress as he travel across the globe helping to facilitate peaceful reconciliations and beginnings.
Sometimes there are times when the bullets are flying, or it’s at the water fountain at work. … It’s when there is damage from one side to the other.”
Rudy now explores “subtle energies, mystery, change processes and the role of the human heart” as they apply to developing peace. At 8 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 18, he presents “The Cutting Edge of Peace” at the College’s Bowers Writers House. Rudy will read from his own poetry and will speak on his experience of building peace.
For Rudy, peace building can be as intimate as personal solace or the harmony between husband and wife, coworkers and siblings or as geographically and culturally distant as ongoing rebel and government conflict in the southern Philippines.
“Sometimes there are times when the bullets are flying, or it’s at the water fountain at work,” Rudy said. “It’s when there is damage from one side to the other.”
Conflict, he noted, is, in and of itself, a neutral occurrence. It is necessary for growth, but it’s how the divergence is handled that determines its path. “Is conflict necessary? Yes. Is violence necessary? No.”
Organizations such as the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), OXFAM International, Alliance for Peacebuilding, Search for Common Ground and the UN take part in building peace in areas of the globe that struggle with ongoing conflict.
Building peace, Rudy said, is much like the construction of a mud hut. It begins with knowing and envisioning what you are going to build. It needs a blueprint that addresses the question of “what would peace look like” to all involved. That outline leads to the materials—the mud and sticks—of peace building.
“Conflict brings energy,” he said, and the building materials come from an analysis of how to channel that energy from negative to positive. Then comes the quest for skills. In some cultures, in which the conflict has been in place for generations, there are no community members with the tools or skills facilitate conflict transformation.
In the southern Philippines, for instance, there has been political tension since the late 1800s. More recent tension arose in the late 1960s between the government and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), originally established to condemn the killing of Filipino Muslims. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a splinter group of MNLF, seeks an Islamic state within the country. No one alive today in the Philippines remembers a time when there was not violence.
In cases of ongoing issues of ancestral domain, there are cycles of peace, Rudy said, but they ebb and flow because the foundation of the issues were not addressed. The reason the peace doesn’t stick, so to speak, is that in past processes, those with the most at stake were not included in the course of action. Those at the talks, said Rudy, are traditionally those who command the forces, but there are no “common people.” Once the common people establish what peace looks like, structures can be put into place to maintain it.
What if peace looks completely different to the opposing groups? How does a peace builder help find consensus?
Conflict transformation is the process of taking the two sides–or positions–and acknowledging a shared interest to create a win-win solution, Rudy said, offering the example of gun control. One position says that there should be no hand guns because hand guns kill innocent people. The other position says they want the freedom to possess guns to be able to ensure defense. The interest shared between the two groups is that of security. That, said Rudy, is where the discussion begins.
Rudy earned his bachelor’s degree from Bethel College in Kansas, a graduate certificate in conflict transformation from Eastern Mennonite University and a master’s degree in religion from Eastern Mennonite University. He advised programs in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Lao PDR, Philippines, Nepal, Sudan and Vietnam among others in administration and peace building and conflict transformation. He was a Bantay Ceasefire member investigating breeches in the MILF/GRP ceasefire agreement in Mindanao.
The Peacemaker-in-Residence worked as a fieldworker, a country corepresentative and was an Asia Regional Peace Resource with MCC, an Akron, Pa.-based peace and justice organization. In 2007, Rudy started his own consulting firm as a nonviolent social change strategist. Though he has been involved in countless and significant peace building efforts in more than 30 nations, he said he can’t take credit for the conflict transformation. It is purely facilitation. The actual act of peace happens in the villages and nations, with the people themselves.
At this point, Rudy said he sees himself as a mentor, passing the torch, in some ways, and accepting new torchlight from younger generations who are developing fresh ideas and energies to make peace possible. “I’m at an age where I help facilitate younger energies and, in it all, I also am a learner,” Rudy said.
In addition to being grateful for the opportunity to stay connected to the field, Rudy said he is “filled with gratitude to have a campus environment at Elizabethtown,” to teach while still learning from those just coming into peace building, collecting ideas and information. Peace building simply continues to be a good fit.
Some of the most basic elements of peace building are “to be kind and be grateful,” Rudy said. “Those two things I can do.”
For more information on the Bowers Writers House event taking place Feb. 18, contact Jesse Waters at writershouse@etown.edu or 717-689-3945
717-689-3945.