JUSTICE IN DIVIDED SOCIETIES Presented as the Horace E. Read Memorial Lecture Dalhousie University Schulich School of Law

Over and over, in societies around the globe, oppression and violence both reflect and perpetuate lines of difference, isolating individuals and groups from recognizing the pain of others. Inevitably, an observer reflects a particular context. Mine is that of the United States in late October, 2023, but I am working to be attentive to developments in Canada and elsewhere. Strikingly, people surveyed from societies across advanced economies report perceiving greater social divisions now than they did before the pandemic.¹⁵ In the United States, the belief that we are divided is perhaps one of the few things that Americans currently have in common.¹⁶ Half of Americans report they prefer their country to be composed primarily of people with roots in Western Europe, and the other half disagree with that view.¹⁷ Political polarization occurs when people’s views on political issues diverge toward extremes, hollow out the center, and build on societal differences. Some politicians amplify white grievances.

Meantime, a majority of African American parents perceive persistent racism and police violence as “big problems.”¹⁸ Anti-Asian and anti-immigrant sentiments are prime concerns for others. American Jews perceive heightened anti-Semitism and risks of violence.¹⁹ American Muslims face religious discrimination and have increased rates of suicide attempts.²⁰ And conflicts between religious free exercise and equal treatment of individuals regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation are mounting in workplaces, healthcare policies, and schools.²¹ A recent poll shows white Evangelical Christians reporting greater fears than any other group about what they perceive as threats to American culture.²² Many people in poor and predominantly white rural communities report feeling abandoned, disrespected, and resentful.²³ National divisions and distrust accompany collective amnesia about past collective amnesia and growing inequalities. People in different and opposing groups fear that their ways of life, their beliefs, or their very existence is at stake. In formal political settings—such as the United States Congress—disagreement within groups rival conflicts between groups and even threatens to spill over to physical violence.²⁴ As a Norwegian social scientist recently noted, “It is dire for democracy if honest disagreement deteriorates into shouting matches of distrust.”²⁵

Current social divisions and distrust around the globe have many sources, including deliberate designs by unscrupulous leaders and social media. Politicians in Hungary, Poland, Venezuela, the Philippines, and Turkey appeal to the fears and hatreds of masses of people—at the expense of minorities, truth, reason, and fundamental values of equality, tolerance, and the rule of law.²⁶ The problem is not a handful of demagogues. Every age produces them. The problem is the discontent of millions of people facing economic instability, climate insecurity, mass migrations, technological change, cultural shifts around gender and race—vulnerable people willing to embrace the politics of fear and blame. And social media companies contribute to fear and division by amplifying extreme and outrage-producing content in pursuit of “engagement” and ad revenues.²⁷ Misinformation and disinformation circulate freely on social media.²⁸ Even Canada cannot escape these forces, although reports of polarization in the country may be artifacts of media hype.²⁹

Domination, division, and oppression operate in part through ideas permeating cultures and beliefs held by individuals, regardless of actual facts. Drawing distinctions between groups is apparently deeply ingrained in humans.³⁰ But who is identified as “us” versus “them” reflects varying contexts, arguments, and ideas, not immutable realities.³¹ Ideas about racial or gender hierarchy rest on notions of race and gender despite their lack of scientific validity—and such ideas and practices persist regardless of reality.³² Ideas, often deeply flawed, about religions, disabilities, and other differences inform people’s fears and beliefs. Narratives about identity and history become part of people’s consciousness from children’s exposure to adults’ explanations, from formal education, and from social settings and cultural practices. Beliefs resistant to factual refutation operate as ideologies.³³ Societies are often organized economically and politically to reflect and reinforce beliefs around group identities. Power maintaining such organization can operate overtly or subtly.³⁴

Conscious and implicit attitudes in people’s minds and also in institutional patterns entrench cleavages and prejudices.³⁵ Scholars for decades have documented the relationships between patterns of violence and oppression along lines of difference in racial, ethnic, religious, or gender identities adopted or reflected in institutions and attitudes.³⁶ Genocide, ethnic cleansing, brutal separation of parents and children, appropriation of land and resources, exclusion from opportunities, mass incarceration, and daily degradations affect people of disadvantaged groups dramatically more than others.

Every country has social conflicts, and social divisions are as ancient as human societies. “History shows us we need labels to help define our place. For hundreds of years, people have categorized others as less so they could feel like more.”³⁷ These constructed differences can become targets of brutality and violence. They can bolster assertions of superiority or entitlement, with lines of difference used to justify mass atrocities, slavery, conquest, colonization, genocide, and apartheid. Centuries of human history are laden with their stories and legacies. We all know that such horrors, sadly, are not new.

What is new is the growing use since World War II of the language of rights rather than misfortune. Legal responses to atrocities can take the form of treaties, constitutional reforms, statutory changes, criminal trials, truth and reconciliation commissions, and reparations. Each can hold promise, but each can also fall victim to indifference or, worse, to backlash.³⁸ Law enforcement can anchor commitment to justice and human rights, but it too can be abused. Moreover, even admirable pursuits of justice can generate backlash, in turn fueling cycles of violence and violations of human rights and dignity.

Responses to injustice and mass violence often take the form of more violence. However understandable a response to harm, revenge means more are harmed. Narratives of victimhood play a key role in entrenching justifications for power, oppression, and backlash against responses to injustice. In the 1870s, many Southern towns and farms lay devastated after the U.S. Civil War. The national government enacted the “Reconstruction” constitutional amendments, affording to Blacks the same rights to citizenship, suffrage, and protection under the law as those enjoyed by whites. Many white Southerners by 1873 called for “Redemption”—the return of white supremacy and the removal of rights for Blacks—and used the often murderous violence of the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and mobs to terrorize Southern Blacks. Historian W.E.B. DuBois later described the period as one where “[t]he slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”³⁹ Resurgence of white supremacist rhetoric and organizations produced violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and contributed to the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Popular culture sources in South Africa have recently projected unfounded claims of “white genocide” related to the murders of white farmers in South Africa.⁴⁰ South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has warned against igniting “the tinderbox of race hatred” and urged recognizing the acts of violence as crimes deserving prosecution rather than talking about them in terms that could strengthen perceptions that whites are still the privileged group.⁴¹ Debates over land reform and worker mistreatment continue to expose the legacies of racialized differences in power and resources.⁴²

Sometimes, backlash stems from ignorance about the past. Ariel Dorfman, Chilean writer and human rights activist, recently warned about the effect of forgetting past oppression, once surmounted, because it can return. In an essay entitled “I Watched a Democracy Die. I Don’t Want to Do It Again,”⁴³ Dorfman reminds readers:

Indeed, the percentage of Chileans who say that the military was right to carry out the coup increased from 16% in 2013 to 36% in 2023.⁴⁵ Chile today is very politically divided. Those divisions include disagreements over how to remember the past, with old narratives and newer ones circulating in a climate of economic dissatisfaction.

These episodes illustrate some of the dynamics of backlash. Backlash is a strong, vehement rejection of change. Advances in women’s legal and social equality have met with movements restricting women’s reproductive choice in the United States, censorship in China, and exclusions from schooling and employment in Afghanistan.⁴⁶ Backlash against court orders to end racial segregation of public schools is an example from the United States.⁴⁷ Here in Canada, a recent survey reports that 53% of young women polled fear so much for their safety when they speak up against harassment, trolling, bullying, and physical violence that most are deterred from doing so.⁴⁸

I certainly do not assign blame for backlash against those who have fought for long-denied rights. Nonetheless, there are warnings from these familiar dynamics, warnings about how losers can lash back and perhaps even believe themselves to be acting justly against what they perceive as their own victimization. Victories for those who have historically been marginalized can have sharply negative unintended consequences, exposing longstanding conflicts and power imbalances. When embedded in dynamics of violence and hierarchy, even solace can perpetuate and escalate pain.

Author Alice Munro captures this problem exquisitely in her short story “Royal Beatings.”⁴⁹ The story reveals a repeated family dynamic. The stepdaughter triggers anger in her stepmother, and both of them know the cycle that will follow: the stepmother calls the father to physically discipline his daughter. After giving her a look filled “with hatred and pleasure,”⁵⁰ he lashes her with his belt and then his hands, and the beating continues long after she shrieks and cries. Yet the daughter knows she is the victim, and she knows that is her role. Later the stepmother comes, as always, to comfort the daughter with a tray of food to eat in bed.⁵¹

Violence in a household is not the same, of course, as societal oppression. But for those caught in dynamics of violence, the interactions of behavior, emotion, and familiar narratives hold some similarities to patterns played out on bigger stages and over longer time periods.⁵² In the context of family violence, there are no easy answers. This was underscored for me when I discussed Alice Munro’s story with a group of judges in a program using works of literature to help judges reflect on family violence problems.⁵³ The judges were learning how to implement a new law authorizing judicial civil protection orders at the request of someone experiencing violence in the home. They immediately recognized the repeated pattern of violence in Munro’s story. The judges acknowledged that all three participants apparently knew each time what had happened and what would happen. One judge memorably commented: “You know, when a family like this comes to court, I never know whether the court is breaking the pattern or simply becoming another participant in it.”⁵⁴ That judge worried that the court’s processes could be manipulated as another weapon caught up in the parties’ struggles. Would the assertion of judicial power, backed by the threat of state coercion, perpetuate rather than alter the patterns of abuse? In a similar vein, opponents of the death penalty in the United States warn that state violence can engender more violence.⁵⁵ Even lawful and warranted assertions of power can continue rather than end violence.

Adversarial responses to harms can accelerate rather than alter the slide from criticism to dehumanization.⁵⁶ This is a big reason for my interest in restorative justice. Truth-seeking efforts such as truth commissions and restorative justice efforts differ from adversarial adjudication. The focus on collaborative truth-seeking and construction of constructive steps for change—building relationships of respect among people coming at the problems from very different places—holds potential for breaking cycles of violence.

Sometimes, gathering and sharing facts broadly can change public understandings and intervene in dynamics of violence and suppression. Absence of common understandings of events, including what harms were created, by whom and to whom, is a by-product and at times a goal of oppression. In some instances, a common understanding is elusive, and instead inquiries must be framed to include disputes over events. On other occasions, breaking silences and overcoming suppression is central and catalytic. An inspiring example comes from Brazil, where first a secret fact-finding effort and then a public commission have inspired truth commissions around the globe as mechanisms for generating findings and altering prevailing silence about the past.⁵⁷

Between 1964 and 1973, the Brazilian military regime subverted democracy, suspending legal rights, and tortured, killed, or “disappeared” thousands of people who engaged in resistance. As the economy and then the political situation changed, in 1979 the military agreed to an amnesty agreement, protecting officials involved in the violent and repressive military regime from any prosecution for human rights violations committed before that time. The deal combined amnesty for political prisoners and gradual return to civilian leadership and a new constitution. But amnesty meant no legal accountability—and a serious danger of suppression of the facts about what happened. To uncover information about torture practiced by the state’s repressive apparatus, a private investigation, undertaken with the support of the Catholic archbishop of Sao Paulo and the World Council of Churches, secretly gathered materials and produced in 1985 a massive report documenting political murders and acts of torture—and it became an unexpected bestselling book in the country.⁵⁸ Eventually, demands for public accountability produced a National Commission on the Disappeared, which thoroughly documented human rights violations through personal accounts of abduction, torture, and death and analysis of the systematic organization of state repression of suspected dissidents.⁵⁹ This truth-telling process became a model for South Africa as leaders from the anti-apartheid movement pursued a peaceful transition from that oppressive regime.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) collected and amplified 20,000 statements from victims and survivors, and the facts gathered from amnesty applications from people who committed crimes and human rights violations informed the five-volume report. The report shows how massive assaults on individuals, families, and humanity could come to pass and makes clear that every part of society bears some responsibility for the past and for the future.⁶⁰ The commission’s work brought many facts to light, helped thousands of victims feel heard and acknowledged, and assisted the transition to peaceful democracy. A public opinion survey ten years after the TRC found compelling evidence that its work contributed to reconciliation within the country.⁶¹ That survey and other accounts underscore that after the TRC, South Africans reported widespread understanding of the wrongness of apartheid as a crime against humanity.⁶²

Albie Sachs, South African anti-apartheid freedom fighter who ultimately became a justice on the post-apartheid Constitutional Court, has explained how the South African Commission succeeded. First, he noted how the truth-telling activities offered an emotional settlement for those who had suffered under apartheid; second, the Commission afforded no space for denial of the truth and instead incentivized perpetrators to confess; and third, it converted the information it acquired into official acknowledgment by the State and, at least symbolically, society.⁶³

The TRC was imperfect and did not fulfill many hopes held out for it. A dominant criticism addressed its failure to hold institutions, including courts and corporations, accountable. Subsequent governments failed to implement the commission’s recommendations or to hold high governmental officials responsible for ordering or countenancing torture and violence, very few prosecutions, and suspended sentences for individuals who did not seek amnesty.⁶⁴ The major failure to address, much less redress, the political and economic structures embedding apartheid practices in ongoing South African practices of power and markets exposes profound limitations of the effort.⁶⁵ Now, with more than a quarter of a century having passed, the many people in the generations born after the TRC concluded did not experience the process. Many younger Black South Africans in particular have responded to structural economic injustice with resistance and even violence.⁶⁶ During 2022, victims of the apartheid regime in protest slept outside the nation’s Constitutional Court as part of a campaign for enforcing promised but never-received reparations.⁶⁷ A recent book reports that many white South Africans are fearful of going out in public; many have not accepted a world where Black people move ahead and whites are not superior.⁶⁸

The TRC did not and probably could not have prevented many problems, including corruption, violence, and racialized inequality that persist in the country. Yet the TRC did play a role in the peaceful transition from apartheid. It enabled over 20,000 people to share their experiences, attain some recognition of their suffering, and contribute to a public narrative breaking official silence about the past.⁶⁹ Even if the TRC efforts did not secure a pervasive culture of stability, equality, and human rights, studies show that communities in South Africa with greater exposure to the TRC through media have lower levels of violence than other communities.⁷⁰ That it did not transform the society should not obscure its apparent success in establishing a baseline of generally acknowledged facts about the apartheid era that reflect the creation of open and public spaces of dialogue.⁷¹ Although some criticize the TRC process for allowing nation-building or colonial attitudes to dominate, the TRC offered benefits to individuals and the society as a whole. The effort to build a shared narrative of the past drew upon and integrated the voices of many people and contributed to fulfilling the aspiration of building a bridge to a peaceful, democratic, inclusive society.⁷² This landmark exemplar of restorative justice could prompt sentimentality about forgiveness but instead should inspire continuing work to build political culture and realities of action in line with affirmed values.⁷³

Restorative justice mechanisms promote truth telling by individuals who have survived abuses and atrocities. By promoting encounters and cooperative meetings among those harmed, those causing harm, and other willing stakeholders, restorative methods focus on truthful human communications about what happened and explore potential consequences and responses. Restorative justice aspires to provide not only responses to past harms but transformation of individuals’ minds, relationships, and communities. Changed understandings of past and future are so often key to remedying deeper injustices and preventing future harms.⁷⁴ As Professor Jennifer Llewellyn has powerfully explained, restorative processes hold potential for a transformative agenda, especially if the process builds personal understandings and shared unity of purpose for change.⁷⁵ The reconciling and transformative work led at places like the Restorative Research, Innovation, and Education Lab offer insights and change for people in local and global settings.⁷⁶

How affirming to see the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe issue in 2018 a formal recommendation for the twenty-eight European Union countries to incorporate restorative justice into their criminal legal systems.⁷⁷ The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime endorses restorative justice, which it defines as “an evolving response to crime that respects the dignity and equality of each person, builds understanding, and promotes social harmony through the healing of victims, offenders and communities.”⁷⁸ In the context of current-day allegations of a crime, restorative justice processes pursue collaboration and forward-looking efforts rather than retributive punishment.⁷⁹ Despite gaps between the ideals and the actual impact of restorative efforts, rigorous studies show promising results in reducing crime.⁸⁰

Restorative methods are spreading widely in response to crime or infraction of school rules and also as a means for addressing mass atrocities, post-war recovery, or legacies of colonization.⁸¹ Restorative processes focus on establishing a common narrative about what happened, built on the participation of victims and survivors, with related changes in political and educational institutions.⁸² Many of the programs have focused on prospects for reintegrating youth in post-conflict settings.⁸³ Although researchers raise criticisms and expose considerable distance between the ideals and the practical implementation of restorative justice,⁸⁴ its aspiration and methods are especially encouraging because they operate at the multiple levels of individuals, groups, and institutions, devising shared narratives and concrete plans for a future that does not ignore or repeat past harms.⁸⁵

Cultural practices, including arts and education, can play valuable roles by affecting the understandings of individuals and communities about social divisions and historic injustices. Rituals, arts, and processes of remembrance and repair and meaning making in response to atrocities have deep roots in cultural practices with histories so lengthy that their beginnings are no longer known.⁸⁶ Commemorative activities afford chances for reflection by people with direct ties to terrible events, opportunities for learning by people without such ties, and, potentially, alteration of the conduct of individuals and groups. An arresting study of German elections over seven cycles finds that exposure memorials commemorating victims and survivors of Nazi persecution are associated with reduction of support for far-right political parties.⁸⁷ The memorial used in the study is called Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”): embedded in sidewalks and streets across the city of Berlin, the memorial commemorates victims and survivors of Nazi persecution in front of their last freely chosen place of residence. These stumbling stone memorials spread by 2018 to 1,100 locations in seventeen European cities.⁸⁸

Compelling recent work has been led by a brilliant and superbly effective lawyer and law professor, Bryan Stevenson, who founded and leads the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. Its successful legal challenges have worked to eliminate excessive and unfair sentencing, expose abuses of people during incarceration, aid children treated as if they were adults by criminal systems within the United States, and secure the release of over 140 wrongly condemned prisoners sentenced to death.

Despite these legal successes, a few years ago, Professor Stevenson reached the conclusion that until national narratives about race change, the problems he and his team challenge in litigation will persist. He explained recently:

It was a narrative choice, he observed, to treat drug addiction as a crime rather than as an illness.⁹⁰ And it was a narrative choice to use the label “superpredators” to apply to children who allegedly fail to show remorse for violent crimes—a choice prompting many state legislatures to lower to fourteen the age for prosecuting individuals as adults.⁹¹

Professor Stevenson set about to change narratives around race, around guilt and innocence, around crime and punishment, and around what should be remembered about slavery, lynching, racial segregation, and their ongoing connections to mass incarceration and racial bias. Recognizing the potential power of arts, museums, and memorials, Professor Stevenson and his Equal Justice Institute team have created⁹² the National Memorial for Peace and Justice commemorating 4,400 Black individuals killed in the United States by lynching between 1877 and 1950.⁹³ Visitors walk up a hill to encounter first a few and eventually eight hundred large steel blocks, one for each county where a racial lynching took place. Each block is etched with the names of victims of lynching. As the visitors walk through the memorial, “the orientation of the hanging monuments changes from eye level to overhead, evoking the way many lynching victims were hanged, often in public spaces.”⁹⁴ Noting specific dates and the places where the lynchings occurred, these monuments commemorate the individuals whose names and lives have been neglected or suppressed.

Nearby, on a site where enslaved people were forced to work at a cotton warehouse, is the accompanying museum. It combines first-person narratives offered in holographic films of actors reading actual testimony by formerly enslaved individuals with interactive exhibits presenting data, history, and artistic works detailing slavery and its legacies in the United States. Those legacies include Jim Crow laws imposing segregation and subordination of African Americans, vigilante killings and terrorizing violence of African Americans, and mass incarceration.⁹⁵ The initiative has also sparked efforts by local communities to reckon with the racial violence in their past and to change understandings and practices.⁹⁶ Since its opening in 2018, the Memorial and Museum have drawn more than a million visitors from around the world.⁹⁷ Popular and academic writings reflect on the memorial and museum; their presence has significantly boosted the economy of Montgomery, Alabama, and stimulated new work by artists and educators.⁹⁸ A major purpose of these initiatives is to overcome the suppression or forgetting of knowledge about slavery and lynching—and to share a narrative about the nation’s past that can support a transformative future.

Restorative and cultural narrative-building efforts that mobilize facts, education, and experiences can offer means for transformation of people and their communities, with a focus on peace and raising new generations to live with productivity and hope.⁹⁹ “Transformative justice” addresses situations of either no prior relationships to restore or ones so riven by unfairness or oppression that starting anew is the only way to seek justice.

Necessary for “transformative justice” are not only narrative-building but also concrete actions.

How can societies overcome structural, political, and economic forms of disadvantages, biases, barriers to opportunity, and oppression? To break out of existing patterns, change must work at multiple levels. These include interactions between individuals: working to treat one another with respect, even when they sharply disagree or perceive one another as threats. Work at this level is essential for building trusting relationships and movements for change. But transformative efforts must work at levels beyond interpersonal communication. Another level involves the social narratives absorbed in the minds of individuals and groups, narratives that have assigned blame and causation in ways that entrap people in biases, in a sense of personal hopelessness, or in feelings of inefficacy. And renovating existing institutions is needed because their rules and practices so often encode ideas and attitudes that get in the way of according people respect or addressing ongoing harms.

Institutional and cultural practices must ensure genuine norms of respect for individuals. It requires hard work to build relationships founded in respect for the dignity of each person. Democracies from ancient Athens to the present have tried to summon respectful treatment of other participants even in the midst of disagreements so that other participants in the project of self-government are not treated as enemies.¹⁰⁰ Philosopher Margaret Walker described the goal in terms of “morally adequate relations” that give people confidence “that they share some basic standards for the treatment of each other [and] are able to trust each other to abide by those standards” or acknowledge fault if not.¹⁰¹ This means that people are justified in their hope that unacceptable treatment will not prevail and victims will not be abandoned in their reliance on the shared commitment.¹⁰² People with repeated experiences contradicting these expectations understandably are wary and distrustful. Only demonstrated practices warranting trust will gain trust. And respect for individual dignity means resisting temptations to dehumanize any individual or group or to deny them respect simply because of their race, gender, or identity, or even because they say disagreeable things.¹⁰³ Emotional self-management as well as norms of respect demand learning when and how to step back from disagreements and to prevent hostility from spiraling out of control. When dealing with large groups and societies as a whole, laws and norms must be continually revised and renewed to channel disagreements away from violence to deepen respect for each person and to effect reforms required to make that respect visible and real.

A spirit of humility and openness to learning is an important element here—even for those who have righteous indignation about their own suffering or injustices done to others. This is the advice of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, reflecting on what it takes for people to build a society of justice, liberty, and equality.¹⁰⁴ She quoted the nineteenth-century French observer of early America, Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”¹⁰⁵ Disagreements will be inevitable; the question is whether they can occur with civility and respect, which require genuine openness. Decent and smart people can profoundly disagree with one another. They—we—can even on occasion persuade one another. A lawyer named David Singleton who used to direct the Ohio Justice & Policy Center once explained to me and our students that the people he had initially written off as political opponents became critical allies in a movement to reform the criminal laws in Ohio.¹⁰⁶ Today’s adversary could become an ally another day, but prospects for that possibility dim when disagreement leads to banishment.

Arguments and empathic bridge-building are complementary tools, each tackling what the other cannot reach. While researching a comparison of current restorative justice and anti-racist efforts, I learned that Fania Davis, a leader of the U.S. restorative justice movement, has a sister who is the well-known political activist and professor Angela Davis.¹⁰⁷ The work of each sister complements the work of the other. They each find value in personally and professionally focusing on repair while waging the long war against injustice. In a dialogue with her sister about restorative justice, Angela Davis observed: “[N]ow we’re thinking deeply about the connection between interior life and what happens in the social world. Even those who are fighting against state violence often incorporate impulses that are based on state violence in their relations with other people.”¹⁰⁸

Focusing only on the interpersonal will not be sufficient. As admirable as it was, the South African TRC failed to address the socioeconomic dimensions of apartheid, and that contributes to failures to change those structures in the post-apartheid world.¹⁰⁹ Restorative and transformative processes can do better, especially when they engage not only those who have direct and immediate relationships to the harms but also others in the society. Recognizing how we are part of concentric circles—each, as Dr. King emphasized, connected with one another—can motivate involvement by business owners, clergy, community leaders, educators, artists, and political officials.

What, concretely, would justice entail for communities divided politically, ignoring or dealing with past traumas, riven by violent conflicts? Altering conditions of injustice for the long term requires support from many people. To build that support, tools from restorative justice and cultural interventions to build interpersonal trust and truthful narratives, acknowledgment and social healing efforts, practice in respectful listening and disputing, and mobilization of people with capacities to make durable changes in laws, institutions, and practices can help. So, too, can lessons from history and learning from others grappling with issues both similar and different. Crucial, over time, is designing and strengthening opportunities for integration in public spheres, including schools and workplaces, so that people can come to know and recognize the humanity in people unlike themselves.

I am not an optimistic person, but I am a hopeful one. Hope is renewed for me when meeting with inspiring people who work for peace and change. One such individual is Padraig O’Malley, an international peacemaker from Ireland.¹¹⁰ In 2009, he organized the Forum for Cities in Transition as a network of people from eleven countries across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; the cities include Nicosia in Cyprus and Belfast in Northern Ireland. He built the Forum’s approach based on his thirty years in conflict resolution efforts around the globe. His strategy is to bring together people from divided cities in nations torn by ethnic, religious, and national divisions. He recruited former antagonists from each community—often people who had been involved in violence but who had set violence aside and worked on resolving differences. He explained that the Forum’s “guiding principle is that one divided society is in the best position to help another.”¹¹¹ I was lucky enough to participate in some of the convenings and to see people who previously had been truly at war with one another come together and share their experiences with others coming from conflictual settings. I listened to the delegations from Beirut, Lebanon; Nicosia, Cyprus; and a city in Northern Ireland alternatively called Derry or Londonderry (or simply “slash city” for the slash between the two names of a place whose residents cannot even agree on its name), all of which were focused on offering guidance and support to others in the thick of conflicts. Although one conversation almost came to blows over soccer teams, the delegations joined together former enemies who all brought a sense of urgency to sharing what they had learned and recognizing that what they thought was their unique suffering resembled patterns elsewhere. They learned not to demonize others and to work tirelessly for justice—at the same time.

Demonizing others “strips away the humanity of other groups of people and threatens to unleash the darkest aspects of human nature,” remarked human rights activist Salil Shetty.¹¹² Even when motivated by righteousness against injustice, demonizing others opens passions that can destroy and shame that spurs new rounds of dehumanizing violence. Resisting that path while mobilizing against injustice can be a real emotional and intellectual challenge. Yet failing to rise to that challenge risks descending into demonizing others and propelling inequality and hatred.

My hope is that we can learn from patterns of division and polarization to anticipate backlash, to mobilize restorative and transformative practices and cultural creativity, and to build durable activities and institutions to advance justice and to strengthen fair and peaceful dealing despite ongoing disagreements. By durable, I do not mean unchanging. To the contrary, durable activities and institutions addressing profound patterns of inequality and legacies of violence must be designed to anticipate disrepair and to support change.

My closing thought begins with a confession: I am a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the franchise that grew from a small audience cult television show to a global media franchise exploring twenty-third- and twenty-fourth-century space travelers with allegories to contemporary dilemmas. In one 1993 episode of Star Trek, competing groups race across planets to find scattered pieces of a prized relic from a prior civilization. A team composed of members from different societies collaborate to locate the first piece, then the second, and finally the third piece in separate locations. Then, suddenly, one of the team members assembles the pieces and turns on the others, announcing that the pieces, once assembled, make a powerful weapon. Our hero—Captain Picard, who is conveniently also an archaeologist—orders his team to drop their weapons and clear their minds of aggressive thoughts. He explains that he was able to read the symbols on the device and discern that it amplifies anger, but peace defeats its power.¹¹³ Metaphorically, this tale underscores how tamping down even understandable fury is key to building enough peace to proceed with the work of building better days.

A character in a more recent Star Trek spin-off says, “The past is written, but the future is left for us to write.”¹¹⁴ One way or another, we will write the future. My hope is that we will learn not to amplify hate—even of our enemies, even if reasonable—so justice will have a chance to prevail.