Teaching Peace Top-down, Bottom-up, or Both? Navigating Basic Dilemmas in Cross-Cultural Conflict Resolution Education

In a recent interview, a Latino American professional conflict resolution educator with over 25 years of experience working internationally shared the following story:

Such disorienting dilemmas (Mezirow 2009), or crisis-instigated learning experiences, were a common theme described by many of the expert practitioners we interviewed for this article, who had been trained and were all-in on either a prescriptive or elicitive approach before they were eventually forced to confront their limitations.

Almost 30 years ago, John Paul Lederach, an eminent international peacebuilder and scholar, challenged the conflict resolution field to its core with the publication of his 1995 book, Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures. In it, Lederach shares his revelation, after decades of involvement in mediation education around the globe, that the primary approach to offering conflict resolution education internationally—an expert-centered, Western-oriented, prescriptive model—is culturally biased, often ineffective, and ultimately imperialist when applied in significantly different cultural contexts. Although this still-dominant paradigm is largely an artifact of the prevalence of standard, traditional, top-down approaches to general education used around the world, a change remains warranted.

Lederach’s critique in the 1990s was consistent with others concerned with power imbalances and inefficacies in cross-cultural education, such as those expressed by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and by UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Peace¹ (1992). To different degrees, all of these critiques emphasize the importance of working with culturally distinct groups in more locally sensitive, inclusive, empowering, and respectful ways. Lederach outlined an alternative approach to Western-prescriptive cross-cultural conflict education, one he labels elicitive, which centers on privileging the elicitation of local cultural experiences and expertise for informing effective conflict resolution education and practice in foreign lands.

Ultimately, although Lederach was clear that the conflict and peacebuilding field leaned heavily toward employing prescriptive methods, and that elicitive methods warranted serious consideration, he concluded that there is often a “critical tension” (Lederach 1995: 63) inherent to the relationship between prescriptive and elicitive approaches to cross-cultural practices—that there are benefits and limits to each—and that we must ultimately find effective ways to combine both modalities. Yet today, decades later, not only do we find the mainstream field of international peacebuilding and conflict resolution education still predominantly prescriptive in practice (Walker 2004; United Nations 2015, 2018; Autesserre 2017), but systematic methods of how we might go about effectively combining the two approaches remain elusive.

This article describes a program of research with experienced cross-cultural peace and conflict resolution educators, which informs a new framework for working effectively in cross-cultural conflict resolution education. It begins by highlighting the need for developing more effective methods of cross-cultural education, and then presents a contingency approach to working adaptively across different types of cultural situations—based on five key factors—as well as insights into enacting hybrid combinations of both approaches. The article concludes with a discussion of the next steps for implementing these approaches in practice.

The demand for more effective approaches to cross-cultural peace and conflict education is rooted in three trends. First, the accelerating process of interconnectedness between formerly distinct cultural groups within and between societies around the globe has brought unprecedented challenges to how we think and work across cultures (Hermans and Kempen 1998; World Values Survey 2024). In fact, the dichotomous views of many standard cross-cultural models—of individualistic versus collectivistic, high versus low power distance, or high versus low context group differences (often associated with groups from specific geographic locations)—has become much less accurate or useful with increases in cultural hybridization and complexity. It can therefore be challenging to adequately identify, gauge, and understand the norms of the communities in question, as the process can be ambiguous and time-consuming (Bajaj 2008), with variation in norms within the same culture, and traditional practices shared inconsistently.

Second, decades after the decline of colonialism, countries in the Global South continue to live with a colonial hangover, with remnants of colonization being perpetuated through globalization (Banerjee and Linstead 2001). With its roots in industrialization, modernization, and capitalism, globalization tends to promote knowledge that prioritizes rational Western thought and science, while often dismissing other modes of knowing (Raley and Preyer 2010; Ideland 2018). For example, Indigenous peoples’ ways of knowing are often discounted as unscientific and are rarely offered in mainstream curricula (Basiga 2004). Increasingly, there is a call to recognize, highlight, and integrate local approaches to peacebuilding in conflict resolution curricula (Vasquez 1976; Salomon and Nevo 2002). This has led to a burgeoning movement of decolonizing peace and conflict resolution education (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2007; Bajaj 2015; Golding 2017).

Third, there is an increasing body of evidence that suggests that many well-intentioned, one-size-fits-all, outside-expert interventions offered by the international community in peacebuilding and other forms of humanitarian work are often ineffective or unsustainable (Wessells 2009a, 2009b, 2015; Aldawood 2020; Peter and Rice 2022). Serious challenges to these approaches include contextual insensitivity to a variety of local issues such as security concerns and the inappropriate use of some training methods; the dominance of an individualistic orientation that does not fit the context and culture of the intervention; and the use of unsustainable, short-term approaches that breed dependency (Wessells 2009b). For these and other reasons, two recent reports issued by the United Nations (U.N. 2015, 2018) have largely lamented its own lack of capacity to build peace sustainably.

In his book Preparing for Peace (1995), John Paul Lederach offered a basic distinction between more prescriptive versus elicitive forms of cross-cultural conflict resolution education (CC-CRE), which identified different worldviews, values, epistemologies, practices, and most importantly, distributions of power. The prescriptive approach is highly familiar to most as it is the paradigm often leveraged in traditional educational institutions. In essence, it privileges the instructor’s knowledge and experiences of conflict resolution, and positions the instructor as the knowledge-imparting authority figure in the peacebuilding classroom. The instructor disseminates (mostly) evidence-based methods, tools, and practices from the field of conflict resolution, often in a more unilateral, standardized, “one-size-fits-all” manner.

In the typical prescriptive approach, the instructor sets the learning objectives beforehand and establishes a plan to achieve them. Educators employing this lens tend to see cultural differences as mainly an obstacle to achieving educational outcomes efficiently. A commitment to following the pre-planned course of action is high, and opportunities to reflect on local applicability of course content are often introduced as an add-on toward the end of the sessions. This approach tends to be more efficient, predictable, and less costly than more participatory methods. Expertise is typically sought externally from specialists seen to have a capacity to view the local situation in novel ways from an outsider’s perspective.

For instance, while delivering a UN-sanctioned mediation training in Nepal, in a purely prescriptive manner, the instructor would teach local community mediators a Western model of mediation, where a neutral third party would ask the parties what is bothering them, identify positions and needs, attempt to find common ground, then help shape a win-win solution. The instructor would go into the training with a set agenda to cover, one that focuses on delivering training to the local instructors in an organized and methodical way. Typically, the instructor would not inquire about existing local processes of conflict resolution, or norms, values, and overall culture of the local instructors or communities, nor would they garner any ideas from the locals on how they might effectively fuse Western approaches with their existing cultural approaches.

In contrast, an elicitive approach honors the value of participants’ locally grounded insights and contributions, viewing them as equally important resources for knowledge and practice. It views the lived experiences, observations, and lessons of the participants as a vital part of the curriculum. Here, the culture of the participants is not perceived as an obstacle to the premeditated lesson plan, but rather as the foundation of the curriculum itself. Knowledge sharing is two-way, where the instructor often learns as much from the participants as the participants learn from the instructor. For instance, while delivering a mediation training in Nepal, an elicitive-oriented instructor might arrive in Nepal a few days in advance of the training and learn about the local culture through observation as well as from guidance from local stakeholders. During the workshop, the instructor would ask the local participants how they traditionally resolve conflicts between parties, what has worked and hasn’t worked for them in the past, and what issues usually present in conflict situations. Then, after understanding the gaps in the local processes, the instructor would invite the local participants to reflect on how they might adjust their strategies, while staying in alignment with existing cultural norms, values, and methods.

Elicitive procedures require instructors to spend sufficient time in the local milieu in advance of a training, in order to get more in sync with the energy, norms, and pace of the environment. They often require enlisting the help of local partners or guides to familiarize the instructors with the culture’s norms and practices regarding conflict and peace. Here, instructors tend to privilege local-experiential or traditional practices over those developed through Western scientific methods. Instructors invite feedback from local participants and adapt their teaching and facilitation accordingly, in an attempt to anticipate unintended consequences. While the elicitive approach may not be the most efficient method, as it can be time-consuming and cost-prohibitive, it is often more culturally fitting and therefore sustainable in the long term in fulfilling the needs of the participants (Phan and Coleman 2023).

Despite these critical distinctions, Lederach (1995) ultimately concludes that “prescriptive and elicitive approaches can be combined in cross-cultural training when understood in the context and relationship of interaction, rather than transfer of knowledge” (Lederach 1995: 121). Here, he is stressing the need for a more balanced, equal-power relationship as foundational between educators and participants—one of exchange rather than of transfer. He recommends that when combining approaches, it is incumbent on the instructors to a) be mindful of the cultural limitations of their model, b) be explicit about these limitations with the participants, c) structure the training to include exploration of the participants’ knowledge, heritage, and understandings, and d) when outside models are introduced, invite participants to critique, challenge, or reject the approach.

The following two studies were conducted to empirically investigate and elaborate on how cross-cultural conflict educators might enact such adaptive or hybrid approaches in the field.

The idea of adaptivity in conflict resolution has been defined as a capacity to “read different or changing situations accurately and employ distinct conflict strategies where they fit, in a manner and to a degree appropriate to the context—which allows for the achievement of one’s goals at a satisfactory rate” (Coleman et al. 2012: 11). Striving to move beyond the simple adage “always be adaptive,” the research behind this class of models begins by identifying the most fundamental situational conditions that require a qualitative change in conflict-engagement strategies, then explores the specific types of strategies that “fit” or work best under each set of conditions. To date, research has revealed different forms of conflict adaptivity, including interpersonal adaptivity, or the capacity to navigate across significant power and relational differences when addressing conflict (Coleman and Ferguson 2014); adaptive mediation, or the capacity to adapt to extreme situational challenges (derailers) when mediating conflicts (Coleman et al. 2015); and clock-cloud adaptivity, or the capability to assess differences in the clock-like (resolvable) versus cloud-like (complex, intractable) nature of the problem-situation faced and to alter strategies accordingly (Coleman 2011; Coleman and Ricigliano 2017).

Recently, we published a study exploring cross-cultural conflict adaptivity, or the conditions under which more prescriptive or elicitive approaches to cross-cultural conflict resolution education (CC-CRE) are more feasible and effective (Phan and Coleman 2023). In this study, 118 experienced cross-cultural conflict resolution educators were asked to describe their last educational offering where they worked with groups from cultures distinct from their own cultures-of-origin. Then, they were asked to rate their case along 21 dimensions identified in the literature relevant to the context, process, participants, and the instructors involved in the case. Finally, the experts described how they went about addressing the particular cross-cultural challenges they faced, as well as how satisfied they were with the outcomes of the training.

Overall, the study found that elicitive approaches were generally more effective (culturally relevant, sustainable, and culturally sensitive) than prescriptive, while prescriptive methods were found to be typically more efficient in terms of time and costs than elicitive. The study also revealed that the approaches taken by most of the CC-CRE educators in the study were overwhelmingly more prescriptive, although some did employ more elicitive strategies.

However, five basic factors were identified in the study, including two aspects of the instructors themselves and three characteristics of the situations faced, which ultimately determined whether or not either prescriptive or elicitive approaches were more efficient or effective. These factors are set forth in Figure 4 below.

These five factors tell a more nuanced story of the relative effects of prescriptive versus elicitive approaches to CC-CRE. In terms of efficiency of the trainings, prescriptive approaches were only found to be more efficient under functional and fair local conditions in communities with looser, less-constraining norms regarding acceptable forms of conflict engagement. Elicitive approaches were found to be more efficient in tighter cultures where foreign influence is more likely to be resisted. Similarly, prescriptive approaches were seen as more efficient in settings with higher levels of value alignment between the instructors and local stakeholders, whereas elicitive approaches were found to be more efficient when there was a lack of such value alignment.

Regarding effectiveness, elicitive approaches were only found to be more effective (culturally relevant, sustainable, and culturally sensitive) under functional and fair local conditions, while prescriptive methods were seen as more effective under less functional and fair conditions. Elicitive approaches were also only found to be more effective when instructors had high levels of tolerance for ambiguity (TfA). When they had low levels of TfA, prescriptive approaches were more effective. Ultimately, when instructors with high TfA employ more elicitive approaches, they are more effective (but less efficient).

To summarize, the two instructor competencies and three situational conditions identified in the study combine to answer the question of when prescriptive or elicitive methods work best. For ease of application, we have developed a “just-in-time” app tool for use when preparing to educate cross-culturally (access this free app on Android and Apple). It is based on the findings from this study and organized around the five diagnostic questions set forth in Figure 5 below.

The combined responses to these questions will point the CC-CRE instructor initially toward employing more prescriptive or elicitive methods.

The adaptive model that emerged from this study offers a contingency approach to CC-CRE based on the five factors—one path forward for intercultural educators. However, how educators may go about combining aspects of both prescriptive and elicitive methods artfully and effectively has yet to be investigated. This was the focus of our next study.

A more advanced method for educating about peace and conflict effectively across significant cultural differences is something we call cross-cultural optimality, or combining both P and E approaches in more ideal ways. To explore optimality practices in CC-CRE more thoroughly and systematically, we recently conducted a series of in-depth interviews with nine highly experienced practitioners whose work we were familiar with or who were recommended to us as exemplary CC-CR educators by John Paul Lederach. As elicitive approaches were less common, we intentionally tapped into Lederach’s network to identify experts who were familiar with and frequently practiced elicitive methods. We reached out to 20 experts and proceeded with nine participants (N = 9) due to limited availability. Three interviewees were from North America, one was from South America, one from West Africa, three from Europe, and one from South Asia. Their experiences ranged from 19–48 years in the field. Three of them identified as female, and six as male.

The semi-structured interviews were conducted over Zoom for approximately 1–2 hours each, using open-ended questions inquiring into the nature of specific CC-CRE projects and training processes (e.g., “Can you tell me the story of the training?” and “How did you navigate the differences between your own cultural background and expertise and the values, norms, and local processes of the training participants?”). All of the interviews were conducted by one member of the research team, who was a national of a Southeast Asian country. The full interviews were then transcribed, and demographic information provided by participants was aggregated. The team went through a process of iterative analysis, where three coders independently identified the subthemes that emerged from the interviews. We then met up to compare and contrast, ultimately grouping these themes into three distinct categories: challenges of working cross-culturally, CC optimality instructor guidelines, and process guidelines.

In this study, we sought to glean generalizable insights to the question: “What innovative approaches have cross-cultural conflict resolution instructors used to effectively design and facilitate more prescriptively informed and elicitively sensitive approaches?” One result from these interviews was a summary of many of the challenges of working in a purely elicitive manner (highly time intensive, contrasts with some funders’ narrower interests or limited institutional mandates, imposition of “participatory” process seen as Western-centric, etc.), as well as those associated with working in purely prescriptive ways (often politically uninformed, ill-fitting Western assumptions and concepts, pedagogical mismatches, colonialist agenda, etc.). Ultimately, however, what emerged from our analysis of the interviews was a set of basic dilemmas that the experts described facing in these types of CC-CRE situations, as well as a set of instructor and process guidelines to help others address these dilemmas in more optimal ways. Like the results from Study 1, this study again revealed that prescriptive methods were often the most standard orientation to CC-CRE, so to reach optimality, instructors had to lean more into working in an elicitive manner.

The four dilemmas identified through our experts included those over whether or when to privilege: 1) top-down or bottom-up control of the educational objectives, content, and process, 2) scientific, evidence-based content or local, practical, experiential expertise, 3) universal human rights and values or locally relative value preferences, and 4) feasible-efficient or ideally sustainable outcomes. Ultimately the choice of which direction to lean into was determined by an intentional combination of the instructor’s own preferences and those of the local stakeholders.

Regarding the instructors’ own inclinations, the four dilemmas can be conceptualized as four sets of competing values on which individual CC-CRE educators will likely differ in terms of their preference for and comfort with facilitating.² They culminate in the CC optimality framework set forth in Figure 7 below.

Gaining some degree of awareness of one’s own inclinations with facilitating CC-CRE at the competing ends of each of these dimensions is an important step toward increasing one’s capacity to work optimally across differences. It is also crucial to become able to identify and adjust to the competing values that are more dominant and preferred in the local cultural context. These two basic competencies—cultural self-awareness and cultural context-awareness—emerged as critical for enacting CC-CRE in more optimally effective ways.

The experts’ guidance for other CC-CRE instructors included specific steps toward opening oneself up to establishing a learning environment with a spirit of, to quote Lederach, “[a] relationship of interaction, rather than transfer of knowledge” (1995: 121). Such steps included those described in Figure 8 below.

Know yourself. Garnering cultural self-awareness regarding one’s competing values and value alignment with the local community is an important part of building an optimal practice. For example, one of the two educators working with political prisoners in Northern Ireland was Protestant and the other was Catholic. When they became faced with the fact that some of the participants in their trainings had murdered members of their respective communities, they had to check their own responses, so as to not allow their own “stuff” about their personal histories with the “Troubles” to derail their objectives in the training.

The facilitator who ran a three-day residential experience where half the participants were victims of homophobia and the other half were leaders in conservative religious organizations recalled an instance where a participant from the conservative side of the group asked if gay people in relationships were capable of loving each other. Another participant answered affirmatively and shared a story about a couple where one had nursed the other for months through cancer before they died. As a gay man himself, the facilitator felt deeply disappointed that the questioner did not already know something that to him was self-evident, but after listening to this exchange, noticed that the questioner seemed to experience a sense of relief and had a new perspective. He reflected that suspending his own judgment was therefore an imperative part of the process.

Always show deep respect for local values, knowledge, and practices (without romanticizing them). This emerged as paramount for establishing trusting, long-term relationships with local leaders and other stakeholders. It can also open up the potential for eventually broaching and exploring the possible downsides of more exclusive or discriminatory local practices. It requires becoming aware of local hierarchies, and of ways of modeling inclusivity with members of low-power groups that may open up a sense of alternatives in others. For example, one of the Latino American experts who had worked extensively in Iraq observed that sensitivity to local gender norms, particularly surrounding physical touch and distance, was essential for successful cross-cultural training in some areas of the Middle Eastern region. So, exercises that might involve physical touch (e.g., holding hands) were modified.

Another example came from an expert working with a group of Indigenous tribes in Northern California and majority white organizations doing land conservation work. She noticed that while working with members in the white organizations, people would start with “What’s our agenda? What are we talking about?” However, the Native people would more likely start with “How’s the weather where you are? What do you see outside your window? How has it been this morning before we got on the phone?” This seemingly small difference would help them to feel centered in the conversation. The expert remarked, “It had a kind of relational integrity to it that immediately changed the nature of the conversation.” Such contrasting approaches can be carefully woven together to help establish a respectful sense of place and purpose.

Adopt an authentic mutual learning orientation. This takes time and practice for those of us reared in the standard expert, top-down educational paradigm, pervasive around the globe. However, again, modeling this orientation for learners can in fact open them up to radically different types of learning experiences. For example, one educator shared that they learned to become more mindful of how Nepal’s hierarchical norms could hinder participants’ ability to trust their own knowledge. To address this, they reminded participants of their past experiences to prompt them. “We started working on the cases that they had resolved or they had addressed so it was not something alien. We were taking lessons from the cases that they were dealing with or they had dealt with, so they knew them much better than us…. So, when we were discussing this, it was structured in such a way that they felt that ‘yes, we know it.’”

The Latino American educator working in Iraq shared that often the local learning sensibility favored prescriptive teaching and learning, which challenged his elicitive pedagogy. He noted how one participant was particularly uncomfortable with informal discussions where people were allowed to eat, smoke, and chat, because she feared it would be too chaotic. However, she eventually came to see the value in it. “I think for her—and she’s an educator and was a very thoughtful person—there was a shift in how she thought about what’s possible if you just allow folks to engage.”

Be open to candid feedback and corrections from locals—work with humility, flexibility, and adaptability. This is bedrock for developing and modeling mutual learning. While offering negotiation training in Germany, one educator observed that the concept of compromise was not culturally universal, as situations were often viewed more as black or white, win or lose. In fact, many Germans he worked with saw compromise as a “weakness.” This difference led to an impasse in his trainings because he was unable to convince everyone in the room that “compromise is a good thing, you should try it out.” Ultimately, this forced him to rethink his framing of the conversation to de-emphasize compromise and explore adjacent tactics.

Another instructor recalled a process that helped him better understand participants’ reactions during training sessions. “For instance, if there’s a man shouting and I think that seems quite aggressive, I’d ask another person in the group if he experienced it as being aggressive. They might go, ‘No, no, he’s just being excited.’” He elaborated, “While I think that there’s a certain amount of universal fundamental in [elements of trust, connection, outcome, and timeliness], they can look vastly different.… I don’t assume that the shape that it appears to me looks like that to other people.”

Develop a capacity to hold contradictions (including moral)—with tolerance for ambiguity and imperfection. This, too, can be a challenge for many of us—as well as our sponsoring organizations—who tend to hold strong value orientations (such as universal human rights) (see Wessells 2005). One instructor working in Sierra Leone observed a conflict that arose for NGOs who were trying to work on child protection issues. He saw that at times, these NGOs viewed local cultural practices as a source of harm to children, such as a prevalence of child marriage. However, he came to realize that historically, some communities had come to use these practices to protect their children from non-marital rape and a life of shunning. NGO employees were afraid that if you engage too deeply with local culture, you could become complicit in such abuses of children. However, the interviewee came to eventually see this idea as misguided, because all cultures have problematic practices. “Culture is always complex. It’s always dynamic. It’s always changing. And there are some practices that are not necessarily going to be very helpful for achieving children’s well-being. And that’s as true in my culture as it is in any other culture.”

Another educator working with political prisoners in Northern Ireland advised, “Try to enable that human side to come out more and more, rather than seeing them as someone who goes out at night with a gun or some type of explosives to kill other people. Be vulnerable with them and they will be vulnerable with you.” One story he shared was of a prisoner who was arrested for leading a terrorist group and whom he had gotten to know better through his training. Upon the prisoner’s release, a church group asked the trainer to introduce him for a talk. Understanding the importance of holding up contradictions that were often absent in the media, the trainer shared a humanizing account of the former convict, who had two children with physical disabilities at home. The trainer’s ability to see his participants as multifaceted allowed him to connect and teach them about peace.

Consider future consequences—hold a long-term orientation. Ultimately, more elicitive and optimal ways of working across cultural differences requires taking a long-term view of the work. For instance, one instructor noted the shortfalls of his affiliations with international organizations and NGOs. As an African American from New York, he knew that while working in South Africa he would be perceived as an “outsider.” He noted, “I realized if I am flying in from New York all the time, whatever African-ness I bring doesn’t make any sense because I will be seen to be part of the privileged society that flies in and tells others how they should do things. And I knew that because I grew up in Africa, so I know exactly how these things work.” So, he chose to move to South Africa during that period to be more locally situated, and leveraged the reputation he got from working with Nelson Mandela and knowing local languages such as French and Portuguese, which eventually led him to earn the trust of local South Africans.

The process guidelines offered through our expert interviews were particularly practical and mindful of managing the inherent power imbalances that Lederach (and others) emphasize. The guidelines offered include those set forth in Figure 9 below.

Allow for prescriptive or elicitive choice locally. Ultimately, the power to decide what type of educational experience would best serve the current needs of a community should remain with the community. This requires giving a reasonable description of the pros and cons offered by each method at the time of entry and contracting, so that local aspirations and expectations are established at the outset.

One expert working in a Northern Ireland prison adapted his process upon hearing the participants’ demand for prescriptive content. He started the process by sending a paper by John Paul Lederach in advance to stimulate some interest. He and his co-facilitators then discussed their work in other places, such as the Basque Country, the Philippines, and with Miskito Indians. When the inmates were provided with examples of other conflicts around the world, they were intrigued by the similarities—like Northern Ireland, the Basque conflict had lasted decades. Sensing that the participants were open to more elicitive work, the instructor and his colleague then elicited observations from the group on what might be transferable from the situation in the Basque Country. They began to work together on this prompt in small groups before coming back with ideas. This was a way of adapting the training to be prescriptive and elicitive, respecting the locals’ preference.

While working with the governments of Papua New Guinea and Bougainville, another instructor used a technique to elicit participants’ different understandings of their peace process. Before he explained to them what a multitrack peace process looks like, he asked them how they wanted to go about it—what was important and relevant to them. Usually, he would do a mini-lecture and say, “This is the process, this is our system, what do you think about it,” and gather responses. However this time, he asked them to observe where their peace process was currently and what they would ideally like for it to be, and then asked them to draw the type of images or symbols that can bridge that gap. He then used the richness and diversity of these interpretations to drive home a point about how different people perceive a multitrack peace process differently, and how people can bring out their own ideas of how to get there. In doing so, he merged something very prescribed with a more creative and human-focused element.

Meet participants where they are at. The early stages of such educational experiences can be well served by framing the discussion over objectives developmentally, to clarify the communities’ immediate needs and concerns in the context of their longer-term visions and aspirations. This helps to set expectations.

One expert who worked with prisoners from Northern Ireland learned that “you move at the speed of the slowest person on self-awareness.” He was working with long-term political prisoners from both Catholic and Protestant factions in a Northern Ireland facility, and he observed that his vulnerability, openness to them, and desire for peace, and allowing them to move along the road to peace at their speed—not his—was very important for trust building and a successful training. Due to the political landscape of Northern Ireland, the political prisoners would have to justify any softening of their attitude to themselves, their colleagues in and outside of prison, and their families, hence their resistance to his and his colleague’s effort at “pacifying” them was reasonable. His goal was to open doors for peace and allow them to look through and decide on their own terms, understanding that they, and not he, would know when they were ready.

For some, offering a pre-facilitation process helped with understanding participants’ concerns and building readiness in advance. The trainer that led a three-day residential workshop between groups with opposing beliefs on LGBTQIA+ rights found that offering pre-facilitation was critical. The trainer had phone calls with each participant to set up expectations before they arrived. This helped him gauge participants’ sense of threat, build trust, and meet them where they were at. One participant mentioned, “You know, if my church heard I was going to this thing, they’d fire me,” but in the end made up their mind to come.

Sequence—Move from P to E or E to P? (Consider culturally embedded capacity building.) If the general expectations of the members of the local community are that they will be provided a new model or method of conflict resolution, then it may be best to begin by presenting one. Opening up such presentations to questioning and critique by all local stakeholders—in terms of the model’s fit and applicability in the local context—is one way to begin to establish a mutual learning environment. However, given the typical power imbalance present in such endeavors, the facilitators must be patient and creative about how they invite local input.

When conducting mediation training in Nepal, an expert recalled the initial challenge to introducing elicitive process. “There was a hesitation, because [local] people were very dependent on the ‘experts’.… Initially we had difficulty convincing them that, yes, you can do it because they felt that they lacked the skills.” She then proposed that they could start with a prescriptive model, and then turn to the local mediator’s knowledge and connection within the community to test and refine it, which seemed to open the participants up to a more elicitive approach. “That really empowered them—it gave them courage and motivation to work hard.”

Have a long-term plan—gaining legitimacy takes time and elicitation takes time, so establish follow-up procedures. Consistent with taking a long-term view of this work, it is helpful to offer a realistic timeline of what can be achieved in the short-, mid-, and long-term sessions with the community. Planning ahead together helps to set more realistic expectations and a sense of possibility.

For instance, the trainer in Nepal remarked that “for a sustainable process, you really have to develop and build the capacity of the local community. All the mechanisms of conflict resolution peacebuilding have to be embedded in the local norms and practices.” She believed in having a continuous process, such as people having mentors and coaches who they can contact when they are stuck, and establishing follow-up procedures.

The educator in Northern Ireland observed that a credible metric of success was a small test: whether you were allowed to do a repeat workshop. If you came back to the training group in three weeks and offered to do another training, and they agreed, then they must have gotten some value. He also believed in having a mutually decided metric of outcome. “More and more funders are understanding what co-creation means and emerging design and emerging outcomes, rather than predetermined outcomes that are just an act of fiction.”

An expert working in Colombia saw it differently. She added that sustainability ultimately depended on each community itself. However, this was the most challenging piece because of time constraints. She believed in the Lederachian approach to creating platforms and invisible networks between people to exchange resources and information and to support one another. What she had seen work were structural efforts in some communities, noting “there are leaders that understand their role as not so much to be the voice of the people but the facilitator, the person that is able to pose provocative types of questions or challenge the community itself. Or that fights for them before the national or local institutions. But to find a leader like that, it’s difficult. It’s not easy to see.”

To summarize, although the findings from our study of optimal CC-CRE practices resulted in a set of general guidelines for preparing instructors and shepherding the processes, ultimately it may be best to view this work as more of an art than a science. The very specific and mutable needs of local communities and the changing conditions on the ground—in combination with instructors’ competencies and comfort and funders’ differing levels of flexibility and tolerance—all come together to determine effective, efficient, and ethical practice in the moment. It is with this acknowledgment that we share these findings humbly and with humility.

Although the findings from the two studies presented here are useful and practical next steps in refining our understanding of effective CC-CRE practices, they are limited. First, we recognize that the sample for the optimality study (n=9) is small and future studies should have a larger sample with greater representation from various regions, particularly the Global South. This would be more aligned with our topic and do greater justice to the issue of cultural representation. Second, both the studies on adaptivity and optimality used self-report measures (surveys and in-depth interviews), and so have yet to include more objective measures of educational outcomes or even participant experiences of the effects of the various approaches. Finally, we discovered upon reflection that even our framing of the questions for the optimality interview study presented cultural differences as a “challenge,” a basic and insidious assumption of dominant prescriptive mindsets. We recommend that future research reframe the questions using more neutral terms (e.g., changing from “cultural challenges” to “cultural artifacts”), in addition to reflecting on the blind spots and biases that come with the researchers’ own social identities. The next steps in this research program are to develop and validate measures of the competing values and competencies associated with both cross-cultural adaptivity and optimality, in order to better assess their effects on CC-CRE outcomes, and then to offer such assessments and feedback profiles as online tools to enhance professional development in this area.

Our capacities as intercultural and international researchers and practitioners in the field of peace and conflict studies to work effectively, respectfully, and sustainably across significant cultural differences are paramount. We have known this fact for many decades. If we do not take these challenges seriously, we will forever be viewed as yet another chapter in the many Western attempts to colonize the globe, only to be quietly or forcefully resisted and rejected. Perhaps with the combined benefits of local expert experience and rigorous scientific inquiry, we can move forward toward a more inclusive set of optimal CC-CRE processes, and genuinely begin a process of mutual learning.

As an academic it is always useful to know how one stacks up on the bullshit meter! I appreciate the opportunity to reflect with you on this body of research and how it connects to my own experiences. This research offers an extraordinary look into current practice, approach, and the ongoing challenges of working with conflict both within complexity and across deep cultural differences. It has been almost forty years since my early learning into what I articulated as the elicitive/prescriptive approaches. Reading through your paper I found myself musing on my own early starting points and the inevitable evolution of my understanding. Let me share a few of these reflections.

Early on in my career I faced the normal challenges around the nature of ethnographic and participatory observation approaches that anchored my vocation as a young practitioner-scholar. At best it was all messy. In the book Preparing for Peace, where I first articulated the elicitive-prescriptive framing, I devoted an entire section to capturing my “experiments” with the elicitive approaches. Much inspired by Gandhi’s autobiography, the effort focused on illustrating emergence more than conclusion. My primary challenge was this: I was trying to create a category for a conversation that did not yet exist. Ethnographers understand that creating a new category of meaning arrives with slower languaging and unfolds across longer time frames than say testing across or within existing categories of meaning. Within conflict resolution, what existed was the prescriptive mode of training and education, though nobody called it prescriptive. Less clear yet, was what to call something that could be in conversation with our actual methods of training that relied mostly on transferring predetermined models and skills. I called our dominant practice “prescriptive” and deployed “elicitive” as a rhyming counterpart to frame up an ideal-type conversation. Thus was born the elicitive/prescriptive naming.

Because the quite young fields of conflict resolution and peacebuilding offered narratives of alternatives (alternative dispute resolution was in fact a literal framing), we were trained in and prepared to offer what was at the time called “skill development courses,” but we did not view our educational processes as prescriptive. In fact, the opposite. Most people envisioned something far more participatory and emancipatory than other pedagogical approaches. This of course all depends on your point of comparison. I think those of us involved in developing our social change fields envisioned our engagement as value-driven, dialogically based, more responsive to human need, and empathic when compared with our “contrarian” counterparts: international relation experts (realism) and lawyers pushing win/lose litigation. This reinforced a view that our emergent field was participatory and hardly prescriptive.

Pushback on the word prescriptive abounded. Further, elicitive as an idea or approach was not just less practiced. It did not exist as a category within the professional field. I recall my first encounter with the BS meter—not [sic], literal and verbatim—came after I had described the notion of elicitive as a way to be in conversation with prescriptive and received a robust and complete rejection from someone who I highly respected as a mentor but who argued that all that “stuff” was tried in the ’60s. None of it worked. What people really wanted is answers and to be told how best to proceed. Something akin to conflict is universal, therefore, approaches to resolution follow universal principles.

Forty years later the categories are now under research, though remarkably, the default system leaning toward prescriptive seems entrenched, as the results of this paper indicate. What has changed across forty years? Let me speak to my own learning and evolutions in my thought. To some degree, they pick up on the significant aspects of this paper. Four evolutions come to mind.

An early evolution was to better articulate and understand elicitive-prescriptive as a spectrum of choices not a rigid binary. Engaging with the elicitive or prescriptive approach presents choices within any given moment, session, event, or program. The spectrum obligates a reflection, a kind of experiment in the self-examined life, to encourage both self- and context awareness. Good skills, identified and practiced in one context are significant but not sufficient for rote transfer to another. Awareness of cultural underpinnings, biases, privilege, and levels of differentiated application—these are all part of deeper patterns no matter the context. But unawareness of these should not be a choice. A significant aspect of elicitive/prescriptive required me, all of us I think, to unpack our baggage around privilege, power, and intellectual preferences. Prescriptive approaches come with justifications that remain, up until today, unconscious with reference to these three Ps, and that in my mind is not the basis from which to make choices.

My first evolution was truly about investigating the hidden aspects of culture, context, and power embedded within what could easily present as best practices and universal skills. One early conclusion came in the form that while not a binary, I did make a case for taking an elicitive-oriented approach. At essence this suggests that the default should not be the assumption of better skill or best approach, but rather the assumption that much remains unknown, much will vary by context, and that context is best known by those closest, most proximate to their own setting. As such, humility requires taking lightly what we have found has worked in the past and in other settings. Elicitive-oriented suggests a permanent emergence of learning and a commitment to co-learning and design.

A second evolution came from the hard questions that often emerged from participants who found that participatory approaches could carry dangers equal to the prescriptive methodologies. While the prescriptive erred on the side of cultural imperialism, elicitive could err on the side of covert extraction. The hard questions were often around basics: Who are you? And what are you hiding? What will you do with all this? Making space for local, context-shaped creativity and knowledge, and cultural interpretation, should never be a recipe for hiding one’s own understandings, for not sharing lived experience, or for engaging in forms of deception in the guise of facilitation. These affront equality and dignity, and show up as a lack of transparency, all of which underpin how subtle and quickly the elicitive and other forms of external research can quickly become extractive modalities for tapping people’s knowledge under the good intention of offering training and education. If this happens, even with the best of intentions, it reinforces patterns of imperial behavior and structures of exclusion. I learned this the hard way, through mistakes and failures. And I certainly needed friends willing to confront my behavior, modalities, and language. This could often be as fundamental as simple words, like how I used the phrase “conflict resolution” or the pushback around what lies behind my purported purpose. Here we add a fourth P—privilege, power, preference, and deep purpose. Transparency and humility are harder to practice than we imagine yet remain the basis of authentic relationship, which in the end sits as the core value of an elicitive-oriented approach.

This leads to the third evolution: how not to get hooked on the appeal and narrowness of a skill-focus, that while beneficial, can easily blind us to the challenges of systemic change. I learned that we fall short when the approach to education reduces itself to the transfer of skills and ignores the quality of relationships embedded within the systems of harm we seek to change.

Far too often we imagine knowledge, capacity, and skill as content functioning outside of context, relationship, and system. A relationship-centric understanding of social change and education necessitates exploring the core question of what, exactly, we are up to?—in every sense of the metaphor. Most of my work over the years evolved toward commitment to accompaniment within longer-term relationships. This became significant enough that I began to align my time commitments with the notion that grounded realities in settings of protracted conflict require us to think and engage across decades and not fall prey to the narrow parameters of a project mentality, the latter being the category of agency within which most “trainings” and funding unfold. It is from the elicitive-oriented approach that I understood a simple maxim: Never let funding determine your deepest sense of purpose.

Over the years, my most significant “experiments with truth” in the elicitive/prescriptive came within longer-term relationships. I recognize that this choice is not possible for everyone nor best suited to every situation. In fact, the opening spokesperson for the BS meter you noted in this paper might have come from the core concern I have heard expressed more than once: Offer me what you have. I will determine how it is applied and whether it is useful. I certainly have experienced that one idea shared at the right time by the right person in the right way can make a world of difference within a particularly challenging moment. I also found this to be true: That moment, that idea, and that skill are a drop in the sea of protracted conflict. The elicitive-oriented approach does not minimize the power of ideas or skills and certainly advocates for transparency and commitment for people to have agency over their process of learning and ultimately decisions about how best to engage in their own settings. Equally true is this: We rarely attend to the implicit underpinning of the dominant, prescriptive-oriented approach that suggests the best way we manage complexity comes by reducing agency to skills, toolboxes, and the plethora of lessons learned. The fact, I think as you rightly state in this article, that the prescriptive-oriented approach remains the default choice of preference suggests that peace and conflict education and support structures continue to foster a significant gap of investment in relational and systemic change. Over time, I evolved in the understanding that the elicitive/prescriptive was not just about the particulars of a training event or how best to develop capacity building. At a deeper level, the mindset exploring this spectrum required me to face the challenge of how I was choosing to be with others in the face of extraordinary cultural and contextual complexity rife with the harms of inequality, inequity, and exclusion. Ultimately, elicitive/prescriptive demands that we address the question of how our theory of learning connects with our theory of change. I remain convinced that the elicitive-oriented approach understands the grounded reality that shifting toxic systems of harm we inhabit requires longer-term joint commitment to co-learning.

A last evolution seems best captured in the simple Quaker notion of let your life speak. We could describe this in different ways. St. Francis is said to have noted that we must speak always to the love of God and use words if we must. At some point I came to understand that a person could be highly prescriptive yet embody a love, curiosity, humility, and commitment to the well-being of others that translated to extraordinary processes of deep co-learning. And, a person could externalize a brilliant case for elicitive methodologies and display few if any of those characteristics. What matters most is what we embody. What matters is the quality of presence and whether we live the values that foster respect, dignity, and profound appreciation for truth, and remain open to very different ways of knowing. Ultimately, the elicitive-oriented approach commits to the pathway of walking and learning together.

John Paul Lederach, April, 2024