Societal Change Open Access

Many years ago, I was at a meeting with a well-known professor who declared that there were only two kinds of conflict resolution: the problem-solving model, as pioneered by Roger Fisher, and the therapeutic model, as developed by Herbert Kelman. I was taken aback because neither model fully captured what we were doing at Search for Common Ground (commonly referred to as “Search”). This was the NGO I founded in 1982. I told the professor that, while our activities included both problem-solving and therapeutic processes, we operated within a broader framework. He asked how I would describe our approach. On the spot, I invented a new term. I said I was a practitioner of “societal conflict resolution.”

I was clear that my ultimate goal was to promote positive social change across entire countries and regions. Despite the long-time involvement of Search and a small number of NGOs, I have been told by expert conflict resolvers such as Professor Lawrence Susskind of MIT that very little study has been carried out on how conflict resolution methodology can be used to bring about social change.

For my part, I am a self-taught practitioner—not a scholar. My wife, Susan Collin Marks, and I built Search into the world’s largest peacebuilding and conflict resolution organization with a staff of 600 and offices in 35 countries. Yet, in my 32 years as head of Search, I was never approached by an academic more senior than a master’s candidate to study the work we were doing around the world to shift attitudes and behaviors on a mass scale.

For the first 14 years of our organizational existence, we lacked the resources to work societally. Our breakthrough came in Burundi when in 1996, the country’s military forces launched a coup d’état and deposed President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, a Hutu. They replaced him with a Tutsi, Pierre Buyoya. My colleagues and I at Search were appalled by the coup. Nevertheless, one result, which we had not foreseen, was that the coup provided us with the opportunity to develop and put into practice comprehensive programs across all of Burundi.

Here is what happened. Before the coup, we were one of many international NGOs that were receiving relatively small grants from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Our work centered on preventing violence, and there was violence everywhere. Already, thousands of Burundians had died, and the country threatened to descend into genocide, as had occurred two years before in neighboring Rwanda, whose population included a similar mix of Tutsis and Hutus.

When a coup takes place in a nation where the US government is providing aid, American law stipulates that funding should be cut off. Thus, after the Burundian coup, we at Search received notice from USAID to close down. The order came even though ethnic enmity between Hutus and Tutsis was the key reason for the coup. From our perspective, this was exactly the wrong time to suspend our work, which seemed more needed than ever.

Therefore, I sent a Hail Mary email to Brian Atwood, the worldwide head of USAID and an old colleague of mine when we both worked on Capitol Hill. I explained the problem and requested a waiver. Somewhat to my surprise, the waiver was granted. Consequently, we no longer had to share the USAID budget with many other NGOs, and we soon received enough funding to expand our activities across all of Burundi. While we never spent more than $3 million a year, we were given enough funding to work at the societal level.

Our projects were rooted in a simple idea: Understand the differences and act on the commonalities. Within that framework, we made use of a diverse toolbox that included such traditional conflict resolution techniques as mediation, facilitation, and training—and unconventional ones involving radio programming, the arts, and empowerment of women as peacemakers. Our goal was to reach the whole population with win-win messages—and enable vast numbers of people to internalize them.

We regarded peace as a process, not an event. Although we appreciated—and yearned for—those wonderful moments when agreements were signed, we recognized that real peace required more than signatures. Even if top leaders were able to agree, we believed that most of the population had to want to end the violence. Thus, we worked to create opportunities for the masses to step back from fear, to see beyond stereotypes, and to discover their common humanity. We were committed to countering extremism by encouraging moderation, and we sought to create an environment across Burundi in which conflict, which is a normal part of life, would be resolved peacefully. Our activities were designed to reach a broad cross section of the population. We believed that if we carried out numerous activities involving a wide range of sectors, we would increase the chances that a certain number would be successful. In effect, we wanted the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts.

Our model required staff members on the ground who were immersed in local culture. They needed to have a deep sense of where they were. Conflicts everywhere were—and are—complex, and we recognized that it took deep engagement to understand them. We recognized that expatriates could have that capacity, but usually the people with the most profound understanding were native to the country. Nevertheless, locals tended to be associated with one side or the other, and they were likely to give the impression that they favored their own group. Our strategy in Burundi was to employ equal numbers of Tutsis and Hutus and also to bring in a few resident expatriates. The expats needed to live in the country long enough to recognize the intricacies of the conflict. Our local employees had to be committed, above all, to preventing violence—not to furthering the cause of their ethnic group—regardless of who was right and who was wrong.

Our societal approach called for us to be weavers who knitted together multiple strands to mend a torn country. We wanted to promote healing. So, after adequate resources became available, we opened four satellite offices outside the city of Bujumbura (then the country’s capital),¹ and we operated in a multipronged, multi-project way. There follows a description of the activities that made up our societal approach.

Our first initiative was to set up a radio production facility, called Studio Ijambo (Figures 1 and 2). (Ijambo means wise words in the Kirundi language.) The idea was to produce programming to counter hate radio of the sort that had incited mass murder in Rwanda. In Burundi, we wanted to make programs that had the opposite effect—i.e., that encouraged peace and reconciliation. We sought to rehumanize the other, to reduce polarization, and to spur dialogue. We reasoned that by establishing a radio studio—as opposed to a station—we would be less vulnerable to closure by the authorities; we would not need to go through the bureaucratic hassle of obtaining a broadcast license; and we would not be competing with existing stations. Our strategy was for Studio Ijambo to offer programming at no cost to all of Burundi’s radio stations. By being cooperative and generous, we were modeling the behavior that we hoped to encourage in the whole population.

When we started, Studio Ijambo was the only media producer in the country where Tutsi and Hutu reporters worked together on an equal basis. We asked our employees to leave their ethnicity at the door. To work at the studio, staff members needed to be committed not to the predominance of their ethnic group but to the promotion of independent, accurate journalism. Indeed, the studio’s reporters showed great courage because many Burundians regarded them as traitors. Balanced reporting was very dangerous in Burundi, but our mixed Hutu/Tutsi reporting teams provided protection for each other.

Despite the threats, Studio Ijambo reached a mass audience in both communities. In our peak years, we produced 15 hours a week of original programming. When the government forbade any contact with rebel groups, we spliced together parallel interviews that allowed the parties to hear each other’s perspectives. The studio even had a fleet of motorcycles, so our journalists could send in news reports from remote parts of the country.

In 1998, the studio broke a story about a massacre committed by government troops who were mostly Tutsi. High officials wanted to penalize the studio for digging into the atrocity, but President Buyoya, himself a Tutsi, disagreed, saying our reporters were just doing their jobs. As a result, Burundi experienced a turnaround. A few days later, the government set up a commission of inquiry and arrested three officers involved in the killings—unprecedented actions in a country where impunity from prosecution had long been the rule. Afterward, the UN Security Council took special note of these positive developments.

In addition to investigative reports, for six years Studio Ijambo produced a weekly documentary series that aired the real-life stories of Hutus who had saved the lives of Tutsis and Tutsis who had saved Hutus. The idea was to redefine the meaning of heroism so that it transcended ethnicity. Each episode ended with a call-in segment for listeners to tell their own stories of cross-ethnic heroism. As one USAID official noted, “You have introduced the vocabulary of peace and reconciliation to the national conversation at all levels, where previously only words of hate and mistrust were heard.”

Our most popular series was a twice-weekly radio soap opera, called Our Neighbors, Ourselves (Figure 3). For six years, we produced 616 episodes of the soap, which reached 87% of the population and became a national institution. Each show dealt with the tribulations of two families, one Hutu and one Tutsi (although we never said which was which). They struggled to stay friends in the midst of ethnic conflict. A front-page Wall Street Journal article stated, “Our Neighbors has sought to prove that radio, which had fomented trouble, could also bring people together.”

In Burundi, there was a tradition of wise elders, called Bashìngantahe, who mediated and arbitrated disputes. However, as in most places where there was violence, the old mechanisms had mostly broken down. We believed that one of our key functions was to combine traditional ways of resolving conflict with more modern, Western approaches. Thus, we produced a 26-part radio series that highlighted the role Bashìngantahe could play in dealing with ethnic conflict.

We made no claim that “common ground radio”—in Burundi or elsewhere—had anything near the power for good that its hate-filled opposite had for evil. Still, we believed that, over time, positive messages could have a substantial impact in changing attitudes and behaviors. Our programs kept alive, in a very difficult environment, the idea that there were alternatives to violence. In the process, we reduced fear and provided a safe space for expression. Indeed, Ted Koppel of ABC’s Nightline told his viewers that Studio Ijambo was Burundi’s “voice of hope.”

Another key part of our multipronged strategy was the Women’s Peace Center, where large numbers of Tutsi and Hutu women regularly came together. When it was founded in 1995, it was the only safe haven in the country for women of different ethnicities to meet and carry out joint projects. In Burundi, as in so many other places, women were not seen as equal to men. In our view, the violence was fueled in large part by macho attitudes that usually involved saving face and seeking vengeance. Men did most of the killing, and women were largely the protectors of the family and potential promoters of reconciliation. We wanted women to take on a leading role as peacemakers. We never went so far as to use the tactic featured in the Greek drama Lysistrata—to have the women withhold sex until the men made peace—but that tactic certainly occurred to us and provided a metaphorical backdrop for our work. At the Women’s Center, we sponsored a series of activities to empower Burundian women to heal the country, with particular emphasis on refugees and the internally displaced. Across the country, the Center supported about three hundred ethnically mixed women’s associations and helped its tens of thousands of members rebuild destroyed communities.

Militia members, who were paid a few dollars a day by political leaders, committed most of the violence in Burundi. (See Figure 4.) In 1999, we worked with a local NGO called JAMAA to provide alternatives for these young men. We originally called our effort the “Working with Killers” project, but we soon dropped that incendiary name, even though it accurately described what we were doing. Such a name was not supportive of our goal of helping participants leave behind their bloody pasts and create a better future.

The project represented a stretch for us because we were working directly with young men who had committed horrendous deeds. We dealt with these people because they were at the heart of the conflict. Our job in Burundi was not to make judgments but to facilitate peacemaking. A key part of our strategy was to give these young men a chance to speak, to compare experiences, and—as incredible as it may seem—to build trust. We came to see that Tutsi and Hutu participants were mirror images of each other. Both groups reflected fear, mistrust, and negative stereotypes.

We kicked off the project with a two-day workshop for an ethnically mixed group of 36 militia members. As the first evening wore on, no one wanted to go to bed. The adult facilitators finally declared that everyone had to retire. There was silence. Finally, assurances from the facilitators, plus fatigue, won out, and the young men went to their rooms. From this incident, we learned a lesson about holding multiday workshops for perpetrators of violence: Namely, no one feels safe sleeping in the same building with people they were afraid would murder them. Nevertheless, in the morning, having survived the night, participants looked at each other with fresh eyes and started to talk deeply. They discovered they shared common ground, since both groups felt they had been exploited by the political leaders who were paying them to be killers.

These young men became the core of our youth activities. We provided funding, a platform, and process suggestions. They organized football tournaments and told their stories through comic books, which related the horrors they had seen—for example, watching victims die horrible deaths. The comic books (Figure 5) were so compelling that the Burundian Ministry of Education added them to the curriculum material for the country’s schools. These comics reached young people in a language that was familiar and accessible to them. It was yet another example of our efforts to speak to our target audience in their own idiom.

Because violent conflict in Burundi, as in so many places, depended on mass stereotyping, demonizing, and dehumanizing, we believed that popular culture could play a key part in reversing the process. We recognized that violent conflict is almost never an intellectual exercise, and in Burundi, as elsewhere, we hoped to reach people on both the emotional and cognitive levels. Therefore, we made wide use of cultural activities such as drumming and dancing (Figures 6 and 7). We organized national competitions and held giant music festivals in Bujumbura. Studio Ijambo employed a full-time disk jockey, named Baby John, and he produced “music-for-peace” radio programming. We even enlisted Jamaican reggae star Ziggy Marley, who had a huge following in Burundi, to record public service announcements (PSAs) about the need to end the violence.

While diplomats eventually played a very important role in Burundian peacemaking, we recognized that conflict resolution would also benefit from unofficial and continuing mediation and facilitation. Hence, in 1995, we brought in Jan van Eck, a former South African ANC Member of Parliament, to help solve problems among leaders of conflicting parties, outside official channels. He worked directly for us for two years, and then independently for the next ten years. During this whole period, van Eck spent about half his time in Burundi. He became a widely trusted intermediary who was in contact with virtually every party to the conflict, including rebel groups with whom almost no one else was talking. He facilitated and brokered many agreements—small and large. According to a senior Burundian official, “The internal partnership we have today—something we couldn’t have imagined less than two years ago—is the fruit of a tree gently planted and patiently watered by Jan van Eck.”

Most of the work we did in Burundi took place at the grassroots level, and it can be described as bottom-up. At the same time, we recognized the extraordinary importance of top-down peacemaking. We came to see that bottom-up and top-down approaches were complementary, and that each was more likely to be successful when the other was present. We believed that our societal work played a key role in creating an environment inside Burundi that was supportive of the official peace negotiations held at Arusha in Tanzania. These talks were led first by Julius Nyerere, the one-time president of Tanzania. After Nyerere died in 1999, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela took over and guided the Burundians to a political settlement, which included national elections and interethnic power sharing. Unfortunately, neither that agreement nor our bottom-up efforts resolved all of Burundi’s problems, and many political leaders refused to abandon their zero-sum approaches. Today, Burundi remains fragile. But compared to 1995 when the country was on the brink of genocide, extraordinary progress has been made.

For us at Search for Common Ground, Burundi was the proving ground for societal peacebuilding. But Burundi is a small country the size of Maryland. We wanted to know if a similar approach would work in a much larger place. Subsequently, we got our answer in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is the size of the US east of the Mississippi. In the DRC, we worked on what could be called an industrial scale. We retrained more than 100,000 military men and police in not committing gender-based violence; we formed participatory theater troupes that performed in village squares and reached more than two million Congolese; and we had four radio studios similar to Studio Ijambo that provided programming to a network of 85 local radio stations. We also adapted our societal approach to many other countries—in full recognition that each place is different, with its own unique history and culture. In our view, about 50% of our toolbox worked when we entered a new country, and 50% did not—and we never knew which 50% was which. For us, the keys were creativity and nimbleness. We believed that standardized, off-the-shelf approaches were much less likely to be effective than customized ones. Still, we almost always found similarities between countries. Everywhere, there was a storytelling tradition, and everywhere, people in conflict saw themselves as victims.

Finally, USAID’s independent evaluation report described our work in Burundi as follows: