This paper began its intellectual life as a simple and autobiographical exploration of how the senior author deals with an unus

Initial Caveats

Anyone who reads what follows will soon see that it suffers from many of the problems that plague academic conference papers. To begin with, the proposal for it was submitted last summer, and our work has changed dramatically since then. That proposal-to-reality gap is all the more important here, because this paper reflects the work of teachers, students, and practitioners more than that of scholars, who at least know how their research projects are likely to unfold over a period of a few months.

In this case, too, the quality of our work is limited by a common theme in the field of conflict resolution. There is a huge gap between the theoretical and conceptual material generated by scholars and the experience of practitioners on the ground. As far as education is concerned, there are literally thousands of creative efforts to help young people and others learn how to resolve conflict and ease political tensions taking place around the world. However, the few attempts to develop theoretical and general conclusions are based on short-term interventions in American K-12 schools and thus omit the experience of a) higher education and b) longer term programs aimed at helping young people and adults deal with intractable conflicts in other countries, where the stakes are often much higher than they are in the United States. (Jones and Compton 2002).

Our point is not to criticize the likes of Jones and Compton, for they have truly done first rate work in helping us understand the kind of American school-based programs they chose to focus on. However, any understanding of the role (and limits) of education as part of conflict resolution and transformation has to go farther, which is what we have tried to do here.

So, what follows is a brief conceptual discussion of the way that the link between conflict resolution and education has to be expanded followed by three case studies from our own work. So, a final caveat before we proceed. The body of the paper then is divided into two parts. The first reviews the state (or perhaps the lack thereof) of the literature on education and the prospect for conflict transformation in the broadest sense of the term. The second includes three case studies drawn from American higher education and the work of Search for Common Ground. These three cases hardly constitute a solid empirical base for major scholarly work. However, we have been able to glean enough material from them to reach some tentative conclusions that could spark further research and practical work.

Authors of conference papers frequently call them a work in progress. This paper does not even warrant that label. It’s more like the image we have of our Washington DC are neighborhoods. The bulk of the writing was done three days after the skies had dumped more than two feet of snow on the Washington DC area. The senior author’s street had been plowed once. You could see bits of road beneath the crushed ice and snow in the one twisty lane that had been cleared. On the sides were huge snow banks covering cars, whose shape and color could barely be discerned…..

Education and Conflict Resolution: The Theoretical State of Play

Ideally, we would use this paper to test and expand theories of conflict resolution that address the impact of education. Unfortunately, we cannot do that at this point, since the most we can claim to have available to us are theoretical snippets and fragments. While much of the research we have drawn on here is very good, it is too limited in scope and too unsystematic in nature to generate the sort of robust, competing theories one finds at the core of mainstream international relations.

As is the case with peace studies and conflict resolution in general, much of the literature is on how education contributes to conflict rather than to its resolution. Indeed, we have a reasonably good idea of how everything from curricula to peer pressure to inflammatory language by teachers can sew the seeds of anger and hate that lead to violence (Eaton 2002),

We know far less about how education can be used to reduce tensions, build trust, and end intractable disputes. As noted earlier, what we do know is based largely on the experience of schools in the United States which is hardly an adequate data base for at least four reasons (Jones and Compton 2002).

First, most of the programs are focused on the issue of school violence. This is, of course, a major problem in American schools. It is not, however, the key question conflict resolution practitioners deal with in other countries.

Second and related, the focus of the programs is also on training children in basic conflict resolution skills. While this is also obviously important, organizations like Search for Common Ground tend to work in situations in which the conflicts from outside the school shape what happens in the classroom. Therefore, our projects tend to focus on the conflict itself and cover more than just teaching conflict resolution skills. In fact, some of them only do so in an indirect way.

Third, many—though by no means all—of the American programs are short term in nature. Students get a day or two of training during the orientation period at the beginning of the school year or have a module on conflict resolution included in the curriculum. Our experience, however, in countries with long-lasting, intractable conflicts, it takes years of concerted effort before a society can make major strides toward reconciliation and stable peace.

Fourth, some of the most important educational experiences take place outside of the classroom. Mohammed Abu-Nimer (1999) has done the most systematic research on the Arab-Jewish dialogue projects that were a common part of life in Israel and Palestine until the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000. Less systematic research has been done on the Seeds of Peace camp and other projects that bring young people together in a recreational or athletic environment. While there is a substantial literature on how outdoor experiential education such as Outward Bound and NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) contribute to self-esteem and other assets, there is little about whether or not they help young people deal with conflict.

Despite the lack of systematic research, Abu-Nimer’s critique of Arab-Israeli dialogue projects he studied does suggest at least one avenue we will be exploring below. He is quite critical of many of the programs because they are too short in duration and do not have much in the way of follow up once the program ends. Some were only a weekend long. Three examples should make the importance of Abu-Nimer’s critique clear.

One of the few unqualified successes in this area is Operation Understand DC. Each spring twelve African-American and twelve Jewish high school juniors are chosen for the highly competitive program. For the rest of that academic year, they spend time together learning about questions of race and religion. During the summer, they spend two weeks in a camp and then travel to important sites in the history of the civil rights movement and of the Jewish people. During the first semester of their senior years, they do outreach work in the community together. Almost all of the OUDC graduates go on to work on race and diversity issues in general when they get to college.

By contrast, consider the summer camp created in 2001 by NBA players from the former Yugoslavia and the Benetton corporation (which happens to own one of the most successful professional teams in Europe). Five of the best young basketball from each of the former Yugoslav republics was chosen to attend the camp in Treviso, Italy. The two week session included both training in basketball and conflict resolution skills. By all accounts, the camp itself was a success. One has to ask, however, what its lasting effect will be since it is all but impossible for those teens to continue interacting with each other now that they have returned home.

Along similar lines, during the 1980s, the Beyond War movement introduced several hundred thousand adults to basic principles of conflict resolution. The organization itself changed its orientation with the end of the Cold War. Many veterans of the movement are still active in the field, and its successes a generation ago undoubtedly made the whole idea of win/win conflict resolution better known. Still, the demise of Beyond War brought this massive educational effort to an end, thereby slowing the spread of the understanding of why conflict resolution is so important.

The Central Role of Education in Conflict Resolution

However weak the theory may be, there can be no mistake about the role that education plays in conflict resolution as a whole. To be sure, there is a limited place for education when decision makers sit around a table to forge a deal to end years of fighting or a protracted labor dispute.

But, much of the resolution of long-standing conflict involves the shedding of one set of beliefs that can lead to confrontation and violence in favor of those that lead to cooperation and stable peace. To make that happen, education in one form or another is part of the process.

The American College Classroom

This section draws on our experiences with conflict resolution in the classroom. Hauss has been teaching about conflict resolution since 1984. He has done so at two American and one British universities. He did a fair amount of writing on the subject in the 1980s, has written a recent textbook in the field (Hauss 2001), and generally has spent a lot of time discussing teaching conflict resolution and political science. Loomis attended Juniata College where he majored in peace and conflict studies and then focused on those same issues in his MA program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Shipler was a peace studies major at Haverford College and then went on to work with young people in Cambodia before joining the Search for Common Ground staff.

It has been our experience that conflict resolution education has passed through three phases, each of which probably has expanded its impact.

Gloom and Doom 101

George Lopez opened the first meeting of the Peace Studies Association at Tufts University in 1989 by calling our teaching “Gloom and Doom 101.” He accused us of focusing more on war than peace and on problems rather than solutions in general. For the most part, he was right. The most widely used anthologies published in the 1980s focused on the problems—the threat of nuclear war, the arms trade, apartheid in South Africa, racism and sexism, and so on (Klare and Thomas 1991).

The courses and the scholarship, of course, reflected the times. These were the Reagan years with their renewed tensions with the Soviet Union, escalating arms race, and swing toward the right wing in domestic politics. Teachers and scholars were discovering new problems and rediscovering old ones. To cite but one example, Carol Cohn participated in a two week faculty seminar on nuclear weapons and security policy co-sponsored by Harvard and MIT in 1984. During the weekend between the two weeks of classes, the group went to visit the nuclear submarine base in New London CT. The visitors were asked if they wanted to “pat” a missile. Moreover, the whole tone of the seminar in which nuclear weapons were treated as if they were not weapons of mass destruction by experts who talked about them in an emotion-free way shocked the then young scholar, who later wrote:

I found myself aghast, but morbidly fascinated—not by nuclear weaponry, or by images of nuclear destruction, but by the extraordinary abstraction and removal from what I new as reality that characterized the professional discourse (Cohn 1989: 40)

Last but by no means least, the peace studies community Lopez was speaking to listed almost completely to the left. Many of the pioneers in the field had long been involved in the movement against the war in Vietnam and other progressive causes. Many came out of the traditional peace churches or the left wing of Catholicism. If there were any Republicans in the room that day, they kept quiet….

Rational Basis for Hope

Lopez did not, however, discuss the then new field of conflict resolution in that keynote address. It was new, and it was still small. But it was growing and it was qualitatively different from gloom and doom 101.

In 1981, two events occurred which did not seem terribly important at the time. Roger Fisher and William Ury published their seminal book, Getting to YES. That fall, the little-known George Mason University in the suburbs of Virginia created the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, the first degree granting program in the field (Kriesberg 2001).

While students and faculty members in programs like ICAR’s still devoted a lot of time and energy to analyzing why conflicts occurred, more and more serious attention was paid to possible solutions. As more research was done and more optimism could be seen in the “real world” with the of the Cold War, the shift away from apartheid in South Africa, and so on, there was a more hopeful tone in many courses as the term conflict resolution suggests (Hauss 1989)

That occurred on two main levels. First, teachers and students gave the principles and techniques of conflict resolution, such as track two diplomacy, win-win outcomes, overcoming the image of the enemy, and interest-based negotiation new attention. Second, many conflict resolution courses were anchored in systems theory which stresses the interconnection of all life and the possibility of systemic growth as well as decay (Senge 1990). As that happened, teachers and students gained new insights and borrowed ideas from fields as diverse as quantum physics and business management.

In other words, these were courses that gave students two things. First, they included reasons why young people could and should feel more optimistic. Second, they pointed them toward ways they could become engaged in constructive programs for social change rather than just in protests that said “no” to the world’s ills. As that happened, classroom diversified ideologically, though it is safe to say that most professors were still on the left. Still more and more conservative and moderate students found their way into courses that addressed peace and conflict.

Into the Mainstream

The second half of the 1990s and the first years of the new century have seen the insertion of conflict resolution into the mainstream of higher education in political science and related disciplines. Many such departments now have courses in conflict resolution to complement those in programs explicitly in the field. Some of these courses appear in unlikely places. For instance, the Royal Military College in Canada (the military academy for all its armed services) requires a year-long course in peace keeping of all second year cadets.

Perhaps even more importantly, issues revolving around conflict resolution are now routinely included in core courses such as international relations and comparative politics. Thus, Hauss now includes material on reconciliation and consensus building both in his own courses and his text book on comparative politics. And, it is not just the pioneers in the field who are bringing this material into the mainstream. In the first two editions of his text on international conflict, Joseph Nye does not even include conflict resolution in the index. In the most recent edition (Nye 2003), conflict resolution techniques are peppered throughout the book. Perhaps even more importantly, track two diplomacy, cooperative problem solving, and other themes growing out of conflict resolution are central to his influential Paradoxes of American Power (Nye 2002).

Much of this mainstreaming can be attributed to events in the tumultuous years since the end of the Cold War. Breakthroughs in such places as South Africa and Northern Ireland and setbacks in Israel or with the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have made it impossible for scholars of all methodological and ideological stripes to avoid conflict resolution.

Some of it, however, has to be attributed to the maturation of the field. Over the course of the 1990s and, especially, since 9/11, quite a number of conflict resolution specialists have seen the need to break out of their intellectual and political “ghetto” and reach out to everyone from new types of students to national security policy makers. That is especially true of younger teachers and scholars who did not grow up with the ideological concerns (and some would say blinders) of the generation which founded the conflict resolution field. On the other side of the academic coin, many traditional international relations specialists have come to see that the conflict resolution community has something to add to our understanding of the complicated international issues of the post-cold war world.

Assessing Change in the Classroom: Can It Be Done?

One of the goals of this paper is to begin an assessment of fairly long term educational programs in conflict resolution. That is all but impossible to do at this point for courses in higher education. Indeed, it is all but impossible to imaagine how that could be done given the number and diversity of the courses and programs being offered—let alone imagining who might fund such an endeavor.

However, from our experiences on both sides of the professorial desk and from our discussions, one conclusion is clear. If student interest and enrollment are any indication, the conflict resolution community must be doing something right. While there were short term spikes and ebbs in student interest after the end of the Cold War and the 2001 terrorist attacks, the overall trends are all up. Individual courses—especially those taught by people who are practitioners as well as academics—are consistently high. Applications to programs like George Mason’s ICAR have doubled. A growing number of people are choosing conflict resolution options within interdisciplinary international studies programs and discipline-specific MA and PhD courses of study. Last but by no means least, the number of applications for internships and entry level jobs at organizations like Search for Common Ground have skyrocketed. Indeed, the demand for those positions dramatically outstrips the supply of young people trying to build a career in the field.

Other than that, only the most tentative conclusions are warranted and then only as intellectual shots in the dark to elicit feedback from colleagues, especially those whose experiences might be different from ours. But, it seems to be the case that conflict resolution education at the college and university level has the greatest impact under the following circumstances:

· The more intense the program the better. Full degrees at the graduate level and majors for the undergraduates are better than individual courses or even clusters of courses. But even they accomplish more than exposure that is limited to modules in broader classes. However, even that is important because it gives the whole field far broader exposures.

· The impact on students seems to be greatest when both practitioners and scholars teach them. It is probably even better if a single individual who works in both sides of the field does at least some of the teaching, although the number of scholar-practitioners is relatively small.

· The more diverse the student body, the better. That is not just true ideologically, but sociologically as well. Universities like George Mason and Columbia have been quite successful at recruiting students from diverse national and ethnic backgrounds, and it is quite common to find students with first hand experience with some of these intractable conflicts in the classroom where they make an invaluable contribution.

Soap Operas and Kindergartens

As noted earlier, the literature on conflict resolution and education revolves heavily around the American experience. That has two implications which are not all the helpful for our understanding of the impact education plays—and can play—in general. First, to the degree that it focuses on specific conflicts, it is usually on violence in the schools themselves and conflict among young people. For good or ill, these issues are often not high on the list of priorities in other countries where the school is often one of the few safe places in an otherwise violent society. Second, because interest in conflict resolution education has emerged at the same time as the intense interest in student achievement, the focus has been more on what and how individual children learn, not on broader conflict resolution processes which are usually more central issues in other countries.

In other words, practitioners outside the United States more often focus on the schools as a way to address broader social issues, including intractable conflicts along racial, religious, and ethnic lines. Whether this involves the creation of new schools or just new curricula, the focus of the program extends beyond the walls of the school far more than in the largely American programs the theoretical literature is based on.

Mozaik: Premises and Context

One of the best known (or at least one of the most discussed) of these projects outside the United States, a series of interethnic kindergartens in Macedonia, operated by Search for Common Ground since 1998. Macedonia is the one former Yugoslav republic which has not seen extensive violence since the country began to break up in 1991, but it has come close.

SFCG created Mozaik as part of its broader goal of preventing the outbreak of extensive violence and helping the various ethnic groups in that country reconcile. Obviously, a kindergarten will do little to prevent violence from breaking out in the short run. However, it is SFCG’s (and that of other groups such as World Vision which has similar programs) untested and untestable premise that bringing young people together today can lead today’s children to see cooperative ways to solve their problems when they become adults and, perhaps, have an impact on their parents’ generation today.

Ethnicity is the most important factor in Macedonian politics and is the tinderbox which could lead to civil war. Two thirds of its people are ethnic Macedonians. Almost a quarter are Albanians. The remaining ten percent consist of small minorities of Turks, Roma, Vlachs, and Serbs. Mozaik concentrated on the two largest groups, since they are the only ones that play any significant political role in the country.

Even though it has not suffered the destruction of its neighbors, Macedonia is a highly segregated country, starting with its school system. Children from each ethnic group grow up in a sequestered educational environment, speaking only one language in their respective classrooms, which is the only one they will ever learn. Friendships outside of school rarely cross ethno-linguistic, religious, and cultural lines. In short, the lack of communication across these barriers at school reinforce cultural patterns that inhibit interethnic understanding and harden ethnic stereotypes. Both the explicit and unspoken message from Macedonia’s segregated schools is to form stereotypes about people of other ethnic groups and develop intolerance toward them.

Like all of SFCG’s projects in Macedonia, Mozaik’s main, immediate goal is to give people a chance to cross lines that have been seared deeply into most people’s—including most children’s—social maps, constructions that prevent them from considering all Macedonians as members of a single, let alone integrated, society.

Mozaik: Structure and Operations

In 1998, SFCG obtained funding to establish three (now six) multiethnic kindergartens. Each has about 20 students and 4 teachers. The students are drawn equally from the two main ethnic communities. Of the teachers, two full time, two part time; two are Macedonians, two are Albanians; none of them are bilingual. Parents pay the same fees they would to state-run, segregated kindergartens. Some were drawn to send their children to Mozaik because they wanted them exposed to the other culture; some chose Mozaik because the low student-to-teacher ratio meant that it provided a better education, however one chooses to define the term.

Mozaik’s immediate goal, of course, is to foster mutual understanding and respect among the children and their parents which, in turn, could be used as a springboard toward longer term reconciliation in the country as a whole. In addition, the curriculum was designed to help the children nurture relationships with each other, learn the “other side’s” language, foster self-respect and respect for others, understanding the basics of interpersonal conflict, and develop skills for constructive and peaceful conflict resolution and problem solving.

In other respects, Mozaik is a typical kindergarten that combines play and other forms of social interaction and basic education. But that is where the similarities with traditional kindergartens stop. Children translate for each other—and their teachers and parents. They teach newcomers the rules of the game, such as saying “good morning” in both languages.

At first, the schools encountered some resistance. Some Macedonian parents were reluctant to let their children mix with Albanians whom they consider inferior. Some Albanians were criticized by their nationalist friends and neighbors for encouraging integration when their rights as a minority were not respected. But as it became clear that the schools provided a better educational experience, the classes filled and waiting lines grew.

Evaluations of the program have been extremely positive. Initial concerns that they were only educating the children of members of the elite who were already tolerant of the other ethnic group have proved unfounded. More importantly, the children seem to learn traditional subjects as well as tolerance more than their counterparts in state schools—as do their parents.

Lessons Learned and Next Steps

The real benefit of programs like Mozaik and similar ones in Israel and Northern Ireland (which have not fared as well in the short run) will not be known for years. It is one thing for the 17 and 18 year olds who participate in Operation Understand DC to take what they learn about racial understanding and reconciliation and carry it over into the rest of their lives. It is quite another for children who are at least a decade younger. When we earlier referred to the untestable premise of the SFCG program, it was that these children would help pave the way toward a more tolerant society. It is untestable because we cannot tell what they will be like even two or three years from now when they have spent as much time in the state schools as they have at Mozaik.

Educational Efforts Outside of the Classroom: Reintegrating Child Soldiers

The final example we draw on is the work Search for Common Ground and other NGOs are beginning to do with child soldiers as part of broader efforts to help people whose lives are disrupted by internal wars. The best estimate is that something like 300,000 children under the age of 15 have been combatants during the wars of the last decade. Some are as young as eight. Many have been forced to take up arms. Most have no life skills—other than fighting.

A web or academic literature search will reveal that there has been a tremendous outcry against the use of children as soldiers. The United Nations and other international organizations have produced resolutions condemning the use of child soldiers, and last year Secretary General Kofi Annan accused 23 parties of consciously recruiting child soldiers in conflicts around the world.

However, far less has been done to help reintegrate them back into “normal” society once wars have ended in places where the conflicts lasted a generation or more. During 2001, about 50 child soldiers a week were taken into custody in Rwanda. In Angola, at least 8,000 children had fought in the war, not counting those who were part of UNITA, whose child soldiers have not yet been acknowledged. After the signing of the 2002 cease fire, UNICEF and local NGOs assembled them at 42 “gathering points” and provided basic psychological counseling for them all. The camps were also set up in such a way that the children could play and otherwise discover how to be children again.

But, the sad reality is that most of these children are consigned to years, if not a lifetime, of living in the camps. Most have no family left or at least have no contact with living relatives. Few have any formal education and any prospects of forging a meaningful career or adult life for themselves.

Perhaps most importantly of all from the perspective of the conflict resolution community, failure to properly reintegrate demobilized children can constitute a major threat to the prospects for sustainable peace, reconciliation, development, and nation-building. Therefore, a handful of NGOs like Search for Common Ground and World Vision have begun to develop projects that would incorporate the reintegration of child soldiers are part of a broader healing strategy following the end of a civil war.

While such projects are still in their initial stages, their educational components go far beyond teaching basic literacy and other conventional pedagogical goals. Among other things, such programs have to help the young men and women develop conflict resolution, cooperative problem solving, and leadership skills. That will help them help themselves but also help them help their colleagues since there is no way the NGO community can meet the needs of at least 100,000 people on its own. But the child soldiers themselves are not the only object of such programs; they also have to prepare local communities and institutions to receive the children once they leave the camps.

Many NGOs already are working with child soldiers are part of their ongoing work with young internally displaced people (IDPs) in countries like Angola. And, while there is no magic formula for reaching out to child soldiers or young people in general, Search for Common Ground has played to its strengths, in particular the use of radio and the arts. Search has also trained former child soldiers and others as facilitators who can teach conflict resolution and other life skills to their peers.

Typical of Search’s work with IDPs was a most atypical event which occurred in August 2002 when its Angolan program welcomed UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in August with a theatre performance. The presentation was performed by IDP camp members of Moxico province and focused on the issue of mine awareness. CCG has been collaborating for months with its theatre troupe partners to train actors in various IDP camps with the skills to conduct theatre performances that raise critical issues for discussion and create community cohesiveness.

Woirld Vision is an Evangelical Christian NGO which started provided humanitarian relief. Two decades ago it added support for sustainable development to its activities. In the last five years, its leaders have realized that it also has to work on conflict resolution if the funds provided for relief or development are to have a lasting impact.

It is also a much larger organization with an overall budget of more than $1 billion a year or roughly 100 times that of Search for Common Ground. Therefore, it is able to actually set up its own centers for former child soldiers. For instance, it has established the Children of War Rehabilitation Centre in northern Uganda (Esalu 2003). The center has become home to children who were abducted and forced to fight in the civil war in southern Sudan. Unlike Search for Common Ground, World Vision tries to unite children with their families as well as providing them with basic education, which is no simple task. As one of the children who spent three years as the slave and wife of a Sudanese commander put it, “how can I go to school when I am big now?” Children like these get extensive psychological counseling and vocational training. More than 5,500 have spent time at this single center since it was created in 1996.

Finally, we would like to point out that educational efforts outside the classroom with young people are not limited to child soldiers and not limited to countries which have suffered from civil wars. As this paper is presented, one of the authors will be in Cincinnati helping establish a program for young people as part of Search for Common Ground’s efforts to forge racial reconciliation there. In April 2002, the ARIA Group (http://www.ariagroup.com) helped the community reach an agreement to settle a federal lawsuit on racial profiling, an agreement that was lauded by both the ACLU and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Since then, Search for Common Ground has been working with local leaders and, now, young people to help address all the other issues and the resentment in that racially divided and tense city.

Four Conclusions

As we noted in the beginning, it is pretentious of us to even suggest that we have pushed the frontiers of conflict resolution theory at all. However, we do think that there are at least four conclusions worth further exploration, because they mesh with other developments in the field as a whole.

John Paul Lederach (2002), among others, has argued that conflict resolution community has to move beyond the kinds of the short-term projects covered in the Jones and Compton volume. These approaches are based on the work of mediators, which is where much of the conflict resolution field as a whole originated. But, in what Lederach calls the kind of “deep rooted” conflicts organizations such as Search for Common Ground and World Vision work on, something much more is needed.

Moreover, we write at a time when the demands on the conflict resolution are growing but some funding sources are shrinking. The funders who remain are increasingly insisting on evidence that our projects actually work, including our projects on education (Honeyman, Hughes, and Schneider, forthcoming).

In that light, we ask you to consider these extremely tentative conclusions.

The first is obvious. The theory and practice on education in conflict resolution in the United States would undoubtedly be improved if more attention were paid to either the higher education or international experience. Indeed, we raised the example of Cincinnati in closing the preceding section precisely because it is Search for Common Ground’s experience in places like Angola that shapes its initial approach to conflict resolution and education in the United States. Obviously, we will not do the same things in Ohio that we did in the Moxico IDP camp. However,

Second, programs should be extensive. Some conflict resolution skills can be taught quickly as the extensive review of the literature in Jones and Compton suggests. However, the challenge that faces us with American college students, Macedonian preschoolers, or Angolan child soldiers is not one that can be met with a few days of consciousness raising or skill development workshops. Even the American college student has spent years learning that conflict and confrontation go hand in glove. But, when we shift our attention to reconciliation following years of violence, education in the broadest sense of the term requires wrenching changes in the hearts and minds of individuals on both sides of the divide that gave rise to the conflict in the first place (LeBaron 2002, Lederach 1999, Hauss forthcoming). People can rarely do that on their own and can rarely do so quickly.

One of the apocryphal stories in the conflict resolution world involves John Paul Lederach’s response to a question about how long it will take to end the “troubles” in Northern Ireland. Ledearch apparently asked his questioner when the conflict had begun. With Battle of the Boyne in 1690 came the reply, to which Lederach responded it will take that same amount of time to settle it. It may be true that we can speed up processes of reconciliation so that they take years and not centuries. Nonetheless, they will still require long-term educational efforts.

Third, they should be integrated and mainstreamed. In American colleges and universities, courses on conflict resolution tend to attract the same kinds of people who are drawn to careers in the field, most of whom are upper middle class and left of center politically. When conflict resolution themes are included in conventional social science courses, they reach a far broader audience and thus can help our community break out of the left wing “ghetto” which limits our impact on society as a whole.

More importantly, projects like Mozaik or the child soldier reentry efforts have to teach to the whole person and to the community of which he or she is a part. Mozaik has an impact on the children’s parents and the neighborhoods they live in. If nothing else, the parents are exposed to their counterparts from the other ethnic community when they visit the school for parent-teacher meetings. But, if those children do not have ways of continuing their positive experiences with their former classmates and others from both communities, the long term impact of the program will be limited.[1]

The same holds for child soldiers. As is the case with the re-entry of ex-offenders in the United States, there is a high probability that these young people will return to violence, since it is just about the only thing they have known for most of their lives. Any program that works is going to have to address the whole community of which they are a part.

Finally, this paper and the broader work we do suggests that the link between conflict resolution and education operates on at least two levels. The first includes the kinds of skills that can be taught quickly—showing children how to take a “time out” or to listen effectively, for example. These are a vitally important part of any effort to spread the use of conflict resolution techniques from the interpersonal all the way out to the international level.

However, the kind of international and domestic conflicts that draw us to the field are so intense that they do no lend themselves to solutions that are so narrowly skills based. Indeed, many of us who work on such conflicts have stopped using the term “resolution,” opting for “transformation” engagement” instead. That is the case because, if we succeed, the nature of the relationships between the people who are parties to the dispute become qualitatively different and more constructive after having participated in whatever project an NGO like Search for Common Ground organizes.

Put simply, the kind of dialogues that lead to reconciliation change whole lives and address peoples’ deepest values as well as the skills you can learn in a classroom or in a workshop. From this perspective, we totally agree with Michelle LeBaron whose recent book is subtitled, “conflict resolution from the heart.”

Works Cited

Abu-Nimer, Mohammed (1999). Dialogue, Conflict Resolution, and Change: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Israel. (New York: State University of New York Press).

Cohn, Carol 1989). “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” In Linda Rennie Forcey ed., Peace: Issues, Meanings, Strategies. (New York: Praeger), 39-72. Originally published in Signs. 12(4) Summer 1987, 687-718.

Eaton, Jana (2002). EdD Dissertation

Esalu, Simon Peter, “Three Years in Captivity.” http://www.wvi.org, accessed 22 February 2003.

Jones, Tricia and Randy Compton (2002). Kids Working It Out: Stories and Strategies for Making Peace in Our Schools. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass).

Hauss, Charles (1989). “A Rational Basis for Hope.” In Linda Rennie Forcey ed., Peace: Issues, Meanings, Strategies. (New York: Praeger), 203-218

_____ (2001). International Conflict Resolution. (New York/London: Continuum).

_____ (Forthcoming). “Reconciliation.” Prepared for the Intractable Conflict Knowledge Base. http://www.intractableconflict.org/index.jsp

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[1] The case of the Seeds of Peace camp is instructive. It maintains a center in Jerusalem and has even given former campers video cameras to record their interactions after returning from their summers in Maine. However, since the most receznt intifada broke out in 2000, it has been all but impossible for the teenagers to continue to see each other in Israel or Palestine.