Peace and Injustice?

Recently, at a conference at a local law school, I was asked how to respond when a client asks “How can we go to mediation when the other side has done something evil?  Isn’t mediation just about compromise?  How can we compromise with evil?”  In my visit to Sudan last fall, I was asked essentially the same question each time I spoke to a group about peacebuilding.  Usually the question was put to me in terms of “How can you encourage peacebuilding when justice is not being done and there is little evidence that it will be?”  They have a point, don’t they?

In his book “Building Peace – Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies,” John Paul Lederach writes that transforming a culture of violence requires working at three levels of leadership in a society-–top, middle & grass roots, or local community leaders.  Leaders at the middle level are those who carry out the policies on a day-to-day basis if they are in government or those outside of government who have access to and some influence on policy makers.  Those at the top are those who make policy.

What if those at the top have no genuine interest in peacebuilding? What if they stay in power, at least in part, because of the conflict and not in spite of it?  What if their policies are to pit groups against groups to keep the opposition divided?  What if there is credible evidence that they have pursued policies of ethnic cleansing or genocide?  What then? Does it do any good to work with the grass roots and the middle levels of leadership when you know full well that you are not going to have access to or genuine participation in the peacemaking of the leaders at the top?

I suppose one answer is that those leaders must some day give up leadership, and whether they succumb to the natural aging process, are voted out, or are deposed, someone someday will replace them.  I would like to think that those who do have been directly involved in a true conflict transformation process.  Just because the current generation is getting it wrong is no reason for us to give up on the next generation of leaders.

Another perspective is that if sustainable peace can be built among factions in the grassroots in pockets, perhaps a critical mass of real progress will become evident giving rise then to a critical mass of hope and a plausible belief that wider spread change is not only possible but necessary.  Unjust walls of oppression have fallen in the past when enough people decided they’d had enough.

Yet another perspective is that if the community of nations can come together and create more effective international institutions to hold leaders accountable for crimes against humanity perpetrated against their own citizens, we want to have leaders dedicated to conflict resolution ready to step up to fill the leadership vacuum that would result.

What do you think?  Should we sit on the sidelines until the top levels of leadership come around, or should we begin now to envision and work for a better future?