December, 2023
Synopsis
This video explains that massively parallel peacebuilding or democracy building is, essentially, a division-of-labor approach to the complex problem of building peace or strengthening democracy. As such, it involves thousands or even millions of people, performing many different roles in different places and contests, which, all done roughly at the same time, can bring about significant social, political, and economic change. The video then goes on to explain the many different roles that massively parallel peacebuilders are already playing.
Full Transcript
Slide 1 — Hi, this is Guy Burgess with the second in our series of videos describing our latest thinking on massively parallel peacebuilding, explaining why we think the strategy makes sense, how it works, and why it's realistic.
Slide 2 — In the first video in this series, we explained our core goal, building a democracy that lives up to its ideals. We explained how peacebuilding and democracy building are really two sides of the same coin, and how they're both strategies designed to deal with the incredible scale and complexity of society-wide conflicts. We also outline four big challenges that make this all so difficult. One is to try to find a set of fairness principles that everybody can agree on as a basis for social organization. The second is teaching people how to navigate the unbelievably cumbersome process associated with any modern democracy. And we also talked about the bad-faith actor problem and how the fact that efforts to make democracy work are under attack by a wide range of force, some include authoritarian wannabes and foreign powers, and we talked about a number of other possibilities. The last thing we talked about was the threat posed by hyperpolarization and the fact that people have split into warring camps where whatever the other side wants, they don't want, without ever really looking at the merits of an argument. And that really makes the kind of compromise that's core to any democratic process impossible. And finally, we talked about how all of these seemingly impossible challenges can get met by the invisible hand, the sort of natural learning processes that are embedded in all social systems. And for this video, I want to go into a lot more detail about what we mean about all of this.
Slide 3 — The first thing to understand is that this notion of massively parallel peacebuilding is not some brand new academic plan that we wrote a paper about that appeared in an academic journal, and the whole world is catching on to our great idea. It's actually just our word for a natural process that is really the way that social systems learn and organize themselves around a shared objective. So what we're really trying to do is describe something that's happening already, rather than to lay out a new plan that nobody's ever thought of, that everybody else ought to follow.
Slide 4 — Now, the key to understanding this is massively parallel forms of social organization, I think, can take us towards building a democracy that works. But they can also take us the other way. And a lot of the hyperpolarization that is dividing society and making democracy so untenable at the moment is also driven by massively parallel processes. So this is not a time for complacency. We have to figure out how we can cultivate and strengthen these processes and use them to build a democracy that really works and prevent them from driving destructive cycles that are tearing our societies apart and pretty much threatening everything that we care about.
Slide 5 — The other thing to understand about all of this is that it's a lagging process. William Ogborn wrote this book, probably a century ago, about how societal institutions lag behind changing social conditions because conditions change and it takes society a while to catch up. So things get bad before they get better. And this applies to the problems facing democracy. So the fact that things are not getting better is what's causing so many people to actually try to address the problem.
Slide 6 — The other thing that's essential to understand in all of this is it's fundamentally a division of labor process. And this goes all the way back to Durkheim, who figured out societies organized with lots of people doing specialized tasks. This problem is so big and so gigantic, nobody can really wrap their mind around or do anything more than a little small corner of it. The way that you do big things is through this kind of division of labor process.
Slide 7 — The other thing that we want to emphasize in this is that you and we are not alone in this. It can get to seem like the whole situation is hopeless. You look at the news and it's just one terrible story after another of people tearing each other apart. This massively parallel peacebuilding process is going on under the radar and doesn't make the news. It's sort of low-key. But there's a lot more to it than you think. And if everybody understood how big of a deal it is, then I think your chances of getting a lot more people involved go way up.
Slide 8 — So what I want to do now is to highlight a whole bunch of different roles in which people are active and working on one part of the problem or another. And to start with, we've divided these social roles or peacebuilding roles into two broad categories. And these are based on one of those podcasts that you listen to and say," Aha! This reminded me of something that's changed my whole worldview." And the thing that this Hidden Brain podcast highlighted was the right and left hemispheres of the brain. This is a core feature of living things going back to the most primitive insects. And what that means is that there are two fundamental parts of intelligence.
On the one hand, there is the ability to understand the big picture and see what needs to be done. And on the other hand, there's the ability to actually do those things. So with a deer, he constantly is monitoring for predators. If he sees one, then the big picture brain kicks over to the action part of the brain that knows how to run, and he runs. So the same sort of thing applies to social conflict and peacebuilding. And we had this post on our Substack newsletter a while ago about this tension and this interrelationship between those doing theoretical work, the strategists, and those who are conflict actors that are actually trying to do things. And what I want to do is highlight two large clusters of roles. One are strategists. These are the people doing big picture thinking and the conflict actors who are actually trying to change the way we interact with one another on a day-to-day basis.
Slide 9 — So start with the conflict strategists. We've broken these down into four big categories. And we'll go into more detail on the roles under each of these categories in a moment. But first, there are conflict lookouts. And what the lookouts do is they look around at all of the things that are going wrong in society that people maybe haven't noticed yet. And they say, "hey, you got to pay attention to this, or we're going to be in trouble!" And they also look for opportunities that people maybe haven't noticed that we could pay attention to. So we need these folks, and there are a lot of people, there are a lot of nonprofit organizations that are doing this kind of work.
We also need "democracy firsters." And these are folks who understand that our ability to solve any problem depends on the health of democracy. So they're focused just on trying to strengthen democratic institutions. Again, there are a big group of folks doing that.
And there are "complexifiers." And these are folks that look at the awful scale and complexity of this problem and try to break it down into manageable pieces and have some folks work on some pieces and some work on others. And to get away from this sort of simplistic good guy, bad guy kind of notion that leads us into hyperpolarization, and then we can't learn anything.
And finally, they're defenders. What the defenders do is defend society, defend democracy from these bad faith actors who are actively trying to prevent it from working. And again, these are the authoritarian wannabes, the foreign rivals, folks who would like very much to have their view of how society works dominate everybody else.
Slide 10 — And on the other side, this is the other half of the brain, there are the conflict actors. These are people who are actually trying to change the way people interact.
Now, there's some at the visionary level, and they're just trying to cultivate within society a sort of shared set of common purposes and common goals so everybody starts going in the same direction.
There are communicators who try to break down the many, many sources of misunderstandings that now exist within our high-tech information systems.
Peacemakers are folks who try to unwind escalation spirals and diffuse polarization and get us back to the point where we can actually talk to one another and try to solve problems.
For that, then you need the issue analysts. And these are guys who actually try to analyze problems, identify possible solutions, and lay out options for people. And the general public needs to make a value judgment about which option is preferable.
They're power balancers. And if you're going to have a power with society, and this is key for democracy, you've got to have some formula for balancing who has decision-making power in one circumstance or another. The power balancers focus on that.
And finally, they're the problem solvers. These are the guys who really negotiate and reach agreements and then implement those agreements on particular issues.
Slide 11 — So going down another layer. So within this broad category, now we're going back to the strategists and looking at the different kinds of lookouts. They're folks that we call "the checks and balancers." These are guys who look at society, and again, in all of these cases, you'll be able to find 501(c)(3 ) nonprofits doing this work. Some government agencies, some private corporations, universities, a lot of people are doing this kind of thing. They're highlighting places where the democratic checks and balances are breaking down, and corruption is becoming increasingly prevalent, and there's real risk of authoritarianism and they say, "hey, we have to deal with each of these things!"
They're canaries. You know, this is like the canaries in the coal mine that warned miners when methane gas was building up. These canaries warn us about all sorts of substantive problems that we maybe haven't been paying attention to and we really ought to. I remember working when I was just out of graduate school at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, when they were just starting to discover about climate change. And then they were just starting to become canaries and tell the world, "Hey, we've got to change this."
Anti-discriminators are folks that focus on the unfair treatment of some groups by the larger society and to try to promote efforts to address those issues.
Thoughtful alarmists are people who look at how hard we're fighting with one another and say, "hey, we're on the brink of large-scale violence here. We have to step back from it." And there are folks that are monitoring the upcoming election, looking for possible sources of violence and trying to get people to work against that.
And finally, in the Lookout Group, we have the Paul Reveres that are warning us when outside powers are attacking our democracy and trying to undermine it. And the sad fact of the matter is there's getting to be a lot more of that. And we really do have to defend ourselves if we want democracy to work, because these folks have an interest in seeing it fail.
Slide 12 — So then in the next group, where we're starting to look at the complexity, and we have this democracy firster group is relatively small, but it's important. So we put that on this slide. These guys are trying to understand all of the things that are going wrong or could go right at a fairly sophisticated level. It involves a lot of social scientists, behavioral scientists, but a lot of everyday folks from religious backgrounds or social organizations, it isn't the sort of thing that's just academic.
There are the torch bearers, and these are guys who have carefully monitored the evolution of democratic ideas over the century and tried to come up with ways of adapting democratic institutions to 21st century realities. There are a whole lot of really good books written by folks who are trying to figure out how to strengthen democracy.
Behavioral thinkers. These are folks trying to understand and apply what we now know about the complex way the human brain actually works. And factoring that into efforts to build a democracy that works. George Lakoff talks about how framing and the subconscious level of the way we think about conflict works. He points out how unscrupulous actors really are employing some very sophisticated propaganda techniques to threaten us and he helps us understand that.
There are a lot of folks trying to help us understand high-tech communication, social media, and all of that, that's really distorting the flow of information through society in ways which is leading us to make lots of bad decisions.
Similarly, there are sociologists and other social thinkers who are trying to think through the ways in which a diverse society interacts with one another, sources of tension. This gets into the whole business of structural racism, for example.
Slide 13 — Political thinkers are trying to figure out how to restructure democratic institutions in ways that would reduce incentives for the kind of destructive hyperpolarization. Initiatives like the rank the vote folks that are trying to promote ranked choice voting.
There are economic thinkers who are trying to help us figure out how to make a globalized economy work that benefits everybody. And that gets really, really tricky, but there's a big part of it.
And finally, systems thinkers are trying to look at the whole thing and see how it relates to one another.
Slide 14 — So now we have another category, and this again is at the strategic level, but these are the folks that are trying to defend society.
The fourth estaters are trying to encourage the media to support democracy by reducing inflammatory and inaccurate content and propaganda, and better informing us and cultivating the kind of freedom of expression that really helps.
There are ethical advocates, and this is a big part of it. Part of what you want to do and part of the key of a democracy is to have advocacy groups that advocate for the interests of particular groups within that society. But it's important they do that in an ethical way that realizes that they have to coexist with other groups with different priorities. So you don't try to push your opponents into the sea. You try to find some way to compromise and coexist with them. And ethical advocates focus on doing that.
Corruption fighters are trying to identify and break down and block all the many ways in which democratic institutions are being exploited for private gain. This book by Sarah Chayes Thieves of State makes a very compelling argument that that's a very, very major threat to democracy all over the world.
And finally, there are the geopolitical strategists who are trying to figure out how to defend our democracy from expansionist powers, China, Russia, Iran, for example. And again, sadly, that's getting to be a real priority.
Slide 15 — So now we're going to switch back over onto the action side of all of this and look at folks who are trying to figure out how we can strengthen a democracy.
First, there are visionaries. This is a picture here is a guy named Ebrahim Rasool from South Africa who made a wonderful presentation at an Alliance for Peacebuilding Conference about how South Africa moved beyond apartheid. And they did that by committing themselves at the beginning to building a South Africa for all who live there and trying not to have a cycle of recrimination. So what he's focusing on is healing roles, trying to help society address the unwritable wrongs of the past in a way that's constructive that lays the groundwork for the other big group here, the co-existers, who try to lay out a forward-looking democratic vision of how very different and diverse groups can live together in a pluralistic spirit of tolerance and respect.
Slide 16 — Another big category are communicators. A big part of our problem is we can't understand each other. And there are organizations like the Bridge Alliance, which is an alliance of lots of other organizations trying to promote better communication. The Alliance for Peace Building does a lot of the same sort of thing internationally. Beyond Conflict even goes far enough to start looking at the neurobiology of the way we communicate with one another.
Some of these folks we call them bubble busters. We all tend to get locked into these reinforcing information bubbles that tell us only the kinds of things we want to hear. And we can't see how other people can have different views, because we can't get out of our bubble. And these are programs that are designed to help people do that.
There are lots of bridge builders whose goal is to get people to talk to one another and really get to understand one another across political divides.
Mass communicators are focused on taking those sort of small-scale things that the conflict resolution field was very good at doing around a table and scaling it up, using a wide range of mass communication strategies to involve millions of people and whole societies.
The free speech advocates are championing free speech. And one of the big problems we have is that it gets very tempting, and a lot of groups are getting very sophisticated at this, to defend your position by making it impossible or sanctioning anybody who tries to disagree with you. And that, again, breaks down this social learning thing.
Slide 17 — There are disinformation fighters that realize that high-tech propaganda is really causing a lot of trouble and trying to figure out how to systematically identify, expose, and block that.
We need lots of media reform. The technology is moving so fast that we're having trouble managing to keep up with it and figuring out what regulations are appropriate.
And finally, there's another big group that's focused on conflict education, which is just teaching coming generations all of this stuff so they can find where they can have a role that can help make things better.
Slide 18 — So then in another big group, there are the peacemakers. These are folks who, first of all, try to help us understand how destructive escalation is. I've argued for years that it's the most destructive force on the planet. This is what leads people to commit genocide. It's what makes the threat of nuclear war so real. It makes all sorts of terrible things happen. And if you understand escalation and how it bends your mind, you're a lot better positioned to actually do something about it.
Conciliators, like the Community Relations Service with the Department of Justice, specialize in actually helping bridge deep divides, generally racial divides, in communities and find ways of working together, not only around the immediate crisis, but going forward and preventing future things.
And this is the kind of thing that the crisis responders do, is they put in place emergency systems to happen in the event of some sort of incident, the kind of incident that could quickly get out of hand and make sure that everything's fairly handled.
There's a role for peacekeepers. Once you have agreements, you need to enforce them. So people don't worry about and aren't double-crossed by people who try to renege on those agreements.
Slide 19 — And this takes us to yet another big category. And you get a sense, and this is a big, long list, but it gives you a sense of just how many people are doing different things that contribute to the strengthening of democracy. And in each of these categories, and this is something that we're working on doing, you can identify a long list of nonprofit organizations, government agencies, educational institutions, private sector businesses that are working in these areas.
So again, with issue analysis, you need technical experts to analyze complex problems like climate change. If you start looking at these climate change reports, it's really impressive. The kind of work that they've done to try to figure out exactly what's going to happen and how we're changing things and what different kinds of green energy strategies, how successful they might be, playing off costs and benefits and all sorts of things.
You also need skeptics that ask hard questions of these experts. You got to keep everybody honest. And the way that science works, is it's got to be constantly challenged.
There's a role for technical reporters that explain scientific findings, which can often be written in impenetrable jargon, to the general public.
The general public then needs to evaluate. Tthe science basically says, if we do this, then this is likely to happen. If we do this, then something else is likely to happen. But it's the public that has to decide, well, which of these things is most desirable? What should we pursue?
And finally, there's a role for science reformers that recognize that scientific institutions are, for a variety of reasons, not quite living up to their responsibilities and proposing reforms to help address that.
Slide 20 — Still, another group, and I think there's only one left, if I remember properly, are the power balancers. These are folks who try to figure out how we can equitably share power in a complex modern democracy.
There are civic skill builders who try to teach people the skills that they need to use democratic institutions effectively to protect their interests. Part of our problem is people don't know how to use the system, and then they lose trust in it.
There's a place for civic reformers. And what their focus is, is on changing the structure of institutions that make it easier to promote wise and equitable problem solving and combat corruption.
There are ethical politicians who are committed to serving all citizens with honest debate and stay away from the hate mongering and destructive tactics that so many other politicians pursue.
And constructive advocates, we mentioned a little bit earlier, these are people who are going to fight for the interests of their group, but recognize that they also have to let other groups protect their legitimate interests.
Slide 21 — And then finally, there are problem solvers. And you take these first group of roles, and they all lay the groundwork for is consensus builders, mediators, and facilitators that can actually take all of these pieces and craft real solutions to real problems. The advocates have a role in that. And then there are globalists who start to understand how the whole security of democratic societies depends on being able to solve all of these problems and demonstrate that democracy is better at dealing with it. And right now, we're struggling with a lot of that, because part of the reason democracy is in decline in so many places is it isn't working very well. But all of these groups are starting to make the changes that are going to be needed to build a democracy that works in the 21st century.
Slide 22 — The last thing to highlight in all of this is within each of these categories, there is a need for groups, and I used a graphic for 501(c)(3 ), which in the United States is a nonprofit, non-governmental institution. And a lot of the work focuses on things that such institutions are doing. But all of them, and then this is also true for governmental institutions, and private sector institutions, and the like. But they need to be able to recruit people to do the work to convince them that, hey, you can make a real contribution. They need to take advantage of the "make-a-difference drive" that so many people have. All of these groups have to learn how to bridge theory and action. So the things that the actors are doing actually make good sense in theory. It's easy to just start acting without being sure quite what you're trying to accomplish. There's a continuing need for evaluation and assessment and improving all of these efforts. Education and training so new people that are getting involved have the kind of background that they need to work effectively, building institutions, and above all, finding the funding needed.
Slide 23 So that is a very quick overview of what we're trying to lay out with massively parallel peacebuilding and democracy building. There's more information available on Beyond Intractability.org in our Substack newsletter. In the months ahead, we're going to start adding much more specific information about organizations working in each of these areas. Thank you.
Photo Credits and Slide References:
Slide 3: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.
Slide 4: https://beyondintractability.
Slide 5: https://www.abebooks.com/9781330397473/Social-Change-Classic-Reprint-Respect-1330397479/plp
Slide 6: https://www.amazon.com/Division-Labor-Society-Emile-Durkheim/dp/1420948563
Slide 7: Crowd of People Cartoon Graphic. Source: https://pixabay.com/vectors/
team-isolated-309097/; By Clker-Free-Vector-Images; Permission: CC0 Creative Commons.
Slide 8: https://hiddenbrain.org/
Slide 9: Afghan War PowerPoint -- Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/
Slide 10: Camp David Agreements – Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/
n_Camp_David_Accords-1978.jpg; Public Domain; Date Acquired: May 14, 2023. and Daytime Protest – Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/
Permission: Unsplash License; Date Acquired: May 14, 2023.
Slide 11: Fire Lookout -- Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/
Slides 12 and 13: Adam Smith -- Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/
Slide 14: https://www.amazon.com/Thieves-State-Corruption-Threatens-Security/dp/0393352285
Slide 15: Ebrahim Rasool – Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/
Slides 16 and 17: https://www.bridgealliance.us/, https://www.allianceforpeacebuilding.org/, https://beyondconflictint.org/
Slide 18: Community Relations Service: https://www.justice.gov/crs, Civil Rights Mediation Oral History Project: https://civilrightsmediation.org/
Slide 19: IPCC: https://www.ipcc.ch/
Slide 20: Rank the Vote: https://rankthevote.us/
Slide 21: Consensus Building Institute Case Studies: https://www.cbi.org/cases/
Slide 23: Beyond Intractability: https://www.beyondintractability.org/ and Beyond Intractability Substack Newsletter: https://beyondintractability.substack.com/
