The good news marking this week’s Sikh Festival of Baisakhi is Punjab’s remission of prisoner sentences. The bad news in my own backyard is the shooting deathof yet another Sikh being investigated as a possible hate crime.

Some people say that war is the only way Americans learn geography. We’re starting a new tradition here at She Negotiates, hoping to replace war with the celebration of religious holidays as the way we learn cultural geography.

What does geography have to do with negotiation? Quite a lot.

First, of course, is an understanding of why we fight. Second is how and why we stereotype. And third is how we negotiate peaceful relations among people who appear on the surface to be radically different from ourselves.

Why We Fight

With or without a reasonable basis to distrust and demonize others, we will do so anyway, creating in- and out-groups with remarkable ease and rapidity. Children and teenagers naturally divide themselves up by beauty, physical prowess or charm (popular kids); by interests such as music, theater or the visual arts; by clothes and grooming (goth, punk or hippie kids); or by the use of alcohol or drugs (party kids and stoners).

 We use these identifiers (jocks, stoners and the like) as cognitive shortcuts to quickly identify people who are likely to be friendly, loyal and comprehensible without much study. They are our “homies” – our gangs or tribes. When we grow up, they become members of our political parties, churches and occupations. Sometimes they even become the brand of our running shoes – Nikes or Pumas!

More perniciously, they become our genders, our sexual preferences and the colors of our skin.

The benefits of in-groups are many – community, safety, expansion of opportunity, friendship and the sharing of work and resources. The detriments are also many. Once we become identified with one or more groups, we tend to view outsiders with suspicion and distrust, even hostility. To maintain a positive image of ourselves and our own in- group members (Christians, Americans, or even simply Pittsburgh Steeler fans) we tend to ignore our own shortcomings or misdeeds while emphasizing the negative traits of others.

When misfortune befalls us and fortune favors them, we too often fall into the naming, blaming and claiming behavior that gives rise to active disputes and expresses itself in stereotyping and scapegoating.

How We Stereotype

Professor, author, mediator and attorney Dr. Kenneth Cloke lists the eight steps people take to reduce a three-dimensional individual to a stereotype.

1. Pick a characteristic
2. Blow it completely out of proportion
3. Collapse the whole person into the characteristic
4. Ignore individual differences and variations
5. Ignore subtleties and complexities
6. Ignore our common humanity
7. Make it match your own worst fears
8. Make it cruel

Cloke, Conflict Revolution, Mediating Evil, War, Injustice and Terrorism

Sound familiar? We’ve all done this and nearly all of us have had it done to us.

Given our documented taste for blood and cruelty, what can negotiators do about it?

Cloke prescribes as remedies for our local and global conflict “dis-ease” both inside and outside work. As he notes in Conflict Revolution, in addition to “being the change [we] want to see in the world,” we also need to do our connective homework – seeing the links and fault lines between ourselves and the institutions we have created to “hold” and express ourselves as a community.

As Cloke explains, the adversarial system both he and I cut our dispute resolution teeth on is a rights-based process that “generates winners and losers, undermines relationships, and results in collateral damage. Since rights rely on rules, change is discouraged, though not prevented, and conflicts are settled rather than resolved.”

This is not easy work.  As a full-time attorney-mediator, I know how elusive Cloke’s “outcomes” can be –

outcomes [in which] both sides win and no one loses, when former adversaries engage in meaningful dialogue and reach satisfying agreements, and when power is exercised with and for each other by jointly solving common problems.

Can  we actively promote mechanisms that create these results?  Yes we can. As Cloke counsels:

Most efforts at resolution . . . downplay or ignore the profound influence that social and cultural environments have on conflicts, and rarely examine or seek to resolve the underlying social assumptions, myths, mores, expectations, and ways of thinking and behaving that link seemingly isolated individual conflicts with the methods by which people ascribe and interpret their meaning.

If we do not recognize and provide for the context in which conflict arises, we have no hope of resolving our differences at either the individual or the societal level.  How could we?  We are it and it is us.  Have we done this before?  Yes we have and within at least one living generation’s personal history.

That Old Women’s Movement of Mine

When I was in my early twenties, an entire generation of post-war women came together to learn about the social and political causes underlying their very personal and frustrating limitations.  We called it “consciousness raising.”

Did our education lead us to wallow in self-pity?  Did we cast blame, cover ourselves in ashes and wait to be rescued?

No.

We went back to school.  We changed our career aspirations from the three or four we believed to be available to us (waitress, wife, teacher, nurse) to the multitude we now inhabit as rightly our own – professor, lawyer, doctor, mechanic, machinist, welder, cabbie, firefighter.

This is “all” Cloke asks of us – that we assess whether our current conflicts are due, in part, to political, social, economic or religious institutions that, united in purpose, we possess the power to change.  There is no true distinction, however, between this critical external work and the important internal work necessary to change the way we change.

As Cloke observes:

Social evolution and personal transcendence are . . . . linked. Each may take place in isolation, internally, and personally; or collectively, externally, and socially. We are therefore led to consider how conflict resolution principles might be used to proactively design social conditions that encourage the prevention, resolution, transformation, and transcendence of individual and social conflicts.

Sounds good.  But we still need help.  Is it on the way?

Analyzing Obstacles

To the adage “know your enemy,” Cloke adds the exhortation that we also know ourselves and our friends; our comforts and our addictions; our fears and our resistance to change.  If name be needed for our enemies, let them be called Prejudice, Nationalism, Xenophobia, Discrimination, Domination, and Orthodoxy.

For transformation and transcendence to occur systemically, we not only need to eliminate the social, economic, and political sources of chronic conflict, but to shift the paradigm of change itself, creating a “revolution in the revolution,” and changing the way we change. It all comes down to us.

Whether our conflicts are intensely personal and between private individuals, or intensely political and between nations and cultures, conflict revolution requires us to recognize that interest-based conflict resolution techniques carry a price in our willingness to listen to people and ideas we do not like or agree with, and to share power and control over outcomes with people who are very different from ourselves.

Ultimately, transcending conflict means giving up unequal, inequitable, and autocratic power- and rights-based practices and institutions and seeking instead to satisfy interests and the reasons people adopt power and rights approaches in the first place. This means surrendering our ability to use force to take from others what does not belong to us, or coerce them into giving what they are otherwise unwilling to give.

The real enemy, the true obstacle to success here, is our resistance to the solution itself.  Once we cross that barrier, what exactly is it we’re supposed to do?

Redesigning Systems

Take a look at Cloke’s suggested principled steps for achieving these goals:

1. Shifting from hierarchy, bureaucracy, and autocracy to heterarchy, participation, and democracy
2. Reducing inequalities in status, inequities in wealth, and autocracies in power
3. Foreswearing the use of military options except in the decreasing likelihood of self-defense when under attack
4. Substituting dialogue for debate
5. Reaching consensus whenever possible and vote only as a last resort.

Who, you ask, will do this work?  How about you?

Implementing Solutions

You didn’t know when you started reading this post how deep and far-reaching it would be. In fact, only those who are already dedicated to changing the course of history will have gotten this far. I want to thank each one of you for doing so. If you believe, as we at She Negotiates do, that you are at the epicenter of a new movement the goal of which is to change the world, please join us here!