For Peacemaking in your Neighborhood, by Jennifer Beer, published in 1986.

If you have felt discouraged about prospects for world peace lately (and who hasn’t), this is a wonderfully affirming book to read. It talks about where peace begins–in one’s own neighborhood. It recounts how one group launched a peacemaking project in that most unpromising of all settings, the fringes of a city, and saw that project take root there.

Conflict, we know, is everywhere. It is in our own inner being, it is present in our relationships even with those we love most. Wherever human beings are in relationship, in the home, at work, in civic affairs, in political decision-making, and in the macro-institutions of state and world, they to some degree clash with each other. Each I has unique wants, needs, interests, and perceptions, as does each social group, in a conglomerate of uniquenesses which is staggering to the mind if we think of the number of conflictual interactions taking place at any one moment on the planet. Out of this conflict can come human growth and development, or destruction. The quality of any human group, institution, or society depends on how that conflict is handled.

Mostly, human beings handle their daily conflicts pretty well–or society would fall apart. We make peace a hundred times a day, with our family, with our co-workers, in a myriad of public and private encounters. But our overall record as peacemakers in the twentieth century is a very mixed one. We have learned a lot about human development and nurturant interaction. We know a lot about creative problem-solving, andhow to turn zero-sum games in which there is only one winner, into positive-sum games, in which all participants gain something. But we have also experienced the profound alienation induced by a technological civilization opaque in its complexity, a civilization which divides rich from poor and turns individuals into social security numbers. The answering escalation of interpersonal and international violence belies our gains in human understanding. Feelings of individual helplessness are pervasive, even among well-educated persons engaged in ostensibly significant professional work.

We have lost our sense of the whole, of how things connect. Peacemaking at the neighborhood level is one important way of regaining the sense of the whole, in that it involves taking a torn and fragmented set of local relationships and creating the conditions for their repair and renewed wholeness. That experience of local healing is empowering on many levels, both for the participants and for the mediators. It reduces the sense of helplessness and makes people feel efficacious, that they can do something about the world around them.All this is testified to in this book. The story of the development of a local mediation service is really the story of developing mediation and conflict resolution capacities for society as a whole. Of course no one will pretend that a successful neighborhood mediator could take on arms control negotiations between the Russians and the Americans. Nevertheless it is also true that a society which has not developed the capacity to make those small yet psychologically huge leaps of faith and trust which dispute settlement between
individual adversaries always requires, will not be able to take the comparably small but psychologically huge steps of trust which international negotiation requires. Cultures are not created in the halls of parliaments and presidential palaces, they are created locally and only later drawn on nationally. Therefore the cultures of mediation and peacemaking must begin locally.

Jennifer Beer’s story of a neighborhood mediation project is the story of a new national movement which is contributing to the growth of this much-needed culture of peace in our time. At present there are 1000 national institutes and services which provide research, training, and services in dispute settlement according to the Dispute Resolution Program Directory for 1984. The American Bar Association identifies about 300 individual mediation services specifically oriented to community mediation, and there are hundreds of local enterprises providing a range of special services. Mediation professionals with advanced training are just the tip of the iceberg. The majority of mediators have been apprentices to other mediators and serve on a volunteer basis. That is why one can speak of a movement. These volunteer mediators represent the generation after the flower children, after the Vietnam anti-war demonstrators, a generation which has turned from love-ins and sit-ins to practical problem-solving where conflict festers. They are not simply pragmatists, however. Beer’s research on these mediators reveals that they are idealistic community activists who are involved in a number of other civic enterprises besides mediation. They worry about larger problems of social justice and sometimes fear the bandaid effect of mediation, which may delay the addressing of the larger problems. These dilemmas are real, and must be faced.

The story of the volunteer mediators which Beer tells is an inspiring one, albeit told with care for realistic detail about the problems and shortcomings of mediation. Beer and her colleagues have spent a great deal of time going over office records make the story complete. As a sociologist I welcome this excellent documentation of an important new social development. But Beer does more than present data. She presents a vivid story of people in action, of an institution in the making. The storyof the suburban Delaware County project is set in the national context. One of the most interesting facts about these local mediators is that they also feel they are a part of this national and international context. They know they are contributing to peace in the larger sense. Many readers will want to go and do likewise, and this book will help focus their intentions and actions.

The development of an apparently simple two-hour mediation sequence for local disputes from a more complex set of labor mediation protocols is an amazing story–the more amazing because over and over again it WORKS. The advice of a third party helping people solve conflicts is as old as the oldest historical
records of our species. New are the assumptions that 1) most people can in fact be trained to serve in that third party role and 2) the third party is not the peacemaker, but the empowerer, enabling adversaries trapped in their own anger to get a handle on their conflict and make their own peace.

The role of a mediator is demanding and exhausting. Most of them are unpaid volunteers. Why do they do it? For the joy of seeing people liberated into creative conflict resolution from a state of being immobilized by their own hostilities, says Beer. The term peacemaking is misleading because, as Beer makes clear, mediators are not making peace for the adversaries. Rather, the mediator is the “”outsider in the middle” who structures interaction for disputants so they become their own peacemakers.`

The concepts and protocols for this remarkable type of peacemaking do not come out of the blue. While certainly owing much to the techniques of labor mediation, it is no accident that the project was developed under Quaker auspices. The historic peace churches generally have had much to do with the new mediation movement. Another interesting discussion centers on the role of women’s peace culture in the movement, since two thirds of the mediators in the Community Dispute Settlement program are women.

A striking feature of Beer’s discussion of the mediation process is the emphasis on the importance of appropriate assertiveness on the part of the mediator, of willingness to be firm, to rule certain behaviors out of bounds, to exhibit what is felicitously called “tough love” in family therapy circles. This raises an interesting point in regard to both Quakerism and women: The Quaker way and the woman’s way have suffered in the past century from an obscuring of that type of realistic, common-sense assertiveness which is native to both, so that Quakers and women have endured a partly self-imposed and a-historical cult of false gentleness. False gentleness does not work in the turbulence of mediation. Coming to terms with the need for assertiveness has been an important growing experience for Quaker mediators, for women mediators, and perhaps most of all for Quaker women mediators! I venture to hope that this type of development will help to right the imbalances that have developed in Quakerism in the quietist period and in women as a result of industrialization.

The second part of Peacemaking in Your Neighborhood deals with organizational/structural problems. Beer does not minimize the difficulties in creating a workable and efficient community mediation service. Oddly, the supply of mediation services has developed faster than the demand. People are suspicious of outside involvement in their conflicts. The new culture of peacemaking has yet to catch on for the average man or woman, the average neighborhood. Class differences between mediators and users of mediation are troubling. Much remains to be done. The honesty with which the problems are discussed is part of the excellence of the book itself. The fine bibliography at the end provides a valuable tool for the reader who would go further.

Letting the reader in on the whole process as Beer has done has been in my view a highly successful strategy. The book leaves us with an overpowering impression of hope, of dynamism, of having found the beginning of an exciting new road. This road is certainly one of the surer paths into the twenty-first century, and one which every reader of this book will want to contemplate for themselves personally.

Elise Boulding, Dartmouth College, January 1985