Jamil Simon:

Welcome to Making Peace Visible, the podcast about peace, conflict, and the media. I’m your host, Jamil Simon. Today’s guest is someone I’ve been wanting to have on this podcast since day one. William Ury is one of the most influential peace builders and experts on negotiation alive today. Some examples, just in the last decade, he helped Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos end a 50-year war with the FARC and played a key role in de-escalating nuclear tensions between the U.S. and North Korea.

Getting to Yes, which Bill co-wrote with Roger Fisher back in 1981, is the world’s best-selling book on negotiation. He also co-founded the program on negotiation at Harvard. I loved his new book called Possible, How We Survive and Thrive in an Age of Conflict. It’s filled with incredible stories from Bill’s career. In the book and in the interview, Bill talks about how lessons learned from past successes and failures in places like Northern Ireland, Colombia, and the Middle East can be applied to the many conflicts we face today.

I also asked Bill about our favorite topic, the role journalists can play in shining a light on compelling stories about peace efforts around the world. Now we usually edit our interviews down to about 30 minutes, but this one was so rich, we decided to leave more in. I think you’ll enjoy this special episode, and like I did, walk away with a new sense of hope. Bill, thanks for joining us today, and congratulations on your new book.

William Ury:

Well, thank you, Jamil.

It’s a real pleasure. We’ve been wanting to have this conversation for a long time. I’m delighted we’re having it now, and thanks for your kind words.

Jamil Simon:

So I’m really glad you named the book Possible, because peace looks so impossible to most of the world in this age of nonstop war and conflict. It’s difficult to even imagine peace in the present climate.

William Ury:

It is, and that’s why when people ask me, I’ve spent about 45, almost 50 years at this point wandering around the world, dealing with some of the world’s toughest conflicts, including a lot of wars, and people ask me, are you an optimist still, or are you a pessimist? And I like to answer, actually, I’m a possible-ist. In other words, human beings are capable of terrible things, but conflict can sometimes bring out the best in us. And the reason I’m a possible-ist, in other words, I believe in human possibilities, because I’ve seen it with my own eyes in places like Colombia, as you just mentioned, or South Africa with apartheid, or Northern Ireland with sectarian strife between Catholics and Protestants where people said, these conflicts are absolutely impossible, they’re going to go on for generations. And in each case, they got transformed.

The destructive fighting gave way to much more constructive negotiation and democratic processes.

Jamil Simon:

Recently, we talked to another peacebuilder, Tim Phillips from Beyond Conflict, about what psychology and neuroscience can contribute to the peacebuilding field. You’re an anthropologist. I know this is a big question, but what does anthropology bring to the field of peacebuilding?

William Ury:

Anthropology is basically the study of human beings, and it’s the study of human cultures and human societies.

And anthropology, the core competence of anthropology, the core challenge is, can we put ourselves in the shoes of the other? Another culture, another religion, another way of seeing things, just another human being. Can we actually engage in that act of empathy, of strategic empathy? And to me, actually, that’s at the core of the field of negotiation and mediation, and at the core of what good journalism is about, is it allows us to put ourselves in the shoes of the other, see the world the way they see it. Because negotiation, after all, is about influence.

You’re trying to change someone’s mind. How can you possibly change someone’s mind unless you know where that mind is right now? Unless you know where that heart is right now. It’s funny, when Roger Fisher and I first started working together, we wrote a little book, which no one has read, called International Mediation, a Working Guide.

Jamil Simon:

It’s an ambitious title.

William Ury:

We joked at that time that there are maybe six international mediators in the world that we could think of. So we had an audience of six. And then one day I sat down with Roger, I said, what if we dropped the word international? We realized that every one of us negotiates all the time, whether it’s with our families or our workplace or in our communities, in our societies, and so on. In that sense, everyone is a negotiator.

I think that’s true. That’s actually many of the same ideas that were in International Mediation, a Working Guide, that were there with no one reading them, turned up in Getting to Yes a few years later.

Jamil Simon:

You know, early in your career, you were asked to help settle a labor dispute between a coal mining company and the Coal Miners Union in Kentucky. Eventually, you realized that you needed to speak with the rank-and-file miners and not just the union leaders. And to do that, you would need to go down into the mine.

Can you tell us a story about deciding to go into the mine and what it was like and what made you realize that was necessary?

William Ury:

Well, yeah, that was really early on. I was still a graduate student studying negotiation. I was looking to get my hands dirty. And that happened to be my first big mediation assignment, and it was my first big mediation failure, you know, which is often the case in negotiations.

We learn from our failures. Absolutely. Yeah. My colleague, Steve Goldberg, and I showed up at this mine. Miners were going on strike every week or two, what were called wildcat strikes in contravention of the agreement.

And they’d been taken to court, and the judge, in his infinite wisdom, had jailed the workforce for a night, believe it or not. People were packing guns, there were bomb threats, there was fear that this would set off a nationwide coal strike. And when we got there, management and the union wouldn’t even sit in the same room together. That was how tense things were. So we engaged in shuttle diplomacy, going back and forth for about six weeks.

And then finally, management and the union leaders decided, okay, yeah, there’s something here we can agree upon. And they felt like, wow, we got it. We’ve made peace. And there was just one little detail, which was the agreement had to be ratified, of course, by the miners. A week later, the vote was nearly unanimous in rejecting the very agreement that their union leadership had just negotiated, which was a surprise and a shock to all of us.

You know, why did they reject it? The agreement on the paper was much better than what they actually had, was an improvement for them. But they didn’t trust management. And they thought that anything that management agreed to, they would simply, you know, it had to be a trick. And so they decided the safest thing was rejected.

So then we could either give up or, and I decided, no, this is just the beginning here. So I moved down to the coal mine and I was trying to get to talk with the miners, but they didn’t trust me much either. I was this guy from Boston, you know, I looked and talked more like a manager than a miner. That’s for sure in their eyes. And so I realized I needed to go down in the mine.

That was the only way I could actually get a chance to listen to them. That was the only place they’d give me the time of day. So the mine manager said, well, you’re going at your own risk, I’m telling you that. And they gave me a safety belt and an oxygen mask and they put your name, your social security number just in case the mine collapses and they’re trying to identify your body. I mean, it was kind of like you go down a mile underground, you can’t even stand up.

It’s complete pitch dark. You have this little lamp on your helmet and you kind of walk like a duck. It’s just the infernal noise from the machines and the dust. So it’s like, wow, these are real tough working conditions. But down there, the miners did have time to talk.

There they started to talk to me, they started to open up.

Jamil Simon:

You went through a sort of an initiation ritual in the mine. I won’t spoil it for people who haven’t read the book, but it seems like you were accepted by the miners and able to connect with them.

William Ury:

I did. I got hazed, royally hazed when that happened.

The word spread through the miners that, hey, now you’re a regular coal miner like us, one of us here. And then they began to open up more and slowly, bit by bit, I was able to persuade them that they didn’t need to walk out when they had a beef or a grievance or complaint. There actually was a chance that by bringing it out, talking to their union officials, talking to management, that they could work it out. And I was mediating those first ones, but just really bringing them together. And gradually they learned that instead of walking out, they could actually get what they essentially wanted, meet their interests by talking out.

Jamil Simon:

So that was a lesson for them and a lesson for you.

William Ury:

It was. It took a long time. It took months of effort, but it showed me that patience, persistence, listening, putting yourself in their shoes, slowly building trust, that actually where things might seem to be impossible, there still might be possibilities worth exploring.

Jamil Simon:

The Camp David Peace Accords, where a deal was signed to normalize relationships between Israel and Egypt, is one of the most celebrated peace agreements in the 20th century.

As you wrote in the book, you played a subtle but important role. What were you doing in 1978 that was your contribution to the process?

William Ury:

Well, I was a very bit player, but I was a little bit of a witness. In the summer of 78, Roger Fisher, my colleague I was working with, came back from Martha’s Vineyard one day with a big grin on his face and said, guess who I bumped into down there? I bumped into Cy Vance, he’s the Secretary of State.

And they’re just about to have this summit at Camp David where President Carter is inviting the two leaders of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, the President, and Menachem Begin, the Prime Minister of Israel, together to see if they can talk and work out something. And he asked me for ideas, and I showed him a copy of International Mediation and Working Guide, which is that little booklet that I told you about that no one had read. And he pointed out in particular this idea of what we called a single text or a one text procedure. And so Roger and I, we pulled together a little seminar with people at Harvard, and we sent a memo to Cy Vance, and it stayed in his briefcase for the first three days of Camp David when Sadat and Begin were talking to each other and there was no chemistry. I mean, it was just like it was going nowhere and everyone was about ready to pack their bags.

And Carter called Vance and said, you got any other ideas? He said, well, and he pulled out this memo, and there’s this one idea we could try called the one text process. Essentially, it’s a very simple idea. Usually in a negotiation, how does it work? Israel and Egypt, they take their positions.

In this case, Egypt’s position was, we want the entire Sinai back that had been occupied by Israel in the previous war. And Israel said, no, we’re not going to give it. We’ll keep a third or quarter of it. And the issue is, okay, so you bargain and you see where you can draw the line in the sand because neither one wanted to make the first concession. No one wanted to look weak.

Begin said, I would pluck out my right eye rather than give up a single Jewish settlement in the Sinai. And, you know, they were at odds with each other. And the one text process is very simple. The Americans went to the Israelis and Egyptians and said, keep your positions. We’re not asking you to make any concessions, so relax.

Now, just tell us, what are your interests? And positions are the things we say we want, like, okay, I want the whole Sinai back. I want this dollars and cents. Interests are the underlying motivations. What did Egypt really want?

They wanted sovereignty. The land had been there since the time of the pharaohs, and they wanted it back. Israel’s main interest was security. Egyptian tanks had rolled across the Sinai four times in the previous 25 years. They didn’t want that happening again.

So then the issue is very interesting. The spotlight moves to not where do we draw a line between the two positions, which we might get nowhere, which would leave each side dissatisfied, but how do we satisfy the underlying interests of both sides, which in this case were security and sovereignty? And there was an idea kicking around that the Egyptians had brought about, well, what about the maybe demilitarizing part of the Sinai? So that Egyptian tanks couldn’t go across, Israel would get security, but the Egyptian flag could fly everywhere. And so the Americans drew up a little proposal based on that, but it wasn’t a proposal.

It’s just, one text is just a, it’s kind of a non-proposal, a non-paper paper. It’s got coffee stains on it. It’s very informal. It’s just an idea. The Americans said, here, you know, we pulled together some ideas here for what might be a possible agreement here.

And we don’t want, this is not an American proposal. We’re not asking you to accept it. All we want you to do is criticize it. Tell us where you don’t think it’s fair. Tell us where you don’t think it actually works or meets your interests.

Well, nobody likes to make a tough decision, but everybody loves to criticize. So the Egyptians criticized it, and then the Israelis criticized it, and the Americans went back and they redrafted it, tried to improve it, tried to take into account the Egyptian concerns, the Israeli concerns, use some of their language and so on. And then they came back and said, here, we’ve been working on it. Again, it’s not a proposal. We’re not asking for any decisions.

All we want is more criticism. Both sides criticized it again. They went through that process 23 times. Wow. 23 times over the course of the next 10 days at Camp David.

That’s the process, is that by the end, there was no way they could improve it for one or the other. It was only at that point that Jimmy Carter, President Carter, took it to Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, and Menachem Begin, the prime minister of Israel, and said, well, this is the best we can do. Do you want it or not? And then Sadat and Begin were faced with a very different decision. Instead of having to make 10 or 20 painful concessions along the way, they only had to make one decision.

And only when they could see exactly what they were going to get in return for it, Sadat could see he was going to get the entire Sinai back, the Egyptian flag could fly everywhere. Begin could see he was going to get an unprecedented peace with Egypt and a buffer of the entire Sinai, not just a third of it. And so they both said yes. And the rest is history in the sense of, to this day, 45 years later, in the midst of wars, assassinations, coup d’etats and whatever, that peace treaty that was forged at Camp David has lasted the test of time. And when people say it’s impossible to make peace in the Middle East, well, look at Camp David.

If it was done before, why can’t it be done again?

Jamil Simon:

I love that quote, nobody wants to make a painful decision, but everybody wants to criticize. But that process turned out to be constructive criticism after all.

William Ury:

That’s it. That’s exactly it.

This is the thing about negotiation, actually, you invite criticism, you welcome criticism, even if it’s not entirely constructive, but just because it gives you information, valuable information about what the other side is worried about, what they actually think.

Jamil Simon:

It becomes like a litmus test almost.

William Ury:

You got it. So see criticism as your friend rather than as your adversary.

Jamil Simon:

Yeah.

So how can we make it better?

William Ury:

Right. How do we make it better?

Jamil Simon:

Well, you frame the book around some key concepts and you set up the Camp David story to demonstrate the example of a golden bridge. Can you explain that concept a bit?

I mean, building a bridge is a very common metaphor for this kind of work, but why a golden bridge?

William Ury:

Because an ordinary bridge these days may not bear the weight of the conflicts that we face. So we need to have a particularly attractive bridge. People say, well, let’s just come up with any kind of agreement. No, you got to come up with a robust agreement, an audacious agreement, and a golden bridge is something that’s truly attractive to both sides so that actually it sustains the test of time.

Jamil Simon:

So it’s that attractiveness that makes it golden.

William Ury:

That’s it. Because so often in negotiation and conflict, what happens is both sides get into this conflict and they each start pushing each other and threatening and pressuring and using force. And of course, the more you push, what does the other side automatically do? They just push back, right?

So you’re kind of a stalemate. What you find successful negotiators do is the exact opposite of pushing, which is to attract. Instead of seeing the job as how do I make it harder for the other side, see your job as making it easier for them. How do you make it easier for them to make the decision you want them to make? That’s the art of building a golden bridge.

Jamil Simon:

Let’s go back to our favorite topic. I mean, now I’d like to ask you some questions about peace building in the media. Our project is all about this kind of work, how it can be better represented in the media or more visible. So let me ask your advice. For journalists covering conflict, are there people involved in conflict situations who you think journalists tend to ignore?

Are there people involved who we should hear more about?

William Ury:

Long time ago, I remember talking to an old labor negotiator who said, you know, Bill, he said, there’s always three tables in any negotiation, at least three tables. We always focus on the one table. And the one table is, it’s the leaders on both sides, union and management, or Arabs and Israelis are all sitting around the table, right? And that’s where the focus tends to go.

That’s where the media puts the focus. That’s where everyone puts their focus. What people forget is that there are at least two other tables there. There’s the internal table inside the union, which included the minors, who’s sitting at that internal table inside the domestic constituency, who’s sitting at around for the other side around management. And this is what I found ever since is that actually, oftentimes, the real stickiness is not at just at the external table where all the attention goes.

The real problem is in the two internal tables. And it’s funny, I ask people all the time, I say, tell me something, of all the negotiations you get involved in, if you had to divide them between, let’s call it external negotiations with people outside of your organization, your clients and your customers, your suppliers and people outside, outside the family, and then the people inside the organization or the family, the people who are supposedly on the same side as you, which personally do you find more challenging, the external negotiations or the internal negotiations? Understanding that both can be challenging, of course, but which you find more challenging, more external? What would you say?

Jamil Simon:

I don’t know.

I guess, internal, I would say.

William Ury:

Well, that’s what most people say. It’s the internal negotiations that are more difficult. With the people who are on the same side, it’s within the family or within the business, within the organization, that’s where we have the greatest difficulty. And so in negotiation, when you cover negotiations as a journalist, don’t just cover the main table, cover the two internal tables, because that’s where the real difficulty is.

Right now, for example, take the Middle East, you know, people are focusing, okay, so Israelis and Palestinians. What about the politics within Israel? What about the politics within, among the Palestinians? You’ll find out that, in fact, that’s where the real blocks are, and that’s maybe where the real opportunities are to allow the external negotiation to succeed.

Jamil Simon:

Right.

It’s those opportunities that people aren’t seeing, I think. They’re seeing the problems and the obstacles, and maybe in part because they’re not looking for the opportunities.

William Ury:

I find that’s true, Jamil. I find that it all depends on the questions that you ask, and journalists are good askers of questions. They are.

Think about the power of the right question. If the power of the question is who’s winning, who’s losing, which is often like, you know, in your marriage, if I ask you who’s winning your marriage, you know, or who’s winning your business partnership, who’s winning you and your customer, who’s winning you and your source as a journalist, you know, if you’re asking that question, you’re asking the wrong question, because those are relationships. Most negotiations, most conflicts are relationships. Even among the Israelis and Palestinians, just to go back to that one, that’s like a bad marriage, right? They’re living in the same house, right?

Right. The same narrow piece of land. I’ve been there many times, and figuring out how do we share it, you know, is the question who’s winning, because we know the dynamics of war here, which is that no one wins. Absolutely. I mean, everyone thinks they might win, and of course you can win a battle.

But in the end, everybody loses. We know that. Everybody. Everybody loses, and it’s just heart-rending. And the key power that a journalist has is the power to reframe the question.

Instead of like, who’s winning, like, ask the question, like, how do two peoples who live in the same land live side by side in security, now that’s the interest, and in dignity and in peace? That’s the challenge. How can we do that? And if that’s the question, then you bring that lens to your question. You can ask anyone or whatever.

That’s a constructive question, because that starts to move things forward. That looks for possibility. And the thing is, you can also ask the question as a journalist, like, well, if that’s the question, this is hard. This is the hardest work human beings can do. It might seem impossible, but where else has this been done in other places where people thought it was absolutely impossible?

And you might talk to some of the, you know, former terrorists in Northern Ireland. I mean, what are the odds that the head of the IRA, Martin McGuinness, whom I met, would be in government together with Ian Paisley, who was the firebrand, absolute adversary enemy of his, and they were both absolute enemies, and yet they’d be working together and actually joking with each other in government. I mean, just think about how did that happen?

Jamil Simon:

Yeah, no, if you look at the news just recently, Michelle O’Neill is a leader of Sinn Féin, and she just became the first minister of Northern Ireland. Who would have imagined it?

William Ury:

And so that’s the thing. And that actually opens up possibility, because if Catholics and Protestants could do it after, you know, people were thinking this was going to go on for generations, they drank the conflict in their mother’s milk. I remember all the things people said. If they could do it, if blacks and whites in South Africa, when it looked like apartheid was going to go on for generations because the whites had all the power, if they could do it, if more recently, you know, my work in Colombia, if government and guerrillas, after a 50-year civil war with hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of victims, if they could transform that conflict, then maybe anybody could.

Jamil Simon:

Yeah.

No, I mean, that’s the thing. We don’t see examples at all. I mean, it’s what we say on our own project is peace is invisible. How do we make it more visible? You know, I’ve been working on this project, focusing on the intersection of peace building and journalism for about seven years now, and one consistent challenge is that the nature of peace building work means negotiations are often done in secret.

You describe situations like this in your book, where the only way you could convince parties to meet in the same room is to ensure secrecy. So any sort of press could derail the negotiations.

William Ury:

That’s true. There are different stages of the negotiation. Like in Colombia, I just mentioned, there was a secret phase that I was involved in as an advisor to the president, Juan Manuel Santos, when they said that maybe six people knew about this, and not even the military, not even the intelligence, because if anybody knew about it, it would get torpedoed.

If it showed up in the press, it would get torpedoed, because all the spoilers, all the forces that people are very skeptical, they’re distrusting, you can’t deal, you can’t negotiate, those guys are terrorists, it would have been killed before it even got a chance to breathe.

Jamil Simon:

I mean, another challenge for journalism is finding the drama in peace building stories. In a conventional sense, the drama is in what’s not happening. No killings, no bombings. Nevertheless, there’s certainly plenty of compelling drama in your book, but you have access that journalists don’t to these secret talks that we just discussed.

And of course, you’re telling these stories years after the fact. For most news outlets, it’s much easier to cover violent conflict with all the visuals it provides. Do you have any advice for journalists looking to tell the kind of dramatic stories that audiences are naturally attracted to about peace efforts?

William Ury:

Yeah, it’s a hard one. I’ve faced that same problem.

This is what I would say. Negotiation can look very boring. People sitting at a table. Okay, they come up and make an announcement. Guess what?

Nothing was agreed today. It’s a little bit like George Mitchell in Northern Ireland, the American mediator, former senator who once said, there are 800 days of negotiations and we had 799 days of failure and one day of success. Right. And that produced the Good Friday Accords. But it was, I mean, going out to the press every day, okay, we failed today.

It’s like, where’s the news? So I think we actually need to really think through that challenge creatively from the point of view, I put myself in the shoes of a journalist, of what can I cover? Where’s the zazz here? Where’s the drama? And I wonder, I mean, just if it could be like, we’re making the impossible possible.

These situations are seemingly impossible. I used to rock climb a lot and I’ve been watching some of these rock climbing films, climbing the Dawn Wall in Yosemite, climbing El Capitan, where they have these documentaries and it seems impossible and yet you watch this amazing climber do it, right? Right, right. And so I’m just wondering whether or not you could take the impossibility of it and say, okay, how are they going to do this? And you actually look at, you create what’s the equivalent of that wall, you say, wow, they have all these spoilers, they have all these blockers, there’s all this baggage from the past, there’s all this distrust, all this drama.

How do you possibly do it? I mean, so by putting the question is how can we make the impossible possible? You know, if that’s the question, then you’ve got drama in there, right? Because the odds are against it. And then if you can actually pepper it with examples from other places where the impossible became possible, I gave you just some right now, Columbia, even in the Middle East there between Egypt and Israel and Northern Ireland, South Africa, others, like they were able to do it.

Could it be done here? And you kind of cover it like, wow, there was a breakthrough, a little breakthrough here and a little breakthrough there. You got to find a way to dramatize the story. I go back, take Columbia, for example. Now, of course, you’re not going to cover the secret phase of the talks.

The secret phase of the talks was about six months, seven months when no one knew about the talks. It was taking place secretly in Havana and there were so many stories that would come out later. But those can be covered later. You know, I mean, that’s the other thing, six or seven months later when you actually have an agreement, go back and cover it a little bit because it was dramatic. The efforts that people had to make, people going in canoes down rivers, blindfolded to a guerrilla camp or trying to take a guerrilla leader by helicopter, which you couldn’t take a military helicopter because the military might quash us.

You had to rent a private helicopter. And this guy shows up in the middle of the jungle and why would he get on this private helicopter to be taken somewhere to get him to Cuba? How does he trust that? And all his fellow guerrillas are saying, don’t get on this, this is a trap. All the high drama of that.

So there’s a lot of drama in these things of how you actually make things happen. But then once you actually does come into the public, then there are ways of covering it. I think that you can cover it trying to get, well, what’s really going on here behind the surface of this, behind the positions? What are the real interests? What’s the equivalent of security for one and sovereignty for the other?

What do people really need? What do people really want? Peel the layer of the onion a little bit. That too, I think, lends itself to drama. There’s human stories.

I mean, so many human stories. I’ll give you just one from Colombia. There was a woman whose name was Pastora Mina. She lived in a little village in Colombia. And one day a wounded fighter came to her door and she took him in and she nursed him.

She put him in her son’s bed. She nursed him back to health. It took her several months. When he’s coming out, he’s finally leaving. He’s in their living room, their parlor room, and he looks and sees a photo of her with a young man.

He says, don’t tell me that’s your son. She says, why, yes, of course, that’s my son. And then he says, he falls to his knees and says, forgive me, forgive me. I was the one who tortured and killed your son. He happened to be on the other side.

And Pastora Mina said, please get to your feet. Please get to your feet. I forgive you. I forgive you. He says, how could you forgive me?

She says, well, because you are liberating me from having to bear the burden of hating you for the rest of my life.

Jamil Simon:

I love that story. I mean, what a poignant story.

William Ury:

It’s the human stories. We think of conflicts as high politics and everything like that.

And sure enough, there’s high politics and power and resources and all this stuff. But in the end, and maybe this is my anthropological lens, it boils down to human beings. That human connection. That human connection that turns out to be central because all these leaders are human beings.

Jamil Simon:

Right.

They all put their pants on one leg at a time. Getting back to Colombia, one of the things that President Santos said about the development of the peace agreement was how surprised he was when the referendum failed. He was so confident that everyone values peace that he took a huge risk and offered the public to vote on the peace agreement in a referendum, even though doing so wasn’t a requirement. He was sure that everyone would embrace peace and give him the opportunity. But that’s not what happened.

The referendum failed and reminded Santos, and I guess everybody around, that peace needs to be understood in order to be supported. Needs to be explained.

William Ury:

Very much so. In fact, that was one of the main lessons I took. I worked with him for seven years.

It is so important to, from the very beginning, to think about negotiation. But the twin sister of negotiation has to be strategic communication, which is where you explain from the very beginning, and you prepare public opinion for this from the very beginning, and you explain what’s going on. This is where the media, the role of journalism, has an enormous role to play. This is exactly it. To build public understanding and public support.

Because even if you don’t have a referendum, you need buy-in from the society. Because the negotiation’s only the halfway mark. Then there’s the whole implementation process, and so many agreements are reached that are never implemented or never well implemented. And implementation depends on buy-in. Buy-in depends on public understanding, and public understanding depends on good journalism.

Jamil Simon:

One of the profoundly important things about the Colombian peace agreement was Colombians had a choice, a major choice. Do they continue fighting a war for another 50 years, or do they engage the third side and try to find a way to end it? And of course, I’m using the term you created when you even wrote a book about the third side. For people who aren’t familiar, what is the third side?

William Ury:

Third side, very simply, is our most ancient human heritage for dealing with conflict that every indigenous society, as an anthropologist I’ve found this, uses, and that we also use to without thinking about it, which is simply that every conflict, if you notice, whether it’s in the media or in people’s minds, we tend to reduce it to two sides.

It’s always two sides. The guerrillas versus the government, Arabs versus Israelis, union versus management, whatever it is. In reality, as we know, there’s actually always a third side. And that third side is the larger community to which the two parties belong, around the two parties. It’s the surrounding friends, their relatives, their allies, their bystanders, their neighbors, and obviously includes mediators too and negotiators, but it’s everyone else.

It’s all of us. And what you find in indigenous societies is, for example, is whenever there’s a conflict, the conflict doesn’t just belong to the parties themselves. It’s the responsibility of the community to help the parties, to create a container within which the parties can talk about, listen to each other, and gradually transform that conflict. So the third side turns out to be the key missing element, engaging that, mobilizing it. If you looked at South Africa, what happened to make that happen?

That miracle happened because I was there, Mandela was in jail, and five years later, I’m back there, he’s president. How did that happen? How did that happen? It happened because there was a mobilization of the third side within South Africa. The business community, the labor community, the faith community, the women community, the university students, civil society as a whole mobilized and said, this has to change.

And it was supported by an international third side, which were the frontline nations around, the United Nations, the world saying, hey, we’ve got to help this. And that’s actually what created the container within which the parties could then transform that conflict. Something similar happened in Northern Ireland. Something similar happened in Colombia. And that’s what we need to do, is we need to tap into our full human potential.

Because these conflicts are difficult. They may seem impossible. The only way they’re possible is by tapping into the natural potential that’s inherent in that situation. And that’s the job of possibilists.

Jamil Simon:

Yeah.

One other thing that’s never been done before, I mean, with the help of grants from the government of Norway, I believe, the Colombian peace agreement has become the most carefully monitored peace agreement in world history. What do you think we can learn from it? What do you hope people will learn from it?

William Ury:

Well, it wasn’t perfect. That’s the thing.

And this is where journalism, good journalism can actually help too, which is journalism can spotlight where the innovations are. Journalism can help us focus on where the successes were, where the failures were, where the lessons are. And it can spread from one conflict to another, lessons from one to another. One of the big lessons to me of Colombia is, you can take what’s impossible and make it possible. That’s a powerful lesson.

It took hard work, took five, six, seven years of determined hard work. A lot of, there were a lot of setbacks along the way. Many. Many setbacks. But in the end, what people thought was absolutely impossible became possible.

And that’s a critical lesson for humanity right now, because we’re faced with all these seemingly impossible conflicts here in this country, politically, in Ukraine, in the Middle East, wherever you look. And that’s why I wrote that book, Possible, is to actually suggest, yes, it’s hard. It’s unbelievably hard. This can be the hardest work we can do, but it is possible. And it’s dramatic the way in which it happens.

And so it can be covered by journalists who can educate people about what’s really going on and carry the lessons from one place to another so that we can all learn, because it’s a collective learning process for all of us about how we gradually learn from the mistakes of the past, learn from the successes of the past, and apply them to the problems of the present.

Jamil Simon:

So looking at the problems of the present, any advice going into this election year? I mean, there’s some ominous signs, people buying weapons, politicians and others using dehumanizing language. The middle ground seems to be disappearing.

William Ury:

It’s true.

And this is why I think it’s so important for us to both face that reality, face the brutal facts of that reality, and then go to the balcony, which is one of the principal lessons of Possible, of the book, go to the balcony, that place where you can see the larger perspective and ask, what’s really going on here? And what’s true? And what’s true is, what’s interesting is, it’s true that there’s a lot of polarization. It’s true that there’s a lot of mudslinging. It’s true, all of these things.

At the same time, what we’re not seeing is that there’s the exhausted majority of Americans who still believe, if you listen to the polls, that Americans, believe it or not, share more in common than what divides us. Exactly. The majority of Americans still believe in reaching out to people with whom you have different opinions, that it’s important to do that. They still believe that it’s actually, it is possible to have a conflict in a healthy fashion rather than an unhealthy fashion. And I think if journalism could spotlight that too, which is fill out the larger picture, that could, in other words, that exhausted majority is what?

It’s the potential third side. The majority of Americans who can stand up and say, enough is enough. We’re going to put some guardrails, right, basta, we’re going to put some guardrails on this conflict because no matter who wins at the polls, we still have a country. We still have children. Nobody’s going anywhere.

No one’s going anywhere. And we have an enormous opportunity and this is, again, what needs to be spotlighted. We have an enormous opportunity because we have some of the early signs of what could be, and a lot of Americans fear this, a civil war. Not a civil war like the one between the blue and the gray, but a civil war like Columbia, like where there’s insurgencies and so on. And we have the opportunity now to prevent it.

Because we see the signs. Exactly. And it’s a lot easier to prevent, as we all know, than it is to pick up the pieces afterward when the blood really starts to flow. So now’s the time for really constructive kind of pieces that fill out the picture. And journalism, I see journalists as third-siders.

They represent the community. In other words, they’re the witnesses of it. And by good journalism, by skillful asking of questions, they don’t have to take one side or the other. The third side, you know, you’re trained not to take one side or the other. Don’t take a side.

Take the third side, which is the side of the whole, and say, how do we do this? What can we learn from other situations? How do we realize this opportunity and actually highlight the danger and look for where the possibilities are?

Jamil Simon:

And it’s also taking the long view. I mean, it’s practically impossible to imagine the resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the near term.

But if you imagine peace 20 years or even 50 years from now, as you’ve asked people to do in a, you know, workshop setting, it frees the mind to think in more creative ways. And that’s what we need to do, is think creatively.

William Ury:

Absolutely. I didn’t know where this notion that somehow you can solve a problem in one peace conference, in one meeting. If you had a friend who was, friends who were a bitterly quarreling couple, and they said, we’re going away for a weekend workshop with couples therapy or whatever it is.

And they came back and said, we’ve solved all our problems. You would laugh.

Jamil Simon:

You might be a little skeptical.

William Ury:

Marriage is a lifelong exercise in conflict management. To imagine that then you could take a conflict like between Israelis and Palestinians and go away to one peace conference and they come back?

No. It takes work. It takes patience. It takes perseverance. And it is possible.

Jamil Simon:

Yeah. Bill, it’s a particularly hard time to believe in a future where Palestinians and Israelis live together with peace and dignity. So given that we’re seven months into this truly historic, horrific war, what advice do you have for people listening who want to be possible about Israel and Palestine?

William Ury:

Well, first, just to acknowledge how heartrending it all is. It’s just absolutely heartbreaking to watch and to witness the horrific violence starting with October 7th.

And to recognize how deeply traumatizing it is for two people who are already traumatized by their past history. It seems absolutely dark. It seems absolutely heartrending. And yet, in the end, what people are learning really the hard way right now is they think, okay, there’s some way in which we can quash the other. You can’t quash the other.

The other is not going away. Israelis and Palestinians are going to be living in that piece of land for a long time to come. And the basic choice which this conflict is now highlighting is you can end up with constant war, which everybody loses, or you can find another way to live together. And we have examples of it. Even in that land, we have examples of it.

If we can start to build on those, is it going to be easy? It’s going to be incredibly hard. But it is possible because it has happened before. If it’s happened before, it can happen again. I think one reason why people think peace is not possible is people have an image of peace like it’s an outcome.

It’s like heaven. It’s blue sky and everyone’s laughing and all that.

Jamil Simon:

Double rainbow.

William Ury:

No, no. Peace is not a destination.

Peace is a process. Peace is the journey. Peace is right now. Peace is the way in which we deal with conflict right now. It’s not the end of conflict.

People imagine that peace is the end of conflict. Conflict’s not going to end. I’m an anthropologist. Conflict is natural. It’s part of life.

We’re going to live with conflict. In fact, arguably, we may need more conflict, not less, oddly enough. We need healthy conflict. Exactly. It’s not about ending it.

I mean, what’s democracy but healthy conflict? What’s a vibrant economic marketplace but healthy conflict? What’s a good marriage but a healthy surfacing of differences? That’s what leads to the best decisions. That creative friction is what allows us to grow.

That’s peace. Peace is the way we deal with conflict, not the outcome.

Jamil Simon:

I think that’s a very good place to end this discussion. We just really hope that people can make a different choice than the choice that they’re making right now, to choose peace and to choose understanding.

William Ury:

Yeah, Shabili.

Sometimes I’ve learned in this—I haven’t been around for 50 years in this war and peace business, and I’ve learned oftentimes—people sometimes, we learn the hard way. But like, for example, just go back to those examples I was giving you again, South Africa, Northern Ireland. They fought for generations. Then they learned that, you know what, everybody ends up losing. And then they think, okay, there’s got to be a better way.

But they don’t believe in negotiation. They think, oh, that’s not going to work at all. But then they give it a little chance. And once they get in the process of negotiation, it may take years, you start to realize, wow, there might be ways in which not only do we just, you know, we’d end up with some kind of highly unsatisfying compromise, but we find ways that are better for everybody. We find ways to transform the conflict.

Is it look easy? That possibility exists, I’m sure. It does. And that’s what happened. And the other thing to remember is, as someone said in the Northern Ireland context, the conflict didn’t end.

The war ended. They’re still fighting it out in parliament and everything like that. They’re just not killing each other. The idea that there’s going to be a perfect peace between Israelis and Palestinians, forget it. The conflict will continue.

But can the conflict continue in peaceful ways, through negotiation, through dialogue, through democracy, you know, through nonviolent action even, rather than through this kind of destructive violence, which is just heart-rending, in which everyone ends up losing. That’s the choice. The choice isn’t ending conflict. The choice is transforming conflict.

Jamil Simon:

Bill, thank you so much.

William Ury:

You’re so welcome, Shamil. And thank you to all listeners, because if you’re listening to this, you’re probably a possibleist. And the world right now needs you, needs possibleists, needs third-siders, people who can look, see the bigger picture, see the third side. And that’s really what’s going to make the difference in the world today. So thank you.

Jamil Simon:

William Ury’s new book, Possible, How We Survive and Thrive in an Age of Conflict, is available wherever books are sold. You can also download the audio book. Bill recorded it himself. Making Peace Visible is produced and edited by Andrew Maraskin, with help from Faith McClure. I’m Jamil Simon.