David Freudberg:

You’re listening to Beyond War, a documentary project from Humankind. I’m David Freudberg…. The daunting litany of global problems can lead people yearning for peace to the pitfall of fatalism. At times it may seem that the whole world has become a terrifying place with no hope in sight. But pessimism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, warns William Ury, a negotiation expert and author of The Third Side in Boulder, Colorado.

William Ury:

History is, you know, periods of peace divided by periods of war. And we tend to focus on the war because that’s what grabs our attention. In fact, I mean, I think the reason why we see so much violence in the media is that, you know, they’ve got to get our attention, the TVs, they’ve got to get our attention to pay attention to the ads. What is the human brain wired to pay attention to? Obviously violence, because that’s dangerous. And so we get fed violence and we get tales of violence and that starts to create an image that there’s nothing we can do about it.

In fact, there’s a lot that we can do about it. There’s a lot that can be done to prevent violence. There are a lot of successful stories and we need to learn to build on those stories. I mean, it’s the greatest challenge that we face because, you know, the violence has been there. I mean, this last century has been perhaps the most violent century on human record with over 100 million people dying in wars and over 175 million in political violence.

And the challenge for this next century, if we’re going to survive, is to learn better ways to deal with our differences through negotiation, through dialogue, through democracy rather than through violence and warfare.