This is Peace Talks Radio, the series on peacemaking and nonviolent conflict resolution. We put the spotlight on peacemakers throughout history and today. Whether it’s the search for inner peace or learning how to resolve conflicts we have with others in our families, workplaces, communities, or between nations, we consider it here on Peace Talks Radio. I’m series producer Paul Ingalls, and for over 30 years our guest today has been studying conflict resolution and applying all he’s learned to all of those circles. William Ury co-founded Harvard’s program on negotiation, and he served as a negotiation advisor and mediator in conflicts ranging from corporate mergers to wildcat strikes in a Kentucky coal mine, to ethnic wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union.

William Ury is the author of books like Why We Fight, Getting Past No, Negotiating With Difficult People, and co-author of Getting to Yes, Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. His book, Getting to Peace, has been re-released in paperback under the title The Third Side. Our host Suzanne Kreider spoke recently with William Ury. How did you come up with this term, third side, and how would you define it? What I noticed, Suzanne, is that we always tend to see conflict as two-sided.

We always, it’s the Arabs versus the Israelis, it’s union versus management, it’s husband versus wife, it’s one child versus another child. But in reality, there’s always a third side, which is the people around the parties, the community, the friends, the allies, the bystanders, the siblings. And that larger community constitutes what I call the third side, and that is actually the key to helping to prevent, resolve, and contain conflict. The third side is the surrounding community that stands up for a peaceful transformation of the conflict. In other words, the third side is us.

You’ve spent time with the Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. What did you learn about peacemaking from them? Well, the San, the Bushmen, live, were living, they’re really one of the last groups of hunter-gatherers living on the planet. Hunter-gathering was a form of life that we humans had for over 99% of our time on Earth. And so they live in small communities of about 500, networks of 500, usually in small groups of around 25 or 30 at any one time.

And they have conflicts, and they all actually have also, for their hunting, they use poison arrows that are tipped. And so each man who’s hunting actually has the equivalent of what we might consider to be a nuclear bomb, because their ability to, the poison is absolutely fatal. If it enters someone’s blood, they die within two days. And so they’re all walking around with these weapons that can kill a human being. And at that scale of a society, you kill one or two or three people, it’s a huge catastrophe.

And so I was really curious, how do they deal with their disputes? How do they deal when emotions get high, and they have jealousies, and they have conflicts? And what I learned from them is they have a very sophisticated system where everyone in the community kind of pays attention, and when emotions start to go high, they notice conflicts starting to escalate. Someone goes and hides the poison arrows out in the middle of the desert, and then the whole group gathers together in a circle, and they sit around, and they talk, and they listen. And they may talk and listen for a day, for two days, for three days, for however long it takes.

And they sit, they dance, and they try to kind of invoke the spirits to give them guidance. And they don’t rest until they resolve the conflict. And it’s not enough just to kind of reach a resolution, but they need to have a reconciliation between the parties who are in conflict. And so there has to be some forgiveness. And if people aren’t ready for that, then they have a system where someone goes and visits their relatives over another waterhole for a few months.

And they have a whole complicated, very sophisticated system for catching conflict before it escalates, for resolving it, and for containing it if it threatens to escalate. And it’s been very successful. And to me, it’s that kind of system that probably explains why we human beings are still alive today. So this complicated system involves these three pieces. They catch it, they resolve it, and somehow they contain it.

What are some ways that they can catch it more quickly? They pay attention. They pay attention to, you know, I mean, it’s the friends, the neighbors, the relatives. I mean, every conflict, no conflict ever comes right out of the blue. Every conflict has early warning signals.

People get upset, they get angry, they take it out, they talk to their friends. And so they pay attention to those early signals, and they make sure that things get talked out and that it gets the attention that it needs, that people’s needs, which are often being somehow dissatisfied, get addressed in time before the conflict gets out of control. And in your book, The Third Side, you talk about these three levels of peacemaking. Talk about the roles that are under prevention. There’s the provider, the teacher, and the bridge builder.

Let’s use, for example, like in a school, if we wanted to get a better handle on bullying. Yeah, the provider plays the role of addressing the basic needs, which, like needs for security, needs for attention, needs for recognition. And oftentimes you find that bullying, what motivates a bully? What motivates a bully is usually insecurity, is a kind of a feeling of not getting attention, of not being acknowledged, of not having power, of not having control, which are all basic human needs, but are more highly accentuated in people who are given to bullying behavior. And so, one, you can try and make sure that the students in the classroom do get the attention that they need, because bullying is a kind of way of kind of reaching out in that sense in a destructive way.

But the other thing you do is you make sure that everyone in the class gets respect, that you establish in the beginning. The teachers who are most successful, I find, are the ones who establish from the very beginning that they don’t tolerate disrespect in the classroom, either towards the teacher or between students. The key to reversing bullying is for the community, for the other students, for teachers to pay attention, to watch what’s going on, to look for those signals, and to catch it before it escalates into abusive behavior. And so, the teacher’s going to be instructing them on how to prevent conflict, I’m assuming.

Right.

That’s part of bullying programs. And that’s another role of prevention, which is the teacher, I mean, is actually helping the children learn how to deal with conflict in constructive ways. And so, schools, a lot of schools, for example, have these programs, conflict resolution programs, where they help children learn these skills. And children are even trained to be peer mediators and to try to catch the conflicts, and the children themselves learn to resolve them among themselves, which, of course, is best of all. Well, I don’t want to be a downer, but why can’t we prevent school violence?

Well, I think we can. And I think we can, I mean, it’s a good question of why we haven’t thus far, but we’re definitely capable of it. I mean, it’s not just something that, you know, we can say in the future, you can actually see examples where schools have turned this around, where situations, I remember, I used to live in Boston, and Boston had, in the 90s, in the 1990s, had a spate of youth murders, homicides, I mean, just dozens and dozens. And then at some point, the community, the third side got together and said, enough is enough. And it was initially led by a group of ministers called the Ten Point Coalition.

They involved the parents, they involved the teachers, they involved the police, they got everyone collaborating, working together, because every one of those people, every one of those constituencies had information or had abilities to play a kind of a third side role and particularly worked with the youth and actually looked at, you know, why are the youth engaging in this kind of behavior? For example, they had nothing to do, for example, on, you know, after school, so they started organizing basketball programs after school, even midnight basketball, for instance. Or the young people had no self-esteem, so they began to offer, you know, jobs to the youth so that they could develop their self-esteem, those kinds of things. And it was not one, any single one magic bullet, but it was all of those things put together and everyone working together that made it work. Yeah, who are some other famous third-siders who people would know and recognize?

Well, I think all of us, actually, each of us is a third-sider, but, you know, some famous third-siders, I mean, Mahatma Gandhi, for example, was a third-sider. A third-sider is just, is basically someone who basically takes the third side because we always see conflict. If you think about it, just the way our minds are organized, we see conflict always as two-sided. And the third side realizes, wait a minute, I don’t have to take one side, I don’t have to take the other side. I can take the third side, which is the side of the whole, and stand for the peaceful transformation of the conflict to the benefit of the parties and the benefit of the larger community.

And that’s what a third-sider does. And if you think about it, this is our oldest human heritage that’s right there in front of us. Every culture has its own methods for kind of mobilizing the community. And right now, in our society, we need to continually reinvent the third side. We need to reinvent it in a society that’s highly, you know, individualistic, in a society where right now a lot of our communication is through the internet.

And right now, in the world, we have to invent a kind of a global third side that’s capable of stopping, preventing, catching wars before they even start. Genocide, for example, any genocide is preventable. Like Rwanda, for example, you know, that terrible genocide in Rwanda where over half a million people died. I mean, it was clear that it was a failure, it was a failure of the larger community to pay attention. Everyone agrees now that even the, like there was a UN general who was there on the ground.

Even at that last moment, he said, look, even with two weeks into the beginning of the genocide, the beginning of the killing, he had a thousand or two thousand UN troops there. He said if we had had 5,000 troops, if they just brought in 5,000 troops, and that would have been, you know, something easy to do. He plotted out how he could have stopped the genocide right there. And of course, it could have been caught even before because there were early warning signals to this. Which of the roles was he playing?

Was he the peacekeeper or the referee? He was trying to be the peacekeeper. And he had very strict instructions, unfortunately, that he, because he actually could see on the ground and they were sending reports months before the genocide began. The genocide wasn’t, as it was often portrayed, just some kind of spark, irrational outburst of hatred. It was carefully organized and orchestrated by a group of people associated with the government.

They were starting to make lists of the people that they were going to kill. They were starting to take control of the radio and the media systems and so on. So it was a carefully orchestrated plot and that was known to people. And there were a lot of people in the larger community, in the world community, who had the ability to stop it. But that’s the frustration.

I don’t understand what we do then when the UN General is saying, give me 5,000 more people and the UN doesn’t listen. What’s the solution? Well, the solution is to learn. I mean, in this particular case, our country played a very unfortunate role. President Clinton, this is maybe, he’s expressed this as his greatest regret of the years that he was in office because there’d been a tragedy in Somalia with our troops there that was portrayed in that movie, Black Hawk Down.

And so the American people were very reluctant to get involved in any kind of mess. And so as a result, when the call came from the UN General to the UN system, the United States said, no, no, no, we can’t get involved in this. It was like there was a willful denial at that point. But now that we’ve seen what happened and it’s been analyzed, people are much more sensitive to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. And so each time there’s a lesson.

I mean, the lesson was learned the very hard way in that particular case. But I think people learned the lesson, people like President Clinton, for example, and the UN Secretary General at the time was Kofi Annan. He certainly learned the lesson. And I think people have responded differently, for example, to the killings that happened in Sudan as a result of what happened in Rwanda. And so very slowly, torturously, even two steps forward, one step back, humanity is basically learning that these things aren’t like, they’re not like hurricanes, they’re not like forces of nature.

These wars and conflicts are products of human behavior and can be prevented by human behavior. Dr. Bill Ury, let’s explain a little bit more about the third side model to our listeners. The resolve step, the second step, has four different roles. And let’s use the workplace because most of our listeners go to work or they’ve had jobs in the past. Talk about one or two of the resolve roles and how people can use those in the workplace to prevent conflict.

One of the roles is the role of the mediator. And everyone in the workplace, you don’t have to be a professional mediator, but everyone in the workplace is a third party. They hear, they see two people or two departments get into a conflict. And there are informal ways in which we can play the role of a mediator, which is to listen to each side, to hear them out, to try and communicate each to the other what the other one is saying, to bring them together, to encourage them to work it out. We can play that role of a mediator.

And every manager, you know, whether they think about it or not, for example, is a mediator of sorts. They have to mediate among their staff. They have to mediate among their bosses. Sometimes they have to mediate among their colleagues. Everyone in fact in the workplace can play that role of a third sider.

And one of the roles also is the role of the healer, which is that there’s an emotional dimension to a lot of conflicts. Human beings, we all have emotions. And so oftentimes those feelings, you know, the relationship needs to be healed. It’s not just enough to resolve the conflict as, you know, the Bushmen teach us. You have to bring the people back into a relationship so that they can continue to work together because after all, that’s what you’re doing in the workplace.

Do you see the possibility that workplaces might even want to talk more openly about third side roles? Or are there a lot of mediation programs already in workplaces? Well, it’s beginning. There’s been a huge shift in the last 30 years that I’ve been involved in and watching. Now, nowadays, I mean, for example, labor management conflicts, I mean, labor management conflicts a hundred years ago, there used to be a lot of violence in that.

Even when I worked in labor management in the coal mines back in the 70s, there were, you know, there were bomb threats and people were packing guns. Nowadays, people are learning to talk things out. They’re learning, okay, we can negotiate. There are negotiation courses, there are mediators involved. There’s been a lot more sophistication now in the workplace about how to deal with differences.

The work has just begun. We have a ways to go, but I do see a lot of progress in the last generation. Let’s talk briefly, though, about the third stage, which is containment. And Bill, I’m going to a family reunion this weekend, and I’m not expecting any fisticuffs. However, in the past, you know, there’s been some door slamming and some yelling.

So what are one or two of the containment roles that my siblings could play just in case somebody kind of blows it? Yeah, well, the containment role might be that if things start to escalate out of control, you know, someone just separates the two parties and say, hey, you know, or takes one of the siblings for a walk and just kind of just a little bit of a cooling off period. You know, a family is a really good instance because if you think about a healthy family and you look at what the parents do, they’re playing all 10 roles seamlessly. They don’t think about it necessarily, but they’re playing the role of the provider. They’re giving the kids the love, the attention that they need.

They’re playing the role of the teacher, helping the kids learn to talk things out. They’re playing the role of the mediator. Sometimes they’re playing the role of the arbiter, and they’re playing the containment roles of, hey, you know, being the witness, kind of watching what’s going on. And if things start to escalate, saying, hey, look, no fists, you know, you can use pillows or sometimes playing the role of the peacekeeper of separating the kids. So if you think about it all the time, these are roles.

This is not something I’ve invented. This is just something I’m naming that is really around us all the time. It’s our human heritage, and it’s just something that we need to bring out to elaborate and to reinvent to deal with the conflicts and the violence of today. So Bill Ury, thirdside.org says, and I quote, you can have natural sympathies for one side or the other and still choose to take the third side. Isn’t that really hard to do?

Isn’t that going against human nature? Well, I don’t think so, actually. In fact, because, I mean, that’s exactly what, you know, the Bushmen do in the Kalahari in the semi. I mean, what they learn is that you can be someone’s friend, for example, and empathize, sympathize, you can be for them. At the same time, you’re, you know, like Nelson Mandela is another example.

I mean, someone who was definitely on one side of the conflict in South Africa, but he was very clear all throughout, as he makes very clear in his speeches, his autobiography, that he was fighting for the freedom, not just of blacks, but of whites as well. He was fighting for the whole. Doesn’t that take a pretty evolved consciousness, though? Don’t get me wrong. It’s not easy.

I mean, the third side is simple. It’s a simple concept because it’s around, but it’s not easy. And dealing with our differences is some of the hardest work that we human beings have to do in our lives. You know, really dealing with our differences, handling our emotions, learning to forgive the other side, listening to things we don’t want to hear. It’s some of the hardest work, the hardest challenges that we face.

But this is something that has been around since time immemorial, and it’s something that is available to each one of us at whatever level of awareness we’re at. If you could give our listeners a pep talk, just three short, simple things, what would they be? Well, to realize that peace is in your hands. It’s something that you can do. It’s not something far off, that it’s possible because it takes place in daily life.

And just to kind of open our eyes to that. So that would be one. And the second thing is to learn to, I use the phrase sometimes to go to the balcony, which is to learn to kind of detach ourselves a little bit, to like go to a mental and emotional balcony, a place of calm. And we all have our ways of doing that, whether it’s to go for a walk, if we get upset or we’re in a moment of high emotion, or it might be to breathe, or it might be to talk to a friend, or it might be to go work out. But learn to keep on going to the balcony where we can keep our eyes on the prize and remember what’s truly important for us and for the community in that regard.

That ability to separate for a moment and then to come back with a new perspective of what’s needed and what do you really want and what do the parties really want. And then the third thing would be to look behind the positions. In other words, the things that people say they want, that they’re insisting on for what do they really want? Using the magical question, why? Why do you want that?

Because oftentimes you can’t reconcile the positions because one person wants to take their vacation in the mountains and one person wants to take their vacation by the sea. But then you say, wait a minute, what is it you really want? You find out what are the underlying interests and say, well, I really want to have a good time with you. I want to experience the, you know, have fresh air and so on. Then you can be creative and come up with a solution that might work for both sides.

You might be able to find a place that there’s mountains by the sea. I mean, so the idea is to always probe behind positions. Don’t just take positions for granted at face value, but look behind them for what are the real underlying needs and see if you can come up with solutions that meet both sides’ needs and the need of the larger community, which is the third side. Dr. William Ury, author of the book The Third Side and many other books on conflict resolution. Ury’s had a great impact on the negotiation and mediation world.

We’ll continue now by talking to a couple of people who’ve trained with William Ury and have gone on to apply the skills of the third side to their work. First, Dana Smith, the co-founder and executive director of Dogwood Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending forests in the southern U.S. from industrial misuse. The Dogwood Alliance has had some success convincing office supply chains from making paper from endangered forests, striking a deal with the Staples chain to reduce its footprint in those forests. She told Suzanne Kryder what she’d learned from Bill Ury that helped her in her negotiations with Staples.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned is not to get stuck in my own position.

We all have positions and a view of the world and the way that we see it. And it’s really, really important in negotiations to be willing to step out of your box and look for paths forward that you may not have thought about as a solution. What were some of the hardest times in those meetings where it was really difficult to listen and how did you break through? Our last meeting with Staples, I think, was probably the most tense. And I remember we had to take a break.

You know, we had to each just sort of take a timeout and regroup, take a breath and come back with a fresh new attitude. And I think that that really, really helped everyone to realize where we needed to go and if we were going to reach agreement. Dana, Bill Ury talks about the third side. Who do you think was the third side in these negotiations? I think both parties brought a little bit of the third side to it.

I think both Staples and Dogwood Alliance met each other at the third side. To summarize, what would you say to our listeners who might be involved in some kind of negotiation or third side process are the three key things to remember? One, make sure that you’re addressing issues related to the imbalance of power. It’s very, very important to go into negotiations from a place of strength. The second thing is that it’s equally as important not to get frustrated personally with the people that you’re negotiating with.

And to really work hard to build personal relationships, find areas of common interest and talk about those outside of the issues. And the third thing, I think, is to remember to step out of your box and to really look to find solutions that work for both parties as much as possible that don’t compromise your core interests. Dana Smith of the Dogwood Alliance and now on a line from Venezuela, Gachi Tapia, a lawyer and mediator who’s worked in conflict zones in Latin America. She was part of a team that included Jimmy Carter and William Ury that many believe prevented a civil war in Venezuela by monitoring elections and mediating conflicts between principal players in 2004. Ms. Tapia was involved with many of the higher level meetings and told Suzanne how she applied third side principles.

I was doing this through some role plays with him and through some very deep conflict analysis, through trying to put what we call to put the people in the shoes of the opponent and try to really be very clear in terms of separating the persons from the problems, which are always confused. And the commonly believed is that the problem is the person, which does not help solve it, you know, maybe helps perpetuating it. So, Gachi, what could you tell our listeners to do when they’re in a situation? It’s certainly not as complex as the one you were in in Venezuela. But what are some specific things that you did or you said that helped people understand what it’s like to be in the other person’s shoes?

Well, one of the things that I think is the most useful is to really be an observer of our own thoughts. We are usually and consciously driven by this idea of putting others negative connotations, attributing bad intentions without confirming they are so. It’s about working a lot with ourselves, not only with the other.

Gachi Tapia, what are one or two tips you can give to our listeners for how to use the third side to make peace?

Well, I think a very simple, very simple tool is to listen, but to listen not to respond, but to listen just to really understand the other one.

Peace is something you can do every day. It’s a day-to-day work. And it’s not about very, very complex systems. It’s about the very little systems in which you are moving. It’s about home.

It’s about your community. It’s about your work. And the quality of connection with the people starts by recognizing the other one, by listening and respecting them. When you are really, truly respecting others, there’s a quality of connection that starts moving on. And that makes a difference.

Conflict management expert Gachi Tapia, talking with Suzanne Kreider about one of her many successful involvements in international conflict resolution, the 2004 Venezuelan elections.

Today on Peace Talks Radio, making peace from the third side with negotiation expert William Ury. The third side realizes, wait a minute, I don’t have to take one side, I don’t have to take the other side. I can take the third side, which is the side of the whole, and stand for the peaceful transformation of the conflict to the benefit of the parties and the benefit of the larger community. We’ll also talk to a couple of people who have trained with William Ury and have gone on to apply the skills of the third side to their work. Equally as important, not to get frustrated personally with the people that you’re negotiating with and to really work hard to build personal relationships, find areas of common interest and talk about those outside of the issues. Try to suspend our reactions. We cannot understand why the other, the behaviors and the thoughts of the other person. We could not be able to influence them. We explore the third side in peacemaking today on Peace Talks Radio. This is Peace Talks Radio, the series on peacemaking and nonviolent conflict resolution. We put the spotlight on peacemakers throughout history and today. Whether it’s the search for inner peace or learning how to resolve conflicts we have with others in our families, workplaces, communities, or between nations, we consider it here on Peace Talks Radio. I’m series producer Paul Ingalls, and for over 30 years, our guest today has been studying conflict resolution and applying all he’s learned to all of those circles. William Ury co-founded Harvard’s program on negotiation, and he served as a negotiation advisor and mediator in conflicts ranging from corporate mergers to wildcat strikes in a Kentucky coal mine to ethnic wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. William Ury is the author of books like Why We Fight, Getting Past No, Negotiating with Difficult People, and co-author of Getting to Yes, Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, an 8 million copy bestseller translated into over 30 languages. His book Getting to Peace has been re-released in paperback under the title The Third Side. Our host Suzanne Kreider spoke recently with William Ury. How did you come up with this term, third side, and how would you define it? What I noticed, Suzanne, is that we always tend to see conflict as two-sided. We always, you know, it’s the Arabs versus the Israelis, it’s union versus management, it’s husband versus wife, it’s one child versus another child. But in reality, there’s always a third side, which is the people around the parties, the community, the friends, the allies, the bystanders, the siblings, and that larger community constitutes what I call the third side. And that is actually the key to helping to prevent, resolve, and contain conflict. The third side is the surrounding community that stands up for a peaceful transformation of the conflict. In other words, the third side is us. You’ve spent time with the Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. What did you learn about peacemaking from them? Well, the Bushmen, who are otherwise called the San, who live in Namibia and Southern Africa, what I learned from them from the time I spent with them, which was a time ago, was what I call the third side, which is to me the secret of peace, which is the most ancient human heritage that we all share for transforming conflict from its destructive form into constructive peacemaking. The San, the Bushmen, live, we’re living, they’re really one of the last groups of hunter-gatherers living on the planet, and hunter-gathering was a form of life that we humans had for over 99% of our time on Earth. And so they live in small communities of about 500, networks of 500, usually in small groups of around 25 or 30 at any one time. And they have conflicts. And they all actually have also, for their hunting, they use poison arrows that are tipped. And so each man who’s hunting actually has the equivalent of what we might consider to be a nuclear bomb, because their ability to, the poison is absolutely fatal. If it enters someone’s blood, they die within two days. And so they’re all walking around with these weapons that can kill a human being. And at that scale of a society, you kill one or two or three people, it’s a huge catastrophe. So I was really curious, how do they deal with their disputes? How do they deal when emotions get high, and they have jealousies, and they have conflicts? And what I learned from them is they have a very sophisticated system where it’s almost like everyone in the community, the third side is really us, it’s the community itself. Everyone in the community kind of pays attention, and when emotions start to go high, they notice conflict starting to escalate. Someone goes and hides the poison arrows out in the middle of the desert, and then the whole group gathers together in a circle, and they sit around, and they talk, and they listen. And they may talk and listen for a day, for two days, for three days, for however long it takes. At night, they dance, and they try to kind of invoke the spirits to give them guidance. And they don’t rest until they, you know, resolve the conflict. And it’s not enough just to kind of reach a resolution, but they need to have a reconciliation between the parties who are in conflict. And so there’s some, there has to be some forgiveness. And if people aren’t ready for that, then they have a system where someone goes, you know, someone goes and visits their relatives over in another waterhole for a few months. And they have a whole complicated, very sophisticated system for catching conflict before it escalates, for resolving it, and for containing it if it threatens to escalate. And it’s been very successful. And to me, it’s that kind of system that probably explains why we human beings are still alive today. So this complicated system involves these three pieces. They catch it, they resolve it, and somehow they contain it. What are some ways that they can catch it more quickly? They pay attention. They pay attention to, you know, I mean, it’s the friends, the neighbors, the relatives. I mean, every conflict, no conflict ever comes right out of the blue. Every conflict has early warning signals. People get upset, they get angry, they take it out, they talk to their friends. And so they pay attention to those early signals, and they make sure that things get talked out and that it gets the attention that it needs, that people’s needs, which are often being somehow dissatisfied, get addressed in time before the conflict gets out of control. And in your book, The Third Side, you talk about these three levels of peacemaking. Talk about the roles that are under prevention. There’s the provider, the teacher, and the bridge builder. Let’s use, for example, like in a school, if we wanted to get a better handle on bullying. Yeah. So the provider plays the role of addressing the basic needs, which like needs for security, needs for attention, needs for recognition. And oftentimes you find that bullying, what motivates a bully? What motivates a bully is usually insecurity, is a kind of a feeling of not getting attention, of not being acknowledged, of not having power, of not having control, which are all basic human needs, but are more highly accentuated in people who are given to bullying behavior. And so one, you can try and make sure that the students in the classroom do get the attention that they need, because bullying is a kind of way of kind of reaching out in that sense in a destructive way. But the other thing you do is, you know, you make sure that everyone in the class gets respect that you establish in the beginning. The teachers who are most successful, I find, are the ones who establish from the very beginning that they don’t tolerate disrespect in the classroom, either towards the teacher or between students. And it may take a little bit of going to get that working. But the teachers that I’ve spoken to, that seems to be the key. And then the key to bullying is, because bullying, again, often happens, you know, between the bully and the victim. But the key to reversing bullying is for the community, for the other students, for teachers to pay attention, to watch what’s going on, to look for those signals, and to catch it before it escalates into abusive behavior. And so the teacher’s going to be instructing them on how to prevent conflict, I’m assuming. That’s part of bullying program. And that’s another role of prevention, which is the teacher. I mean, it’s actually helping the children learn how to deal with conflict in constructive ways. And so schools, a lot of schools, for example, have these programs of conflict resolution programs where they help children learn these skills. And children are even trained to be peer mediators and to try to catch the conflicts. And the children themselves learn to resolve them among themselves, which, of course, is best of all. Well, I don’t want to be a downer, but, you know, we’ve created this culture where we can put a man on the moon, or a computer in the palm of my hand. Why can’t we prevent school violence? Well, I think we can. And I think we can, I mean, it’s a good question of why we haven’t thus far, but we’re definitely capable of it. I mean, if we take the same amount of dedication, and talent, and attention, and resources, and put it into preventing conflict, I’m absolutely persuaded that we can stop school violence. And in fact, it’s not just something that, you know, we can say in the future, you can actually see examples where schools have turned this around, where situations, I remember I used to live in Boston, and Boston had, in the 90s, in the 1990s, had a spate of youth murders, homicides, I mean, just dozens and dozens. And then at some point, the community, the third side got together and said, enough is enough. And it was initially led by a group of ministers called the Ten Point Coalition. But they worked together with the police, with parents, with teachers in the schools, to begin to play these third side roles of working with youth, identifying the youth who are most likely to be vulnerable to this kind of violence, or perpetrators of this kind of violence. And over five years, they brought the rate of homicide in Boston from dozens a year to zero. What exactly did they do? Give me three things they did. What they did was, they organized the community. They talked, they involved the parents, they involved the teachers, they involved the police, they got everyone collaborating, working together, because every one of those people, every one of those constituencies, had information or had abilities to play a kind of a third side role. And so they worked with the police, because the police had a good idea of who was doing this. They then went to the families, talked with the families, worked with the parents about what the parents could do, what the teachers could do in the classroom, and particularly worked with the youth and actually looked at, you know, why are the youth engaging in this kind of behavior? For example, they had nothing to do, for example, on, you know, after school. So they started organizing basketball programs after school, even midnight basketball, for instance, or the young people had no self-esteem. And so they began to offer, you know, jobs to the youth so that they could develop their self-esteem, those kinds of things. And it was not one, any single one magic bullet, but it was all of those things put together and everyone working together that made it work. Bill Ury, it sounds like a third sider could be the community, but it could also be the individuals in the community. Who are some other famous third siders who people would know and recognize? Well, I think all of us, actually, each of us is a third sider. Each of us is a third sider. But, you know, some famous third siders, I mean, Mahatma Gandhi, for example, was a third sider. A third sider is just, is basically someone who basically takes the third side because we always see conflict. If you think about it, just the way our minds are organized, we see conflict always as two-sided. And the third side realizes, wait a minute, I don’t have to take one side, I don’t have to take the other side. I can take the third side, which is the side of the whole, and stand for the peaceful transformation of the conflict to the benefit of the parties and the benefit of the larger community. And that’s what a third sider does. And if you think about it, it’s no, this is not rocket science. You don’t have to put a person on the moon. This is our oldest human heritage that’s right there in front of us. Every culture has its own methods for kind of mobilizing the community. And right now in our society, we need to continually reinvent the third side. We need to reinvent it in a society that’s highly individualistic, in a society where right now a lot of our communication is through the internet. And right now in the world, we have to invent a kind of a global third side that’s capable of stopping, preventing, catching wars before they even start. And we’re learning. We’re learning. We’re in the process of a huge, huge learning right now. And we’re learning. We often learn the hard way, unfortunately, but I do see progress. I do see that we’re beginning to learn that we, you know, genocide, for example, any genocide is preventable. Like Rwanda, for example, you know, that terrible genocide in Rwanda where over half a million people died. I mean, it was clear that it was a failure, it was a failure of the larger community to pay attention. Everyone agrees now that even the, like there was a UN general who was there on the ground. Even at that last moment, he said, look, even with two weeks into the beginning of the genocide, the beginning of the killing, he had a thousand or two thousand UN troops there. He said, if we had had 5,000 troops, if they just brought in 5,000 troops, then that would have been, you know, something easy to do. He plotted out how he could have stopped the genocide right there. And of course, it could have been caught even before because there were early warning signals to this. Which of the roles was he playing? Was he the peacekeeper or the referee? He was trying to be the peacekeeper. And he had very strict instructions, unfortunately, that he, because he actually could see on the ground and they were sending reports months before the genocide began. The genocide wasn’t, as it was often portrayed, just some kind of spark, irrational outburst of hatred. It was carefully organized and orchestrated by a group of people associated with the government. They were starting to make lists of the people that they were going to kill. They were starting to take control of the radio and the media systems and so on. So it was a carefully orchestrated plot and that was known to people. And there were a lot of people in the larger community, in the world community, who had the ability to stop it. But that’s the frustration. I don’t understand what we do then when the UN general is saying, give me 5,000 more people and the UN doesn’t listen. What’s the solution? Well, the solution is to learn. I mean, in this particular case, our country played a very unfortunate role. President Clinton, this is maybe, he’s expressed this as his greatest regret of the years that he was in office because there’d been a tragedy in Somalia with our troops there that was portrayed in that movie, Black Hawk Down. And so the American people were very kind of reluctant to get involved in any kind of mess. And so as a result, when the call came from the UN general to the UN system, the United States said, no, no, no, we can’t get involved in this. It was like there was a willful denial at that point. But now that we’ve seen what happened and it’s been analyzed, people are much more sensitive to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. And so each time there’s a lesson. I mean, the lesson was learned the very hard way in that particular case. But I think people learned the lesson. People like President Clinton, for example, and the UN Secretary General at the time was Kofi Annan. He certainly learned the lesson. And I think people have responded differently, for example, to the killings that happened in Sudan as a result of what happened in Rwanda. And so very slowly, torturously, even two steps forward, one step back, humanity is basically learning that these things aren’t like, they’re not like hurricanes, they’re not like forces of nature. These wars and conflicts are products of human behavior and can be prevented by human behavior. Dr. Bill Ury, let’s explain a little bit more about the third side model to our listeners. The resolve step, the second step, has four different roles. Let’s use the workplace because most of our listeners go to work or they’ve had jobs in the past. Talk about one or two of the resolve roles and how people can use those in the workplace to prevent conflict. One of the roles is the role of the mediator. And everyone in the workplace, you don’t have to be a professional mediator, but everyone in the workplace is a third party. They hear, they see two people or two departments get into a conflict. And there are informal ways in which we can play the role of a mediator, which is to listen to each side, to hear them out, to try and communicate each to the other, what the other one is saying, to bring them together, to encourage them to work it out. We can play that role of a mediator. And every manager, you know, whether they think about it or not, for example, is a mediator of sorts. They have to mediate among their staff, they have to mediate among their bosses, sometimes they have to mediate among their colleagues. Everyone in fact in the workplace can play that role of a third sider. Sometimes if the conflict can’t be mediated, you know, it needs to be arbitrated in that sense. And so in the workplace, I mean, in a union management situation, they’re very formal systems now for dealing with conflicts so that you can actually bring in even an outside mediator and an outside arbiter. But in the more informal day to day sense, you know, the boss will sometimes, if something can’t be resolved, the boss will help decide, will play that role of the arbiter, for example. As just, those are two of the roles. But one of the roles also is the role of the healer, which is that there’s an emotional dimension to a lot of conflicts. Human beings, we all have emotions, and so oftentimes those feelings, you know, the relationship needs to be healed. It’s not just enough to resolve the conflict as, you know, the Bushmen teach us. You have to bring the people back into a relationship so that they can continue to work together because after all, that’s what you’re doing in the workplace. Do you see the possibility that workplaces might even want to talk more openly about third side roles, or are there a lot of mediation programs already in workplaces? Well, it’s beginning. There’s been a huge shift in the last 30 years that I’ve been involved in and watching. Now, nowadays, I mean, for example, labor management conflicts, I mean, labor management conflicts a hundred years ago, there used to be a lot of violence in that. Even when I worked in labor management in the coal mines back in the 70s, there were, you know, there were bomb threats and people were packing guns. Nowadays, people are learning to talk things out. They’re learning, okay, we can negotiate. There are negotiation courses, there are mediators involved. People are learning informally, there are mediators, and those are all third side roles. Those are all people learning to play the third side. There’s been a lot more sophistication now in the workplace about how to deal with differences. The work has just begun. We have a ways to go, but I do see a lot of progress in the last generation. And I think one role we haven’t talked about yet is the witness, how important it is for people to speak up in the workplace. Absolutely. Because, you know, it’s basically, I think it was Martin Luther King who said that our lives begin to end when we turn silent about the things that matter. And so the ability to speak up when you see something, when you see a conflict emerging, when you see a bullying behavior, that’s the key. That gives us the time then to activate the third side so that you can head off destructive conflict and violence. And to create systems in workplaces, for example, an ombudsman, so that people feel safe to go and report their boss or a colleague without anyone knowing. That’s it. In fact, and that’s one of the amazing things in speaking about the workplace. There are now literally tens and tens and tens of thousands of ombuds people around the country in different workplaces. It’s spreading. And so every one of those is like one role or one part of the third side. And if you put them all together, and I outline 10 different roles, but if you put it together, it does constitute a system, a robust system that’s almost like if one safety net breaks, you have another safety net behind it, and then you have another safety net. It’s a little bit like that African proverb that when spider webs unite, they can halt even a lion. And so each one of us, you know, can weave a little spider web, which might not be enough, but if you line them all up, they can halt even the lion of war. We’ll have more with William Ury about making peace from the third side in a moment. Plus later, two people who tutored under William Ury and applied third side principles in their own negotiation scenarios. All in Peace Talks Radio, the series on peacemaking and nonviolent conflict resolution continues in a moment. You’re listening to Peace Talks Radio, the series on peacemaking and nonviolent conflict resolution. We’re online with scores of episodes in our series dating back to 2003 at peacetalksradio.com. Lots of audio, transcripts, and other helpful links about peacemakers throughout history and working in our world today, and helpful ideas on all kinds of conflict resolution scenarios, all at peacetalksradio.com. Visit and click around. I’m series producer Paul Ingalls, and today’s program features one of the top names in conflict resolution, William Ury, who co-founded with former President Jimmy Carter, the International Negotiation Network, a non-governmental body seeking to end civil wars around the world. During the 1980s, he helped the U.S. and Soviet governments create nuclear crisis centers designed to avert an accidental nuclear war. In that capacity, he served as a consultant to the Crisis Management Center at the White House. More recently, Ury has served as a third party in helping to end a civil war in Indonesia and helping to prevent one in Venezuela. He’s the author of The Third Side, which describes three levels of involvement we can all take in preventing and halting conflict. Stage one, to catch it, stage two, to resolve it, and stage three, to contain it. Here’s more with William Ury and our host, Suzanne Kreider. Let’s talk briefly, though, about the third stage, which is containment. Bill, I’m going to a family reunion this weekend, and I’m not expecting any fisticuffs. However, in the past, there’s been some door slamming and some yelling. So what are one or two of the containment roles that my siblings could play, just in case somebody kind of blows it? Yeah, well, a containment role might be that if things start to escalate out of control, someone just separates the two parties and say, hey, you know what, or takes one of the siblings for a walk, and just a little bit of a cooling off period. You know, a family is a really good instance, because if you think about a healthy family, and you look at what the parents do, they’re playing all ten roles seamlessly. They don’t think about it necessarily, but they’re playing the role of the provider. They’re giving the kids the love, the attention that they need. They’re playing the role of the teacher, helping the kids learn to talk things out. They’re playing the role of the mediator sometimes. They’re playing the role of the arbiter. And they’re playing the containment roles of, hey, you know, being the witness, kind of watching what’s going on, and if things start to escalate, saying, hey, look, no fists, you know, you can use pillows, or sometimes playing the role of the peacekeeper of separating the kids. So if you think about it all the time, these are roles. This is not something I’ve invented. This is just something I’m naming that is really around us all the time. It’s our human heritage, and it’s just something that we need to bring out to elaborate and to reinvent to deal with the conflicts and the violence of today. Your website, thirdside.org, has really wonderful resources. You can map out a third-side conflict. So I gave it a try, and I got to map out this inner conflict I’m having with myself about my work style, and it came out with this graphic that showed all the different parts of me around a fire trying to resolve the conflict and make peace. There’s this third-side inventory where you go in and you answer a bunch of questions, and then it gives you a score on each of the 10 roles. So I got to see, like, my top three roles. That’s it. That’s it. Because each of us, that’s the key, Suzanne, is that each of us, whether we think of it or not, is a potential third-sider, and each of us can play those roles at home, at work, in our community, and ideally, too, in the larger world so that we can leave our children a more peaceful planet. We posted a link to the third-side assessment on our site, and we’d love to hear from our listeners about which roles they’re strongest at and which ones they tend to use least. So Bill Ury, thirdside.org says, and I quote, you can have natural sympathies for one side or the other and still choose to take the third side. Isn’t that really hard to do? Isn’t that going against human nature? Well, I don’t think so, actually. In fact, because, I mean, that’s exactly what, you know, the Bushmen do and the Kalahari and the Semai. I mean, what they learn is that you can be someone’s friend, for example, and empathize, sympathize. You can be for them. But at the same time, you’re, you know, like, for example, in your family reunion, you know, you’re close to your brother or your sister or your cousins. And so, you know, you love them and whatever, and at the same time, you remember, like, for the sake of the family and for the sake of family harmony, you know, we need to try and resolve this. So you have, it’s both and. It’s not either or. You don’t have to choose. You don’t have to be entirely neutral. You don’t have to be a eunuch from Mars. You can be a human being with natural sympathies and natural ties to people. But at the same time, you know, rooting and for the whole, for the whole family to be a healthy family, for the whole society, for the whole workplace. And that’s what it means to take the third side. I mean, Nelson Mandela is another example. I mean, someone who was definitely on one side of the conflict in South Africa, but he was very clear all throughout, as he makes very clear in his speeches, his autobiography, that he was fighting for the freedom, not just of blacks, but of whites as well. He was fighting for the whole. And that’s what we need to learn to do, is to direct our efforts to assure that it’s not just a one side winning, you know, it’s both sides winning, but it’s also, there’s a third side winning too. It’s the whole. It’s a triple win. You know, it’s a win for the first party, a win for the second party, and a win for the whole, be that the community, the workplace, the family, or the world. Doesn’t that take a pretty evolved consciousness though? Don’t get me wrong. It’s not easy. I mean, the third side’s simple. It’s a simple concept because it’s around, but it’s not easy. And dealing with our differences is some of the hardest work that we human beings have to do in our lives. You know, really dealing with our differences, handling our emotions, learning to forgive the other side, listening to things we don’t want to hear. It’s some of the hardest work, the hardest challenges that we face, and it benefits as you evolve in your thinking and your consciousness and so on. But this is something that has been around since time immemorial, and it’s something that is available to each one of us at whatever level of awareness we’re at. If you could give our listeners a pep talk, just three short, simple things they can do or they can be, what would they be to resolve conflict or to make peace? Well, to realize that peace is in your hands. It’s not, it’s something that you can do. It’s not something far off. It’s that it’s possible because it takes place in daily life, and just kind of open our eyes to that. So that would be one. And the second thing is to learn to, I use the phrase sometimes to go to the balcony, which is to learn to kind of detach ourselves a little bit, to go to a mental and emotional balcony, a place of calm. We all have our ways of doing that, whether it’s to go for a walk if we get upset or we’re in a moment of high emotion, or it might be to breathe, or it might be to talk to a friend, or it might be to go work out. But learn to keep on going to the balcony where we can keep our eyes on the prize and remember what’s truly important for us and for the community in that regard, that ability to separate for a moment and then to come back with a new perspective of what’s needed and what do you really want and what do the parties really want, that ability to work from the balcony is key. And then the third thing would be to look behind the positions, in other words, the things that people say they want, you know, that they’re insisting on, for what do they really want? You know, using the magical question, why? Why do you want that? Because oftentimes you can’t reconcile the positions because one person wants to take their vacation in the mountains and one person wants to take their vacation by the sea. But if you understand, you know, they want to go to Colorado and they want to go to California, but then you say, wait a minute, what is it you really want? You find out what are the underlying interests and say, well, I really want to have a good time with you. I want to experience the, you know, have fresh air and so on. Then you can be creative and come up with a solution that might work for both sides. You might be able to find a place that there’s mountains by the sea. I mean, so the idea is to always probe behind positions. Don’t just take positions for granted at face value, but look behind them for what are the real underlying needs and see if you can come up with solutions that meet both sides needs and the need of the larger community, which is the third side. Violence is a preventable disease. We need to get that in our heads. It’s not something that’s inherent, that’s necessary. There’s no way because after all, if you look around you, most of us don’t see much, you know, physical violence around us. Yes, you read about it in the papers and you may hear about an occasional episode or not, but it’s not like human beings are, you know, violent at any moment about to go violent. It’s something that happens. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a fraction of human activity, but it’s something that we can learn how to prevent to resolve the underlying conflict and to contain. You’re right though. The scale is so different though, because we’re not talking about a couple people or even 500 people having poison arrows. We’re talking about weapons of massive destruction. So how, how would you like to see the global third side reinvented? Well, let me just also say this. I mean, Suzanne, when I began working in the field of peace over 30 years ago, the kind of conflicts I was working on, we were working on were, for example, the conflict in South Africa, you know, the conflict in Northern Ireland, the cold war conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, a lot of conflicts. And people at that time said those were impossible conflicts. There was never going to be peace in South Africa. You were going to see civil war for as long as you could. The Catholics were always going to be killing the Protestants in Northern Ireland. The Berlin wall would always stand. The cold war was going to go on for generations. And so I’ve watched over the last 30 years, how conflicts that were previously considered absolutely impossible and intractable conflicts, you know, I went to the Soviet Union, I went to South Africa, I went to Northern Ireland, I saw for myself, I worked in those areas and I saw how those conflicts yielded to patient, persistent negotiation. And in each case, the third side played a decisive role. In South Africa, you know, the world kind of organized around the, you know, the youth, the churches, the United Nations, and then within South Africa, individuals, the churches, the women’s groups, the youth groups, the labor movement, the business movement, everyone got involved in helping to transform destructive conflict into constructive contention and cooperation. And it’s the same thing in Northern Ireland. And right now we’re faced on the planet with this challenge of how do we reinvent, as you mentioned, the third side for this time and place when right now we have to reinvent the third side for all of humanity, so that all of humanity has this communal voice. And we have the very first forms showing up. I mean, you know, the United Nations, for example, was one experiment. But now with the internet and with the ability of civil society and NGOs, we need to think about how to organize the third side in an effective way, using the media, using civil society, using individuals to form that effective, really what is a social immune system against the virus of destructive conflict. Dr. William Ury, author of the book, The Third Side, and many other books on conflict resolution. Ury’s had a great impact on the negotiation and mediation world. We’ll have a little more with him later in the show. But when we come back after a break, we’ll talk to a couple of people who have trained with William Ury and have gone on to apply the skills of the third side to their work. Back in a moment with more Peace Talks Radio. You’re tuned to Peace Talks Radio, the series on peacemaking and nonviolent conflict resolution. This whole episode and dozens of others in our series can be heard online at peacetalksradio.com. I’m series producer Paul Ingalls. We’ve been featuring the conflict resolution theories of William Ury on today’s show. We’ll have a little bit more from our conversation with Dr. Ury in a moment. But now we want to talk to two people who studied with Dr. Ury and have applied the third side principles to their negotiation work. First Dana Smith, the co-founder and executive director of Dogwood Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending forests in the southern U.S. from industrial misuse. The Dogwood Alliance has had some success convincing office supply chains for making paper from endangered forests, striking a deal with the Staples chain, for example, to reduce its footprint in those forests. She told Suzanne Kreider what she’d learned from Bill Ury that helped in her negotiations with Staples. It was a campaign at that point targeting the office supply industry. There was a lot of controversy and protests about how office supply companies were financing the destruction of southern forests. And we were in negotiations with executives at one of the biggest Staples office supply retailers in the country. And we were negotiating how to get Staples to adopt more environmentally friendly practices and purchase more environmentally friendly paper as a strategy to help protect our forests. Wow, I can’t even imagine Staples wanting to let you in the door, but they must have been concerned about the protesters. That’s exactly right. I think, you know, when we first started our campaign, you know, in sort of classic style of David and Goliath, there was a big imbalance of power. Staples didn’t know who we were. We tried to send them letters and we got no response. And it wasn’t until we started, you know, mobilizing these diverse voices across the region and protesting Staples stores that Staples started to listen. And at that point, we realized that our role really had to transform from, you know, equalizing the balance of power to begin to be a bridge builder and to build relationships with the key decision makers at Staples and help them understand that, you know, this was not a personal issue. We knew it was not their personal agenda to destroy forests, and we really wanted to work with them on a solution. Paint a picture for our listeners, Dana, of what the protesting looked like. How did you get their attention? We would organize national days of protests in which, you know, on that day at over a hundred stores across the country, people would be out in front of Staples stores holding up signs saying, stop destroying our forests. And we would be leafleting customers. We also got high visibility through the campaign through media. We were on the front page of the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. We got Jim Lehrer News Hour to do a segment on the campaign and flew them over the forest that we were concerned about that Staples paper was coming from. We brought a lot of public visibility to the campaign. Dana, talk about the role of the protests, because we do see protesting in a lot of instances where we’re trying to change society or change behaviors. Well, I think the role of protests in the context of this issue was critical in getting us to the table with Staples. Where there is a very obvious imbalance of power, it’s important to go into the negotiations with power. And sometimes in the society that we live in, protest is a very valuable tool for getting the attention of companies. And what we’ve seen is that we don’t have to do as much protesting as we had to do in the past. Once we demonstrated the power that we had behind us, we were able to negotiate commitments with other companies without as much protest involved. Even protesting, there are ways to communicate with companies. We’re in the process right now of leveraging video and internet to communicate the concerns of thousands of people across the region and across the country. That definitely got the attention of Staples. How did you begin to build bridges with them? Well, it was my personal intent in the process of meeting with Staples. They, I think, realized that there was something important that we had to say that they needed to listen to if we were going to resolve this. And it was my personal intention in those conversations to really build a personal relationship with the people at Staples to help them understand why people were out there protesting them and that the stakes were high and why people were so concerned about the southern U.S. and paper production in our region and to help them understand that we were there because we saw Staples as a key player and having a tremendous opportunity to make a difference. Dana, talk about Dr. Urey’s work and how you applied it. It sounds like one of the third side roles that you all used was teacher. You were teaching Staples and they were teaching you. So tell us about a meeting, how you actually made progress in these personal relationships. Well, we would talk with them about the data behind our concerns and they would listen and ask questions. They would then talk to us about their business and some of the challenges that they had in doing all that we wanted them to do. And I think that it was really important for all of us to keep our ears open and to really listen and to find those places where there were opportunities to move forward. What were some of the key skills or tools that you learned from Bill Urey’s training? One of the most valuable lessons I learned is not to get stuck in my own position. We all have positions and a view of the world and the way that we see it. And it’s really, really important in negotiations to be willing to step out of your box and look for paths forward that you may not have thought about as a solution. What were some of the hardest times in those meetings where it was really difficult to listen and how did you break through? Our last meeting with Staples I think was probably the most tense. And I remember we had to take a break. We had to each just sort of take a time out and regroup, take a breath, and come back with a fresh new attitude. I think that that really, really helped everyone to realize where we needed to go if we were going to reach agreement. They were saying that they were going to go ahead and go forward with their policy, which was, you know, from their perspective, an industry-leading position. And we came back and said, you know, you can go forward with the policy, but it’s not going to stop the protesting. Because as long as your policy doesn’t protect the forests that people care about that are doing the protesting, it doesn’t matter if you have a leading, you know, leading policy on recycled content, because people are still going to be out in front of your stores. And at the end of the day, Staples realized that if they were going to avoid that conflict, they were going to have to resolve that issue with us. Dana, Bill Ury talks about the third side. Who do you think was the third side in these negotiations? I think both parties brought a little bit of the third side to it. I think both Staples and Dogwood Alliance sort of met each other at the third side. To summarize, what would you say to our listeners who might be involved in some kind of negotiation or third-side process are the three key things to remember? One, make sure that you’re addressing issues related to the imbalance of power. It’s very, very important to go into negotiations from a place of strength. The second thing is that it’s equally as important not to get frustrated personally with the people that you’re negotiating with. And to really work hard to build personal relationships, find areas of common interest and talk about those outside of the issues. And the third thing, I think, is to remember to step out of your box and to really look to find solutions that work for both parties as much as possible that don’t compromise your core interests. Dana Smith of the Dogwood Alliance, and now on a line from Venezuela, Gachi Tapia, a lawyer and mediator who’s worked in conflict zones in Latin America. She was part of a team that included Jimmy Carter and William Ury that many believe prevented a civil war in Venezuela by monitoring elections and mediating conflicts between principal players in 2004. Ms. Tapia was involved with many of the higher-level meetings and told Suzanne how she applied third-side principles. One of the goals of this meeting was to create a space of dialogue that they were expecting William Ury could facilitate. But this needed an agreement from the government, this needed an agreement from Chavez. So Jimmy Carter played a key role as convener of this meeting. And my role at this time was more what we call an inner impartial third-sider, which was, you know, trying to work with one of the sides, and trying to bring some training, preparation, reflection, and inspiration on how to approach this space, because actually, usually the greatest challenge to reach agreement between parties that are confronting is the lack of trust between them. Talk about the specific things you did as a third-sider to build trust. How do you do that? Well, it was necessary to clarify that the effort should be focused on being able to generate, if not confidence between them, at least confidence in the negotiation process. My intervention was focused on preparing this leader through stimulating his ability to understand the views of his opponent and shift the confrontation dynamics into a scenario of respect that might transform the context and prevent the violence to escalate. So I was doing this through some role plays with him and through some very deep conflict analysis, through trying to put what we call to put the people in the shoes of the opponent, and try to really be very clear in terms of separating the person from the problem, which are always confused, and the commonly believed is that the problem is the person, which does not help solve it, you know, maybe helps perpetuating it. So Gachi, what could you tell our listeners to do when they’re in a situation, it’s certainly not as complex as the one you were in in Venezuela, but what are some specific things that you did or you said that helped people understand what it’s like to be in the other person’s shoes? Well, one of the things that I think is the most useful is to really be an observer of our own thoughts. We are usually, and consciously, driven by this idea of putting others’ negative connotations, attributing bad intentions, without confirming they are so. So I think communication and the quality of connection with the persons are key. If we could really go out through our own ego and try to go and connect the very deep of the self of the other person and use, then we can use very concrete tools, we can deep our listening. You know, we need to be, we need to talk in a way in which the other one will like to continue speaking. We need to listen in a way in which the other one wants to continue speaking. And we need to talk in a way, in a way that the other one wants to continue listening and try to suspend our reactions, our fur reactions, try to understand that if we cannot understand why the other, the behaviors and the thoughts of the other person, we could not be able to influence them. It’s about working a lot with ourselves, not only with the other. Gachi Tapia, what are one or two tips you can give to our listeners for how to use the third side to make peace? Well, I think a very simple, very simple tool is to listen, but to listen not to respond, but to listen just to really understand the other one. This is something you can do every day. It’s a day-to-day work and it’s not about very, very complex systems. It’s about the very little systems in which you are moving. It’s about home. It’s about your community. It’s about your work and the quality of connection with the people’s thoughts by recognizing the other one, listening, and respecting them. When you are really, truly respecting others, there’s a quality of connection that starts moving on, and that makes a difference. Conflict management expert Gachi Tapia, talking with Suzanne Kreider about one of her many successful involvements in international conflict resolution, the 2004 Venezuelan elections. William Ury and Jimmy Carter were also involved in those negotiations. Mr. Ury wrote the book The Third Side, and earlier in the program, we had him explain the third side principles to peacemaking. If you missed that part of the show, our whole program is online at peacetalksradio.com. But right now, we go back to a little more from William Ury with our host, Suzanne Kreider. Can you tell us about your most recent initiative, the Abraham Path? Sure. It’s very much a third side initiative because in all my years, if you’re in the field of conflict resolution, the conflict that most people want to ask you about is the Middle East. It’s widely regarded as the icon of impossibility, the most difficult conflict. A few years ago, I came up with an idea to try to strengthen the third side in the Middle East, to strengthen the role of the witness, and the provider, and the different roles. And that was to look at the story and ask, who’s the symbolic third side of the Middle East? And for me, as I investigated as an anthropologist, it turns out to be Abraham, who is kind of the founding father of all the different faiths, and everyone traces their origins to this story of Abraham. What does he symbolize? He symbolizes respect. He symbolizes kindness towards strangers. And so I thought, how do we revive that spirit of Abraham? And I thought, okay, what if there were, what if we were able to revive the ancient path, a little bit like the Appalachian Trail, but create a trail that honors the story, the journey of Abraham through the Middle East. And it turns out Abraham was known in Arabic as Ibrahim. And it’s a path that goes through 10 different countries. It actually unites, it connects the entire Middle East. And so for the last, people said, well, this is impossible. You can’t cross those borders. It’s too insecure, all the reasons why. But we got together a group and actually retraced the footsteps of Abraham, showed that it could be done. You could cross the borders, and you could do it safely. And now we have groups organized in four or five different countries in the Middle East, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of people beginning to walk parts of the path. And it will take, you know, some generations, but gradually the ancient path of Abraham is being revived, and people make films, and people stay in people’s homes. It brings economic development. It brings recognition to people. It builds intercultural communication. So it’s become a third side project because everyone who walks it, or everyone who travels, it becomes an instant third side, or they witness the conflict, and they look for things they can do. I’ll just give you one example. There is a friend of mine whose daughter was 15, and she went on a walk in the middle of the West Bank in Palestine a couple of years ago, a youth walk with young people from around the world and young Palestinians. And she was so moved by it that she came back and made it her school project. And then she studied Arabic on the side, and she just went back this summer to work in an orphanage there in the middle of the West Bank because she was so moved, and this will probably be her life. She wants to be a guide on the Abraham Path. So it’s those kinds of stories that we’re trying to highlight, cultivate, and to bring hope to a region or to an area that the world widely regards with despair. Dr. William Ury, thank you very much. It’s been my pleasure, Suzanne, a real true pleasure. William Ury, author of many books on conflict resolution. Some of the titles are The Third Side, Why We Fight, Getting Past No, Negotiating With Difficult People. And he’s co-author of the book Getting to Yes, Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In.