You know, we tend to think the problem is human beings having this natural tendency to kill, and yet in the middle of a hot war, World War II, a good war, as it were, the U.S. Army was astonished to learn that at least 3 out of every 4 riflemen who were trained to kill and commanded to kill could not bring themselves to pull the trigger when they could see the person that they were being ordered to kill. And that inner resistance to violence is a very well-kept secret. A global peace mediator offers some ways out of our thinking that violent conflict is inevitable. You’re listening to Humankind. I’m David Freudberg. If you focus on the headlines, the attacks on civilians, and the rise of militarism, it can seem like human beings are dominated by the basest instincts, a caveman approach to tribal conflict and ruthless violence. But that blanket image is simply false, says William Ury, an anthropologist who has studied war and peace in different cultures and who has helped broker peace in world hotspots from Chechnya to the Balkans. Co-author of the negotiation classic Getting to Yes, he has recently written The Third Side, a book emphasizing the importance of neutral intervention when two parties are at odds. Conflict is not going to go away. In fact, arguably, we may need more conflicts in this world and not less, in the sense that wherever you see injustice or wrong, maybe we need to start a conflict. The question is, can we create a container that’s strong enough to contain that conflict so that it can be transformed into a constructive form like negotiation or dialogue or democracy rather than have it turn into a form, a destructive form like violence and war. And that container is the third side. And the question is, you know, conflict is inevitable, but violence is not necessarily inevitable if we can construct that strong container. Today we have several photos available to show you that would depict some of our efforts. A press briefing at the Pentagon, October 2001. First, I have a pre-strike image. This garrison has troops, tanks, armored and support vehicles, as well as other facilities. Next is the post-strike damage to those facilities. Given widespread war-making and the persistence of ethnic conflict around the globe, peacemakers like Bill Ury often come up against a huge obstacle, the prevalence of deep pessimism when they attempt to bring about nonviolent solutions to festering problems. I encounter it all the time, actually, whether it’s in labor management situations or whether it’s in ethnic conflicts, which is basically the idea that fighting, war, violence, it’s all human nature. People have been fighting since the beginning of time. They’ll always be fighting, so what can you do about it? And it’s a paralyzing fatalism, and I think it actually is a fatal fatalism in the sense of it actually costs lives. I mean, we know, for example, that in the former Yugoslavia, the response by the West, by what could have been a third-side preventive response maybe to avoid that disaster, was in part paralyzed by the idea that was ceaselessly repeated in the media and also by the politicians, which was these people have been fighting for centuries and centuries, with the clear implication that they’re going to be fighting for centuries more, and what can you do about it? And first of all, the truth is they weren’t fighting for centuries and centuries. Same thing happened in Rwanda, where a preventive response was easily possible. It was possible to save 800,000 lives from genocide if we’d been willing to believe that conflict was preventable. So it’s critical that we reexamine our assumptions about human conflict and come around to the view that conflict is inevitable, but war and violence are not. Pentagon officials said today American warplanes continued to hit 85% of their targets as they pounded Taliban positions across Afghanistan. You know, we look in our history books, it’s just one war after another. We look in the newspapers or on the media that violence is continually there. The paradox is, you look on the TV and you see violence all the time, but you walk down the street, and most of the time, most of us are getting along. And it’s not just here, it’s in every part of the world that I’ve been, even in conflict-ridden countries. Most people get along, and most nations are at peace with most nations. So once we put it in that context, it’s not to deny the existence of violence and war on the face of the planet, far from it, but it’s simply to realize that, in fact, peace is the norm. And what’s fascinating to me as an anthropologist is looking back at the history that we base our assumptions on, is that what’s fascinating is the archaeological record suggests that for the first 99% of our time on Earth, human beings actually lived much more through coexistence than they lived through coercion, which might then change the way in which we think about conflict and might say, maybe it is possible, maybe we do have the potential, the human natural potential to live in peace. You’ve worked in family feuds, labor strife, ethnic wars around the world. What are the places in a dispute where people most often get stuck? I think maybe the single hardest thing, or maybe the key to, if there’s one skill in negotiation and problem-solving, that we need to arrive at a satisfactory solution that we need to arrive at a satisfactory agreement, it’s the simple, somewhat common-sense skill of learning how to put ourselves in the shoes of the other person. It’s empathy. And that simple ability to put ourselves in their shoes is hard because we’re afraid that if we put ourselves in their shoes, somehow that’s going to change our mind, maybe, or it’s going to open up our mind. We have to hear things we don’t want to hear. I remember once trying to make this point to a group of military officers during the Cold War, and I was saying, you want to influence the Soviets, you need to put yourself in their shoes. And one of them said, what? You’re asking me to put myself in the Soviet shoes? That might distort my judgment. And I think that’s our fear. What was his concern? His concern was if he put himself in the Soviet shoes, that he would somehow start to weaken, his own position would weaken. And so that was the last thing he wanted to do. And yet, as I pointed out to them, even in warfare, the first rule is know your enemy. And certainly in negotiation, if you’re trying to influence someone, you need to know where their mind is because that’s the mind you’re trying to influence. And so it’s the critical skill, it’s the single thing that, it’s the thing that gets in the way, I think, of being able to resolve conflict. Absence of empathy can lead to strife that might erupt into warfare, but there’s a huge psychological component to the belief that violence is the only option. It’s as if people in a dispute get so emotional that they stop seeing the full range of choices available. If we want a more peaceful world, says Bill Ury, we have to be willing to shift the way we think. There’s a story about King Frederick of Prussia, a historical story, and he had a falling out with his favorite general and wouldn’t talk with him for six months. And one day in the palace corridor, he passes the general, and because he doesn’t even want to acknowledge his presence, he turns his back to the general. And the general says, Sire, I’m delighted to see that you’ve taken me back into your good graces. And Frederick spins around on his heel and says, I don’t mean taking you back into my good graces. I certainly have not. And the general says, well, sire, your majesty is a great warrior, and he’s never been known to turn his back on an enemy. And apparently Frederick was so enchanted by that remark that he took the general back into his good graces. And so that’s, you know, that power of reframing the situation, again, is one of the most effective ways, you know, to try to diffuse a negative situation. Bill Ury is often called into a dispute when the stakes could not be higher, at the flashpoint of a crisis that could well turn into a catastrophe. Yet the principles and techniques of conflict resolution have the greatest chance for success not when a problem has mushroomed out of control, but when it is nipped in the bud. To me, it’s a shame if you come in late, you know, you come in to pick up the pieces. To me, the real opportunities that we’re missing is in prevention. You know, there’s a quote from Shakespeare that goes, a little fire is quickly trodden out, which being suffered, rivers cannot quench. A little fire is quickly trodden out, which being suffered, rivers cannot quench. And the same thing is true of wars and conflicts. In other words, it’s easier to deal with them long in advance when they’re small than it is to deal with them when they’re large. And those are the great missed opportunities. To me, I would like to see mediators, not just wait, but there be mediation services and those kinds of third-party services that are available long before conflicts get so serious that it becomes almost impossible to deal with them at that point. So prevention, to me, is key. So in a way, we could view conflicts that have really flared up as being the failure of the preventive mechanisms thus far. That’s right. And I think, you know, we need to be asking, whenever we see an intractable conflict, how can we strengthen the third side? In other words, the surrounding community’s capacity. How can we strengthen the third side so that it’s equal to the task? How do we do that? I mean, I’ll give you an example. Take Kosovo, which, as we all know, turned out to be an enormous tragedy and is very costly for everyone today. In early 1993, I was asked to facilitate a meeting on Kosovo at the Carter Center in Atlanta with the unofficial president of Kosovo, Mr. Ibrahim Rugova. And we spent a day talking about the issue there. And it was very clear to everyone in that room, by the end of that day, that you were going to see a war there unless something was done. I mean, you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist. The economy was depressed. The political system was in chaos. There were human rights abuses. The police were suppressing everything. The young kids were all out of work, and the schools were closed, the universities were closed. And Rugova was trying to use almost like Gandhian techniques of nonviolent resistance. But how long could you do that, you know, and keep people patient in the face of all the provocations and the human rights abuses? And he was going around at that time begging, hat in hand, for help from the United States, from the European community, from the United Nations. And he got almost no help. I look back on that, and I say, you know, there were so many missed opportunities to prevent. I mean, to me, one of the hopeful things is that conflict is increasingly predictable. And if we can get involved, if we could have provided economic aid, if we could have provided kind of, you know, assistance in learning the tools of democracy and setting up dialogues between Serbs and Albanians to talk out the issues, you know, kind of a conference on Kosovo to kind of coordinate various diplomatic efforts, sent in U.N. observers, you know, tried to reduce the human rights abuses, you know, work that situation for a number of years, all those people need not have died. Ibrahim Rugova sounds like a flicker of light in an otherwise pretty dark landscape. What was he like? What was his demeanor? What was his philosophy? How did he get to the place of trying to be a peacemaker? I do know that he studied in Paris at one point because he spoke fluent French, and he became very enamored of the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi and really thought that that was the way to go and I think still does, was convinced. And, you know, even though there may be a failure here and there, I do think that nonviolent action, I think he’s right, I think nonviolent action has an incredible potential, as we saw in India, as we saw actually in Czechoslovakia, you know, helping to bring down the Berlin Wall in Eastern Europe, and as we saw in the Philippines bringing down the regime of Marcos. So nonviolent action, I think he’s right in that particular situation, but nonviolent action requires for its success also mobilizing the support of the external community, the external third side, and that’s where, you know, we let him down. We didn’t provide the support that he needed to be able to do the work that he could do in order to avert a catastrophe. We’re talking with William Ury, who travels the world as a negotiator and peacemaker. He’s co-author of the bestseller Getting to Yes, and more recently of a book entitled The Third Side. For Listening to Humankind, I’m David Freudberg.